Mau Mau Crucible of War

Statehood, National Identity, and Politics of Postcolonial Kenya

By (author) Nicholas K. Githuku City University of New York, York College Foreword by Robert M. Maxon West Virginia University, John Lonsdale Trinity College, Cambridg

Publication date:

09 December 2015

Length of book:

574 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

239x157mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781498506984

Mau Mau Crucible of War is a study of the social and cultural history of the mentalité of struggle in Kenya, which reached a high water mark during the Mau Mau war of the 1950s, but which continues to resonate in Kenya today in the ongoing demand for a decent standard of living and social justice for all. This work catalyzes intellectual debate in various disciplines regarding not just the evolution of the Kenyan state, but also, the state in Africa. It not only engages historians of colonial and postcolonial economic and political history, but also sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and those who study personality and social branches of psychology, postcolonialism and postmodernity, social movements, armed conflict specialists, and conflict resolution analysts.

Chapter 1: Inside the Mau Mau Mind: “Returning the Imperial” Gaze in Centennial Perspective
Chapter 2: White Man’s Country: The Colonial Foundations and Legal Architecture of the Kenyan State
Chapter 3: Colonial Rupture: African Experiential Anxiety of Transformation in Time, Space and Place, 1900-1951
Chapter 4: ’52 Minds on Kenya’s Destiny: The view from “the above”
Chapter 5: Drudgery in Pyrrhic Victory: Whither the Fruits of Independence?
Chapter 6: “Matigari ma Njirungi”: Bifurcation, Atomization and Survival of the Mentalité of Struggle
Chapter 7: “Bado Mapambano,” Solidarity Forever: Latter Day Travails of Critical Publics
Chapter 8: The Long Kenyan Century: A People’s Elusive Quest for “the Good Life”

[T]here is much to be admired in this ambitious and unconventional approach. Githuku provides a richly detailed and passionately argued study that will be of interest to anyone who seeks to understand the making of the postcolonial state in Kenya and the continuing tensions and disaffections that lurk just beneath the surface of its modern political life.