Word: mau
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Invariably, Mau Mau has either been distorted by British survivors or rendered incomprehensible by anthropologists. Elkins’ work directly combats this syndrome and serves as an accessible narrative of Mau Mau, from beginning to end; in pursuit of this goal, she has created one of those rare history books which is immensely readable, even to someone who knows little about British colonial history...
Sadly, the popular aspect of Elkins’ history also takes Imperial Reckoning off-track. In an attempt to help her non-academic audience understand the Mau Mau, she uses tropes like “Nazism” for comparison’s sake and drops the word “genocide” numerous times. Eager to make this relatively unknown episode seem relevant to book-buying audiences, she has avoided using “Mau Mau” in her work’s title. Instead, she gives the out-of-context label “gulag?...
European settlers in Kenya felt that “Mau Mau adherents did not belong to the human race,” claims Elkins. She compares the vilification of Jews with settlers’ characterizations of Mau Mau. These European settlers described the important Mau Mau initiation oath—which involved goat intestines, blood-drinking, the eating of raw flesh, and so on—as “bestial” and un-Christian. I must confess that I do not understand the zinger in her argumentation. Lest anyone forget, Mau Mau was a violent movement whose initiation...
...British repression of Mau Mau was an act of injustice—but not a genocide. First and foremost, Mau Mau was not an ethnic group—although it was an almost entirely Kikuyu uprising—and sometimes Elkins intermingles the two terms. There was never any shortage of Kikuyu loyalists willing to point fingers at Mau Mau, and the British were always pleased to promote these Kikuyu to the highest position any African could attain. Moreover, membership in Mau Mau unambiguously hinged on a specific induction oath that created an ideological distinction within a larger ethnic community...
European settlers’ fear of death at Mau Mau’s hands ignited a vicious colonial response that is damning, to be sure. But Britain’s colonial empire in East Africa was not an unambiguously evil empire. In what is today Tanzania, immediately south of Kenya, and where fewer settlers lived, the British replacement of the German colonial power in the wake of World War I saved the lives of many Africans, who were oppressed and persecuted substantially more by the German government. There, the British used their might to finally put an end to slavery...