"We can handle the truth. Can you handle the shame?"

I interviewed my colleague at SUNY-Oswego, Faith Maina, just as the story broke about Britain's involvement in human rights atrocities in Kenya. Faith was a young girl during the Mau Mau uprising, and her father—a teacher—was detained twice; afterwards, he could only get a job as a "boy" in the city. Her family also lost their lands, in retaliation for a suspected murder of a "white man or a chief [who was friendly to the British]." I asked her to comment on the significance of the trials and the case brought by four Kenyans against the British Foreign Office, for her and her family.

Faith began by telling me about the significance of Caroline Elkins' book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. Imperial Reckoning intended to present a revised history of Mau Mau insurgency, uncovering the colonial myths about 'civilizing' the dark continent—building schools, hospitals and railways—and exposing the manner in which this 'mission' gave way to the savagery of imperial self-preservation. It details the atrocities committed by the British colonial system, including the colonial office in London, the colonial government in Nairobi and the British settlers, missionaries and businessmen in Kenya. Five years ago, when the book was published, Faith "read it from cover to cover because it was simply 'unputdownable.'" Elkins' book "validated those stories that my grandmother, Njeri wa Kagunya told us, and put them in a policy perspective so that I can now really understand the pain of the unfortunate relatives, friends and neighbors who had to endure the British 'civilizing mission.'"

Faith points out that when the book first came out, certain British reviewers reacted with the expected denialist-stance, indicating wider, more pervasive attitudes towards imperial war crimes. In particular, Betty Caplan, who critiqued Elkins' book in the Kenyan press, cited Imperial Reckoning as an example of what goes wrong in "revisionist" historical accounts. Caplan's review, titled "Pitfalls in writing modern history" (published in March 7, 2005), claims that the people interviewed for the book "had decayed memory," and that any brutality was carried out by the Kenyans. In fact, and old geography coffee table book I saved from the rubbish dump, Africa Aeterna: pictoral of a continent, documents the Mau Mau uprising as having employed a "fearful mixture of primitivism, secret societies and of borrowings from the European arsenal of psychosexuality" (text by Paul Marc Henry, trans. Joel Carmichael).

We also spoke about the role played those Kenyans co-opted by the British. Faith names the Michuki family as "the subject of [her] grandmother's scorn" and "some of the biggest beneficiaries" of the colonial period, at whose hands her family incurred many losses. She explains that the Kikuyu used to rule through a non-hereditary council of elders—women, in particular, "looked forward to menopause," because they would be invited to the council as elders. When the British came, they instituted a different system of rule: they elevated some people, according to their "friendliness." People "like [current MP, John Michuki]'s father" were made the "chief," and his descendents (following the new British system of inherited power) continue to enjoy those privileges.

Michuki Sr. earned the name "kimedero" (clippers) because he had reportedly castrated many men. Michuki Jr. has been an MP of her constituency "for nearly 30 years, or since [she] can remember," and one of the richest men in the country, buying votes for his continued stay in power. Meanwhile, the village women were made to dig the deep trenches and put up the barbed wire that "secured" them from providing sustenance for the Mau Mau. Their confiscated farmland was used for coffee, sisal, and pyrethrum plantations, and they still haven't seen it returned.

–Neelika Jayawardane (Mohammed Elsafty on camera)