“A building heavy with secrets"

August 20, 2016 9:41 AM

In 2005, junior Harvard historian Caroline Elkins's controversial first book, Imperial Reckoning: Britain's First Gulag, resurfaced the history of Britain's brutal internment camps for the ethnic group the Kikuyu, believed to be supporters of the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. She then found herself working for survivors of the camps in a landmark case seeking reparations from the British government. The plaintiffs were aided by the stunning discovery at the time of their case of massive archives--1.2 million files worth--held in illegal secrecy by the Foreign Office which included files systematically removed from former colonies as the British withdrew. (Note: many of these links contain descriptions of violence against civilians.)

These files generally supported Elkins's account, which had drawn heavily on oral histories. The British government settled with the plaintiffs in 2013, agreeing to pay survivors around $4,000 a person. Last November, the British High Commissioner unveiled an official memorial in Nairobi to the Kenyan victims.

The British government had always denied the existence of these "migrated archives."

The study of those archives has now "revealed" the existence of a second camp which held "hard core" Mau Mau women, some of whom have brought other cases for compensation.

"If you were creating a movie set for a secret government compound with secret government files...you would make this." We still don't know what further study of the Hanslope Park archive papers will reveal.

posted by praemunire (24 comments total)

It's hardly Britain's first gulag. The first "concentration camps" were part of the counterinsurgency strategy of the Boer War.
posted by musofire at 9:44 AM on August 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

the critique of Elkins within history academia centers around whether the British killed 15,000 Kikuyu or 150,000 to 300,000 Kikuyu... which tells you exactly what academic history is about.

I mean, look at the picture in the 'radiolab' link of Kikuyu lined up in a barbwire enclosed compound, under the watch of a British white officer and surrounded by armed guards and I dare you not to think "concentration camp." the thing is not to compare the British to the Germans, or argue over what genocide is about, but to look at how orderly the whole scene is. the fence is squared off. the guards are at regular intervals. even the prisoners are ordered in rows. you don't get "concentration camps" without bureaucracy and planning. design committees, paperwork, clerks filing authorization documents, the whole deal... all the way up to authorization at the top.

but the second thing to realize is that if you take that view of it seriously, there can never be accountability. the crimes are too integral to the continuing British state. everyone was complicit in one way or another. so, like abuse in a family, the more evidence you pile up the more you deny and forget. "Britain had an empire?" "Oh, it wasn't so bad as you say."
posted by ennui.bz at 10:00 AM on August 20, 2016 [11 favorites]

Musofire: I'm sorry, that's not actually in the British title. That was my error. (If a mod wants to correct that, I'd be glad.)
posted by praemunire at 10:02 AM on August 20, 2016

"A building heavy with denial" would be more accurate. The cruelty, inhumanity and exploitation of British imperialism is not a secret. Hundreds of millions of people have borne witness to it.
posted by ariadne_88 at 10:14 AM on August 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

The British government has form for this sort of atrocity, they're just good at denying it. Consider the London Cage as a predecessor to Gitmo, for example: and postwar goings-on at the Bad Nenndorf Interrogation Centre. Nor is it right to say that just because the victims of these institutions were (mostly) Nazis and (in some cases) war criminals this in any way exculpates the torture and abuse that went on there. And they kept doing it in the 1970s and the 2000s.

Final aside: who do you think invented the term Political Officer? (Nope, it wasn't the Soviets.)

(Disclaimer: my British citizenship should not be construed as indicating that I condone my government's actions.)
posted by cstross at 10:23 AM on August 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

I'm idly wondering where the US version of these files is kept.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:08 AM on August 20, 2016

One of the books in the Swahili curriculum for Kenyan middle schoolers is a short novel about Mau Mau, Kaburi Bila Msalaba. it's about a girl whose boyfriend is in the Mau Mau. He's killed, she's raped, and dies in childbirth. We read it in my Swahili class in college.

When I was in working in Turkana in 2009, the guys I were working with all remembered reading it, and the acronym they learned to go with it, "Mzungu Aende Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru." More or less, Let the white people go to Europe, and the African get freedom. It was particularly interesting hearing about Mau Mau from those guys in that place because we were very close to Lodwar, where Jomo Kenyatta was imprisoned for several years after being sentenced to 7 years of hard labor for his supposed connection to the Mau Mau movement, before becoming Kenya's first president post-colonialism.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:09 AM on August 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

It's only very, very recently - in the past three or four years - that victims have received compensation. Imagine these people are in their 70s and 80s now, and it's obvious that so many people who deserve some sort of compensation for their torture have already passed away.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:28 AM on August 20, 2016

Correct me if I'm wrong but to my understanding there is about 25 nations to-day that british army has not yet entered wielding a gun - keeping this in mind this news-item is no big surprise. This number gives quite different interpretation for concept of "british gentlemanship" :)
posted by costello at 11:59 AM on August 20, 2016

the critique of Elkins within history academia centers around whether the British killed 15,000 Kikuyu or 150,000 to 300,000 Kikuyu... which tells you exactly what academic history is about.


