Terror, Fratricide, and Empire in Kenya: The Mau Mau War in Historical Perspective

3 units

On 6 June 2013, the Foreign Secretary William Hague expressed his sincere regret that the Kenyan colonial authorities had subjected Kenyans to “torture” and announced that the British government would pay twenty million pounds in compensation to more than five thousand surviving victims. Most people in twenty-first century Kenya now recall the “Mau Mau Emergency” as a anti-imperial war of national liberation. Members of the Kenya Land Freedom Army (“Mau Mau” has no meaning in any Kenyan language) were the avowed enemies of the colonial government and European settlers. Yet Mau Mau can also be seen as a civil war fought within the Gikuyu community between members of the Land Freedom Army and “Loyalists” who had a different vision of post-independence Kenya. This course, which has no prerequisites and assumes no prior knowledge, is an introduction to the basic methodologies of African history through the close examination of the origins, manifestations and recollections of the Mau Mau war. Drawing extensively on primary sources, the class is appropriate for students interested in African studies, the British Empire, the imperial era in Africa, agrarian studies, collective identity, guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency, psychology as a punitive and disciplinary tool, mass detention, decolonization, nation-building and historical memory.