"Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly 10 years
compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain's Gulag. Elkins reveals
that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain,
but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and
fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from
malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the
children died. The inmates were used as slave labour. People deemed to
have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were
forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Interrogation under
torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken
bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold
a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his
rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by
dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for
first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate
women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their
eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated.
Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound."