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This article seeks to illustrate the emergence and significance of permanent exile in the latter years of British rule in Kenya. Drawing on concepts of the "state of exception" in the imperial context, the analysis places Kenyan policy into a longer history of penal practice. Exile as a mode of punishment was a permanent fixture in the repertoire of the British Empire as a method of controlling rebellious subjects. In Kenya, it was a tool to ostracize "troublemakers" from their home community, stabilizing the body politic in fractious moments. However, during the State of Emergency declared against the anti-colonial Mau Mau movement, the legal and spatial production of spaces of exception, settlements in the far-flung corners of the colony, reached its apotheosis. Drawing on long histories of colonial banishment, and specific legal precedents shrouded in liberal language, administrators hoped to make Kenya safe for a loyalist ascendancy by excising the "irreconcilables." Critically, permanent exile was deemed necessary for a section of the population "infected" with Mau Mau ideology. In large exile settlements, rebellious subjects were expected to be remade into pacified workers. Colonial correspondence, as well as the petitions of the displaced, reveal the production of exile during these years as well as its misdiagnosis of the various imaginations of the exiled. "Settlers," at exile camps like Hola, retained an autonomous vision of "land and freedom," refusing their forced migration, and eventually precipitating the collapse of the scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the so-called "era decolonization" in Africa, few historical events held more salience than what is most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (which covered the period from 1952 to 1960). This article examines not only how tropes about the nature and origins of Mau Mau were and are deployed across different semiotic landscapes, but also the ways in which their operations are made manifest through practices of reading. I argue that we should consider the idea of Mau Mau—whether it be central to a text or present a mere detail—as a catalyst through which broader claims are made, especially as they relate to the nature of history and the semiotic dimensions of the events that populate it. This article shows this through conducting a "tropology" of Mau Mau, in which the suffix - ology underscores reading its tropes as a particular mode of studying it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the impact of Kenya's Mau Mau uprising in Jamaica during the 1950s. Jamaican responses to Mau Mau varied dramatically by class: for members of the middle and upper classes, Mau Mau represented the worst of potential visions for a route to black liberation. But for marginalized Jamaicans in poorer areas, and especially Rastafari, Mau Mau was inspirational and represented an alternative method for procuring genuine freedom and independence. For these people, Mau Mau epitomized a different strand of pan-Africanism that had most in common with the ideas of Marcus Garvey. It was most closely aligned with, and was the forerunner of, Walter Rodney, Stokely Carmichael, and Black Power in the Caribbean. Theirs was a more radical, violent, and black-focused vision that ran alongside and sometimes over more traditional views. Placing Mau Mau in the Jamaican context reveals these additional levels of intellectual thought that are invisible without its presence. It also forces us to rethink the ways we periodize pan-Africanism and consider how pan-African linkages operated in the absence of direct contact between different regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores colonial water development on the Tana River Irrigation Scheme in eastern Kenya, between 1948 and 1963. Using Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Water, and Prisons Department sources, the paper argues that this irrigation scheme acted as a tool of dispossession in opening up new landscapes for agricultural development, through the exclusion of local populations and their replacement with detained individuals from outside of the district. Despite being framed as a benevolent and forward thinking agricultural scheme, the project actually fulfilled long-term goals of population resettlement in the region. The large detainee population rounded up during the Mau Mau Emergency provided an unwilling settlement force for the project, dispossessing and disenfranchising local residents. These residents went on to resist their dispossession in a variety of ways, leading to their readmittance onto the scheme after 1959. The paper therefore argues that water management and irrigation were essential tools of political power that allowed the colonial state in Kenya to carry out long-term policy goals under the guise of economic or political expedience. This article thus provides an essential exploration of how political power was extended into the semi-arid landscapes of eastern Kenya during the postwar era, as the role of water management and access restrictions have generally been left out of narratives of postwar development in Kenya in favor of soil erosion and ranch management projects in more densely occupied areas of the colony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a tort's capability to resolve historic human rights abuses by examining the cases involving the British Empire and the Kenya Emergency in the mid-1900s. Topics include the efforts by the empire to repel self-determination movements like the Mau Mau insurgency during the period, the common law theory of jurist A. V. Dicey, and the cases of torture, extrajudicial killing, and rape in Kenya.

