******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
Elkins emerged with a book that turned her initial thesis on its head.
The British had sought to quell the Mau Mau uprising by instituting a
policy of mass detention. This system – “Britain’s gulag”, as Elkins
called it – had affected far more people than previously understood. She
calculated that the camps had held not 80,000 detainees, as official
figures stated, but between 160,000 and 320,000. She also came to
understand that colonial authorities had herded Kikuyu women and
children into some 800 enclosed villages dispersed across the
countryside. These heavily patrolled villages – cordoned off by barbed
wire, spiked trenches and watchtowers – amounted to another form of
detention. In camps, villages and other outposts, the Kikuyu suffered
forced labour, disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder.
“I’ve come to believe that during the Mau Mau war British forces wielded
their authority with a savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial
logic,” Elkins wrote in Britain’s Gulag. “Only by detaining nearly the
entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and
psychologically atomising its men, women, and children could colonial
authority be restored and the civilising mission reinstated.” After
nearly a decade of oral and archival research, she had uncovered “a
murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens
of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead”.
Elkins knew her findings would be explosive. But the ferocity of the
response went beyond what she could have imagined. Felicitous timing
helped. Britain’s Gulag hit bookstores after the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan had touched off debate about imperialism. It was a moment
when another historian, Niall Ferguson, had won acclaim for his
sympathetic writing on British colonialism. Hawkish intellectuals
pressed America to embrace an imperial role. Then came Bagram. Abu
Ghraib. Guantánamo. These controversies primed readers for stories about
the underside of empire.
Enter Elkins. Young, articulate and photogenic, she was fired up with
outrage over her findings. Her book cut against an abiding belief that
the British had managed and retreated from their empire with more
dignity and humanity than other former colonial powers, such as the
French or the Belgians. And she didn’t hesitate to speak about that
research in the grandest possible terms: as a “tectonic shift in Kenyan
history”.
Some academics shared her enthusiasm. By conveying the perspective of
the Mau Mau themselves, Britain’s Gulag marked a “historical
breakthrough”, says Wm Roger Louis, a historian of the British empire at
the University of Texas at Austin. Richard Drayton of King’s College
London, another imperial historian, judged it an “extraordinary” book
whose implications went beyond Kenya. It set the stage for a rethinking
of British imperial violence, he says, demanding that scholars reckon
with colonial brutality in territories such as Cyprus, Malaya, and Aden
(now part of Yemen).
British soldiers assist police searching for Mau Mau members,
Karoibangi, Kenya, 1954
British soldiers assist police searching for Mau Mau members,
Karoibangi, Kenya, 1954. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images
But many other scholars slammed the book. No review was more devastating
than the one that Bethwell A Ogot, a senior Kenyan historian, published
in the Journal of African History. Ogot dismissed Elkins as an
uncritical imbiber of Mau Mau propaganda. In compiling “a kind of case
for the prosecution”, he argued, she had glossed over the litany of Mau
Mau atrocities: “decapitation and general mutilation of civilians,
torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells,
burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the
stomachs of pregnant women”. Ogot also suggested that Elkins might have
made up quotes and fallen for the bogus stories of financially motivated
interviewees. Pascal James Imperato picked up the same theme in African
Studies Review. Elkins’s work, he wrote, depended heavily on the
“largely uncorroborated 50-year-old memories of a few elderly men and
women interested in financial reparations”.
Elkins was also accused of sensationalism, a charge that figured
prominently in a fierce debate over her mortality figures. Britain’s
Gulag opens by describing a “murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu
people” and ends with the suggestion that “between 130,000 and 300,000
Kikuyu are unaccounted for”, an estimate derived from Elkins’s analysis
of census figures. “In this very long book, she really doesn’t bring out
any more evidence than that for talking about the possibility of
hundreds of thousands killed, and talking in terms almost of genocide as
a policy,” says Philip Murphy, a University of London historian who
directs the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and co-edits the Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History. This marred what was otherwise an
“incredibly valuable” study, he says. “If you make a really radical
claim about history, you really need to back it up solidly.”
Critics didn’t just find the substance overstated. They also rolled
their eyes at the narrative Elkins told about her work. Particularly
irksome, to some Africanists, was her claim to have discovered an
unknown story. This was a motif of articles on Elkins in the popular
press. But it hinged on the public ignorance of African history and the
scholarly marginalisation of Africanist research, wrote Bruce J Berman,
a historian of African political economy at Queen’s University in
Kingston, Ontario. During the Mau Mau war, journalists, missionaries and
colonial whistleblowers had exposed abuses. The broad strokes of British
misbehaviour were known by the late 60s, Berman argued. Memoirs and
studies had added to the picture. Britain’s Gulag had broken important
new ground, providing the most comprehensive chronicle yet of the
detention camps and prison villages. But among Kenyanists, Berman wrote,
the reaction had generally been no more than: “It was as bad as or worse
than I had imagined from more fragmentary accounts.”
