Mau Mau in Brief

Mau Mau Status in Kenya Members of Mau Mau are currently recognized by the Kenyan Government as Freedom/Independence Heroes/Heroines who sacrificed their lives in order to free Kenyans from colonial rule. The Government of Kenya has proposed Mashujaa Day (Heroes Day) to be marked annually on 20 October (the same day Baring signed the Emergency order). According to the Kenyan Government, Mashujaa Day will be a time for Kenyans to remember and honour Mau Mau and other Kenyans who participated in the fight for African freedom and Kenya's independence. Mashujaa Day will replace Kenyatta Day; the latter has until now also been held on October 20.—Wikipedia The scriptwriters really had to develop the white characters. They were unevenly developed as seen through the eyes of Haley's ancestors, who knew only what they perceived. This point of view extended even to what was going on throughout the country as a whole.

Haley did it through black eyes by surmising that Bell had the ability to read and write, which she kept secret. But she did secretly read the newspapers that Dr. Reynolds left around the house. And so she knew what was being written in the newspapers about the slave revolts and slavery. She didn't tell even Kunta Kinte until after they were married, and she found out that he could read Arabic and could show her what is name looked like in Arabic.—Roots Impact

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Mao’s position on white revolutionaries was more practically based in his fight against Western imperialism. He supported anyone who fought on the domestic front against the United States of America--the strongest anti-revolutionary force and the greatest imperialist power in the world. Whites who proposed revolutionary change in America, for Mao, came under the united front strategy of : "The enemies of my enemy are my friends." Mao and the Chinese Revolution had trouble with a white, Russian Revolution that constantly fought Peking for world-wide control of the "international" Communist movement. If revolutionaries as legendary as Malcolm X and Mao had their suspicions about white revolutionaries, then why was Cleaver so eager to embrace them?—Retrospective on Soul on Ice

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Dedan Kimathi Waciuri (truly, Kimathi wa Waciuri), (31 October 1920 – 18 February 1957) was a Kenyan rebel leader who fought against the British colonial government in Kenya in the 1950s. He was convicted and executed in 1957 for murder and terrorism. The British colonial government that ruled Kenya considered him a terrorist, as did the many Kenyans who opposed the Mau Maus. The Mau Mau killed at least two thousand Kenyan civilians, 32 European settlers, and 200 British and Kenyan soldiers in the eight year uprising. The British and Kenyan military units killed 20,000 Mau Mau rebels in combat, hanged over 1000 suspected Mau Mau supporters, and interned more than 70,000 Kikuyu civilians. Former Mau Mau viewed Kimathi as a freedom fighter—Wikipedia *   *   *   *   * On September 17, 1938 he was circumcised at the Ihururu Dispensary. In 1939 he got his kipande from the DC’s office and got his first job with the Forestry Department. Leaving there under a cloud he met and impressed a teacher called Eliud Mugo from Mathira Division. Eliud, blind in one eye and later to become a notoriously oppressive Chief in lriaini Location during the Emergency, arranged for Kimathi to enrol at the Tumutumu CSM School. He stayed there for two years, save for a three-month break in 1941 when he joined the army. He finally left Tumutumu in February 1944, being unable to pay fees arrears. Over the next five years he tried different ways of earning a living, becoming a school teacher, a clerk with first a dairy and then a timber firm, and a trader. In January 1949 he got a job, but not for long, as a teacher at his old school Karinaini.

But wherever he went and whatever he did Kimathi became a welcome and popular figure with his fellow Kikuyus on his travels. He had a powerful and attractive personality and he began to involve himself in the politics of the day, and also of the night. Initially he was just one of the stewards at the mass rallies held by Kenyatta and other politicians. However, he speedily graduated and became the chief organiser. He was elected secretary of the Ol Kalou and Thomson’s Falls branch of the Kenya African Union (KAU) on June 2, 1952. It is widely accepted that he was already planning a more proactive and aggressive strategy than the Muhimu Central Committee with whom he had long forged links.

