Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins - 2005 - 701 Pages

 Imperial Reckoning:  The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins - 2005 - 701 Pages

2006 Pulitzer Prize Winner

From the Pulitzer Award Statement 

“Imperial Reckoning is history of the highest order: meticulously researched, brilliantly written, and powerfully dramatic. An unforgettable act of historical re-creation, it is also a disturbing reminder of the brutal imperial precedents that continue to inform Western nations in their drive to democratize the world.”

Imperial Reckoning:  The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins deals with Britain’s response to an uprising by Native Kenyans, primarily of members of the largest ethnic group in the country, the Kikuyu, against British colonial rule. This savage response took the form of eight years of systematic murder, starvation,rape, slave labor, torture and confinement in barbaric camps which Elkins justifiably equates to the Germans in the Holocaust and the Gulags in Stalinist Russia.

To the British the Kenyans who fought for independence, the Mau Maus,  were not freedom fighters but savages, cannibal, rapers of white women.  The English employed Kenyans loyal to them as the foot soldiers in their fight against the Mau Maus.  They bribed them with extra food and gave them the land owned by insurgents. They had license to rape women considered anti English. The English were signers to post World War Two documents on basic human rights but there was no consideration to this at all.  The loyalist troops were lead by British officers, many of whom made sport of killing people with no proofs of any crimes.  Loyalist troops had free rein to rape the women of insurgents, as did many officers.  Often after a woman was gang raped she was murdered so she could no accuse anyone.  

Elkins reveals what England under Churchill and conservative politicians wanted to conceal.  For eight years about 1.5 million Kikuyu, nearly the entire population were kept in detention camps behind barbed wire, guarded by Loyalist non-Kikuyu Kenyans seeking advantage and just delighting in their power.  Estimates of deaths are about 500,000.  Most of the survivors lost everything and had their health destroyed for their remaining life.  Women could often not give birth.

After around 1958 when progressive elements in English society became aware of this the authorities did their best to burn all documents related to their actions.

Elkins details the post English rule of Kenya.

Caroline Elkins is an assistant professor of history at Harvard University. Conversant in Swahili and some Kikuyu, she has spent nearly a decade traveling and working in rural Africa. She and her research were the subjects of a 2002 BBC documentary entitled "Kenya: White Terror." This is her first book.

She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

She has a second book coming out on March 29, 1196;pages. 

The Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire which traces 200 years of race based violence by England against their colonial subjects.

Mel Ulm

"Gorilla's Apprentice" by Billy Kahora - Short Listed for the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing

Note added July 4, 2014- I have read the three additional short listed stories and I did not find them worthy potential prize winners or stories I cared to post upon.  

You can read The 2014 Caine Prize Shortlisted works and learn more about the Caine Prize on their webpage

http://www.caineprize.com/

The Caine Prize for African Fiction is given annually to a short story writer born in Africa.  It is a very prestigious award.  I first blogged on the short listed stories (the winner will be named July 14) in 2010. At that time as far as I know I was the only person to blog on each story.  In 2011 the publisher for the Caine Prize asked me to post on the stories again, more bloggers looked at the stories and by 2012 there was a well organized group effort.  There was a lot of political commentary on the stories.  In 2013 I skipped the stories as involved otherwise.  Of the fifteen Caine Stories upon which I have posted, two I considered works of great distinction. "Stick Fighting" by Olufema Terry from Sierra Leon, winner of the £10,000 award in 2010, was a magnicent story of the grandson's of warriors playing stick ball in a garbage dump.  "Bobmay's Republic" by Rotimi Babatunde from Nigeria was a powerful very interesting story centering on a Nigerian man who served in the British Army in Asia during World War II.  It is just a wonderful, hilarious must read work. It was the 2012 Winner.

This year I am going to try to read and post on all the stories.  

I previously posted on "Chicken" by Efemia Chela, a delightful story.

I first became acquainted with the work of Billy Kahora (Kenya) when I read and posted on his 2012 story "Urban Planning", set in Nairobi, short listed for The Caine Prize that year.  That story and "Gorilla's Apprentice" depict the urban chaos of Niarobi, focusing on people trying to survive the chaos of an out of control wrought with civil violence tropical mega-city while keeping as much of their humanity as they can.  The story is also very much about the terrible environmental degradation of the country, the consequences of colonialism and is a vivid portrait of a what would be to most readers a nightmarish near narcopolis that the central character of this story calls home.  Like many an Irish short story, it deals with a missing father and a heavy drinking culture.

As the story opens a young man, Jimmy, on whom the story centers is visiting his good friend Sebastian.  Sebastian is a fifty six year old male Gorilla, living in an animal orphanage at the Niarobi Zoo.  Sebastian is very old for a gorilla, way past his prime.  Jimmy, seventeen, lives with his mother in a high rise tentament. His father who Jimmy barely remembers, left long ago.  His mother, still beautiful, has a number of boyfriends.  She seems to try to be a good mother.  As Jimmy goes about the city he sees and is pretty much immune to scenes of urban violence.  Gun shots and fires are common place. The building he lives in has a lot of prostitutes.

