Kenya, British Colonial Violence in the Twentieth Century: Confronting the Horrors, Understanding the Legacies

Caroline Elkins is an associate professor of African studies at Harvard University and author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, which was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and selected as one of the Economist's best history books for 2005. Professor Elkins is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. Her research interests include colonial violence and post-conflict reconciliation in Africa, and violence and the decline of the British Empire. She is currently working on two projects: one examining the effects of violence and amnesia on local communities and nation-building in post-independent Kenya; the other analyzing British counter-insurgency operations after the Second World War, with case studies including Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Nyasaland. Professor Elkins teaches courses on modern Africa, protest in East Africa, human rights in Africa, and British colonial violence in the 20th century. 

Discussant: Klaas van Walraven

This seminar will examine British colonial violence in Africa, with a specific focus on South Africa, Kenya, the Rhodesias and Nyasaland. It will evaluate the similarities in the institutions and structures in these colonies that facilitated the use of violence during colonial rule, and its proliferation, particularly during decolonization. It will then turn to issues that are encountered today when writing about violence and empire in the academy. These include methodological criticisms, the questioning of source material (especially oral histories), and the institutional norms that continue to govern the research questions driving many fields. The paper will conclude by placing the study of violence in Africa and the attendant problems of such work within the academy in the broader context of a re-evaluation of the British colonial empire in the twentieth century.