Four months later he was involved in organising a mass oathing ceremony on the banks of the Gura River, which was attended by thousands of Kikuyus. Nderi Wang’ombe, the Nyeri District Senior Chief, got wind of what was happening. Fatally, Nderi decided to intervene and he was killed by the frenzied crowd. Kimathi became a marked man and shortly afterwards he was arrested by Chief Muhoya’s Tribal Police at a friend’s house.

At the Chief’s Camp, he did a deal with the guards and disappeared in the night to the Aberdares. He was now 32 years old and entering the most important four years of his life. By the end of it he had been, at the least, a crucial factor in forcing the British Government to reassert its right to dictate the pace of constitutional change in Kenya. British Colonial Secretaries henceforth used this right rapidly too dismantle the white settlers’ political power in Kenya, some more ruthlessly than others.

Kimathi’s war became a most vivid real-life demonstration to the world that the British people, severely exhausted by the Second World War, no longer had either the will or the resources to impose colonialism in Kenya or anywhere else in Africa through the barrel of a gun.

It is one of the ironies of our history that in October 1956 Kimathi was shot and captured while at the same time Lennox-Boyd (Colonial Secretary) was telling the annual conference of the Conservative Party that “any other policy but that of moving towards self-government and satisfaction of nationalist aspirations in the colonies would be fraught with disaster”?—Sunday Standard, Kenya, 17th Feb. 2002—MisterSeed

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Stories of the Last Days of Kenya Colony

This autobiographical documentary revisits the Mau Mau Rebellion of the 1950s. More than 50 years after the conflict, in which the director participated as a young British soldier stationed in Kenya for his national service, he confronts his past with audacity and unflinching self-inquiry. Combining McWilliams' own photographic record of the times with original animation and archival imagery, A Time There Was crafts a thoughtful account of the Mau Mau Rebellion—one of the most contentious episodes in Britain’s imperial endgame.

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Remembering Wangari Maathai

We always knew the crazy tales our people told about the vicious madness of White Supremacy, enforced by Uncle Sam Gestapo Good Old Boy Cracker Nazis, Spawn of the “Soul Thieves” (Fred said) who bought our bodies to work for them free, forever, so they could be rich and rule the world.  Sunday School and one people and friends and brains had told us clearly to recognize:  Heathens, jealous Crackers the old folks called them.  Racists.  Lynchers.  The spiritual KKK in America’s soul.

We are its Blood, ourselves.  Sucked out of our homes by our African selves as captors, then sold to vampire-like European and American slaves traders.  They are the meaning of Halloween.  The Skull and Crossbones is their only flag. From Parks to Marxism

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McKay always evinces a sensitive identification with his people, both in their sufferings as well as in their joys.  Proud of his race, the wrongs they suffer hurts him.  But in his early work there is no strident racial protest except for two poems "Jim at Sixteen"  and "Strokes of Tamarind Switch."  "Jim at Sixteen" shows the raw wound McKay’s tight handcuffs make on the wrist of the arrested lad.  But with patience, he kept saying that he knew he could not help it, confessing how sad and ashamed he felt even though it was accidental.  "Strokes of Tamarind" is written in reaction to a judicial flogging he had witnessed;  "I could not bear to see him – my own flesh – stretched out over the bench, so I went away to the Post Office near by."  The boy who had cried during the flogging broke down later while talking to McKay who was so moved that he gave him tickets for his train journey.  Such gentleness of spirit for a policeman is softness, unmanliness, and sentimentality.  But this brings about the finer verse based on an instinctive feeling of sympathy for a suffering people, and no less for an individual.—Black Consciousness Poet

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Later, I returned to Harlem, in ' 68; and Comrade Ernie Allen, co-editor of Soulbook, and I participated in Part II of the BAM, by organizing the "Loft" movement on 125th St. Our Loft was called "The Black Mind," and we joined in with the Original Last Poets (of whom I became a mentor), whose Loft was named the "East Wind."

