British colonial history
Mau Mau and the bodysnatchers
Dec 29th 2004
How not to run an empire
Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire By David Anderson Norton; 320 pages; $25.95. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £20
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of the End of Empire in Kenya By Caroline Elkins Henry Holt; 496 pages; $27.50. Published in Britain as "Britain's Gulag"; Jonathan Cape; £20
THE common image of the Mau Mau fighter is hard to erase: dirty, sullen and intransigent, with hair matted into dreadlocks from his months on the run in Kenya's equatorial forests. From the start, Mau Mau was cast as a throwback from a dark and primitive past, with its blood oaths and its disembowellings. Not since the Black Hole of Calcutta did a single phrase so instantly conjure up the forces of evil that Britain's civilising mission abroad was supposed to be doing its best to overcome. Elspeth Huxley, the white settlers' literary spokesman, wrote in 1957 that Mau Mau was the “yell from the swamp”. http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3518628