Dedan Kimathi on Trial: Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion (Ohio RIS Global Series)

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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 rebellion forces that took to the forests to fight colonial rule in the 1950s. Kimathi personified a number of the contradictions that the Mau Mau insurrection represented: rebellion statesman, literate peasant, up to date traditionalist. His capture and trial in 1956, and subsequent execution, for plenty of marked the end of the insurrection and turned Kimathi into a patriotic martyr.

Dedan Kimathi on Trial unearths a piece of the colonial archive long thought lost, hidden, or destroyed. Its discovery and landmark publication unsettles an already contentious history and prompts fresh examinations of its reverberations in the present.

Here, all of the trial transcript is to be had for the first time. This critical edition also includes provocative contributions from leading Mau Mau scholars reflecting on the meaning of the wealthy documents offered here and the figure of Kimathi in a wider field of historical and up to date concerns. These include the nature of colonial justice; the moral arguments over insurrection, nationalism, and the end of empire; and the complexities of memory and memorialization in up to date Kenya.

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

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