Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya

Read this and know the soul of your own nation Britons. The price Africans paid for our so called civilising influence. A repulsive, barbaric occupation. Displacing a whole people. Killing and torturing without mercy. Genocide by any serious definition. All in the name of Queen Elizabeth II of England. The wrong side won. Shame on Kenya. So many still wretched to this day. Shame on us.

This is a thoroughly researched, balanced and readable account of the role of the British Empire in Kenya. That it contains such harrowing material is of course not the authors' fault but owes everything to the ractises and behaviour of both the colonial machine and the white settlers.The recent court cases in Britain which have partially revealed a decades-long cover up demonstrate that the record described in this work is correct in all its essential details. Elkins' detractors should now leave the field in silence.The power of the account is reinforced by the fact that the author did not set out to provide a critique of Britian's role and was utterly taken aback by her discovery of it. This adds to the great strength of the research, which is meticulous, even exhaustive, at least of what was then in the public domain. Even now, the British authorities seem intent on allowing access to the hidden files only by more trusted academics, not those who have achieved ground-breaking work such as this author.However, without suffering any preconceptions about Britain's role In Kenya, the book fails to place it in the overall context of Britain's imperial reign in Africa, what was a stake among the imperial powers in the Scramble and what factors obliged the ignominious retreat. The effects on post-colonial Kenya are too only hinted at. But maybe she and other authors will take up those challenges in future work.

pleased with the product. arrived on time. thanks

as expected

Quite an 'eye-opener' - We should be ashamed our ourselves.

Well written and well researched. An eyeopener.

The author gives voice to a disgraceful and wrenching 'incident' in history and spares us none of the necessary detail to understand exactly what went on at that time and place. Both on the individual and political level. Human bigotry and wretchedness at its worst. Even more shocking considering that WWII was fairly recent history. Her decade of work shows on every page and all revelations are supported by deep research.

This is a very important book. Sadly, it is seen as revelratory. It is not really. The British murdered more than15% of my peoples in concentration camps during the years 1899 - 1901 in conditions of extreme brutality. They took special delight in hacking pianos to pieces, all to demonstrate to us how civilised they were. Then they proceeded to shoot every farm animal to death. To ensure we got the point, they raped our women and childen and, just to ensure we really understood how civilised they were, they loaded us on cattle trucks en route to concentration camps where our women and childen would die horrible deaths. Then they spread myths around about how backward we were. They killed about 20 000 Black South Africans in separate (apart) concentration camps but, because they considered African people to be backward, we do not have accurate figures. At least one can get an approximation of ALL the South Africans murdered by the British in this terrible war of exploitation at the memorial garden in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Because they were never made to face up to their atrocities, the British then did even worse in Kenia. They rolled people up in barbed wire and rolled them around the camp for fun. That was after they crushed their balls. Then they had the Iraq war where they proceed to commit atrocities in their (yet again) prison camps. What would it take to get the British to face up to their darkness?