Caroline Elkins

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Caroline Elkins (born 1969) is a professor of History at Harvard University.[1] She studies the colonial encounter in Africa during the twentieth century, and the British treatment of the Kikuyu in Kenya. She was a Policy Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government in the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy, Harvard University in 2006. Her work, Imperial Reckoning, presents information held at the Kenyan National Archives of the conditions in Kenyan concentration camps.[2]

Contents

[edit] Biography

Caroline Elkins graduated summa cum laude with a major in History from Princeton University. She received her Master's and Doctoral degrees in History from Harvard. She teaches courses on modern Africa, protest in East Africa, human rights in Africa, and British colonial violence in the 20th century.

[edit] Works

[edit] Criticism of Elkins' work

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James Mitchell[who?], in a highly critical review of the book, said 'I shudder for those of her students who expect academic rigour: Elkins doesn't let facts stand in the way of a good rant.'[1] David Elstein[who?]has also noted severe shortcomings in Elkins' methodology and conclusions. Elstein contends that her casualty figures are derived from an idiosyncratic reading of census figures and a tendentious interpretation of the fortified village scheme. Elkins' Harvard colleague Niall Ferguson, who praised Elkins for her research which he described as "painstaking", nevertheless described her book as a highly "sensationalist account of the rebellion".[2] In 2007, the demographer John Blacker writing in African Affairs demonstrated in detail that Elkins' estimates of casualties were grossly over estimated.[3]

The Kenyan historian Bethwell Ogot, from Moi University, has written a critical review of Elkins’ book, “Imperial Reckoning”, noting that Mau Mau fighters:

Contrary to African customs and values, assaulted old people, women and children. The horrors they practiced included the following: decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women. No war can justify such gruesome actions. In man’s inhumanity to man there is no race distinction. The Africans were practising it on themselves. There was no reason and no restraint on both sides, although Elkins sees no atrocities on the part of Mau Mau. Journal of African History 46, 2005, page 502.

The historian Susan Carruthers from Rutgers University has written in reviewing Elkins’ book, “Imperial Reckoning” that:

In her determination to redress imperial propaganda’s stereotypes of Mau Mau savagery, Elkins leans into unintended condescension, lauding the Kikuyu’s ‘sophisticated’ appreciation of British hypocrisy. (Why wouldn’t those most thoroughly dislocated appreciate the character of European colonialism better than anyone?) Conversely, Elkins’ settlers and colonial administrators are cartoonish grotesques: ‘These privileged men and women lived an absolutely hedonistic lifestyle, filled with sex, drugs, drink and dance, followed by more of the same’. Twentieth Century British History 16, 2005, Page 492.

[edit] Awards

[edit] References

  1. ^ Caroline Elkins' faculty web page at Harvard
  2. ^ Bergner, Daniel (2005-01-30). "'Imperial Reckoning' and 'Histories of the Hanged': White Man's Bungle". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30BERGNER.html. 

[edit] External links
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