Caroline Elkins is an assistant professor of history at Harvard University. Conversant in Swahili and some Kikuyu, she has spent nearly a decade traveling and working in rural Africa. She and her research were the subjects of a 2002 BBC documentary entitled Kenya: White Terror. Imperial Reckoning is her first book. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
"Caroline Elkins has written an important book that can change our
understanding not just of Africa but of ourselves. Through
exhaustive research in neglected colonial archives and intrepid
reporting among long-forgotten Kikuyu elders in Kenya's Rift
Valley, Elkins has documented not just the true scale of a huge and
harrowing crime--Britain's ruthless suppression of the Mau Mau
rebellion--but also the equally shocking concealment of that crime
and the inversion of historical memory." --Bill Berkeley, author of
The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of
Africa
"On the basis of the most painstaking research, Caroline Elkins has
starkly illuminated one of the darkest secrets of late British
imperialism. She has shown how, even when they profess the most
altruistic of intentions, empires can still be brutal in their
response to dissent by subject peoples. We all need reminding of
that today." --Niall Ferguson, Professor of History, Harvard
University, and Senior Research Fellow, Jesus College, Oxford;
author of Colossus: The Price of America's Empire and Empire: The
Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for
Global Power "In the 1950s, Mau Mau provided the Western world with
photographic evidence of what Africa and Africans 'were like':
savage, bloodthirsty, and in need of British civilization. Imperial
Reckoning shows us how these images neglected to show the brutality
and savagery being committed against the Kenyan Kikuyu people
detained by the British. Caroline Elkins fills out the images,
tells the rest of the story, and corrects the record in this
masterful book." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor
of the Humanities, Harvard University "Rarely does a book come
along that transforms the world's understanding of a country and
its past by bringing to light buried, horrifying truths and
redrawing central contours of its image. With voluminous evidence,
Caroline Elkins exposes the long suppressed crimes and brutalities
that democratic Britain and British settlers willingly perpetrated
upon hundreds of thousands of Africans--truths that will permit no
one of good faith to continue to accept the mythologized account of
Britain's colonial past as merely a 'civilizing mission.' If you
want to read one book this year about the catastrophic consequences
of racism, about the cruelty of those who dehumanize others, or
about the crimes that ideologically besotted people--including from
western democratic countries--can self-righteously commit, Imperial
Reckoning is that book." --Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
and recipient of Germany's Democracy Prize "Given the number and
nature of the atrocities that filled the 20th century, the degree
of brutality and violence perpetrated by British settlers, police,
army and their African loyalist supporters against the Kikuyu
during the Mau Mau period should not be surprising. Nor, perhaps,
the fact that the British government turned a blind eye, and later
covered them up. What is surprising, however, is that it has taken
so long to document the whole ghastly story-this is what makes
Caroline Elkins's disturbing and horrifying account so important
and memorable." --Caroline Moorehead, author of Human Cargo: A
Journey Among Refugees and Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
"Imperial Reckoning is an incredible piece of historical sleuthing.
The author has reconstructed the story that British officialdom
almost succeeding in suppressing. Her sources are the Mau Mau
fighters and sympathizers whom the British detained in
concentration camps during the 1950s. Her interviews with the
survivors of this British 'gulag' are a labor of love and
courage--impressive in their frankness and deep emotional content
as well as properly balanced between men and women, colonial
officials and Mau Mau detainees. Caroline Elkins tells a story that
would never have made it into the historical record had she not
persevered and collected information from the last generation of
Mau Mau detainees alive to bear witness to what happened." --Robert
Tignor, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History,
Princeton University
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