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Author Topic: British concentration camps
Jerry West
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Babbler # 1545

posted 04 July 2006 04:42 PM      Profile for Jerry West   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
An interesting article on a book about British atrocities in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising which were swept under the carpet.

quote:

Secrets & lies
While researching Kenya, she found shocking truths about the British empire

By David Mehegan, Globe Staff | July 3, 2006

CAMBRIDGE -- Wiry and energetic, the Hugo K. Foster Associate Professor of African Studies at Harvard University coils in her chair and speaks with rapid force about her book that recently won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize.

``I was strongly urged by colleagues not to undertake this project, for two reasons," Caroline Elkins said in an interview at her home, not far from the campus. ``One, they felt it was too politically sensitive. Two, they said there wouldn't be enough information. So, me being me, I decided those were good enough reasons to undertake the project."

At 37, Elkins has spent more than 10 years exhuming and writing about the long-hidden story at the heart of ``Imperial Reckoning: the Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya." It's a vivid narrative -- not without its critics -- of oppression, torture, and cover up during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, which shows how even a democratic government with humane values can hide the truth of its abominable behavior.

Mau Mau was an uprising among the Kikuyu tribe of British Kenya, essentially a response to economic privation due to losses of land at the hands of British settlers. Beginning in 1951 and ending in 1959, the rebellion included an oath of loyalty among adherents, attacks on settlers, and a poorly armed movement based in Kenyan forests. Thirty-two Europeans were killed in rebel attacks. But in the British campaign that followed, thousands of Kikuyu, many of them innocent, were abused, tortured, or killed in a system of camps known as the Pipeline. By Elkins's calculations, as many as 320,000 men and women were held in the camps, and as many as 50,000 were killed....


Link to full article


From: Gold River, BC | Registered: Oct 2001  |  IP: Logged
Dead_Letter
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Babbler # 12708

posted 05 July 2006 07:11 AM      Profile for Dead_Letter     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Thank you for this. It should be higher profile than it is. This and other de-colonialism-era atrocities Britain committed in ... Burma, I think. I sorta wanted to say Malaysia ... see, this really does need to be higher profile.

Britain has sorta managed to foster a reputation of benevolence in their de-colonialist dealings that's pretty undeserved when you read things like the above.


From: Vancouver | Registered: Jun 2006  |  IP: Logged
ceti
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Babbler # 7851

posted 05 July 2006 09:42 AM      Profile for ceti     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
George Monbiot commented on this in an article of his quite recently. Will try to dig it up.

The repression of Kenya was extremely vicious, no doubt about it.


From: various musings before the revolution | Registered: Jan 2005  |  IP: Logged
ceti
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posted 07 July 2006 09:43 PM      Profile for ceti     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Here it is. Monbiot makes some important points about how the Brits airbrush history by denying their own holocausts. The same with the Americans, as well as every colonial power, most of whom have never paid any reparations or even apologized for the rapine and plunder they subjected their territories to.
From: various musings before the revolution | Registered: Jan 2005  |  IP: Logged
abouttimetobefree
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posted 11 July 2006 04:07 AM      Profile for abouttimetobefree     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
It's about time that truths were told about all corrupt and lying governments and regimes. I had read and was familiar with the Mau mau war (not the official British version). I wonder when ordianry people will sit up and face the truth about thier so called Empire's atrocities. I wish we really had a good press, media where a journalist would get full cover uncensored to tell the truth of the state sponsored terrorism carried out on the N Ireland Nationalist community by the Orange and British governemnt. I think maybe the censored press would have a job on their hands now having to expose all of the British government lies to their own people. They have had them convinced for so long, Shame!
From: North East | Registered: Jul 2006  |  IP: Logged

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