Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya written by Caroline Elkins, published by Henry Holt, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. [1]
Elkins' work was criticized by historian Lawrence James in The Sunday Times as being a one-sided account of the Mau Mau Uprising. In an article in The Guardian, James, in turn, was criticized for "whitewashing the history of the British empire".[2]
Nicholas Best, acknowledging that "there can be no excuse for what happened" in Kenya, questioned Elkins' detention and casualty figures as "ludicrous" and accused Elkins of being selective in her sources.[3]
Richard Dowden wrote a critical review of Elkins' book in The Guardian.[4] James Mitchell, in a highly critical review of the book, said "I shudder for those of her students who expect academic rigour: Elkins doesn't let facts stand in the way of a good rant."[5]
The BBC documentary Kenya: White Terror was based on Elkins' controversial research into the Mau Mau. It aired on Sunday 17 November 2002 on BBC Two at 1915 GMT and subsequently on BBC World. As a result of complaints made against this documentary, Ofcom (the British broadcasting watchdog) ruled that the programme had been partially unfair to Terrence Gavaghan, whom Elkins accuses of brutality.
Elkins' Harvard colleague Niall Ferguson, who praised Elkins for her research which he described as "painstaking", nevertheless described her book as a "sensationalist" account of the rebellion.[6]
In 2007, the demographer John Blacker writing in African Affairs demonstrated in detail that Elkins' estimates of casualties were grossly over estimated.[7]
The historian Bethwell Ogot, from Moi University, has written in reviewing Elkins’ book that Mau Mau fighters who were involved in the war (against the British and the Africans who supported the British):
Contrary to African customs and values, assaulted old people, women and children. The horrors they practiced included the following: 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. No war can justify such gruesome actions. In man’s inhumanity to man there is no race distinction. The Africans were practising it on themselves. There was no reason and no restraint on both sides, although Elkins sees no atrocities on the part of Mau Mau".[8]
The historian Susan Carruthers from Rutgers University has written in reviewing Elkins’ book that:
In her determination to redress imperial propaganda's stereotypes of Mau Mau savagery, Elkins leans into unintended condescension, lauding the Kikuyu's "sophisticated" appreciation of British hypocrisy. (Why wouldn't those most thoroughly dislocated appreciate the character of European colonialism better than anyone?) Conversely, Elkins' settlers and colonial administrators are cartoonish grotesques: "These privileged men and women lived an absolutely hedonistic lifestyle, filled with sex, drugs, drink and dance, followed by more of the same"[9]
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, Henry Holt/Jonathan Cape, 2005, ISBN 0805080015