Elkins and out

Previously logged on April 28th and May 13th last year in the other place.

'Britain's Gulag' having languished at the bottom of a pile for getting on for a year now, I decided that it was time to polish it off, one way or another. Polishing off did not include actually finishing wading my way through any more accounts of colonial brutality, but I did come to the summary of events which I offer below.

The inhabitants of what is now Kenya were fighting each other for land and status long before we arrived, it being in the minds of some of us to civilise them. Maybe to introduce them to Jesus and to sell them the strange idea that one wife good two wives bad. Maybe also to do something about their terrible sanitary arrangements.

Another part of this civilising process was to bring in lots of white settlers (many of them rather unpleasant types and not even proper farmers) and to give them lots of land. Land to which there might not have been any clear title beforehand, but which was certainly denied to the blacks afterhand. A process which rather reminds me of the current doings with settlers in Israel.

After a while the blacks, in particular the Kikuyus, had had enough and started to make trouble, trouble which some have dressed up into a civil war among the blacks, rather than a push for justice from the whites. We pushed back with all the brutality documented by Elkins. A brutality which gradually seeped into the awareness of folks back home, with Barbara Castle being one of the honourable few who tried to do something to stop it, aided and abetted by African-Asian lawyers, that is to say Kenyan lawyers of Asian ethnic origin. Eventually, in the early sixties say, the (home) government of the day realised that while it might have succeeded in containing its problems in Kenya, its position in Africa was untenable and we had to get out (all this being at roughly the same time as the French messes in Algeria & Vietnam). The alleged rebel leader was released from prison and became leader of the new country; a leader who was magnanimous enough to crack jokes with the governor who had had him jailed, and whose desk & office he had taken over. A leader whose main business was to bury the past, for better or for worse; a burying which us brits were only too happy to go along with. And Barbara Castle was given other fish to fry.

Excess deaths as a result of our incompetence, racism & attendant brutality look to be in excess of 100,000; a disaster of the same order as that perpetrated in Iraq some sixty years later. As the French would no doubt say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. But the numbers are contested and a few minutes with Wikipedia gave me the following abstract: 'This article examines the allegation that up to 300,000 Kikuyu and others died as a result of the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya in the 1950s. This figure was based on comparative numbers from the 1948 and 1962 censuses, but they failed to take into account the changes in the tribal classifications and differences in the coverage of the two censuses. Using data from the 1969 Kenya census, we have reconstructed the levels and patterns of mortality in the 1950s, and we show that mortality of the Kikuyu was consistently lower than those of the Kamba, Luhya and Luo peoples. We have also used unpublished data from the 1948 census to estimate infant mortality among the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru prior to the emergency. Using this figure as an indicator of ‘normal’ mortality, we have compared them with the estimates derived from the 1969 census, and so calculated the number of ‘excess’ deaths. They amount to perhaps 50,000; more than half of them were children under 10. Given the fragile nature of the data and assumptions, our estimates are subject to large margins of error, but they at least give us an order of magnitude'. Will we ever come to rest?

PS 1: Elkins is an acclaimed Professor of Bash the Brit Studies at Harvard University, so I expect that she is more personable in person than she is on the page. And to be fair to her, while her book could have been a lot better and a lot shorter, it did serve its purpose. I do now feel I have something of a grip on the whole sorry business.

PS 2: Microsoft seem to have fiddled with my desktop again. Having just about learned how to fire up Notepad (which I use to strip unwanted formatting from things), they have seen fit to move it in the course of last night's very important update.