Authority, Gender & Violence: The War Within Mau Mau's Fight for Land & Freedom

This hypothesis suggests two riders to any explanation of rural resistance. Some social force must be felt to threaten a peasantry; and external allies must be available to help peasants resist. It is futile to try to understand rural rebellion by looking at cultivators and pastoralists alone. In colonial Kenya one must also assess the changing strategies of the regime, of white settlers and of African big men, the peasants' patrons; and ask to whom else rural householders could turn. To examine, so far as one can, tension within and between households can thus be no more than first step in understanding. Such fissures may have fired people to challenge their leaders' accommodations with the British, but colonial policy itself coloured the future that householders imagined. [Author]