He called Elkins “astonishingly disingenuous” for saying her project
began as an attempt to show the success of Britain’s liberal reforms.
“If, at that late date,” he wrote, “she still believed in the official
British line about its so-called civilising mission in the empire, then
she was perhaps the only scholar or graduate student in the
English-speaking world who did.”
To Elkins, the vituperation felt over the top. And she believes there
was more going on than the usual academic disagreement. Kenyan history,
she says, was “an old boys’ club”. Women worked on uncontroversial
topics such as maternal health, not blood and violence during Mau Mau.
Now here came this interloper from the US, blowing open the Mau Mau
story, winning a Pulitzer, landing media coverage. It raised questions
about why they hadn’t told the tale themselves. “Who is controlling the
production of the history of Kenya? That was white men from Oxbridge,
not a young American girl from Harvard,” she says.
On 6 April 2011, the debate over Caroline Elkins’s work shifted to the
Royal Courts of Justice in London. A scrum of reporters turned out to
document the real-life Britain’s Gulag: four elderly plaintiffs from
rural Kenya, some clutching canes, who had come to the heart of the
former British empire to seek justice. Elkins paraded with them outside
the court. Her career was now secure: Harvard had awarded her tenure in
2009, based on Britain’s Gulag and the research she had done for a
second book. But she remained nervous about the case. “Good God,” she
thought. “This is the moment where literally my footnotes are on trial.”
In preparation, Elkins had distilled her book into a 78-page witness
statement. The claimants marching beside her were just like the people
she had interviewed in Kenya. One, Paulo Nzili, said he had been
castrated with pliers at a detention camp. Another, Jane Muthoni Mara,
reported being sexually assaulted with a heated glass bottle. Their case
made the same claim as Britain’s Gulag: this was part of systematic
violence against detainees, sanctioned by British authorities. But there
was one difference now. Many more documents were coming out.
Just as the hearings were set to begin, a story broke in the British
press that would affect the case, the debate about Britain’s Gulag, and
the broader community of imperial historians. A cache of papers had come
to light that documented Britain’s torture and mistreatment of detainees
during the Mau Mau rebellion. The Times splashed the news across its
front page: “50 years later: Britain’s Kenya cover-up revealed.”
Foreign Office archives at Hanslope Park
Foreign Office archives at Hanslope Park. Photograph: David Sillitoe
for the Guardian
The story exposed to the public an archival mystery that had long
intrigued historians. The British destroyed documents in Kenya –
scholars knew that. But for years clues had existed that Britain had
also expatriated colonial records that were considered too sensitive to
be left in the hands of successor governments. Kenyan officials had
sniffed this trail soon after the country gained its independence. In
1967, they wrote to Britain’s Foreign Office asking for the return of
the “stolen papers”. The response? Blatant dishonesty, writes David M
Anderson, a University of Warwick historian and author of Histories of
the Hanged, a highly regarded book about the Mau Mau war.
Internally, British officials acknowledged that more than 1,500 files,
encompassing over 100 linear feet of storage, had been flown from Kenya
to London in 1963, according to documents reviewed by Anderson. Yet they
conveyed none of this in their official reply to the Kenyans. “They were
simply told that no such collection of Kenyan documents existed, and
that the British had removed nothing that they were not entitled to take
with them in December 1963,” Anderson writes. The stonewalling continued
as Kenyan officials made more inquiries in 1974 and 1981, when Kenya’s
chief archivist dispatched officials to London to search for what he
called the “migrated archives”. This delegation was “systematically and
deliberately misled in its meetings with British diplomats and
archivists,” Anderson writes in a History Workshop Journal article,
Guilty Secrets: Deceit, Denial and the Discovery of Kenya’s ‘Migrated
Archive’.
The turning point came in 2010, when Anderson, now serving as an expert
witness in the Mau Mau case, submitted a statement to the court that
referred directly to the 1,500 files spirited out of Kenya. Under legal
pressure, the government finally acknowledged that the records had been
stashed at a high-security storage facility that the Foreign Office
shared with the intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6. It also revealed a
bigger secret. This same repository, Hanslope Park, held files removed
from a total of 37 former colonies.
The disclosure sparked an uproar in the press and flabbergasted Elkins:
“After all these years of being just roasted over the coals, they’ve
been sitting on the evidence? Are you frickin’ kidding me? This almost
destroyed my career.”
