‘We only went to Kenya because a Nairobi businessman fumbled in his jacket pocket.” So begins Nicholas Rankin’s hybrid of history and memoir focused on the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. The businessman’s car keys “snagged the trigger of his Beretta, and he shot himself in the stomach. My father got his job.”
Historians don’t write history, they curate it, and in Trapped in History Rankin challenges his own childhood absorption of