This article argues that the so-called “Maji Maji story” that David Bourne writes in The Garden of Eden is not about the Maji Maji Rebellion at all. Details of the story suggest that it is about the Nandi Resistance in British East Africa and the massacre that ended that struggle. Writing during the Mau Mau Uprising of the 1950s about the 1905 massacre that most clearly symbolized the founding violence of British colonialism in Kenya was a significant political gesture. We need to turn to settler colonialism theory, however, to understand why this gesture is so opaque in the text and why it matters for our understanding of the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subnational conflict research increasingly utilizes georeferenced event datasets to understand contentious politics and violence. Yet, how exactly locations are mapped to particular geographies, especially from unstructured text sources such as newspaper reports and archival records, remains opaque and few best practices exist for guiding researchers through the subtle but consequential decisions made during geolocation. We begin to address this gap by developing a systematic approach to georeferencing that articulates the strategies available, empirically diagnoses problems of bias created by both the data generating process and researcher-controlled tasks, and provides new generalizable tools for simultaneously optimizing both the recovery and accuracy of coordinates. We then empirically evaluate our process and tools against new micro-level data on the Mau Mau rebellion (colonial Kenya 1952–60), drawn from 20,000 pages of recently declassified British military intelligence reports. By leveraging a subset of these data that includes map codes alongside natural language location descriptions, we demonstrate how inappropriately georeferencing data can have important downstream consequences in terms of systematically biasing coefficients or altering statistical significance and how our tools can help alleviate these problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complicated positions from which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o witnesses the trauma of the emergency period in Kenya (1952-59) are examined in this paper against the background of trauma and witnessing first threshed out by Dori Laub. Proceeding from a discussion of trauma, witnessing, narrative memory, and melancholia, I show that while the memoirs narrativize events that do not rise to the high threshold of traumatic experience, they contain reconstructed narrative memories of the loss and melancholia Ngũgĩ felt during the period. Progressively, the young Ngũgĩ accepts substitutes for what he calls 'the lost old world' that enable him to articulate his melancholia as grievance. These substitutes paradoxically become available to Ngũgĩ at the colonial school, the site that would have ensured the production of the autonomous self alienated from his lost world. Paradoxically, the autonomous self ends up speaking for his community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As British imperialists in Kenya were fighting the Mau Mau movement for black independence in the early 1950's, two American novelist/journalists moved into this conflicted space between the two sides and redefined events in their own way for an American readership. Earnest Hemingway and Robert Ruark restructured the imperial conflict in terms that fitted white American fears of black power at home as well as the threats of the cold war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1956, an imperial scandal erupted over the treatment of female prisoners and detainees held at Kamiti Detention Camp and Prison in Kenya. The scandal was sparked when Eileen Fletcher, a British Quaker who had worked at Kamiti, exposed the abuses and conditions of the prison and detention camp to the British public. Kamiti became the center of a major controversy that drew in politicians, activists, journalists, and religious communities in Britain and beyond. This article examines two sets of discourses that were at the core of the controversy: gender and the morality of colonialism. In the debates on Kamiti, competing gender discourses were used to criticize or justify the treatment of Kamiti's women and girls, while various anticolonial arguments were pitted against notions of the civilizing mission in discussions about the future of colonial rule. Ultimately, the controversy reveals the connections and contests within transnational networks engaged in debate about the future of colonialism in the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article written in the early 1990s, John Saville looks at British perceptions of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. Starting with the origins of British colonialism in East Africa, it considers the peculiarities both of the white settler society in Kenya and those aspects of Kikuyu society which made the Kikuyu particularly refractory towards imperial rule. It traces the origins and development of the anti-colonialist movement in Kenya and the response of the British state and its satraps in Kenya, before looking at the Mau Mau rebellion itself, how it was presented and fought by the Kenya authorities. It highlights the roles of Fenner Brockway in drawing attention to the colonial abuses in Kenya, and of D.N. Pritt in defending Jomo Kenyatta and others in court against trumped-up political charges. Finally, it considers how, in the years since independence, the British establishment has tried to sanitise the record of Britain in Kenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the growth of socio-political songs in Kenya reflects the effect of the evolution of information technology (IT). The unprecedented proliferation of IT – especially mobile telephony, the Internet and frequency modulation (FM) radio – has played havoc with authoritarian control of information, especially by governments. The speed and modes through which information and song are transferred have diversified, making it possible to send, receive and access both quite easily. Using three epochs of leadership in Kenya, we show how the dynamics of the socio-political song have transformed from an authoritarian regime, when the state muzzled freedom of expression, to a more democratic era of IT, where artists can more easily reach their audience. By analysing music with lyrics and secondary data, we show that freedom of speech is as important as the proliferation of IT. Both are necessary conditions for the growth of socio-political song. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This roundtable essay on decolonization discusses the availability and location of archival history sources related to Great Britain's decolonization of countries, focusing especially on Kenya. It explores the use of the National Archives at Kew, England to understand the events of decolonization in Kenya, especially the events surrounding the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya. The author's book "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya" and "Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire," by David Anderson, both on Mau Mau Emergency, are considered.

The article discusses a symposium titled, The Legacy of Malcolm X: Black Nationalism, Internationalism, and Transnationalism published in the Journal of African American History (JAAH). Topics include African American history, African American political culture, and racial inequality. Other topics include role of human rights activist Malcolm X, Black Power Movement, and Mau Mau rebellion.

An essay is presented on human rights activist Malcolm X's theories of transnationalism and his role in the Kenyan Mau Mau Rebellion focusing on the views shared by Kenyan revolutionaries in their struggle against colonial rule. It discusses the history of land distribution issues in Kenya, African diaspora, and racial segregation in U.S. It also discusses Malcolm X's role in supporting the African Americans in U.S. and other liberation movements in several parts of Africa.

Despite the recent proliferation of scholarship on the Mau Mau rebellion, little attention has been paid to the ‘propaganda war’ it generated. The absence is especially striking given the importance that both the British and Mau Mau fighters attached to success in the battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of Kenya's African population. This article analyzes the production of colonial propaganda – and its reception by Africans – in the ‘Emergency’, revealing how its themes and strategies changed over the course of the 1950s. Despite vast resources pumped into this effort, both African and British testimonies reveal that this propaganda had only limited success until government forces gained the upper hand in the military war against Mau Mau in late 1954. After that point, the increased level of control in Central Province enabled officials to finally best the efforts of skilled Mau Mau propagandists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the difficulties encountered by British colonial officials when attempting to determine the legal age of juvenile offenders in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising (1952–1963). It identifies a main contradiction in the management of juvenile delinquents. In a trans-imperial project of reform, colonial governments across the British Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds created or expanded legislation with specific age limits. The practice of actually establishing the legal age of children and young people in local communities that relied on divergent criteria of classifying generations, however, was highly contested and subject to inconsistencies. This article highlights the complications of transporting metropolitan legal discourses to colonial settings. Using several case studies rooted in the Kenyan context, this article demonstrates that the categories of child, youth and juvenile were highly unstable and contentious categories. This was not a problem unique to Kenya, as colonial officials confronted the issue in other parts of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds. However, this article explores how the context of the Uprising heightened tensions surrounding intersections of gender, age and criminality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The emerging African Theology in the Kenyan context, and indeed elsewhere on the continent, must be predicated upon the peoples' conception, experience, and interpretation of their time, history, and socio-messianic hopes. The colonial missionary Christianity understood their faith from an other worldly point of view while their African adherents held a more mundane type of faith. While the missionaries supported the colonial government, which gave rise to the maxim, 'the cross goes before the flag,' their African faithful lent support to the nationalistic movement that agitated for the inalienable right for socio-political freedom for the African people. This divergent cosmological view of time, history, and social- messianic hopes resulted in the Mau Mau liberation movement