As a result, colonial officials interpreted Mau Mau and oathing as radical,
irrational, barbaric, and uncivilized. The oathing Mau Mau fighters were labeled
as gangsters, thugs, and criminals from the start of the movement, making it
virtually impossible for the African grievances of land and freedom to receive
attention. The early colonial descriptions were dominated by these perspectives,
which hid the realities of the war, preferring to showcase only the atrocities of
Mau Mau fighters. Colonial archive reports and testimonies formed a picture of
Mau Mau that was evil and unjustifiable; this concurred with existing Eurocentric
views of African people as a group lacking civilization, despite their long history
of development. As a result, false and distorted depictions were easily supported
by many with African grievances. The initial writings, reports, and images long
shaped the conversation, impression, memory, and history of Kenya.
Recent scholarship questions these perceptions about the Mau Mau past.
For example, Carolyn Elkins’ study of the Mau Mau war, Imperial Reckoning,
provides an intervention by revealing and analyzing files associated with the
horrors and murders at the detention camps. According to Elkins, over the span
of the war there may have been “tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of
thousands” of African deaths compared to fewer than one hundred European
deaths.14 The war also involved the detention of 1.5 million Africans by British
officials. And many, including Elkins, question whether this was a British attempt
to erase an entire ethnic population.15 The major problems now in understanding
14 Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain ,s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry
Holt and Company, LLC, 2005), xvi.
15 See Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, xi-xvi.