Events moved quickly from there. In court, lawyers representing the
British government tried to have the Mau Mau case tossed out. They
argued that Britain could not be held responsible because liability for
any colonial abuses had devolved to the Kenyan government upon
independence. But the presiding judge, Richard McCombe, dismissed the
government’s bid to dodge responsibility as “dishonourable”. He ruled
that the claim could move forward. “There is ample evidence even in the
few papers that I have seen suggesting that there may have been
systematic torture of detainees,” he wrote in July 2011.
Foreign Office lawyers conceded that the elderly Kenyan claimants had
suffered torture during the Mau Mau rebellion
And that was before historians had a chance to thoroughly review the
newly discovered files, known as the “Hanslope disclosure”. A careful
combing-through of these documents might normally have taken three
years. Elkins had about nine months. Working with five students at
Harvard, she found thousands of records relevant to the case: more
evidence about the nature and extent of detainee abuse, more details of
what officials knew about it, new material about the brutal “dilution
technique” used to break hardcore detainees. These documents would
probably have spared her years of research for Britain’s Gulag. She drew
on them in two more witness statements.
Back in London, Foreign Office lawyers conceded that the elderly Kenyan
claimants had suffered torture during the Mau Mau rebellion. But too
much time had elapsed for a fair trial, they contended. There weren’t
enough surviving witnesses. The evidence was insufficient. In October
2012, Justice McCombe rejected those arguments, too. His decision, which
noted the thousands of Hanslope files that had emerged, allowed the case
to proceed to trial. It also fed speculation that many more colonial
abuse claims would crop up from across an empire that once ruled about a
quarter of the earth’s population.
The British government, defeated repeatedly in court, moved to settle
the Mau Mau case. On 6 June 2013, the foreign secretary, William Hague,
read a statement in parliament announcing an unprecedented agreement to
compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured and abused during the
insurrection. Each would receive about £3,800. “The British government
recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of
ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration,” Hague said.
Britain “sincerely regrets that these abuses took place.” The
settlement, in Anderson’s view, marked a “profound” rewriting of
history. It was the first time Britain had admitted carrying out torture
anywhere in its former empire.
The lawyers were done fighting, but the academics were not. The Mau Mau
case has fuelled two scholarly debates, one old and one new. The old one
is about Caroline Elkins. To the historian and her allies, a single word
summarises what happened in the High Court: vindication. Scholars had
mistreated Elkins in their attacks on Britain’s Gulag. Then a British
court, which had every reason to sympathise with those critics, gave her
the fair hearing academia never did. By ruling in her favour, the court
also implicitly judged her critics.
The evidence backing this account comes from Justice McCombe, whose 2011
decision had stressed the substantial documentation supporting
accusations of systematic abuses. That “spoke directly to claims that,
if you took out the oral evidence” in Britain’s Gulag, “the whole thing
fell apart”, Elkins says. Then the Hanslope disclosure added extensive
documentation about the scale and scope of what went on. At least two
scholars have noted that these new files corroborated important aspects
of the oral testimony in Britain’s Gulag, such as the systematic beating
and torture of detainees at specific detention camps. “Basically, I read
document after document after document that proved the book to be
correct,” Elkins says.
Jane Muthoni Mara, Wambuga Wa Nyingi and Paulo Muoka Nzili celebrate
the outcome of their case at the High Court, October 2012
Jane Muthoni Mara, Wambuga Wa Nyingi and Paulo Muoka Nzili celebrate
the outcome of the Mau Mau veterans’ case at the high court, October
2012. Photograph: Ben Curtis/AP
Her victory lap has played out in op-eds, interviews and journal
articles. It may soon reach an even bigger audience. Elkins has sold the
film rights for her book and personal story to John Hart, the producer
of hits including Boys Don’t Cry and Revolutionary Road. An early
summary of the feature film he is developing gives its flavour: “One
woman’s journey to tell the story of the colonial British genocide of
the Mau Mau. Threatened and shunned by colleagues and critics, Caroline
Elkins persevered and brought to life the atrocities that were committed
and hidden from the world for decades.”
But some scholars find aspects of Elkins’s vindication story
unconvincing. Philip Murphy, who specialises in the history of British
decolonisation, attended some of the Mau Mau hearings. He thinks Elkins
and other historians did “hugely important” work on the case. Still, he
does not believe that the Hanslope files justify the notion that
hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Kenya, or that those
deaths were systematic. “Probably most of the historical criticisms of
the book still stand,” he says. “I don’t think the trial really changes
that.”