whose spiritual succour was the newly formed African Independent Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonial states of emergency are declared and promulgated to contain the disorder of rebellion, resistance and revolt and to effect a return to an order integral to colonial settlement and occupation. The paper draws on colonial archives, analysis of emergency and colonialism evident in the literature, and the contribution of images to guide apprehension of the sites and locations of the emergency landscapes and the geographies of resistance of Kenya from the 1950s and across historic Palestine since 1948. Positing the practices enabled through Emergency regulations as intensified forms of instrumentalised colonial governmentality and violence, part of the structure of settler colonialism, the paper examines the racialised vocabularies of the British colonial administration of the Emergency over Kenya and the Zionist/Israeli state/military frames of Palestinian resistance, the technologies and architectures of subjugation and punishment through which the threat of disorder is contained in carceral zones, and the militarised violence of the colonial response to resistance characterised as catastrophic threat from an enemy located within frames of terrorism, disloyalty and illegality. Photographs taken as part of an inquiry into the architectures, remnants, material assemblages and spatial arrangements found in the emergency landscapes and the geographies of resistance of post-colonial Kenya and across the multiple geographies of historic Palestine are included as evidence of the photographic event and as provocation to thought in an encounter with the workings of colonialism and of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1954 to 1960, the British detained approximately 8000 women under the Emergency Powers imposed to combat the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya. Kamiti Detention Camp was the main site of women's incarceration, and its importance has been widely acknowledged by scholars. However, new documentary evidence released from the Hanslope Park Archive since 2011 has revealed the existence of a second camp established for women at Gitamayu, created in 1958 explicitly to deal with the remaining “hardcore” female detainees. This article examines the British struggle to contend with the hardcore Mau Mau women in the final years of the Emergency Period, one that was marked by uncertainty, violence, and an increasing reliance on ethno-psychiatry. Debates about how to deal with this group of women engaged and perplexed the highest levels of the colonial administration, generating tensions between legal, political, and medical officials. At the center of these debates was the question of the female detainees' sanity, with some officials pressing for these women to be classified as insane. The charge that hardcore women were “of unsound mind” was used for a variety of purposes in the late 1950s, including covering up the abuses in the camps. Examining the British approach to these detainees illuminates how ideas about gender, deviancy, and mental health shaped colonial practices of punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the 1940s and 1950s, Kenya's African population received millions of pounds in colonial development and welfare funding. The majority was spent during the latter decade via the Swynnerton Plan, the largest and most complex instance of British planning in post-Second World War Africa. The plan's implementation coincided—though not coincidentally–with the peak of the Mau Mau conflict. Kenya's ‘Emergency’ thrust the colony's central region into disorder. The Emergency itself largely concerned the Kikuyu, Kenya's most populous ethnic group. This article, however, focuses on the Kamba, the Kikuyus' eastern neighbours. The Kamba comprised the majority of Kenya's soldiers and police, though numbering only 11.6 per cent of its African population. Considered a ‘martial race’ by the British, the Kamba occupied an essential role in maintaining the colony's security. Highly aware of this pivotal position, British officials provided the Kamba with vastly disproportionate amounts of development funding in an attempt to dissuade them from harbouring sympathies with Mau Mau. Extraordinarily, the various datasets concerned with development spending in Kenya during the 1940s and 1950s reveal that the Kamba typically received more than 50 per cent of the entire colony's budget, far more than those Kikuyu ‘loyalists’ who scholars have assumed were the focus of the conflict-inspired funding bonanza. Despite officials' hopes, however, this ‘controlling development’ was never a neatly effective tactic to manage the lives of Africans. Kamba chiefs attempted to control and manipulate the notion and mechanics of the development agenda to best suit their own interests, with a high degree of success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay provides readers with a critical analysis of the ethnographic sciences and the psychological warfare used by the British and Kenyan colonial regimes during the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. In recent years, several survivors of several detention camps set up for Mau Mau suspects during the 1950s have brought cases in British courts, seeking apologies and funds to help those who argue about systematic abuse during the times of 'emergency.' The author illustrates that the difficulties confronting Ndiku Mutua and other claimants stem from the historical and contemporary resonance of characterizations of