- Editorial note: I put this post up last night. It elicited some interesting & helpful comments. This morning I wanted to correct a couple of typos in it & put in a couple more page numbers… But by mistake I ‘deleted’ the whole post! Yikes! Luckily I still had one loaded on my browser, so now I’m reposting it here (with those comments.) Sorry for any confusion caused. If you want to link to this post, please use the present permalink (above).
On Sunday, I wrote how much I was learning from a book about Britain’s shockingly repressive end-of-empire counter-insurgency in Kenya, Caroline Elkins’s Imperial Reckoning. One commenter noted there had later been a letter to the NY Review of Books that had questioned some of Elkins’ use of her sources.
Today, by chance I picked up an old issue of the NYRB, and there was the letter. It was from David Elstein, who is not a historian of Africa or even, it seems, any kind of expert on matters African. He’s a TV producer.
His main criticism was with, as he wrote, the fact that, “She suggests ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Kikuyu died at British hands