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." This is her first book. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Advance praise for "Imperial Reckoning: " "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 itsg
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