What would you rather they critique of her work? Where is she wrong?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:16 PM on August 20, 2016

This is one of the things that sickened me about the Brexit campaign - when they talk about the 'good old days', this is exactly what they wanted to go back to. Repressed tea and crumpets on the surface, supported entirely by brutality and exploitation underneath.
posted by Vortisaur at 1:33 PM on August 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

To this layperson it doesn't sound so much wrong as the critique is between "heinous" and "sick."
posted by rhizome at 1:37 PM on August 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

What would you rather they critique of her work? Where is she wrong?

This is one of those situations in which the exact facts are useful to know and worthy for the historian to determine, but an overinvestment in precision betrays a general desire to minimize and deny.
posted by praemunire at 1:52 PM on August 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is one of those situations in which the exact facts are useful to know and worthy for the historian to determine, but an overinvestment in precision betrays a general desire to minimize and deny.

Scholarly endeavors are necessarily critical. I have never seen a work--no matter how good--that is immune from criticism. To view academic criticsm of Elkins' work as reflecting not normal scholarly discourse but rather as an impulse to deny the very thrust of her work is inimical to the actual conduct of scholarship and poisonous to discourse.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:56 PM on August 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'd say that depends very much on the circumstances and the type of criticism. I don't see anyone suggesting that Elkins's work should be "immune from criticism." However, for example, one historian accused Elkins of committing "blood libel" against Britain. That should raise an eyebrow or three.

Historians are not actually miraculously and uniquely detached from their cultures. The "conduct of scholarship" did not prevent British historians from writing decades of extraordinarily deceptive scholarship of colonialism's "civilizing mission" (and, of course, the British are not unique in this failing).
posted by praemunire at 2:12 PM on August 20, 2016 [7 favorites]

The Wikipedia page on the Mau Mau is a fascinating cacophony of perspectives and rhetorical styles, from radical feminist deconstruction to fascist apologia of genocide and polite liberal racism.

In particular I was struck by the similarities of some passages to the words of holocaust deniers or lost-cause romanticists:

All of this is not, of course, to say that Kikuyu society was stable and harmonious before the British arrived. The Kikuyu in the nineteenth century were expanding and colonising new territory and already internally divided between wealthy land-owning families and landless ones, the latter dependent on the former in a variety of ways.

(AKA the "they do the same thing to themselves so why are you made at us for doing it to them" argument)

Nevertheless, as many Kikuyu fought against Mau Mau on the side of the colonial government as joined them in rebellion[13] and, partly because of this, the conflict is now often regarded in academic circles as an intra-Kikuyu civil war,[12][83] a characterisation that remains extremely unpopular in Kenya.

(the classic "black people fought for the confederacy" gambit, also posthumously reinforcing colonial political tactics, manipulating tensions from conflict between colonizer / colonized into smaller conflicts between subgroups of the colonized).

The section on the estimated death toll might be informative to the conversation in this thread:

The British possibly killed in excess of 20,000 Mau Mau militants,[3] but in some ways more notable is the smaller number of Mau Mau suspects dealt with by capital punishment: by the end of the Emergency, the total was 1,090. At no other time or place in the British empire was capital punishment dispensed so liberally—the total is more than double the number executed by the French in Algeria.[198]

posted by idiopath at 2:21 PM on August 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Andrew Roberts is far from an academic historian so I don't know how his words are an indicator of how they view elkins's work
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:27 PM on August 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's hardly Britain's first gulag. The first "concentration camps" were part of the counterinsurgency strategy of the Boer War.

Not contradict the general sense of your remarks (that the UK had done this kind of thing before), but for completeness's sake I need to say: Not exactly. The first actual use of the term was for places where Spanish troops "concentrated" Cuban civilians in order to keep a close eye on them and try to stop them from aiding guerrillas during the Cuban Wars of Independence in the later part of the 1800s. There were a lot of deaths in these camps from malnutrition and disease.
posted by dhens at 7:01 PM on August 20, 2016

the classic "black people fought for the confederacy" gambit

I recently had occasion to look up "slavery" on Youtube. According to Youtube, it turns out to mostly have affected the Irish, except when there was a black slave owner.
posted by thelonius at 7:09 PM on August 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

To echo MisanthropicPainforest really really don't use Andrew Roberts as an examplar of academic history - he and his fellow media-historians (see also David Starkey, Dominic Sandbrook, sometimes Niall Ferguson) - do not represent the views or approach of most academic historians.

