Secrets & lies
…“I was strongly urged by colleagues not to undertake this project, for two reasons,” Caroline Elkins said in an interview at her home, not far from the campus. “One, they felt it was too politically sensitive. Two, they said there wouldn’t be enough information. So, me being me, I decided those were good enough reasons to undertake the project.”
…She began her research as a graduate student at Harvard in 1993, continuing for several years and receiving her doctorate in 2001. “I was going to write on the success of British liberal reform in the detention camps of Kenya,” she said. British official records suggested that there were only a few “one-offs” — bad apples — in an otherwise-enlightened program of reeducation. But by 1998, after an early visit to Kenya and after reading accounts of horrors in private collections and interviewing former colonial officers in London, she had become suspicious.
“I remember distinctly, I was in my flat in London,” she said, “trying to write up a portion of what I had found. And it wasn’t adding up. Then I said, after days of frustration, `What if I turn this upside down? What if this is a story of extreme violence and repression, more systematic over time, and about coverup?’ It was an `oh-good-God’ moment. It all began to fall into place. The purging of files was extraordinary. The British were meticulous record keepers, but there wasn’t a single file that said how many camps there were, their names and functions. I had to piece it all together.”
boston.com