The British genocide in Kenya

Alternet has a review of the book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkin. The massacre of some 300,000 Kikuyu by British forces in the 1950s is arguably the least known mass slaughter of the 20th century.

Reviewer John Dolan offers a harsh, but probably not unfair, assessment:

One of the great mysteries of the 20th century was the way Britain got away with pillaging nearly every country on the planet without suffering any retribution. I've spent a long, bitter time brooding over this experimental proof that there's no such thing as karma. Among the reasons I've found for this failure to prosecute are the reluctance of the raped to report their sufferings, the stupidity and credulity of American scholars vis-a-vis their Oxbridge colleagues, and the charmed life that seems to reward those individuals and nations lucky enough to lack any vestige of conscience.

But the answer is more simple. The Brits simply destroyed all records of the massacres. And dead men don't tell tales.


The difference between the British Empire and other fascist empires is not that these guys were nicer. Nobody who reads this book could continue to believe that, if they were fool enough to believe it beforehand. The difference is that the Brits were good at it, and had no conscience to trouble them. Thanks to that careful incineration of records and highly adaptive national sociopathic disorder, "...there would be no soul-searching or public accounting [in Britain] for the crimes perpetrated against the hundreds of thousands of men and women in Kenya."

These were the same Brits whose purported colonial mission was bringing Christian civilization to the savages.