At the height of the Mau Mau crackdown, the British colonial government constructed what they called the Pipeline, a network of detention camps across Kenya holding over 150,000 Kenyans without trial. Detainees were subjected to systematic torture, forced labour, starvation and sexual violence. British historian Caroline Elkins documented the atrocities in her 2005 book Imperial Reckoning, which won the Pulitzer Prize. The camps were not temporary facilities. They were a deliberate system for breaking the will of Kenyan resistance, using methods that violated every standard of human rights.