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DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES ON MAU MAU Caroline Elkins. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt, 2005. xvi + 475 pp. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.50. Cloth. David Anderson. Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. ix + 406 pp. Maps. Tables. Photographs. Notes. Glossary. Chronology. Index. $29.95. Cloth. David Lovatt Smith. Kenya, the Kikuyu and Mau Mau. Eastbourne: Anthony Rowe Ltd., 2005. 358 pp. Map. Photographs. Notes. Appendixes. Index. £18.00. Paper. Historians have long viewed Mau Mau as both a nationalist movement and a civil war between those who joined its ranks and the Kikuyu who refused to join for a variety of reasons. These included adherence to Christianity, employment in the colonial administration, revulsion with the content of oathing ceremonies, and rejection of insensate killing and violence. The preponderance of evidence suggests that some one hundred whites, eighteen hundred Africans, and twelve thousand Mau Man adherents died during the slightly more than seven years of the Emergency, which lasted from October 21, 1952, until January 12, 1960. Some eighty thousand people (mostly Kikuyu), or 1 percent of Kenya's then eight million population, were held in detention for varying periods of time, and 1,090 men were hanged for various crimes related to Mau Man activities. The importance of Man Mau to the decolonization process in Kenya and its unique and complex characteristics ensure that it will continue to be examined by historians, political scientists, and sociologists. Each generation brings to endeavors of this kind the intellectual influences that have shaped its critical thinking and attitudes toward the certitude of received knowledge. It is thus not only history that can be reexplored in the future, but also how scholars of past generations have interpreted the forces that shaped it. Under the influence of the New Left, some historians of the 1970s made efforts to bring into their historical narratives those who had previously been excluded, including women and minorities. As Robert J. Norrell has observed, "Influenced by the counterculuiral influences of the '60s, those practicing this 'new history' often dismissed old history as biased in favor of white, male elites in the west, and tended to celebrate those forgotten people without subjecting them to the same tough-minded criticism that they were applying to the old elites" (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 11, 2005). In the 1980s, New Left countercultural scholars found a compatible intellectual harbor in postmodern thought, and especially in Jacques Derrida's grand theory of deconstruction. The net effect of this was replacement of carefully reasoned objectivity with strident explicitness and a tendency toward intellectual exhibitionism. Taken to its extreme, deconstruction is forged in a hermeneutics of suspicion and antifoundationalism and denies the objectivity of any reality. Instead, relativism replaces objectivity and is driven by perspectives heavily textured by gender, class, ethnicity, or race. In the view of some postmodern thinkers, the elusive nature of objective truth gives license to a deconstruction of received knowledge, varying interpretations of historical evidence, and the need to create revisionist narratives framed by antifoundationalism. The influence of these powerful intellectual forces is evident in two of the books under review here: Caroline Elkins's Imperial Reckoning and David Anderson's Histories of the Hanged. For the benefit of American audiences, the former has been purged of its hyperbolic British title: Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. One does not have to read many pages of this volume to detect that there is an stronger influence at work here than that of postmodern deconstruction, although in order to understand it fully one must examine ex parte evidence nowhere divulged by the author in her book. …

HEALTH & DISEASE Kirk Arden Hoppe. Lords of the Fly: Sleeping Sickness Control in British East Africa, 1900-1960. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2003. xii + 203 pp. Photographs. Maps. Bibliography. Index. $67.00. Cloth. African trypanosomiasis, also popularly known as sleeping sickness, is caused by flagellated protozoa of the genus Trypanosoma. There are numerous species of Trypanosoma, some of which uniquely infect animals. However, only the subspecies of Trypanosoma brucei infect and cause disease in humans. These subspecies are Trypanosoma brucei gambiense, found primarily in central and West Africa, and Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense, present in much of East Africa. The former causes a milder and less acute form of the disease than the latter. Both organisms initially infect the hemolymphatic system and then inevitably the central nervous system, where they cause a meningoencephalitis that leads to a somnolescent state, coma, and death. African trypanosomiasis is transmitted by the bite of tsetse flies that belong to the genus Glossina. There are a score of species of tsetse and numerous subspecies. The ecology of the disease is rendered complex by the existence of animal reservoirs for trypanosomes and the ability of the latter to undergo genetic change in the mid-gut of the fly, thus altering already existing virulence. Glossina have specific environmental requirements for survival and reproduction, including vegetation characteristics and temperature. Unlike most flies, Glossina possess a viviparous method of reproduction in which eggs are not laid, but rather a single larva is produced and nourished within the fly's uterus. Larvae are deposited on the ground in the shade, pupate, and eventually emerge as flies. Flies infected with trypanosomes tend to have a longer period of probing while biting, thus ensuring more efficient transmission of the parasite. African trypanosomiasis is a devastating and deadly disease in both its endemic and epidemic forms. According to the book reviewed here, it killed perhaps a quarter of a million people during the epidemic in Uganda at the turn of the twentieth centuryu. However, trypanosomiasis in Africa is often a disease that goes undetected in the absence of active surveillance and screening. The late Benitieni Fofana, minister of public health and social affairs of Mali, once summed this up for me when he said: "Epidemics of trypanosomiasis do not exist until you start looking for them" (personal communication, 1974). Kirk Arden Hoppe observes that the statistical disappearance of trypanosomiasis during the 1960s and 1970s was most likely due to a decline in surveillance, screening, and control efforts on the part of poorly resourced, newly independent African states. The increases noted in the 1980s and 1990s may not necessarily have represented a true rise in incidence, but simply the fact that public health authorities began looking for the disease. The case management of patients infected with trypanosomiasis has always been very challenging because of the toxic nature of the drugs used, their administration either intravenously or intramuscularly over prolonged periods of time, and the need for an infrastructure of well-trained medical personnel and laboratory facilities to examine blood and cerebrospinal fluid. Patient compliance with courses of treatment is often difficult to maintain, not only because of drug side effects, some of which are severe and life threatening, but also because of their duration. Kirk Arden Hoppe is an assistant professor in the history department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His study of colonial sleeping sickness control in East Africa came about as a result of his research into the history of fishing on Lake Victoria, an important epicenter for the disease, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century. He has attempted to write an "environmental history of British colonial sleeping sickness control that examines the social and cultural meanings of depopulations, resettlement, and brush clearing in East Africa" (3), framing his discourse within the rhetoric of postcolonialism and establishing his central arguments in a hermeneutics of suspicion. …

MEMOIRS AND BIOGRAPHY Ian Parker. Jua Kali's Voyage on the Jade Sea. Moray, Scotland: Librario Publishing Ltd., 2004. xi + 228 pp. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Index. Appendix. £21.00. Cloth. Kira Salak. The Crudest Journey: 600 Miles to Timbuktu. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2005. x + 230 pp. Map. $26.00. Cloth. Africa's rivers, streams, gulfs, and lakes have always been of great interest. They are so not only because they are defining topographic features, but also because they figure so prominendy in the social, economic, and political lives of so many people. Earlier accounts of Africa's waterways, such as S. and E. B. Worthington's Inland Waters of Africa (London: Macmillan and Co., 1933), and C. Auvray, P. Durbreuil, and R. Lefevre's Monographie du Niger (Paris: Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer, 1958-1960), focused on the scientific aspects of rivers and lakes. Yet, urged on by the quest for personal adventure, travelers challenged themselves by attempting to sail these bodies of water in a variety of crafts. This tradition, set in a contemporary period, is reflected in the two volumes under review here. Ian Parker is a former game warden in Kenya and a wildlife research and management consultant. Born in Kenya, he and his wife, Christine, set up East Africa's first wildlife consultancy firm in 1964 and have advised on wildlife