the Mau Mau as devilish figures with deranged minds. The author also argues that while many journalists today have commented on the recovery of 'lost' colonial archives and the denials of former colonial administrators, what gets forgotten are the polysemic ways that Carothers, Leakey, and other social agents co-produced all of these pejorative characterizations. Kenyan settlers, administrators, novelists, filmmakers and journalists have helped circulate the commentaries on the 'Mau Mau' mind that continue to influence contemporary debates about past injustices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2009, five Kenyan nationals brought a claim against the Government of the United Kingdom (UK) for acts of torture allegedly committed against them in the course of the emergency regime established following the Mau Mau uprising of 1952. The preliminary judgment handed down in this case responds to an application for summary judgment brought by the UK Government on the basis of its claims it was not legally responsible for the abuse. Many of the arguments made by the UK Government gain strength from the fact that, under UK law, the action is not in torture, but in the tort of trespass to the person. The judgment of Justice McCombe raises the prospect of an emerging disjuncture between liability for torture and liability for the tort of assault/battery where this constitutes torture. The main focus of this article is on whether the fact that the impugned conduct constitutes torture should be relevant to the resolution of liability issues relating to an action brought in tort. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses legal actions by Kenyans against the British government in response to purported mistreatment by colonial officers during the 1950s. Opposition by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to an October 2012 decision by the British High Court to try the cases is noted. Other topics include the British response to the 1950s Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya through the creation of concentration camps, the British theft of documents at the Kenyan National Archives, and allegations of torture by former prisoners at the camps. The Batang Kali Massacre in colonial Malaya is also noted.

The article discusses the role of the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya against British rule and the reaction of the British to that revolt in the political independence and national unification of Kenya. among other topics addressed are Kenyan statesman Jomo Kenyatta who served as the nation's first president and his role in the Mau Mau revolt, an overview of the history of Kenya from antiquity, and the nature are sources in the opinion of the author of tensions between the native Kenyan population and European colonists.

Accusations of abuse and torture in the counter-insurgency campaign against Mau Mau rebels in Kenya were widely publicised during the 1950s. The typical British response was to issue official denials, and when prosecutions did arise the perpetrators were characterised as pathological, their behaviour presented as isolated and exceptional. New evidence found in the British colonial ‘Migrated Archive’ for Kenya now confirms that the practice of torture and abuse was widespread, amounting to a systematic pattern of state policy. This article rejects dispositional and individual explanations of British torture in Kenya and instead examines the violence in temporal and structural terms, showing how the toleration of violence at an early stage of the Emergency led to its institutionalisation in Kenya's detention camps at a later stage. The article offers evidence from the screening process in the first phase of the counter-insurgency campaign, and from the ‘dilution technique’ applied in the detention camps after 1956 in the final phase of the war to illustrate the argument. The concluding discussion explores the dilemmas confronting Kenya's colonial violence workers and their political masters as they struggled to present torture as lying within the ‘rule of law’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Restorative justice in various forms is a phenomenon that has swept across the globe over the last three decades. Most recently, it is unfolding in the High Court of Justice in London where five Kenyans have filed a claim against the British government, alleging that they suffered acts of mistreatment and torture at the hands of British colonial and military personnel. Three revisionist Mau Mau historians have served as advisors and expert witnesses for the claimants. Judicial procedure and the positivist stance of the court have framed their production of evidence and its reading. This article will examine the production of the historians’ witness statements, and the impact that the recent Hanslope Disclosure has had upon their work. The discussion is framed within the broader context of Mau Mau revisionism and the critiques that ensued after the publication of Imperial Reckoning and Histories of the Hanged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In April 2011, civil proceedings were launched in the High Court in London concerning alleged torture during the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya, from 1952 to 1960. In this on-going case, the claimants allege that torture was widespread in Kenya, and that it was condoned by the British state. This article explains the background to the case and describes the expert evidence given by the author on the British Army's role in the Emergency. The historical evidence on five issues is summarised: the command and control arrangements for the security forces, the nature of the intelligence system, the relationships between British and local security forces, the army's knowledge of human rights abuses and whether efforts were made to stop them, and army participation in screening and interrogation. In each case, it is shown how the British Army was deeply implicated in a system of mass repression of the civilian Kikuyu, Embu and Meru populations. Finally, the article examines the discovery of a vast cache of documents at Hanslope Park, which covers 37 territories during the decolonisation period. The discovery of some 8,800 files is likely to have a significant impact on the understanding of post-war decolonisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2011, a landmark hearing before the High Court in London found that the British government had a case to answer concerning abuse and torture allegedly carried out by British officials in Kenya during the Mau Mau counter-insurgency. Prior to the hearing, it was revealed that the British government had removed some 1,500 ‘sensitive’ government files from Kenya at independence, many of these relating to alleged abuses carried our during the Emergency of the 1950s. This discovery then led directly to the revelation of a further tranche of 8,800 historical files relating to the decolonisation of 36 other former British colonies. This article explains the nature of the claims of torture and abuse made in the Kenya case in the High Court, and then describes the new evidence in the recently disclosed documents. The concluding section then discusses the Kenya case and the implications of the larger discovery of the ‘lost’ British Empire archive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the influence of Mau Mau and of the counter-insurgency strategies devised by the British in Kenya on the state of emergency declared in Nyasaland in March 1959. It focuses on the hitherto largely undisclosed history of Malawian detainees both in Gwelo and Marandellas prisons in Southern Rhodesia and in Kanjedza camp near Blantyre, where conditions were notably more severe. The Kenyan influence was particularly evident in the Pinney Plan of April 1959 which was predicated on the need for detainees to be 'rehabilitated' (cleansed of their mistaken beliefs) through a combination of hard work and confession. This assessment, however, was challenged in the Colonial Office partly as a result of the Hola Camp massacre in Kenya but also because of the publicity given to the mistreatment of detainees in Kanjedza. The extreme brutality of the early weeks was largely abandoned; at the same time detainees took control of much of the internal workings of Kanjedza. Much remains to be studied concerning the social profile of the detainees and the world they made for themselves in the camps. What is clear is both the extensive influence of Kenya on colonial strategies during Nyasaland's state of emergency and also the fundamental differences in approach and outcome that ultimately separated the two territories from each other. Also apparent is the fact that, following independence, some nationalists used their experience of detention under the British as a benchmark in demanding that a new generation of detainees should be treated with even greater brutality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical revisionism is equally appealing to state and non-state actors during periods of intense socio-political change, especially following civil conflict, when the need for unification is paramount. This applies to Kenya as it struggles to come to terms with the post-electoral crisis of 2007/08. The need to redress state-orchestrated amnesia about Mau Mau and the struggle for independence is also important; encouraged by first president Jomo Kenyatta, ostensibly in the interests of national unity, the trend was continued by his successor. Since Mau Mau was unbanned in 2003, and a lawsuit was brought by veterans with the support of a human rights group against the British government in 2009, there has been an upsurge in public memorialisation and debate about the liberation movement in Kenya. This has been accompanied by increasing calls for 'true' history to be written. Veterans have persuaded the state to support a project on rewriting Kenya history, which links to efforts to commemorate heroes and broaden official definitions of heroism to include a wide range of ethnic communities and rebel leaders from different periods of anti-colonial resistance. These themes are reflected in two new history exhibitions developed by National Museums of Kenya (NMK), and in the local media, which has done more to popularise these histories and commemorative initiatives than any scholarly texts. This article draws on research interviews and the literature on resistance, social memory and patriotic nationalism to problematise and analyse these developments, within the context of constitutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the Mau Mau rebellion that gripped Kenya in the 1950s, the British colonial government created a network of detention camps across the country that imprisoned a significant proportion of the native population. To justify and legitimise such widespread incarceration, the Nairobi government introduced a much-publicised rehabilitation programme in an attempt to transform Kikuyu inmates into loyal and productive citizens upon release. However, the conditions in the camps were not conducive to a programme that sought to educate and transform