In the opening pages of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1967 novel A Grain of Wheat, a European district officer asks a version of the question at the core of discourse about the anticolonial movement that gripped Kenya in the 1950s: “What is this thing called Mau Mau?” As an icon of violent resistance to colonial domination, one answer regarding the armed struggle that defined late-colonial Kenya has been to read it as an “unfinished revolution” whose decolonial aims remain unfulfilled (or, more precisely, betrayed). This talk attends to Mau Mau’s symbolic place in cultural politics in Kenya and beyond by exploring how narratives interpreting it as such have shaped transnational understandings of postcolonialism and decolonization. By tracing the rhetorical politics that cohere around it, I argue that we should consider the invocation of the idea of Mau Mau — whether it be central to a text or present as an offhand reference — as a catalyst through which broader claims are made. I link how African and diasporic writers have positioned Mau Mau as an episode in the greater “African Revolution” to the challenge it represents to existing racial and ethnic structures. Drawing from Kenyan, South African, and American sources, this talk explores how these dual interpretations have shaped Mau Mau’s prominent position in cultural production and the politics of dissent across the world. 

Thursday, February 27
5:00pm - 8:00pm
Kaplan 348

Click here to register 

Cost : Free

Sponsor(s): African Studies Center, Comparative Literature