Njama's Supper

The Consumption and Use of Literary Potency by Mau Mau Insurgents in Colonial Kenya

Bibliographic Data

ID2109441
AuthorsJ H Smith (0000-0001-7567-2010, University of Chicago, corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume40
Issue03
Publication date1998-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueComparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s001041759800139x
OpenAlexW2121376717
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited19

In this essay I hope to come closer to an understanding of how Mau Mau insurgents created a world in the Aberdares forest composed of individuals and groups who contested the means for which positive social value could be attained.Mau Mau is the name given by whites to the Central Kenyan insurgency that became openly violent in 1952. Most Mau Mau violence was centered in and around the Aberdares Forest, which separated the European “White Highlands” from the African Reserves. Though not entirely a Kikuyu movement, most forest fighters were Kikuyu, and Mau Mau has often been referred to as a “Kikuyu civil war” because so much of the violence was directed at African (mostly Kikuyu) elites and because many Kikuyu (such as chiefs, elites, and Homeguards recruited by the colonial government to fight Mau Mau insurgents) took an active role in denouncing or quelling it. As John Lonsdale (1992) and Bruce Berman (1991) have shown, Mau Mau framed and informed debates about morally appropriate lifeways among a people who were never a cohesive “tribe” and who experienced radically different living and working conditions under colonialism. The world they created was replete with power, and this power was congealed in certain objects and the ability to use them. Many of these objects were literally stolen from the institutions which made up the colonial regime (schools and offices, for example). They circulated within and among groups of insurgents (itungati) in the forest and in some way represented and embodied the enchanted power of the colonial state apparatus.Most authors translate itungati as “freedom fighter” or “guerilla.” Lonsdale (1992) has indicated that the term literally means “rear guard” and probably refers to the self-conception of the original Mau Mau leadership as the rear guard, vis è vis literate nationalists like Jomo Kenyatta, in the struggle for independence. Yet the circulation of these objects into new social space (Mau Mau camps), whose constitution they contributed to, both changed the meaning of these objects and clarified and accelerated divisions within the movement

Colonialism · Ethnology · Kenya · Political science · Power (physics · Sociology · State (computer science · Tribe · African history and culture analysis · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law

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