its participants into supporters of British rule. Using a range of primary sources, including previously unseen archival evidence, this paper contributes to the relatively sparse historiography on Kenya's detention camps. In particular, it explores the divergence between the intended rehabilitation programme and the conservatism and brutality of its implementation. Whilst the colonial government lauded its achievements and impressive release rates, this paper argues that rehabilitation transformed into a programme that repressed the Kikuyu population that it was meant to be reforming and only served to speed the process towards independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategists are currently debating the efficacy airpower provides in counterinsurgency operations. Through the lens of Colonel John Warden's theory of systemic paralysis, this essay reveals the truth about how airpower was employed in the Mau Mau conflict - a subject that has, until now, been both shrouded in mystery and inaccurately reported. It reveals that the use of airpower in a conflict occurring almost 60 years ago proffers a number of lessons for its use in counterinsurgencies today. Moreover, it discovers that although useful in many respects, Warden's model is somewhat limited for analysing the true use of airpower in counterinsurgencies today and consequently, a more appropriate model is offered for airpower strategists to use in such conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the dominant paradigm in studies of British small wars positing a central role of minimum force in doctrinal guidelines for counterinsurgency needs to be even more fundamentally revised than has been argued in recent debates. More specifically, it argues that minimum force is nowhere to be found in British doctrine during the small wars of decolonisation. The need for revision also applies to the way British counterinsurgency is usually sharply contrasted with French counterinsurgency. British doctrine during this period is better understood when placed in its proper historical context. This means comparing it with the other two most significant examples of doctrinal development for small wars of decolonisation - those of France and Portugal. This comparison shows that British counterinsurgency was not uniquely population-centric, and this characteristic cannot, therefore, be the reason for its arguably superior if far from infallible performance. Evidence for these arguments comes primarily from doctrinal sources developed specifically to deal with counterinsurgency, complemented with insights from key military thinkers and archival sources of relevance practices. Some wider implications of this analysis for the relationship between combat experience and doctrinal development as well as for counterinsurgency are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which examines the representation of African oral law in the book "The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta," by Montagu Slater. It explores the status of the book in issues between oral culture and colonial literature culture in Africa which involves literal electronic amplification. It offers brief overview of the history of militant liberation movement Mau Mau and determines the law that confronts orality in the trial of Kenyan nationalist leader Jomo kenyatta.

Air power has not featured prominently in most histories of the British counter-insurgency during the 1952-60 Kenyan Emergency. But as a fresh reading of the evidence shows, air assets were invaluable in the fight against the Mau Mau. By carefully avoiding civilian casualties, the RAF was able to target the Mau Mau insurgents in their remote strongholds without alienating the local population. The use of air power in the Kenyan campaign may well provide lessons for today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns the simultaneous and contradictory conceptions of Kenyan history by rereading popular representations of the Mau Mau war of Kenyan independence and its postindependence consequences. It examines twenty-first-century evocations and appropriations of Mau Mau in relation to earlier discourses in literature and politics. It discovers that contemporary artists and citizens deploy references to Mau Mau outside of its historical context to address, in highly emotive language, contemporary problems in Kenya, such as runaway corruption and police brutality. It reads emergent artists and writers against the background of more dominant and canonical work to demonstrate the evolution of popular memory and the need to consider everyday, marginal, and liminal texts in a postcolonial context where the perspectives of ordinary people are excluded from official archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The avalanche of plantation strikes that took place during the early months of 1960 initiated the successive strike waves which plagued Kenya's decolonisation process. The lifting of the Emergency and the announcement of a transition period to African majority government in January 1960 was marked by a new confidence. After years of draconian discipline, estate workers embraced trade unionism and moved into their first organised struggles over wages and conditions. They were joined by unrestricted former Mau Mau detainees and the victims of land consolidation who entered the plantation work force. The arousal of high expectations fuelled the strikes that engulfed the plantation districts of Kenya's Central Province during the approach to independence. These events took place against a background