"Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya" by Caroline Elkins
"Imperial Reckoning" Story aired: Wednesday, May 03, 2006
A new history of the Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya in the 50's has just won the Pulitzer Prize.
Mau Mau.
Just the words are chilling. They conjure up old images from Life magazine of the barbaric Kikuyu people who savagely attacked British settlers in colonial Kenya.
When Caroline Elkins was a Harvard graduate student ten years ago, she became fascinated with the Mau Mau uprising of the 50's.
She thought her thesis would be about what she was told was Britain's effort to civilize the Africans. But then she moved to Kenya where she learned Swahili and Kikuyu, bought an old Subaru and traveled deep into Kikuyu land. The result: her new book "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya."
