Justice for Kenya’s Mau Mau
NAIROBI, Kenya — George Morara, a program officer with the Kenya Human Rights Commission, is compact and strong, like a boxer. But the fight on his hands now is to defend veterans of the Mau Mau nationalist movement in their sunset years. It was partly his research, planning, and pleading that recently won the right to trial in a British court for these aging veterans of rebellion against colonial rule more than 50 years ago. But a case against the British, who once ruled Kenya, would not have been possible without the work of Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, said Morara. He credits her scholarship and voluminous oral histories as the primary evidence for Mau Mau justice. “Without her seminal work,” he said, “this story wouldn’t have come to the fore.” Mau Mau veterans, in search of an apology and financial relief, may get their day in court by 2013. But Morara fears that...