A unique study of the movement based on fieldwork done at the time of the Mau Mau emergency.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
The settlement of Kiambu until the Kirika famine of 1835; from Kirika until the end of the 19th century; land ownership in the 20th century; the labour market for the local population; land, labour and living in the colonial era; the resistance of the elders; the resistance of the land poor and landless the beginning of Mau Mau; the emergency, Marige and the end of Mau Mau. Appendices: data, reliability and analysis; oral traditions; notes on Kiambu social organization; economic data; notes on the Kenya land commission report; notes on the Rift Valley; notes on local education; late 19th and 20th-century oaths; notes on Mau Mau; land consolidation and villagization.
... a unique account of Britain's most bloody war of decolonization... .More than any other writer on Mau Mau, Kershaw has captured and distilled its internecine complexity, in the process identifying why the wounds have taken so very long to heal...