Britain’s Gulag
The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
Caroline Elkins’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Britain’s response to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s. Drawing on survivors’ testimony and surviving archives, she documents a system of detention camps that held vast numbers of Kikuyu, and the violence and cover-up that went with it.
Recommended by 1 Person
Adam Foulds
In her final chapter she writes directly about its suppression and about the afterlife of the conflict, and the fact that there was no official parliamentary inquiry – so there was no real self-examination at the time on the part of the British. It also seems to be the case that a large amount of significant documents pertaining to the camp system that were in the Commonwealth Office were deliberately destroyed.
Interview · February 2010
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