Pulitzer adds heft to her story of ‘gulag’ in Africa

When the Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in New York this week, a Swahili expression joined the messages of congratulations filling the inbox of Caroline Elkins, the winner for general nonfiction for “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya.” Furaha kabisa, meaning “completely happy,” people wrote Elkins from Kenya’s villages and its halls of government.

“For someone who works on the part of the world people tend to ignore, it’s a moment of triumph,” Elkins said from her office in Harvard’s history department, where books on Africa line a wall from floor to ceiling and Kenyan baskets cluster on the floor. But for Elkins and the people whose story she tells in her book, the Pulitzer is a vindication as well as an honor. Though the book was released in Kenya, booksellers were terrified to stock it. Elkins traveled to Nairobi on her own dime to plead with them to carry it, and it was months before Kenyans could buy the book on the open market.

Today, a year later, the tension around the book has hardly lessened. On talk radio and in newspapers people continue to lambaste “Imperial Reckoning” for revealing a history many people still contend never happened.

Elkins’ book jumps into the controversial terrain of Kenya in the 1950s. Britain had just lost India to its nationalist movement, and Kenya was the remaining jewel in the imperial crown. White settlers appropriated the country’s fertile land from prosperous Kikuyu farmers, forcing them onto tiny reserves or reducing them to squatters on their own land.

What ensued quickly became synonymous with savagery: the Mau Mau rebellion. The story of the “Kenya Emergency,” as the British call it, had long been understood as a civilizing mission against brutal natives. Yet Elkins, now 36, found a very different story when she began to research what she thought would be Britain’s success story. She discovered what she calls a gulag that was as remarkable for its viciousness as for its subsequent cover-up.

When Elkins was a senior at Princeton, writing her thesis on women in Kenya’s detention camps, she was stunned to find the lack of scholarship on the topic. After graduation, she became an investment banker for several years to fund her graduate studies; she still prefers crisp white shirts and navy blue blazers, even in the heat of Kenya. In 1994 she enrolled at Harvard’s graduate school, then traveled to London archives, where documents told what she calls a “seductive story” about Britain’s mission in Kenya. But many files were missing from the archives. The book asserts that the British burned them in bonfires before retreating from Kenya. Puzzled by these gaps, Elkins went to Kenya, where she spent the better part of a decade in mud huts and on gritty streets, listening to survivors’ stories of the camps she set out to understand.

While the Mau Mau insurgency was alarming for its gruesome violence, native hands killed only 32 colonialists, according to the book. Meanwhile, in the camps where the Brits sent the Kikuyu who banded together to win back their freedom, up to 100,000 died, Elkins claims. Elkins heard stories of rape by gangs of men using every imaginable object, children’s body parts paraded around the camps on spears, and regular castration.

One chapter begins with the relentless beating of a man with blood oozing from his mouth and nose whose head had been crammed for hours into a bucket of his own urine and feces, a practice the camp authorities called “bucket fatigue.” One settler remembers his own interrogation practices in these words: “By the time I cut his [testicles] off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him.” The British, however, had portrayed these camps as schools for home economics and infrastructure-building -- the culmination of Britain’s centuries of humane colonialism.

When Elkins’ book launched in Kenya under the title “Britain’s Gulag” last year, she expected it to validate the survivors who had shared their traumatic history with her. But instead, booksellers pulled the book from their shelves in fear. An obscure British colonial law remains in place in Kenya that finds sellers themselves responsible for libel in the books they sell. Libel in Kenya, Elkins said, is determined by the will of high-ranking Kenyans, some of whom were British collaborators.

“It’s like the wild West there,” Elkins said. “People still disappear in the night.” One significant player in Kenya stoked a particular fear in the heart of merchants, Elkins said: a man known by the nickname “Three Sacks,” for all the bags he could fill with the testicles he cut off during the Insurgency; it’s this man who was beating the man with “bucket fatigue.” He appears in only a few sentences in the book, but people in Kenya have been sued for less.

After the book was pulled from Kenya’s bookstores, Elkins said, her book was being photocopied and distributed covertly on street corners, so eager were Kenyans to read their own history. Her pleas to booksellers were ignored. But in March 2005 she held a book launch anyway at a Nairobi hotel, in a room crammed with hundreds of the survivors she had interviewed.

That evening, the vice president, Moody Awori, strode into the room in marked support of the book and made a speech that for the first time publicly demanded an apology from Britain (the demand has been ignored). Without this support, the book would never have made it back into Kenya’s bookstores. Today it is being translated into Kikuyu and Swahili and, Elkins said, it will be used in secondary schools.

But Kenyan settlers and Kikuyu collaborators alike as well as influential Britons like Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard, have been fiercely critical of Elkins’ version of Kenya’s history; they continue to deny that the atrocities ever happened. The Pulitzer, Elkins said, will only deepen that controversy, both in those countries and abroad.

“A Pulitzer does so much more than what a book alone can do. It gives the material authority,” said Charlotte Abbott, an editor at the book trade magazine Publisher’s Weekly. Three of the past four Pulitzer winners for nonfiction have been about gulags or genocide, topics book buyers hardly snap up for a beach read. But the award has multiplied sales -- and the books’ impact. “There are enough book clubs that want to read one serious book a year, and they tend to choose a Pulitzer winner,” Abbott said.

“The Pulitzer takes a book out of a path of its peers and places it in its own category,” said Vanessa Mobley, senior editor at Henry Holt, who edited “Imperial Reckoning” as well as Samantha Powers’ “A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” which won the general nonfiction Pulitzer in 2003. “This book reveals a group of civilized people who truly lost their principles in the service of their goals,” she said. “Maybe that will make people think more rigorously about what countries do in their own name.”

For Elkins, the effect of the prize on Kenya is most important. “This award will have major impact from the streets of Nairobi to the humblest elderly people living in outlying areas. This is what a Pulitzer does: The world knows this story now,” she said. “Even people in the remotest corners of Kenya know what the Pulitzer means.”