Dedan Kimathi on Trial : Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion

Authors

Julie MacArthur

Files

Series

Research in International Studies, Global and Comparative Studies

Description

The transcript from this historic trial, long thought destroyed or hidden, unearths a piece of the British colonial archive at a critical point in the Mau Mau Rebellion. Its discovery and landmark publication unsettles an already contentious Kenyan history and its reverberations in the postcolonial present.

Perhaps no figure embodied the ambiguities, colonial fears, and collective imaginations of Kenya’s decolonization era more than Dedan Kimathi, the self-proclaimed field marshal of the rebel forces that took to the forests to fight colonial rule in the 1950s. Kimathi personified many of the contradictions that the Mau Mau Rebellion represented: rebel statesman, literate peasant, modern traditionalist. His capture and trial in 1956, and subsequent execution, for many marked the end of the rebellion and turned Kimathi into a patriotic martyr.

Here, the entire trial transcript is available for the first time. This critical edition also includes provocative contributions from leading Mau Mau scholars reflecting on the meaning of the rich documents offered here and the figure of Kimathi in a much wider field of historical and contemporary concerns. These include the nature of colonial justice; the moral arguments over rebellion, nationalism, and the end of empire; and the complexities of memory and memorialization in contemporary Kenya.

Contributors: David Anderson, Simon Gikandi, Nicholas Githuku, Lotte Hughes, and John Lonsdale. Introductory note by Willy Mutunga.

Award: Paul Hair Prize

Copyright Statement

Dedan Kimathi on Trial © 2017 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780896805019

Publication Date

11-27-2017

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

anticolonialism in Kenya, British Kenya Colony, colonialism in Africa, decolonization in Africa, African independence, Kenyan independence, Mau Mau Uprising, Mau Mau Rebellion, Mau Mau Revolt, Kenyan Emergency, Dedan Kimathi, Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), revolutionary leaders in Africa, African revolutionary martyrs

Disciplines

African History | African Studies | Political History | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

MacArthur, Julie, "Dedan Kimathi on Trial : Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion" (2017). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 107.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/107