'Mau Mau: The Face of International Terrorism in the 1950's in the Contemporary Perspective'
Duration: 54 mins 5 secs
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| Description: | A talk by Prof Bruce Berman, Professor Emeritus of Political Studies and History at Queen’s. He was the director and principal investigator of the Ethnicity and Democratic Governance Program from 2006 to 2012 In 2012-13 he was the Smuts University Research Fellow at Cambridge and is a continuing Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College. He is the author of Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya (Gregory Prize, 1991 and, with John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (Reese Prize. 1995). His most recent books are Secular States and Religious Diversity, edited with Andre Laliberte and Rajeev Bhargava (UBC Press 2013), and Moral Economies and Ethnic and Nationalist Claims, edited with Andre Laliberte and Stephen Larin (UBC Press, forthcoming in 2016). He and John Lonsdale are completing The House of Custom: Louis Leakey, Jomo Kenyatta and the Modern Kikuyu. |
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| Created: | 2016-05-26 15:14 |
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| Collection: |
Centre of African Studies
Centre of African Studies |
| Publisher: | University of Cambridge |
| Copyright: | Victoria Jones, Bruce Berman |
| Language: | eng (English) |
| Keywords: | Mau Mau; Kenya; Kikuyu; terrorism; colonialism; |
| Abstract: | For more than 30 years until the end of the1980’s, Mau Mau in Kenya was to the Western world the terrifying face of African savagery. The British colonial authorities depicted it as an atavistic terrorist movement among a “primitive” people unable to cope with the pressures of modernity. This image of Mau Mau was vigorously propagated by the British through the Western media and was used to justify one of the first counter-insurgency campaigns against anti-colonial terrorism.
Almost nothing about the official version of Mau Mau was true, however. Some sixty years of research has revealed Mau Mau to have been an initially inchoate and later more organized response of a Kikuyu underclass of dispossessed peasants, urban workers and the unemployed. In contemporary perspective, what Mau Mau history suggests is the shared origins of the far more violent and ideologically extreme movements from Boko Haram and al Shabaab to the ISIS in the catastrophic impact of capitalist modernity on the underclass of indigenous societies. These consequences have been misunderstood, dismissed or ignored completely by all of the dominant theories of ‘development’ of the past seventy years. What we can learn from Mau Mau is what one veteran told a visiting researcher, that he joined “to get land and become an adult”. |
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