pumpkinstrokemarrow

On April 28th I noticed a book about bad things done by the British in Kenya in the course of the Mau Mau rebellion, prompted originally by  piece in the Guardian. This same piece prompted a former district officer in Kenya to write in to explain that Monbiot & Elkins (the author of the exposée) had got it all wrong and what actually happened was that the Brits toiled manfully & decently to contain a civil war which had broken out among the Kikuyu.

Which I do not believe is a fair representation of what happened, despite the Elkins book continuing to irritate. It has the same dull and dreary tone that I have come across in other lefty diatribes about the awful deeds of governments past and present. The heaping up of dubious oral testimony from blacks about events which took place over half a century ago. Very little oral testimony from the whites, dubious or otherwise. The book reads more like an article in the newspaper which has got far too long than history.

I share a snippet about libraries. It seems that in some camps the regime was so brutal that the prisoners were reduced to passing messages to each other by putting them inside innocuous looking books in the prison library. I was rather struck by the brutality of a regime which ran to prison libraries and my degree of belief in the parallel drawn between the Nazi concentration camps, Stalin's gulag and the Brits was somewhat diminished. But despite all this, I think Elkins gets nearer the truth than the Guardian correspondent.

And to be fair to her, she does allow that the rebels did some bad things too. Like killing any of their own who did not sign up to the rebellion.

But could a better job of it been done? Has a better job been done?