Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

In Legacy of Violence, Caroline Elkins exposes a racist theory that advocated unremitting aggression to defend Britain’s colonial gains across more than two centuries. She explains how the conceptual roots of aggression were based in Victorian-era requests for disciplining obstinate ‘natives’, and how its forms grew gradually systematized through history. Britain fled when it could no longer keep authority over violence it incited and perpetrated and left their rule to their black puppets. I look to examine how this affected one of its colonies, Kenya, and its impact today.

Elkins is disappointed by the common people’s reluctance to view British imperialism as sustained by repression. The use of violence must be understood as the major element of British imperialism. It has left a permanent influence on its subjects both in their colonial territories and Britain. Focusing on the British Empire overall, she demonstrates how liberal hegemony wiped away proof of its violence against its imperial subjects, legitimizing these acts as essential and, despite being long in force, short-term, and as having an ‘ethical’ impact on ‘primitive’ citizens, who were racialized as incorrigibly unsuitable to make choices on issues of regime.

Being from Kenya and living in a neocolonial state, her findings are very relevant to what Kenyans like myself are facing right now. Britain still maintains a neocolonial stranglehold on Kenya, controlling a large portion of the Kenyan economic and political systems. It is extremely difficult for Kenya to avoid relying on Western nations for self-development. Imperialist companies like British American Insurance Company Limited and British American Tobacco have continued to exploit the Kenyan people for cheap labour. Right from the colonial era, where the ‘divide and rule’ tactic was employed, to the declaration of emergency in 1952, Britain used brute force to demobilize resisting citizens.

Building upon her earlier book, Britain’s Gulag, Elkins highlights how Mau Mau freedom fighters were violently thwarted and thrown in concentration camps with orders from top colonial officials. She said:

‘Turning to history’s balance sheet to determine which European empire was more or less brutal than others can be an invidious exercise. Historians usher objective data to make their case: body counts, number of soldiers on the ground, official reports. But all evidence is subjective, particularly that which is mediated through state bureaucracies. [Henri] Junod is a case in point. He privately told Kenya’s governor that detainees needed a violent shock it was the price to be paid for their acquiescence and reform. This violent shock was called the dilution technique, though Junod made no mention of it in his final report, which is catalogued in an official archive.’ (p.23)

This shows a brutal, inhumane, and unjust way of ruling. This was to dehumanize the colonized. Any thought of revolt would be met with even greater violence. Rule by fear was the best way to keep them in check.

The book reveals shocking, raw, individual accounts from victims of violence. Elkins is able to construct a scathing narrative of the British Empire by assembling so many instances dispersed across place and time. In Nairobi, for example, former Mau Mau recruits recounted how they were placed in concentration camps and brute force was used to get information out of them:

Despite the insurgents’ shortcomings and Britain’s superior fire power, [George] Erskine’s forces took until the end of 1954 to gain the military initiative, partly because of the impenetrable forests and Mau Mau’s civilian support. Erskine looked to Palestine and Malaya for guidance. With Kenya’s version of covert operations in the works, he coordinated with Baring to target the Kikuyu civilian population in Nairobi, the reserves, and the European farms. By locking down all suspected oath takers and cutting off their supply lines to the insurgents in the forests, security forces planned to starve the guerrillas and take them out using Kenya’s version of killer squads. The all-out civilian assault began with sweeping arrests and detentions without trial combined with the forced removal of Kikuyus who remained in the White Highlands. Colonial officials packed thousands into railcars and Lorries and shipped them back to the reserves […] [T]he government moved over one hundred thousand Kikuyus via transit camps. Many languished with inadequate sanitation, clean water, and rations as officials figured out how to squeeze them back into the overcrowded reserves. (p.107)

In former British colonial states, violence is still meted upon citizens just like colonial times. What Kenya and other colonial states got was ‘flag independence’, not real independence. The flag colour is Kenyan but the style of rule is still British. Atrocities committed in the colonial era haven’t gone away. All post-colonial governments are still using the same tactics. The deaths of two brothers in police detention in Kianjokoma in 2021 is one of the many cases exposing Kenyan police's disproportionate use of violence and brutality while executing COVID guidelines. The British army, who still have camps in the country, also continue committing atrocities against Kenyan citizens. The case of Agnes Wanjiru, who was murdered by a British soldier in 2012, caused an uproar by citizens and was proof of how the soldiers viewed the locals.

Truly, independence in Kenya is still a mirage. We as RSL continue to campaign against AFRICOM because we understand the militarization of Africa by imperialist states including Britain and the USA is to protect their interests in their former colonies at the expense of the citizens.

What Elkins has rightly highlighted in this book is still very relevant in the Kenyan context. The British left their culture, infrastructure, dress code, language, and education system – even the first post-independence army was still led by British officers. The government’s illegal detention of resisting citizens, enforced disappearances, police brutality, extra-judicial killings, and divide-and-rule tactics are still alive and well. Comrades who dare to march against this system are detained or disappeared without trace. Pio Gama Pinto was one of the first casualties of the post-colonial government. He was killed for organizing and resisting that regime. He understood that it was ‘Not yet Uhuru’ – not yet freedom. One of his closest allies Oginga Odinga wrote a book titled Not yet Uhuru which details how violence was meted upon him and other progressive comrades like Pio Gama Pinto.

We as the Revolutionary Socialist League understand Elkins was trying to put across the violence of colonialism and neocolonialism as systemic. To address this, capitalism has to fail. Changes in regime cannot solve our people’s material conditions – only an improvement to a better system, socialism, can do so. We continue to educate the masses about imperialism and its characteristics. Our current campaign, dubbed ‘Njaa revolution’ which means hunger revolution, for example, has been met with violence with some of the comrades arrested and even beaten. Elkins’ findings are vivid and with this clarity, contradictions in today’s Kenyan society can be better understood.

As the Revolutionary Socialist League, we credit this book for advancing revolutionary theory, and have found that it can be a good study material in our cells. Her view on militarism and imperialism is spot on and it clearly manifests itself in African societies today. Governments continue to brutalize their citizens while the West still has their claws on us Africans through Africom, World Bank, and the IMF amongst other things. Revolutionaries all over are encouraged to read it.

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
Caroline Elkins
Bodley Head, 2022
9781847921062