Dedan Kimathi on trial : colonial justice and popular memory in Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion / edited by Julie MacArthur ; introductory note by Willy Mutunga ; foreword by Micere Githae Mugo and Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Introductory note / Hon. Chief Justice Willy Mutunga -- Foreword / Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo and Micere Githae Mugo -- Introduction: The trial of Dedan Kimathi / Julie MacArthur -- Primary documents -- Trial of Dedan Kimathi -- Judgment -- Appeal to the Court of appeals for Eastern Africa -- Appeal to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom -- Interrogation report of Dedan Kimathi -- Select letters and exhibits from the trial -- Final letter from Dedan Kimathi to Father Marino -- Critical essays -- Mau Mau on trial : Dedan Kimathi's prosecution and Kenya's colonial justice / David M. Anderson -- Mau Mau's debates on trial / John M. Lonsdale -- Unfolding of Britain's and Kenya's complex tango : an uneasy revisit to a critical past and its implications / Nicholas Githuku -- Dedan Kimathi : the floating signifier and the missing body / Simon Gikandi -- Memorialization and Mau Mau : a critical review / Lotte Hughes.

The transcript from this historic trial, long thought destroyed or hidden, unearths a piece of the British colonial archive at a critical point in the Mau Mau Rebellion. Its discovery and landmark publication unsettles an already contentious Kenyan history and its reverberations in the postcolonial present. Perhaps no figure embodied the ambiguities, colonial fears, and collective imaginations of Kenya's decolonization era more than Dedan Kimathi, the self-proclaimed field marshal of the rebel forces that took to the forests to fight colonial rule in the 1950s. Kimathi personified many of the contradictions that the Mau Mau Rebellion represented: rebel statesman, literate peasant, modern traditionalist. His capture and trial in 1956, and subsequent execution, for many marked the end of the rebellion and turned Kimathi into a patriotic martyr. Here, the entire trial transcript is available for the first time. This critical edition also includes provocative contributions from leading Mau Mau scholars reflecting on the meaning of the rich documents offered here and the figure of Kimathi in a much wider field of historical and contemporary concerns. These include the nature of colonial justice; the moral arguments over rebellion, nationalism, and the end of empire; and the complexities of memory and memorialization in contemporary Kenya.

COPYRIGHT NOT covered - Click this link to request copyright permission:

https://lib.ciu.edu/copyright-request-form