This book documents the abuse of Gikuyu detainees incarcerated by the British government in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency (1952–60). Gripped by what Elkins calls an “eliminationalist mentality,” colonial officials, white settlers, and African loyalists imprisoned and tortured thousands of Gikuyu people suspected of harboring Mau Mau sympathies. By shedding light on this history, Caroline Elkins has written a timely and devastating critique of liberal imperialism. But in her emphasis on punitive nature of “Britain's gulag,” Elkins flattens out divisions of thought among the African protagonists of the war. Her account makes it hard to see how detention camps helped create a Mau Mau movement.

Elkins is unoriginal about the roots of the Mau Mau war. Her account is derived from the liberal historiography of the 1960s, which treated Mau Mau as a straightforward struggle between a self-knowing Gikuyu people and their British oppressors. Elkins's book starts with the British conquest of Kenya's highlands in the late nineteenth century. Gikuyu people lost over 60,000 acres of prime farmland to white settlers, and in subsequent decades thousands of them were coerced into working for low wages on settlers’ farms. Disaffected with the colonial regime, Gikuyu first took oaths in the late 1940s “in a collective effort to fight the injustices of British rule” (25). The oaths were a means of “indoctrinating” them into an identifiable “Mau Mau movement,” says Elkins (28). In all, some 90 percent of Kenya's 1.5 million Gikuyu people took the oath. A small minority, in the tens of thousands, went into the forest and fought an unsuccessful guerilla war against the British army. But it was the far larger civilian population that bore the brunt of the colonial government's wrath. Perhaps as many as 320,000 people were detained in government camps that were collectively called the “Pipeline.” A significantly larger number were herded into villages supervised by police and African loyalists.

It is in the reconstruction of this detention system that Elkins's contribution lies. She uncovers a widespread system of abuse in Kenya's detention camps, comparable in nature if not in scale to the Stalinist gulag or to Auschwitz. Incarcerated without due process, detainees were assigned to one or the other of the camps along the Pipeline. Those who refused to confess to taking oaths were subjected to inhumane discipline; those who confessed enjoyed better treatment. During the “screenings” where confessions were elicited, detainees were whipped, burned, and forced to eat feces and drink urine. Sexual violence was widespread: men were made to eat their own testicles and women were raped with bottles. This system of abuse reached its apotheosis in Mwea camps, built in the late 1950s to house the most unreformed Mau Mau sympathizers. There government officers authorized the “dilution technique,” whereby detainees were beaten unremittingly until they performed a task set out for them. Their enforced compliance was supposed to make them confess. The highest levels of British officialdom were aware of these abuses. Yet demands for a full inquiry were repeatedly pushed aside, as conservative majorities in Parliament voted down Labour Party protests.

Elkins's book illuminates an awful history. But in her eagerness to induct the “Pipeline” into the twentieth-century vocabulary of genocide, Elkins obscures the unique character of Kenya's detention camps. The system of detention should be seen as part of a wider governmental effort to clarify Gikuyu subjectivities. For (contra Elkins) their precolonial history did not invite Gikuyu to see themselves as a unified people kept down by colonial repression. They derived contending political theories from their past: some sought to build large-scale parties with which to contend with the British administration; others argued that only locally proven reputation could be the basis for alliance. These divisions of thought did not disappear in the 1950s. Many people took oaths, but (again contra Elkins) they were not joining an identifiable political movement. The oaths of the late 1940s and early 1950s committed Gikuyu to work against moral decay, against the dissolution of families, and also against the undermining of established gender roles. Many people, Christian or not, thought these oaths to be a moral obligation. Mau Mau's moral project was something with which most people could agree.

Organizers sought to turn this struggle against sexual and social indiscipline into a political conflict between two sides. Mau Mau's organizers in the forest issued identity cards to supporters, kept records, and thereby created a constituency from which to draw support. British officials also worked to identify Mau Mau's constituency. They ringed the Aberdares forest with a deep trench, issued uniforms to those they thought to be government supporters, and built barbed wire fences around villages. These were efforts to pin people down, to mark “Mau Mau” off from British loyalists. This sorting process was carried forward in detention camps and through screening. By force or by persuasion, British and African screeners produced confessions, proof that a given person held certain dispositions. “Screening” was the extension of a broader political process by which the British gave identifiable shape to Mau Mau's constituency. Detention was surely punitive, but it was also an aspect of colonial knowledge production.

Elkins has nothing to say about the politically creative nature of torture. For her, detention camps and emergency villages were meant to punish people who had already been indoctrinated into an identifiable Mau Mau movement. Her flat historical analysis forecloses investigation into the complexities of Gikuyu identity: Gikuyu were either part of a “Mau Mau population” or British loyalists, moving in “lockstep with the British to ensure their common collective interests” (60). Individuals like Simon Rutho, a teacher in government employ who supported Mau Mau, was in Elkins's nomenclature a “double agent” (245). There were surely people who “played both sides, loyalist during the day and Mau Mau by night,” she writes, but these individuals were simply hedging their bets (68). Elkins's analysis pushes Gikuyu identities toward one of two poles, ignoring the broader range of moral projects that Gikuyu people pursued in the 1950s. Government officials likewise sought to pin down Gikuyu people's loyalties with torture and barbed wire. Elkins resolves, in writing, what was in fact the central political problem that detention camps addressed.

Imperial Reckoning reminds us that violence was at the heart of Britain's “civilizing mission.” Yet Elkins is too eager to compare Kenya with Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, and not attentive enough to Gikuyu political history. The British herded Gikuyu into supervised villages, built detention centers, and elicited forced confessions because they needed to give definite shape to a Mau Mau movement. Detainees were also producing knowledge, discussing political theory, writing tracts, and teaching other detainees to read. On all sides, detention camps were more than systems of punishment. They also opened up lines of thought and action.