Word: mau
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Over the past decade, Assistant Professor of History Caroline M. Elkins has carefully crafted her maiden work, a 500-page indictment of British authorities’ repression of the Mau Mau uprising in post-World War II Kenya. Imperial Reckoning is a composite of oral interviews and painstaking documentary research that already seems destined to become the authoritative work on an important but under-discussed episode in African history...
...fluid narrative tells the story of Mau Mau—a term whose origins are unclear even today—a rebellion incited after the British settled in the traditional homeland of the Kikuyu, which pushed 1.5 million people onto reservations governed by puppet “chiefs.” Kikuyu resentment of British settlers escalated into Mau Mau, a rebellion whose adherents hacked to death about 2,000 European settlers and Kikuyu “loyalists.” While these deaths have been well-documented, Elkins’ work focuses, by contrast, on the many Kikuyu...
Elkins’ primary accomplishment is that she makes rubbish of the official British claim that only 11,000 Mau Mau were killed in action. The embarrassed British destroyed most incriminating documents years ago, so instead Elkins sought out private collections that escaped incineration and talked to now-elderly Mau Mau adherents. Where no damning official record exists, she has analyzed population records, piecing together the number of Kikuyu missing or killed under the auspices of the British...
...read Charlotte Simmons without picking nits. There was a time when Wolfe was a pioneer, reporting back to straight America from the exotic island of radical youth culture in books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, but nowadays American culture and youth culture are basically the same thing, and it's Wolfe who looks a little behind the times. He leans heavily on catchphrases from such movies as Swingers ("You're money, baby") to give his dialogue a contemporary vibe. There are missteps: What self- respecting black hoopster would...
Students of Kikuyu or Swahili will have the chance to visit universities in Kenya and can also participate in an oral history project, led by Assistant Professor of History Caroline M. Elkins, which centers on the life stories of survivors of the Mau Mau Rebellion...