These lofts, in conjunction with Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theater Workshop, the Studio Museum in Harlem, led by our Black Dialogue editor, and comrade, Ed Spriggs and with Robert McBeth and Ed Bullin's New Lafayette Theater, and Ernie McClintock's theater, became the major institutions which led the Second Phase of the Harlem BAM (roughly '68 to '74) which was in continuous contact w/Imamu Baraka's Spirit House in New Ark. Baraka's "Spirit House Movers" often performed @ our Loft-theaters, and visited the New Lafayette Theatre.—Rudy Interviews Askia Touré

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There is perhaps more discomfort now in the fact that a large percentage of the twelve million undocumented are poor and brown and from the developing world. For years, people like Pat Buchanan have bemoaned the fact that there was no melting taking place in the pot. They consider un-American what they see as the immigrant’s backward glance at their sometimes poverty stricken and politically heated homelands.

Monies sent back are equated with taxes not being paid. Newborn babies are health care thieves. And since good fences make good neighbors, especially when only one neighbor can afford to build or would seemingly benefit from the fence, images of barbed-wire topped walls with armed Minutemen on the other side dance around in wistfully nativist heads.—Out of the Shadows

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Unbowed: A Memoir By Wangari Maathai The mother of three, the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate, and the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Wangari Maathai of Kenya understands how the good earth sustains life both as a biologist and as a Kikuyu woman who, like generations before her, grew nourishing food in the rich soil of Kenya's central highlands. In her engrossing and eye-opening memoir, a work of tremendous dignity and rigor, Maathai describes the paradise she knew as a child in the 1940s, when Kenya was a "lush, green, fertile" land of plenty, and the deforested nightmare it became. Discriminated against as a female university professor, Maathai has fought hard for women's rights. And it was women she turned to when she undertook her mission to restore Kenya's decimated forests, launching the Green Belt Movement and providing women with work planting trees. Maathai's ingenious, courageous, and tenacious activism led to arrests, beatings, and death threats, and yet she and her tree-planting followers remained unbowed. Currently Kenya's deputy minister for the environment and natural resources, Nobel laureate, visionary, and hero, Maathai has restored humankind's innate if nearly lost knowledge of the intrinsic connection between thriving, wisely managed ecosystems and health, justice, and peace.—Booklist

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Video: "South Side Story" —Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses Michelle Obama with Paul Coates an outspoken publisher and former Black Panther—his father. “American Girl" By Ta Nehesi Coates When Michelle Obama told a Milwaukee campaign rally last February, "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country," critics derided her as another Angry Black Woman. But the only truly radical proposition put forth by Obama, born and raised in Chicago's storied South Side, is the idea of a black community fully vested in the country at large, and proud of the American dream.

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Sex at the Margins Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry By Laura María Agustín This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London

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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America By Melissa V. Harris-Perry According to the author, this society has historically exerted considerable pressure on black females to fit into one of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the Matriarch or the Jezebel.  The selfless Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.      Professor Perry points out how the propagation of these harmful myths have served the mainstream culture well. For instance, the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for black females to feel a maternal instinct towards Caucasian babies. As for the source of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their own bodies during slavery given that they were being auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless, it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate indiscriminately.

 

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Weep Not, Child By Ngugi wa Thiong'o This is a powerful, moving story that details the effects of the infamous Mau Mau war, the African nationalist revolt against colonial oppression in Kenya, on the lives of ordinary men and women, and on one family in particular. Two brothers, Njoroge and Kamau, stand on a rubbish heap and look into their futures. Njoroge is excited; his family has decided that he will attend school, while Kamau will train to be a carpenter. Together they will serve their country—the teacher and the craftsman. But this is Kenya and the times are against them. In the forests, the Mau Mau is waging war against the white government, and the two brothers and their family need to decide where their loyalties lie. For the practical Kamau the choice is simple, but for Njoroge the scholar, the dream of progress through learning is a hard one to give up.—Penguin

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  /  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  /  Only a Pawn in Their Game

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery

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updated 4 October 2007