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Kikuyu Revisionism

It's not often that a history dissertation makes national news, but a book which came out of a Ph.D. thesis was featured on Weekend All Things Considered yesterday. Caroline Elkins, assistant professor at my alma mater department (which has hired and even tenured some fantastic female historians in the last few years), did her research on the last decades of British rule in Kenya (that's the 1950s and 1960s, for those of us not up on African decolonization), particularly on their treatment of Kikuyu peoples after the radical Mau Mau attacks on white settlers. Among the points made in her interview:

The Mau Mau attacks, while vicious, were grossly overstated in the British press, which based their reportage on British government sources, resulting in a popular image of the Mau Mau attacks as much more widespread and damaging than they actually were
The British response was to screen 1.2 million Kikuyu people for Mau Mau sympathies, which involved dislocating them -- sometimes for years -- and interrogating them.
British claims of "civilizing mission" were grossly contradicted by their treatment of Kikuyu moderates, including Jomo Kenyatta, and the long-term damage done to the population by the heavy-handed, decade-long "state of emergency."

This probably isn't terribly suprising news to my Africanist colleagues, though I'd very much like to hear their take on her work. It's certainly interesting stuff.

The road to stardom is not direct, though: Prof. Elkins' research was also the subject of a BBC documentary. So you might still need a good publicist if you want to make it on to NPR.

[They also had a story on composer Philip Glass's attempt at Ancient Mesoamerican Music. Maybe the Toltecs would have enjoyed it. But they're dead now.]

Non Sequitur: The World Economic Forum in Davos has a blog which is apparently for use by some/all/many? of the participants. [via Rebecca MacKinnon]

Posted on Sunday, January 23, 2005 at 4:19 AM | Comments (6) | Return

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