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

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Abstract

In a groundbreaking and Pulitzer winning debut, Harvard historian and 1998 IDRF Fellow Caroline Elkins has recovered the lost history of the last days of British colonialism in Kenya. Elkins reveals for the first time what Britain so desperately tried to hide. In the aftermath of World War II and the triumph of liberal democracy over fascism, the British detained nearly the entire Kikuyu population—some one and a half million people—for more than eight years. Inside detention camps and barbed-wire villages, the Kikuyu lived in a world of fear, hunger, and death. Their only hope for survival was a full denunciation of their anti-British beliefs.