Huw Bennett. Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency.

Abstract

Mau Mau history is a contentious, high-stakes field. Four years after the 2005 publication of my own Imperial Reckoning and David Anderson's Histories of the Hanged, five elderly Kikuyu filed claims in London's High Court of Justice alleging that British colonial officials had perpetrated systematic abuses in the Mau Mau detention camps, emergency villages, and interrogation centers. The case was unprecedented in the history of the British Empire. As an expert witness, I joined the case at its inception; later, Anderson followed suit, as did Huw Bennett. Together we had privileged access to the 300 boxes of previously undisclosed files that British officials “discovered” at Hanslope Park during the course of the case. Eventually we accessed some 20,000 pages of the new files, many of which confirmed our own revisionist histories, as well as gestured to the need for additional revisionist studies. It is here where Bennett's new book on the British army was poised to offer a major contribution to the field. Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency is the first in-depth examination of the role of Britain's military in the suppression of the Mau Mau. It successfully inserts the army and its main protagonist, General Sir George Erskine, into the narrative, and with it interrogates the doctrine of minimum force, which Bennett calls “exaggerated, at the expense of the equally important notion of exemplary, punitive force” (p. 90). Pointing to multiple examples of the army's complicated participation in brutal excesses, Bennett provides a wealth of new empirical evidence that will be of great interest to many scholars.