Justice by committee
The document dump was formidable: 300 boxes holding more than 20,000 pages of colonial-era notes, letters, and reports released by the British government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The London lawyers of elderly Kenyans suing the British government for atrocities committed during the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion needed help. They turned to Caroline Elkins, a Harvard history professor whose 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Imperial Reckoning,” helped get the trial going. Elkins said yes. But 10 years of researching and writing her book taught her a thing or two about handling volumes of old documents. She knew that she would need help herself. Enter Team Mau Mau. Elkins organized a group of current and former Harvard students to help her search for keywords and common threads, evidence of both torture and efforts to cover it up. The five-person team, headed by doctoral student Erin Mosely, toiled through last fall, sifting and categorizing documents even as Elkins began...