I certainly don't disparage independent scholars, or academics who are good at talking beyond the academy - I think we should all do it more - but these guys have become successful public figures precisely because they are happy to sell a particular type of macho British imperial nostalgia that has very little to do with critical academic research, and that appeals to a wider public by flattering them with a sense of Britain's glory. See here for a good piece on the excellent Media Diversified (albeit one which also makes the mistake of assuming Roberts, Starkey are the norm rather than the outliers) on this kind of colonial nostalgia.
posted by melisande at 8:21 AM on August 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

Look, you don't get to play No True Scotsman with fellows of the RHS and people who have taught history at some of Britain's most prestigious institutions. I haven't followed Roberts's career that closely, but I do know and have great contempt for Starkey's. They're not freaks bearing no relationship to the institutions they trained and worked in. They're just the most extreme and blatant cases on one end of a spectrum. A couple of generations ago, they would have been entirely mainstream, so, please, let's not pretend that academic history is uniquely independent of politics and can never be influenced by the latter to its detriment. Especially when we're talking about the history of the Empire, for goodness's sake.
posted by praemunire at 9:34 AM on August 22, 2016

Roberts isn't an academic historian. He does not do academic research. He does not publish in academic journals. Also, you're misusing 'No True Scotsman'. If your usage were correct, that would imply that we are saying Roberts isn't an academic historian because he has bad views. On the contrary, we are saying Roberts isn't an academic historian because he doesn't do the things academic historians do.

They're just the most extreme and blatant cases on one end of a spectrum

So you are saying that Roberts et al are just extreme version of academic history's view of Elkins and her work? Elkins is one of the most respected and rewarded historians in academia today. Rather than being banished and ridiculed for promoting uncomfortable truths, Elkins was quickly promoted to full professor at Harvard (this is not done lightly) and is the founding director of a center at Harvard.

On the whole, the idea that academic historians in the US generally have soft spot for imperialism is laughable if it wasn't so drowned in ignorance.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:55 AM on August 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

So you are saying that Roberts et al are just extreme version of academic history's view of Elkins and her work?

No, I am saying that Roberts et al are an extreme example of the way a historian's underlying political sympathies and world-view can inflect their scholarship. Since historians are human beings, that such sympathies, along with other underlying beliefs, can affect their work is a trivially obvious point. Which means that it is at times possible, or at least defensible to attempt, to discern the influence of those beliefs on their work. A historian forcefully dismissing Elkins's work because she may not have correctly worked out the precise number of those murdered is going to raise such questions. Even if one agrees that a more accurate body count would be a worthwhile inquiry.

the idea that academic historians in the US generally have soft spot for imperialism is laughable if it wasn't so drowned in ignorance.

When you are speaking to pseudonymous people, it is advisable to adopt a degree of epistemological humility as to their actual identity and background.

Anyway, I suspect I'm verging on thread-sitting, so I'll leave it at that.
posted by praemunire at 11:41 AM on August 22, 2016

I think both MisantropicPainforest and praemunire are making valid points here, and to be clear, I'm not saying that Roberts et al aren't 'proper historians' but I do stand by the view that they are not representative of academic historians and that they do not speak for the profession. While they may have worked within that tradition in the past, that is no longer the platform from which they speak.

Yes they are still members of the RHS and have taught in prestigious institutions, and yes - of course those same prestigious (often conservative and traditionalist) institutions have in the past contributed to their particular strand of imperial nostalgia - a praemunire says, 'a couple of generations ago they would have been entirely mainstream'. Indeed in some such institutions there are people still working within that tradition (though doing so in a way that is theoretically and methodologically rigorous) but they now ARE the outliers within academic history, a lot has happened in those 'couple of generations' and that is why it's particularly important to draw a distinction between Roberts et al and 'current academic history'.

Roberts, Starkey, Sandbrook etc are historians who trade on a popular and media appetite both for the (imperial nostalgia) stories they tell, and for the particular kind of academic persona (blustering white male prof) that they are performing.

As I've just said, it's possible to write history an imperial tradition in a way that is critically rigorous, but that is not what Roberts etc seek to do. The problem is not that Roberts' personal and political views influences his historical judgement - of course they do, but most serious historians acknowledge the way their subjectivity will influence their judgement and take the theory and methodology seriously precisely in order to grapple with with this difficulty.

Roberts, Starkey et al are media-successful precisely because they are happy NOT to engage with current academic history, they are happy to deny that their views are subjective and claim speak from a position of disembodied authority, which is authenticated by their performance of a particular academic personality that is exclusive and exclusionary. Relatedly, in my direct personal experience, one of them at least is only too keen to maintain the idea that a 'History Professor' looks like this (no disrespect intended to that particular historian), and not like any of these people
posted by melisande at 1:03 AM on August 23, 2016