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The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has termed the award of this year’ s Pulitzer Prize for specialised books to the book „Imperial Reckoning” as a milestone for the clearing up of British colonial crimes in Kenya. „After decades of tabooing Great Britain’s dirtiest colonial war in Africa against the so-called Mau-Mau revolt of 1952-1960 this award can help towards the survivors at long last seeing justice”, said the GfbV Africa expert, Ulrich Delius on Wednesday. The Pulitzer Committee announced its decision on Monday evening. The prize, which has been awarded each year since 1917, is the highest sign of merit for journalists and writers in the USA: The publication of the book of the historian Caroline Elkins, who teaches at the University of Harvard in the USA, sparked off a debate in Great Britain on the brutal crushing of the Mau-Mau revolt, which has long been treated as taboo. At that time the colonial government placed the whole tribe of the Kikuyu behind barsto prevent the British colonial empire in East Africa from falling apart. Elkins presented in „Imperial Reckoning”, which contained hundreds of interviews with survivors of the British internment camps, the cruel reality of these gulags. When the Kikuyu and other Kenyan tribes rose up in 1952 against the British colonial rule more than 10,000 villages were destroyed by British soldiers and the Kikuyu areas were ethnically cleaned. Some 1.5 million people were forced into encampments which were closed in with barbed-wire and guarded by soldiers. More than 70,000 Kikuyu were held in prison camps, in which the conditions of life were catastrophic. Lack of nourishment, brutality and systematic torture led to the violent death of thousands. In order to wear down presumed supporters of the freedom movement British soldiers regularly carried out torture in the camps and murdered interned people arbitrarily. Estimates vary on the number of persons killed in the bloody crushing of the Mau-Mau revolt, but it appears that there were more than 20,000. Official statistics today grant the number of Kikuyu killed as just 12,500.
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