The Agikuyu: 1890 - 1965

Author Maina wa Kinyatti, who has written extensively on the history of the Mau Mau, breaks fresh ground in this treatise, first delivered in The Gikuyu language. The Agikuyu people with their cousins--Embu, Miiru, Mbeere and Akamba--are the inhabitants of central Kenya, which was the epicenter of the decade-long Mau Mau war of liberation. In this book, Kinyatti deftly navigates through the early phases of Kenya's history from the invasion and occupation of the country by the British imperialists and the Africans' spirited response to repression, which would find expression in formulations such as the Kenya African Union (KAU). Kinyatti pays close attention to KAU's towering figures like Jomo Kenyatta, the country's future founding president. He explains how his complicated role in the national struggle--anti-imperialism on one hand, and Mau Mau ambivalence on the other--would lead to his mistaken persecution by the British occupiers, and transform Kenyatta's political fortunes, and permanently alter the country's course of history. Kinyatti traces the genesis of the Mau Mau and its evolution, analyzing the social and cultural forces that elevated it from a clandestine cell to a powerful front, and reaffirms the movement's potent power as the ultimate strength that wrenched freedom from the British. Sadly, he says, the freedom is surrendered to politicians who subvert its meaning by submitting to world imperialism. But as Kinyatti argues eloquently, the lesson from the past offer a stable base for Kenyans and Africans to build on the legacy of their freedom-loving forebears.