Richard Drayton dismisses me as a "television businessman" (Letters, 16 June). So much for my double first in history at Cambridge at age 19, my 25 years as a broadcast journalist, the score or more of historical documentaries, articles and lectures I have produced or written, and my three visiting professorships.
The published versions of my critique of Caroline Elkins's book Britain's Gulag can be easily found on Wikipedia. The sole source she provided for her estimates of excess Kikuyu deaths during the Mau Mau emergency was a comparison of population statistics in the 1948 and 1962 censuses in Kenya. It transpired that 80% of the "missing 300,000 Kikuyu" that she reported were actually Embu and Meru, who were not involved in the fighting.
John Blacker offered a far more sophisticated critique of Elkins, correcting for a whole range of reclassifications of ethnic groups between the two censuses. He concluded that the total of excess deaths "for the period 1949-59 range from 30,000 to 60,000 … a round figure of 50,000 is as good a guess as any". Of these, "rather more than half, say 26,000, will have been children under 10 years of age … of the remaining 24,000 adult excess deaths, perhaps some 17,000 were of males and 7,000 of females." The range cited by Drayton – "35,000 to 328,000" – simply does not exist. Blacker dismissed this suggestion, which implied that half of the adult Kikuyu population had been wiped out. Blacker also demonstrated in exhaustive detail that "the excess mortality of the Kikuyu attributable to the Emergency cannot possibly be measured by comparisons with other tribes".
Drayton claims Blacker could have been parti pris, because he had worked for the colonial government before independence. Blacker is no longer alive to defend himself, but suffice it to say that he continued to work as a demographer in Kenya after independence, and was called back as a consultant for the 1979, 1989 and 1999 censuses: scarcely the mark of a colonial apologist.
David Elstein
London
Professor Eaglestone (Letters, 15 June) is wrong on two counts. The national curriculum in England and Wales is defined by statutory order and the QCA/QCDA has been acting in a non-statutory capacity, giving advice to support the curriculum, not to rewrite it or control it. It has been Ofsted's role to monitor the curriculum. The reference to GCSE exam boards is irrelevant as the statutory national curriculum across key stages 1 to 3 finishes before most students start their GCSEs. The idea that teachers would tolerate a single historian, working at the behest of a political party, determining the nature and content of their narratives is preposterous, and surely neither Michael Gove nor Niall Ferguson would want that.
Senior lecturer, University College Plymouth St Mark and St John