management in fourteen African countries. Possessed of a diorough familiarity with Kenya and its waterways, but lacking sailing experience, they set out to circumnavigate Kenya's Lake Turkana (formerly Lake Rudolf)-a considerable challenge given its length of 155 miles, its location in a remote and desiccated environment, and the gale-force winds and short-frequency waves that unpredictably arise out of a clear sky. The Parkers chose to undertake this challenge in a nineteen-foot boat, the Jua Kali, equipped with an outboard motor and a mini-sail mast. While the fifteen chapters of this book chronicle the Parkers' adventures (and frequent misadventures), they are also textured with rich historical details about the lake, its peoples, its economy, and accounts of past efforts to sail these dangerous waters. While the Parkers succeeded in circumnavigating only the northern two-thirds of the lake-in itself, a major accomplishment-the author comes through as clearly an informed traveler, keenly conscious of the multidimensional history of this part of the world. As a result, Jua Kali's Voyage on the Jade Sea is a unique and detailed resource on the sailing history of Lake Turkana that will have great appeal for both scholars and travelers alike. Kira Salak's The Crudest Journey carries readers to the interior of West Africa. Sponsored by the National Geographic Society, she traveled by kayak on the Niger River in Mali some six hundred miles from Segou to Timbuktu, retracing part of the voyage of the early nineteenth-century Scottish traveler Mungo Park. Although Salak has built a reputation as a solo traveler, on this trip she was accompanied by a photographer and his support staff who sailed nearby in a substantial boat. According to the author, they kept well out of sight most of the time so as to permit her to undergo her experiences alone. …

Charles Bordogna. The Discerning Eye: African Art from the Collection of Carl and Wilma Zabel. Tenafly, NJ.: The African Art Museum of the SMA Fathers, 2005. 36 pp. Photographs. Map. Bibliography. $15.00. Paper. Donna Page. Artists and Patrons in Traditional African Cultures: African Sculpture from the Gary Schulze Collection. Bayside, N.Y.: Queensborough Community College, the City University of New York, 2005. 84 pp. Photographs. Endnotes. Bibliography. $30.00. Paper. Major exhibitions of African art in the United States were once confined primarily to leading museums in large metropolitan centers. There were always exceptions to this pattern, such as the exhibition at the African Art Museum of the SMA Fathers (AAMSMA) in Tenafly, New Jersey, which was established in 1980, and the permanent exhibition of more than three hundred objects of African art at the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum, which opened in Chanute, Kansas, in 1974. The AAMSMA is a unique repository of African art whose original holdings were collected over the years by an order of missionaries in Africa that historically has valorized the arts of the peoples of Africa and viewed the museum as a bridge between cultures and peoples. AAMSMA's successive directors have actively and selectively enhanced the collection and fostered important temporary exhibitions of extremely high quality. Placing a great emphasis on education, the museum's exhibitions are generally accompanied by scholarly monographs or catalogs that reach large audiences worldwide. Robert J. Koenig Jr., who has directed the museum for the past decade, has not only sponsored exceptional exhibitions, but also has greatly enlarged the museum's permanent collections and attracted a large cadre of supporters from the greater metropolitan New York region. The Discerning Eye, his latest exhibition, ran from October 2, 2005, to April 2, 2006. The exhibition focused on the collection of Carl and Wilma Zabel. As Holland Cotter, the art critic of the New York Times, observed, the Zabels "chose to lavish their attention on a type of art often overlooked or dismissed, namely East African sculpture.... Some [objects] depart audaciously from preconceived standards of sculptural beauty. In doing so, they automatically extend the way beauty can be defined" (November 25, 2005). The catalog essay by Charles Bordogna explores in detail the impressive diversity of sculpture from Tanzania as well as from Kenya and Madagascar. While objects from other areas of Africa are also discussed and illustrated, it is the Tanzanian objects that are at the heart of the volume. The excellent examples of Makonde, Pare, Shambaa, Zigua, Zaramo, Nyamwezi, Fipa, Luguru, and Sukuma art provide a window on the superb range of sculptural forms created by the peoples of modern-day Tanzania. The excellent essay and the lengthy text entries for the fifty objects illustrated make for an easy understanding of their cultural contexts and symbolic