Criticism
Elkins' 2005 Imperial Reckoning aroused considerable controversy.
Like many, Bethwell Ogot, one of Kenya's leading historians, was critical of the book's blatant pro-Mau Mau slant. While not denying British crimes, he highlighted the appalling crimes perpetrated by Mau Mau militants against fellow Kikuyu, including old people, women and children: "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 . . . Elkins sees no atrocities on the part of Mau Mau." Elkins' Harvard colleague, Niall Ferguson, while praising her research as "painstaking", described her book as a highly "sensationalist account of the rebellion". Historian Susan Carruthers of Rutgers University charged that Elkins' determination to gun down the still-widespread, imperial-propaganda view of Mau Mau adherents as mindless savages had unfortunately led her into "unintended condescension". Carruthers also chastised the book's portrayal of settlers and colonial administrators, who, she said, were reduced to "cartoonish grotesques".
The most contentious part of Imperial Reckoning, however, was its estimate of the death toll caused by the British reaction to the rebellion and the conditions it engendered. David Elstein argued that there were severe shortcomings in Elkins' methodology and conclusions, that her casualty figures were derived from an idiosyncratic reading of census figures and a tendentious interpretation of the fortified village scheme. Elkins responded that
Elstein is not a historian, but rather an independent television executive. He is also a long-standing advocate of Terence Gavaghan, the Officer-in-Charge of Rehabilitation in the Mwea Camps. Gavaghan was responsible for implementing systematised violence in several of the detention camps after 1957 vis-à-vis the dilution technique, and there are multiple sources, written and oral, which implicate him in grave acts of colonial brutality perpetrated against detainees.
In 2007, the demographer John Blacker demonstrated in detail that Elkins' estimates of casualties were grossly overestimated. Elkins has responded to Blacker's analysis.
Read more about this topic: Caroline Elkins
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