Kenya
Last updated: July 18, 2023
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, one of Kenya's most famous writers, has been recommended several times on Five Books, Petals of Blood being highly recommended.
For a Kenyan politics book, Regime Threats and State Solutions by Mai Hassan, "a really terrific study of the development of the Kenyan bureaucracy. It reflects the challenges that are brought out in the other books, which is how, in a very ethnically divided society—and Kenya is fantastically diverse with many languages and ethnic groups—do you manage the country’s ethnic elites, who are competing for resources and power, and yet keep things running?" Say Eval Lieberman in his recommendations for the best books on African politics.
“One of the underlying themes of the book is that online activities are not separable from the economic, political and social landscape of the offline world, nor immune from its political influence. There is a passage in the book that talks about ‘what is possible online is dependent on what exists offline’.” Read more...
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Mohammad Amir Anwar, Political Scientist
“Hassan looks carefully inside the state and shows that there’s a lot of strategic deployment of particular bureaucrats by politicians. And this happens both during the authoritarian periods, and the more recent democratic periods in Kenyan history. She reminds us that these bureaucrats are often driven by different loyalties. They have different ethnicities. And as a result of their own personal positions, and because of different relationships to politicians, you see a lot of variation in state capacity within a country.” Read more...
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Evan Lieberman, Political Scientist
“It’s a novel about Kenya on the verge of independence with a rich cast of characters, from people who fought for independence to people who collaborated with the British colonialists. It’s about the legacy of violence, the intersection of public and private memory regarding conflict. It’s about how we commemorate war and how the celebration of war can be at odds with the experience of veterans. It’s about the possibility of redemption and moving forward from war.” Read more...
Phil Klay, Military Historians & Veteran
“It was written relatively soon after the Mau Mau uprising. Petals of Blood is his best book. African literature is too often put into a corner of the bookshop like some kind of booby prize. But it’s a world-class novel by any standards – it happens to deal with those themes, but it’s a cleverly constructed and accurate account… It’s sort of prescient. Like any great novel it opens the heart of the issue. It’s basically about the Mau Mau, and about various infighting and how the Mau Mau became, from his perspective, a gang war in some ways.” Read more...
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Sam Kiley, Journalist
“The uncomfortable fact remains that a large slice of the British Empire was bankrolled by opium money.” Read more...
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Julia Lovell, Historian
“I think he’s a really interesting historian who writes very beautifully. It’s a historical essay – the thesis of which is somewhat contra Edward Said’s arguments in his book Orientalism. Part of Cannadine’s argument is that there was much more cultural interpenetration in the British Empire, certainly in India, than Said suggests. But also its central contention is that the British Empire wanted to see in other cultures a replication of its own power structure, and of its own aristocracy and royalty.” Read more...
The best books on The Mau Mau Uprising and The Fading Empire
Adam Foulds, Novelist
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997
by Piers Brendan
One of his central arguments is that the Roman Empire was always consciously in the minds of the British imperialists. It was the great historical model for the project of Empire, and that is double-edged: there is both the massive triumphalism and assertion of historic dignity and power in it, but it also means that the entire conversation about the British Empire from the beginning is shot through with a sense of its ultimate likely decline. The book is also good on the fact that the Empire for British society as a whole was a minority pursuit.
Mau Mau and the Kikuyu
by L S B Leakey
Louis Leakey was very interesting – a major intellectual figure in the history of paleoanthropology. He grew up in very close contact with the Kikuyu, but this book is squarely in the language of the time, which was that Mau Mau represented an atavism, that they had regressed back to their savage, pre-settled, pre-Christianised state and what was being unleashed was a kind of innate violence.
Histories of the Hanged
by David Anderson
David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged is a very good detailed historical overview of the Mau Mau uprising. It’s a military history as well as a social history of the conflict. Its name comes from the fact that central to it is his writing about the kangaroo courts that were set up in Kenya…that tried and convicted and hanged about 1,500 people. The courts functioned to standards that would in no way have been tolerated in Britain at the same time.
The best books on The Mau Mau Uprising and The Fading Empire, recommended by Adam Foulds
British novelist and poet Adam Foulds discusses fading empire in the context of Kenya, including the horrors of British gulags, the Mau Mau uprising, and the social deprivation endured by the Kikuyu.
