Secrets & lies
While researching Kenya, she found shocking truths about the British empireBy David Mehegan, Globe Staff | July 3, 2006CAMBRIDGE -- Wiry and energetic, the Hugo K. Foster Associate Professor of African Studies at Harvard University coils in her chair and speaks with rapid force about her book that recently won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize.
"I was strongly urged by colleagues not to undertake this project, for two reasons," Caroline Elkins said in an interview at her home, not far from the campus. "One, they felt it was too politically sensitive. Two, they said there wouldn't be enough information. So, me being me, I decided those were good enough reasons to undertake the project."
At 37, Elkins has spent more than 10 years exhuming and writing about the long-hidden story at the heart of "Imperial Reckoning: the Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya." It's a vivid narrative -- not without its critics -- of oppression, torture, and cover up during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, which shows how even a democratic government with humane values can hide the truth of its abominable behavior.
Mau Mau was an uprising among the Kikuyu tribe of British Kenya, essentially a response to economic privation due to losses of land at the hands of British settlers. Beginning in 1951 and ending in 1959, the rebellion included an oath of loyalty among adherents, attacks on settlers, and a poorly armed movement based in Kenyan forests. Thirty-two Europeans were killed in rebel attacks. But in the British campaign that followed, thousands of Kikuyu, many of them innocent, were abused, tortured, or killed in a system of camps known as the Pipeline. By Elkins's calculations, as many as 320,000 men and women were held in the camps, and as many as 50,000 were killed.
Elkins uncovered hundreds of stories of tortures committed in the worst of these camps, some in grisly detail: castrations, clamping of women's breasts with pliers, fatal beatings. Equally compelling is her account of the British denial of the truth, which extended from local colonial officials right up through Winston Churchill and his successors, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan.
Though British officials lied baldly in Parliament and later burned virtually all the records of the camp system, Elkins reconstructed the story -- including the names and locations of the camps -- using eyewitness accounts, contemporary letters and private documents, and records of the opposition Labor Party's futile resistance to the repression. Most of the chief architects of the camp system, including governor Evelyn Baring, retired from the colonial service with honor and were never held accountable for the abuses. Several senior participants were interviewed by Elkins, and they are unrepentant.
After the end of the empire, Elkins writes, people in Britain wanted to put the conflict in the past. After independence in 1963, Kenyan leaders, too, found it convenient to forget about the guerrilla war in the interest of unity, since many abuses were committed by Africans on the British side. Since the longtime ban on the Mau Mau movement was revoked in 2002, renewed discussion of the rebellion has blossomed in Kenya. A group of Kenyan lawyers recently announced a plan to file suit against the British government in coming months.
The barbed-wire camps of the Pipeline seem a long way from the leafy environs of Cambridge, where Elkins lives with her husband and two sons. Indeed, she could have stayed comfortably in academia and avoided the gory details of war.
Born in New Jersey, she majored in history at Princeton. She had had the usual European and American history courses when she took a course with Robert Tignor, professor of African studies. Fascinated by the continent, she graduated in African history, with highest honors. But she was far from finished.
"What really stood out was her energy and her desire to pursue a difficult career in the face of many challenges," Tignor said by phone. "We were overwhelmed by her stick-to-itiveness, her ability to tackle archival and personal research. All that comes out clearly in 'Imperial Reckoning.' "
In her senior year, Elkins was researching women in the colonial period, she said, "and I got to the period of Mau Mau and came to a reference to an all-female detention camp. I was looking for literature on the camp, anything, to write about. I found nothing. I decided that if I went to graduate school, I would write my dissertation on these detention camps."
She began her research as a graduate student at Harvard in 1993, continuing for several years and receiving her doctorate in 2001. "I was going to write on the success of British liberal reform in the detention camps of Kenya," she said. British official records suggested that there were only a few "one-offs" -- bad apples -- in an otherwise-enlightened program of reeducation. But by 1998, after an early visit to Kenya and after reading accounts of horrors in private collections and interviewing former colonial officers in London, she had become suspicious.
"I remember distinctly, I was in my flat in London," she said, "trying to write up a portion of what I had found. And it wasn't adding up. Then I said, after days of frustration, 'What if I turn this upside down? What if this is a story of extreme violence and repression, more systematic over time, and about coverup?' It was an 'oh-good-God' moment. It all began to fall into place. The purging of files was extraordinary. The British were meticulous record keepers, but there wasn't a single file that said how many camps there were, their names and functions. I had to piece it all together."
Back in Kenya, she set to work in archives and in the field. With an assistant who spoke the Kikuyu language, she drove a beat-up Subaru station wagon around rural areas, "with a tape recorder and not a lot of money," looking for people to tell their stories. Sometimes it took time to win trust. People loosened up when she assured them that she was not British. Many assumed at first that she was a missionary nun.
One interview led to another by referral -- "Do you know anyone else who would speak to me?" she would ask -- and over time she gathered hundreds of testimonies. Soon she had so many people wanting to talk that she had to stop interviewing. Her findings became her doctoral dissertation, later rewritten as "Imperial Reckoning."
The interviews were no pleasure, according to Elkins: "To hear recollections of torture that in your wildest imagination you could never possibly conjure, was exceedingly difficult." In 2003, wanting to preserve the thousands of testimonies she could not gather herself, Elkins co founded the Kenya Oral History Centre in Nairobi. Partially funded by Harvard, the center gathers testimonies of Africans, Asians, and Europeans.
"Imperial Reckoning" is an angrier book than one might expect from a disinterested scholar. Tignor, Elkins's Princeton professor and longtime mentor, acknowledged that at first the book's indignant tone made him wince. But he said, "By and large, the British empire has been given a favorable reputation in historical work. She was writing against the background of destroyed records and suppressed information, and that can make a scholar pretty mad."
Elkins said, "When I was writing, there was a bit of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. If you wrote a book like this and didn't have an opinion, people would say, 'For God's sake, how can you possibly not have an opinion about this?' But if you express anything that hints at partiality, people will say you're not impartial enough."
Reaction to the book in Kenya was mostly positive. Elkins says she has received hundreds of grateful letters. It was also mostly well-reviewed in England. Still, there has been predictable anger from some former settlers and retired colonial officers, and some critics have treated the book roughly. There has been no official reaction from the British government.
Kenyan historian Bethwell Ogot questioned Elkins's honesty in quoting anonymous settlers' confessions of tortures: "How do we know these are not fabricated confessions intended to paint the British in the worst possible light?" he wrote in The Journal of African History. In a review in the Times of London, historian Lawrence James wrote, "Like other American academics, [Elkins] is an heir of the [American] war of independence and schooled to believe that all empires are intrinsically evil, corrupting and integral to the 'old Europe' of current American demonology. . . . The reputation of the British empire can withstand the defamation of holier-than-thou American academics."
"I've been called many things that aren't printable," Elkins said. "I've gotten, 'You're absolutely wrong; this didn't happen.' At the same time, settlers in Kenya have said to me, 'It happened, but [the book] isn't balanced. Why isn't there more about Mau Mau atrocities?' My feeling is that the book is about proportionality. Thirty-two European settlers died, and the response to the uprising was Draconian. The way I wrote this book reflects the nature of the war that occurred."
© 2006 The New York Times Company
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