Harvard historian Caroline Elkins is not just a brilliant
academic but someone making a difference in the world. A great story worth a
close read:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/18/uncovering-truth-british-empire-caroline-elkins-mau-mau
“A London law firm
was preparing to file a reparations claim on behalf of elderly Kenyans who had
been tortured in detention camps during the Mau Mau revolt. Elkins’s research
had made the suit possible. Now the lawyer running the case wanted her to sign
on as an expert witness. Elkins was in the top-floor study of her home in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the call came. She looked at the file boxes
around her. “I was supposed to be working on this next book,” she says. “Keep my
head down and be an academic. Don’t go out and be on the front page of the
paper.”
She said yes. She
wanted to rectify injustice. And she stood behind her work. “I was kind of like
a dog with a bone,” she says. “I knew I was right.”
What she didn’t know
was that the lawsuit would expose a secret: a vast colonial archive that had
been hidden for half a century. The files within would be a reminder to
historians of just how far a government would go to sanitise its past. And the
story Elkins would tell about those papers would once again plunge her into
controversy.”
Related:
http://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2016/06/history-lesson-british-rule-in-africa.html