meanings. The Discerning Eye represents a valuable and unique contribution to our understanding of East African artistic traditions. It reflects the scholarship of the author, the dedication of Carl and Wilma Zabel in assembling so impressive a collection over many years, the vision of the AAMSMA's director, and the noble endeavor of the SMA Fathers. QUEENSBOROUGH COMMUNITY COLLEGE (QCC) of the City University of New York reopened its Art Gallery in 2004 after a multi-million-dollar renovation. Located in the Oakland Building, the oldest structure on the campus, the gallery is currently equipped with up-to-date security and environmental controls, high-quality exhibition space, a theater, and an art research library. Under the dynamic directorship of Faustino Quintanilla and reflecting the broad vision of QCC President EduardoJ. Marti, the gallery not only hosts major temporary shows, but also has a splendid permanent exhibition of African art. …

Guy Yeoman. The Quest for the Secret Nile: Victorian Exploration in Equatorial Africa 1857-1900. London: Chaucer Press, 2004. 192 pp. Photographs. Maps. Index. £20. Cloth. Monty Brown. R. J. Richard John Cuninghame 1871-1925: Naturalist, Hunter, Gentleman. London: MJB, 2004. 398 pp. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £75. Cloth. Beginning in the 1830s, Europeans, and especially the British, became obsessed with defining the sources of the Nile. This effort was initially dominated by armchair Sophists such as William Desborough Cooley, James MacQueen, and Charles Tilstone Beke. They attempted to deduce the Nile sources and other geographic features of Africa through the formalistic application of the methods of medieval scholasticism to Arab, classical, medieval, and Portuguese texts. Their painstaking pursuit of geographic truth through meticulous but faulty logic eventually came into direct conflict with the findings of those who had seen the equatorial snow-covered mountains, lakes, and rivers of East Africa. The reputations of these stay-athome geographers rested on their deduced assertions. Small wonder, then, that they prompdy disparaged early reports of geographic findings gathered in the field that were not in harmony with their own views. Thus the reports of Johann Rebmann about Mount Kilimanjaro and Ludwig Krapf about Mount Kenya in the late 1840s were not received by an unbiased audience. Guy Yeoman begins his fascinating account with an overview of what was known to the armchair geographers, and how the Rebmann and Krapf findings represented the first challenge to their erroneous opinions. Using a chronological approach, he covers the expeditions of the principal travelers who elucidated the Nile sources over the following quarter of a century. This includes Richard Francis Burton, John Manning Speke, James Augustus Grant, Samuel and Florence Baker, David Livingstone, and Henry Morton Stanley. He recounts the now legendary controversy between Burton and Speke, and the latter's untimely death just prior to their scheduled debate at Bath in 1864. As many will recognize, this is all very familiar ground, well documented in a wealth of primary and secondary sources, and recounted in numerous popular and scholarly books over the past century and a half. The obvious question, then, is what is unique about The Quest for the secret Nile, what sets it apart from other recent popular accounts such as Alan Moorhead's The White Nile? There are several characteristics of this volume that make it a unique contribution in a crowded field. The author, a mountaineer and veterinary surgeon, spent twelve years in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). He traveled extensively over the routes of the nineteenth-century explorers, mounted several expeditions through the Rwenzori and Virunga mountain ranges, and widely photographed the Nile watershed. In later years, Yeoman became an ardent environmentalist, greatly concerned by the deforestation that threatens the thousands of remote sources of the great Nile. It was his hope that this volume would draw attention to the fragility of these sources and motivate people to protect them, not least of all in the interests of ensuring the survival of the Nile itself. This account, then, was written by someone who climbed the mountains, sailed the rivers and lakes, and sought out the numerous springs and brooks that represent the sources of the Nile. Two other features make this volume unique. Fifty of the author's prizewinning color photographs of the region illustrate relevant portions of the text. The author also provides a number of maps, several of which show the routes of the explorers discussed. The Quest for the secret Nile reflects the same sensitivity and engaging style present in the author's previous book, Africa's Mountains of the Moon: Journeys to the Snow Sources of the Nile (1989). …