Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority, and Narration

by E.S. Atieno Odhiambo, John Lonsdale (Contribution by), E. S. Atieno Odhiambo (Editor)

Overview

Fifty years after the declaration of the state of emergency, Mau Mau still excites argument and controversy, not least in Kenya itself. Mau Mau and Nationhood is a collection of essays providing the most recent thinking on the uprising and its aftermath.

The work of well-established scholars as well as of young researchers with fresh perspectives, Mau Mau and Nationhood achieves a multilayered analysis of a subject of enduring interest. According to Terence Ranger, Emeritus Rhodes Professor, Oxford, “In some ways the historiography of Mau Mau is a supreme example not only of ambiguity and complexity, but also of redemption of a topic once thought incapable of rational analysis.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821414835
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	01/31/2003
Series:	Eastern African Studies
Edition description:	1
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

E. S. Atieno Odhiambo was a professor of history at Rice University. He is the author of The Paradox of Collaboration and Other Essays, and Siaya: Politics and Nationalism in East Africa, 1905-1939. He is the editor of African Historians and African Voices and coeditor, with David William Cohen, of The Risks of Knowledge.

John Lonsdale is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Editorial Reviews

After 40 years of independence, Kenya still wrestles with the legacy of the Mau Mau revolt of the 1950s. Were its fighters the sole heroes of the anticolonial struggle, only some of the heroes, or just gangsters, as Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first president, once implied? Was Mau Mau a class war, a nationalist movement, or an ethnic rebellion, and if principally the last, what part should it play in the ongoing construction of Kenyan national identity? This excellent and expert collection offers samples of work from the burgeoning field of Mau Mau studies, dissecting the movement's socioeconomic foundations, recruitment and survival techniques, impact on British public opinion, interpretations in Kenyan fiction, and contested symbolism in post-independence Kenyan politics. Looking back on British official responses to the movement at the time, it is hard to avoid hearing eerie echoes of contemporary American attempts to analyze and pose solutions to the threat of international terrorism.

Foreign Affairs

A thousand words can never do justice to this tremendous collection, so I will state at the outset that it is a must read.”—Cynthia Brantley, American Historical Review

From the Publisher