THE ALARM BELLS SHOULD HAVE RUNG AS soon as the Buckingham Palace press releases landed. The King’s first state visit to a Commonwealth country, to the former British colony of Kenya, would be an opportunity for him “to express regret over abuses during the Mau Mau Emergency of the 1950s”. The giveaway was the citation by the Palace of an estimate from the Kenyan Human Rights Commission that 90,000 Kenyans had been “killed, tortured or maimed during the British counter-insurgency”.
There is no evidential basis for such a claim. 1,090 men had been executed after being convicted of capital crimes such as murder or supplying arms to the Mau Mau rebels. 10,540 Mau Mau had been killed in action — mostly by fellow Kikuyu rebelling against the reign of terror Mau Mau had inflicted on those resisting its attempt to win domination over Kenya’s largest tribe. But the notion that some 80,000 had been “maimed or tortured” was a complete invention.
That the British Foreign Office had allowed the Palace to endorse such nonsense was no surprise — it had a track record in swallowing such claims. No less surprising was the re-emergence, as an “expert” witness in media coverage of the state visit, of Professor Caroline Elkins, the originator of much of the absurdity written about the Mau Mau uprising.
Census calculations
WHAT FIRST APPEARED AS A BELATED FOOTNOTE ON PAGE 429 of a 475-page tome, based on the PhD thesis of a junior Harvard historian, proved to be a bombshell. Caroline Elkins, the author of Britain’s Gulag, published in 2005, went on to become a leading light amongst liberal US commentators. Despite many hostile reviews, and detailed exposure of the glaring errors in her scholarship, Britain’s Gulag became — and remains — hugely influentual.
What was the bombshell? Elkins had consulted the Kenya census tables of 1948 and 1962, which covered the eight-year period when the British authorities, having declared a State of Emergency in the face of a rising tide of violence, had suppressed a rebellion from within Kenya’s largest tribe, the Kikuyu.
What came to be called “Mau Mau” (a phrase of unknown meaning and origin — the rebels called themselves “the Land and Freedom Army”) proved to be the most serious challenge British authority faced in any colony. It was suppressed with considerable force, and ruthless deployment of emergency legislation. The official history of the origins of Mau Mau listed 11,500 Mau Mau killed in action (a figure subsequently corrected to 10,540) and 1,090 hanged for murder or other offences (such as administering the notorious Mau Mau oaths).
But Elkins thought these figures much too low. She calculated that the population growth of three Kikuyu-speaking tribes between the two censuses had been far slower than that of three other tribes. From this she projected that up
