Mau Mau from Below

by Greet Kershaw

Published 30 September 1996
This text is based on the oral evidence of the Kikuyu villagers with whom the author lived as an aid worker during the Mau Mau emergency in the 1950s. The data suggests that there was never a single Mau Mau movement, and that noneof its members ever saw it as such, not because they did not have a political aim, but because that agenda was contested within different political circles over which they had no control and of which they may scarcely have had any knowledge. The importance of this is that almost all the enemies of the Mau Mau did see it as a whole movement, in order to try and comprehend it and defeat it.

North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP