In 2006, Harvard historian Caroline Elkins published her PhD thesis to a lot of academic acclaim, as well as to a fair share of sullen criticism. Her book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, was a damning indictment of Britain’s counter-insurgency strategies in East Africa and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in the year in which it was published. The Pulitzer is an award that usually goes to journalists, but academics have been regularly honoured for their work by the foundation. What was surprising in Elkin’s case, was the subject of her book and the fact that she managed to retrieve some historical insights into a contemporary debate that is becoming one-sided.
Following World War II, former colonial powers found their authority being challenged by natives in Africa and Asia. In Asia, the British authorities found themselves engaged in low intensity wars in Palestine and Malaya, while the French floundered in Vietnam and the Dutch in Indonesia. In Africa too, European colonial authorities were faced with rebellious tribes in every corner of the continent. The post-war world was not ready for continuing with a disastrous political status quo, especially since the ascendant powers – the United States of America and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – were already drawing in the world into polarised spheres. In this new dispensation, the idea of land and peoples in Africa and Asia being governed from distant European capitals and by a small, white bureaucracy was deemed unsustainable and untenable. However, the old colonisers were not going to leave the tropics quietly. They had plantations, mining concessions, acres of forests and most importantly, a vast army of native labour that they still had to exploit. So, they dug in and wrote up a theory of warfare so brutal that the world still has to recover from it today.
Colonial administrators and military personnel had picked up a few lessons from the Chinese revolution, which had inspired many left-leaning armed insurrections in Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia and French Indo-China. They knew, for example that guerrillas had to survive among the masses as “fish survived in water”. Hence, they devised ingenious and brutal methods to deny the guerrilla their water. “Groupings” and “mass internment” became common strategies for conducting low-intensity wars. General Frank Kitson, of the British Army, was one of the key persons for formulating these strategies that borrowed shamelessly from earlier British experiments with the Boers in South Africa, and more damningly, from the Germans. It involved uprooting years, decades and sometimes centuries, of rooted cultures, lives and livelihoods and corralling them to a life behind barbed wire. It also involved a systematic censorship of news, especially in the home countries, where the local press and populace were already asking uncomfortable questions about the human cost of the colonial wars.
Elkins, a historian by training, literally stumbled upon archival data on Britain’s concentration camps and brutal counter-insurgency campaigns in Kenya, where millions of Kenyans, mainly Kikuyu, were incarcerated without recourse to judicial process. Her efforts are being challenged by some of her peers who claim that her figures are exaggerated. This is academic nitpicking that ought not detract us from the fact that powerful countries still engage in counter-insurgency operations that make Britain’s East Africa campaign pale in comparison. In India, groupings and internment have now moved from the fringes of the country’s Northeast to its heartland and we only have a few academics, activists and reporters who have documented its effects on the socio-political fabric. The mediated public sphere might not have space for the thousands of Naga and Mizo voices that suffered internment in the 1950s and 1960s, but somewhere there is a keen historian, or anthropologist, who might well be asking uncomfortable questions. Hopefully, then, one will see the end of an old, brutal history of counter-insurgency in our lands.
Following World War II, former colonial powers found their authority being challenged by natives in Africa and Asia. In Asia, the British authorities found themselves engaged in low intensity wars in Palestine and Malaya, while the French floundered in Vietnam and the Dutch in Indonesia. In Africa too, European colonial authorities were faced with rebellious tribes in every corner of the continent. The post-war world was not ready for continuing with a disastrous political status quo, especially since the ascendant powers – the United States of America and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – were already drawing in the world into polarised spheres. In this new dispensation, the idea of land and peoples in Africa and Asia being governed from distant European capitals and by a small, white bureaucracy was deemed unsustainable and untenable. However, the old colonisers were not going to leave the tropics quietly. They had plantations, mining concessions, acres of forests and most importantly, a vast army of native labour that they still had to exploit. So, they dug in and wrote up a theory of warfare so brutal that the world still has to recover from it today.
Colonial administrators and military personnel had picked up a few lessons from the Chinese revolution, which had inspired many left-leaning armed insurrections in Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia and French Indo-China. They knew, for example that guerrillas had to survive among the masses as “fish survived in water”. Hence, they devised ingenious and brutal methods to deny the guerrilla their water. “Groupings” and “mass internment” became common strategies for conducting low-intensity wars. General Frank Kitson, of the British Army, was one of the key persons for formulating these strategies that borrowed shamelessly from earlier British experiments with the Boers in South Africa, and more damningly, from the Germans. It involved uprooting years, decades and sometimes centuries, of rooted cultures, lives and livelihoods and corralling them to a life behind barbed wire. It also involved a systematic censorship of news, especially in the home countries, where the local press and populace were already asking uncomfortable questions about the human cost of the colonial wars.
Elkins, a historian by training, literally stumbled upon archival data on Britain’s concentration camps and brutal counter-insurgency campaigns in Kenya, where millions of Kenyans, mainly Kikuyu, were incarcerated without recourse to judicial process. Her efforts are being challenged by some of her peers who claim that her figures are exaggerated. This is academic nitpicking that ought not detract us from the fact that powerful countries still engage in counter-insurgency operations that make Britain’s East Africa campaign pale in comparison. In India, groupings and internment have now moved from the fringes of the country’s Northeast to its heartland and we only have a few academics, activists and reporters who have documented its effects on the socio-political fabric. The mediated public sphere might not have space for the thousands of Naga and Mizo voices that suffered internment in the 1950s and 1960s, but somewhere there is a keen historian, or anthropologist, who might well be asking uncomfortable questions. Hopefully, then, one will see the end of an old, brutal history of counter-insurgency in our lands.
Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora xonzoi.barbora@gmail.com