Susan L Carruthers feels the same about her own criticism of Britain’s
Gulag. Carruthers, a professor of history at Rutgers University at
Newark, had cast doubt on Elkins’s self-dramatisation: her account of
naively embarking on a journey of personal discovery, only to see the
scales drop from her eyes. She finds that Elkins’s current “narrative of
victimisation” also rings a bit false. “There’s only so much ostracism
one can plausibly claim if you won a Pulitzer and you became a full
professor at Harvard – and this on the strength of the book that
supposedly also made you outcast and vilified by all and sundry,” she
says. “If only all the rest of us could be ostracised and have to make
do with a Pulitzer and a full professorship at Harvard.”
The second debate triggered by the Mau Mau case concerns not just Elkins
but the future of British imperial history. At its heart is a series of
documents that now sits in the National Archives as a result of
Britain’s decision to make public the Hanslope files. They describe, in
extensive detail, how the government went about retaining and destroying
colonial records in the waning days of empire. Elkins considers them to
be the most important new material to emerge from the Hanslope disclosure.
Elkins thinks all of this amounts to a watershed moment in which
historians must rethink their field
One morning this spring, I accompanied Elkins as she visited the
National Archives to look at those files. The facility occupies a
1970s-era concrete building beside a pond in Kew, in south-west London.
A blue cord held together the thin, yellowed pages, which smelled of
decaying paper. One record, a 1961 dispatch from the British colonial
secretary to authorities in Kenya and elsewhere, states that no
documents should be handed over to a successor regime that might, among
other things, “embarrass” Her Majesty’s Government. Another details the
system that would be used to carry out that order. All Kenyan files were
to be classified either “Watch” or “Legacy”. The Legacy files could be
passed on to Kenya. The Watch files would be flown back to Britain or
destroyed. A certificate of destruction was to be issued for every
document destroyed – in duplicate. The files indicate that roughly 3.5
tons of Kenyan documents were bound for the incinerator.
“The overarching takeaway is that the government itself was involved in
a very highly choreographed, systematised process of destroying and
removing documents so it could craft the official narrative that sits in
these archives,” Elkins told me. “I never in my wildest dreams imagined
this level of detail,” she added, speaking in a whisper but opening her
eyes wide. “I imagined it more of a haphazard kind of process.”
What’s more, “It’s not just happening in Kenya to this level, but all
over the empire.” For British historians, this is “absolutely seismic,”
she said. “Everybody right now is trying to figure out what to make of
this.”
Elkins laid out what she makes of this development in a 2015 essay for
the American Historical Review. Broadly speaking, she thinks
end-of-empire historians have largely failed to show scepticism about
the archives. She thinks that the fact that those records were
manipulated puts a cloud over many studies that have been based on their
contents. And she thinks all of this amounts to a watershed moment in
which historians must rethink their field.
The issue of archival erasure figures prominently in Elkins’s next book,
a history of violence at the end of the British empire whose case
studies will include Kenya, Aden, Cyprus, Malaya, Palestine and Northern
Ireland. But if the response to her latest claims is any indication, her
arguments will once again be controversial. The same document
shenanigans that leave Elkins wide-eyed prompt several other historians
to essentially shrug. “That’s exactly what you would expect of a
colonial administration, or any government in particular, including our
own,” laughs Wm Roger Louis. “That’s the way a bureaucracy works. You
want to destroy the documents that can be incriminating.”
Murphy says Elkins “has a tendency to caricature other historians of
empire as simply passive and unthinking consumers in the National
Archives supermarket, who don’t think about the ideological way in which
the archive is constructed”. They’ve been far more sceptical than that,
he says. Historians, he adds, have always dealt with the absence of
documents. What’s more, history constantly changes, with new evidence
and new paradigms. To say that a discovery about document destruction
will change the whole field is “simply not true”, he says. “That’s not
how history works.”
Some historians who have read the document-destruction materials come
away with a picture of events that seems less Orwellian than Elkins’s.
Anderson’s review of the evidence shows how the purging process evolved
from colony to colony and allowed substantial latitude to local
officials. Tony Badger, a University of Cambridge professor emeritus who
monitored the Hanslope files’ release, writes that there was “no
systematic process dictated from London”.
Badger sees a different lesson in the Hanslope disclosure: a “profound
sense of contingency”. Over the decades, archivists and Foreign Office
officials puzzled over what to do with the Hanslope papers. The National
Archives essentially said they should either be destroyed or returned to
the countries from which they had been taken. The files could easily
have been trashed on at least three occasions, he says, probably without
publicity. For a variety of reasons, they weren’t. Maybe it was the
squirrel-like tendency of archivists. Maybe it was luck. In retrospect,
he says, what is remarkable is not that the documents were kept secret
for so many years. What is remarkable is that they survived at all.
full:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/18/uncovering-truth-british-empire-caroline-elkins-mau-mau
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com