From loyalist to Mau Mau: Ambiguities and allegiances during the Mau Mau insurgency in Central Kenya, 1952-60 - Research Seminar

Daniel Branch is working on his DPhil in Modern History at St Peter’s College, University of Oxford. ‘Memorialising Mau Mau’ is a joint archaeological and historical project with Dr David Anderson (Oxford) and Dr Paul Lane (Nairobi) intended to document historical sites, personalities and memorials to those associated with the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya during the 1950s. In 2004 Daniel Branch won the St Peter’s College Graduate Award.

Starting with an examination of a massacre of members of the pro-colonial Home Guard movement by soldiers of the King’s African Rifles in June 1953, this seminar will explore the morass of identities that emerged during the Mau Mau rebellion that engulfed Kenya’s Central Province in the 1950s. The creation of rigid and essentialized retrospective analyses of allegiances by both colonial and nationalist hagiographies, which determined whether the population of the region were either rebel or collaborator, will also be examined. Such categories appear to bear little relation to the complexities of the period, nor do they account for the primary concerns of the vast majority of the people in question; to survive, and to achieve or maintain wiathi, the Kikuyu concept of self-mastery. The seminar will conclude with a discussion of the longer-term consequences for Kenya of the failure of populist historiographies to account for such plurality in a profoundly contested past. These arguments will be based primarily upon archival research carried out in Kenya, Britain and the United States in 2002-2004 and a small number of interviews conducted in Kenya.