Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire

Abstract

Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. By DAVID M. ANDERSON (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005; pp. 406. £20). STORIES of how empires end reveal as much about the nature of the empire itself as stories of how they begin; perhaps, in many cases, more so. Indeed, it can be argued that empires are defined by the manner of their dismantling, interpreted and understood through the processes of decolonisation that consign them to the past. While there is much in the story of British-ruled Kenya that is peculiar to that territory, it is also, on certain levels, more broadly indicative of the manner in which the modern British empire found itself in an unsustainable position by the end of the 1950s. Decolonisation, moreover, is a complex and bloody business: ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ are not always clear-cut categories, struggles take place within struggles, and the new nations—both decolonised and decoloniser—that emerge from the process bear the scars, haunted by the political realities thus created and by the pasts with which they struggle to come to terms. Certainly, the battle for the memorialisation of the Mau Mau uprising in the past half-century has been, in its own way, as intense as the war itself, and has sparked some of the key debates among historians of Africa and British imperialism alike in that period.

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