Britain’s Gulag

Author Caroline Elkins
Narrator Teri Schnaubelt
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 27 June 2024
Run Time 17 hours and 28 minutes
Format Audio
Genre African history, Colonialism and imperialism, History, National liberation and independence, Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions, Violence, intolerance and persecution in history.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Only a few years after Britain defeated fascism came the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya - a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million and to portray them as sub-human savages. Detainees in their thousands - possibly a hundred thousand or more - died from exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality. For decades these events remained untold.

Caroline Elkins conducted years of research to piece together this story, unearthing reams of documents and interviewing several hundred Kikuyu survivors. Britain's Gulag reveals, for the first time, the full savagery of the Mau Mau war and the ruthless determination with which Britain sought to control its empire.

© Caroline Elkins 2005 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

Critics Review

A tale of systematic violence and high-level cover-ups

Guardian

Caroline Elkins has starkly illuminated one of the darkest secrets of late British imperialism. She has shown how, even when they profess the most altruistic of intentions, empires can still be brutal in their response to dissent by subject peoples. We all need reminding of that today

Niall Ferguson

Given the number and nature of the atrocities that filled the 20th century, the degree of brutality and violence perpetrated by British settlers, police, army and their African loyalist supporters against the Kikuyu during the Mau Mau period should not be surprising. Nor, perhaps, the fact that the British government turned a blind eye, and later covered them up. What is surprising, however, is that it has taken so long to document the whole ghastly story-this is what makes Caroline Elkins’s disturbing and horrifying account so important and memorable

Caroline Moorehead

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