of severe crisis within world coffee markets. Faced by this, European coffee growers attempted to compensate themselves by rationalising the plantation economy at the expense of their workers. This was met by fierce resistance from plantation labourers, which was only eventually tamed as union leaders struggled to arrest the movement and surrender organisational autonomy to the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With strategic success in Iraq and Afghanistan far from certain, comforting beliefs about Britain's superiority at counterinsurgency have come under increasingly sceptical scrutiny. This article contributes to the debate with particular reference to the supposedly pivotal principle of minimum force. After discussing the recent literature on the subject, the article critiques the methodology employed by advocates of the traditionalist view on British COIN, arguing for a more rigorous historical approach based on primary sources. Following these historical matters, it is argued that conceptually, minimum force should be analysed dialectically in relation to practices of exemplary force, and above all, on the evidence of what happens in a conflict. Arguably the value ascribed to doctrine in strategic analysis has become unduly inflated, and we must look beyond it to understand war and political violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent attempts to revive counterinsurgency strategies for use in Afghanistan and Iraq have been marked by a determination to learn lessons from history. Using the case of the campaign against the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya of 1952-60, this article considers the reasons for this engagement with the past and the issues that have emerged as a consequence. The article disputes the lessons from British colonial history that have been learned by military planners, most obviously the characterization of nonmilitary forms of British counterinsurgency as nonviolent. Although it contests some of these supposed precedents for successful counterinsurgency in British military history, the article also identifies more generalizable elements of the Kenyan case. Particular emphasis is given to the effects on the nature of counterinsurgency, a reliance on locally recruited allies, and the decentralization of command. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the participation of the Kamba people in the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial rule in Kenya in the 1950s. Commonly assumed to be an anti-colonial movement dominated by the Kikuyu people, Mau Mau is instead seen to have had much wider ethnic participation. Also discussed is why not all Kamba chose to join Mau Mau, with the reasons seen as: British manipulation of Kamba ethnicity; colonial community development and welfare programs; and the position of Kamba chiefs in the conflict.

The article presents an in-depth examination into the archaeological search for the remains of the Kenyan revolutionary martyr Dedan Kimathi. Introductory details are given describing the history of the political figure, explaining his role in the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s and highlighting his later fame and popular association with the post-colonial movement. Details are given describing both the history of efforts between the 1990s and 2004 to uncover his remains and analyzing the social factors which made his relics so important. Social aspects examined focus on the ideological concepts of freedom, the cultural influence of Christianity, and the social attitudes regarding funeral rites.

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The article presents the author's thoughts in response to the article "The Other Side of the COIN: Minimum and Exemplary Force in British Army Counterinsurgency in Kenya," by Huw Bennett in issue 4 (2007). A discussion of the British military philosophy of minimum force is presented, noting concerns over the portrayal of several of the actors in the Kenyan Case in the article by Bennett. The Mau Mau uprising, differences between the King's African Rifles colonial military units and the British Army, and the work of British Army General George Erskine are also discussed.

The idea of freedom, or wiathi, lay at the centre of political and moral discussion around the time of Mau Mau. But what did this idea of freedom entail? This article focuses attention on the need to reconstruct what was understood by wiathi by concentrating on the particular context in which the term was used. It is suggested that wiathi denotes an idea of freedom as moral agency, which confers authority to act within the community and makes one fully adult. Although that idea has certain parallels with the principal ways in which the term 'freedom' is typically understood in political analysis, wiathi is properly understood by treating it on its own terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illuminates the creative intellectual and social projects in which Mau Mau detainees were engaged. It draws on the private papers of Gakaara wa Wanjau, a Gikuyu writer who during his eight years of detention composed several plays, wrote ethnography and poetry, and carried on an extensive correspondence with his family. Gakaara and other detainees were doing more than defending a Mau Mau ideology. They were opening up new ways of doing Gikuyu culture, holding wives and children accountable, and representing them- selves to a British public that could, they hoped, be brought round to their side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]