The gorilla can kind of be seen as a symbol for the lost wildness of Niarobi. Jimmy goes almost every day to see Sebastian.  One day he observes a man seemingly talking to Sebastian.  It turns out the man is an expert on gorillas and lectures at a university.  Jimmy, compressing a bit, meets the man and he tells him Sebastian will die soon.  The ending was really interesting and amplifies the symbolic import of Sebastian.

This is a good story and I am glad I read it.  I could see it winning.

Billy Kahora

Billy Kahora is the Managing Editor of Kwani. He also writes fiction and completed an MS.c in Creative Writing with distinction at the University of Edinburgh as a Chevening Scholar in 2007. Before that, Billy studied and worked in South Africa for 8 years and in between worked as an Editorial Assistant for All Africa.com in Washington D.C. He has a Bachelor of Journalism degree and post-graduate diploma in Media Studies from Rhodes University. His short story, ‘Treadmill Love’, was highly commended by the 2007 Caine Prize judges. He edited ‘Kenya Burning’, a visual narrative of the Kenya post-elections crisis published by the GoDown Arts Centre and Kwani Trust in March 2009. His extended feature, ‘The True Story of David Munyakei’ on Kenya’s biggest whistleblower has been developed into a non-fiction novella and was released by Kwani Trust in July 2009. Billy was a Regional judge for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize as well as the 2014 Etisalat Prize for Literature.

"Urban Zoning" by Billy Kahora-Second of Five 2012 Short Listed Caine Prize Stories

"Urban Zoning" by Billy Kahora (2011, 13 pages)

2012

Blogging the Caine Year Three

My posts on Caine Prize Stories in 2010 and 2011

My Ranking of the 2012 Stories So Far

1.  "Bombay's Republic" by Rotimi Babatunde-worthy to be a winner

2.  "Urban Zoning" by Billy Kahora

The Caine Prize is considered Africa's leading literary award.    Entry is open to anyone from an African country and the form of work is the short short.   The patrons of the prize include three African winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Wole Soyinka.    Chinua Achebe, winner of the International Man Booker prize,  is also a patron.    The award comes with 10,000 British Pounds  and is given out annually at a celebratory event in Oxford.     The short story is seen as a continuation of the tradition of African story telling which is one of the reasons the award focuses on that genre.    The award began in 2000.   

I began blogging on the Caine Prize short listed stories in 2010.   As far as I know I was the only person to do this.  In 2011 six bloggers posted on the stories which resulted in some very good posts and conversations.   In 2011 much of the comments were about whether or not the stories were a form of what was called "African Poverty Porn".   In 2010 there were several good stories and the winner, "Stick Fighting Days" by Olufemi Terry was just wonderful.  The 2011 stories were of lower quality.   There are now 19 bloggers posting on the stories this year so far.  

I will be posting, as will a number of others, on a story a week for the next five weeks.   "Urban Zoning" by Billy Kahora is a better story than any of the 2011 stories.

Some short stories should be read in silence with no food or drink to interfere with your experience.   I think "Urban Zoning" should be read only after you have consumed several large Tusker Lagers, Kenya's number one brand of beer.  Thanks to a brilliant Ipad program, Tunein Radio, I can listen to 1000s of radio stations from anywhere in the world.   I think it is best to read this story while listening to Ghetto Radio 88.5 from Nairobi, with external speakers so as to achieve maximum sound.  


I have said before I do not really like stories that centering on heavy drinking and the live experiences binge drinkers.   This even kept me from really appreciating a lot of the stories of Raymond  Carver even though I see his technical brilliance.     "Urban Zoning" is about a young man who has given up the pleasures of casual sex for 72 hour drinking sessions.   I realize this is a way of coping with the despair of his environment, in part.  The story starts as Kandle is coming into what he calls "The Zone", a calm state of mind he says he comes into after a minimum of three days straight drinking. Kandle takes us on a sort of interesting night town tour of Nairobi.   We meet some lose women and some of his friends.  It is kind of an interesting tour.  Then we find out Kandle works in a bank.   Before you say say oh how can he do this, just read the headlines about the banks of the world.   Once we are inside the bank and meet the employees there, Kendle has been called up before a committee to justify why he should not be fired for missing a huge amount of work.   I really didn't find myself caring.


This is an OK story, I am guess I am glad I read it but I will be shocked if it wins.  I did not find it real original or creative.    


Here is his official biography

Billy Kahora is the managing editor of the Kenyan literary journal Kwani? and the author of The True Story of David Munyakei (2009). His writing has appeared in Granta, Kwani?, Chimurenga and Vanity Fair. His short story, 'Treadmill Love', was highly commended by the 2007 Caine Prize judges. He is working on a novel titled, The Applications and is writing a book on Juba.

There is a link to the other posts on the Caine Prize here

Mel u