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Imperial Reckoning, The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenyaby Caroline ElkinsHenry Holt, 2005, 475 pages, $27.50, ISBN-0-8050-7653-0.Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenyaand the End of Empireby David AndersonNorton, 2005, 406 pages, $25.95, ISBN 0-393-05986-3.
Who authored the atrocities linked with the Mau Mau? How did Mau Mau, which began as an armed movement against settler power in the White Highlands of Kenya, turn into a civil war among the Kikuyu of the Central Province? The Mau Mau killed only 32 white settlers. "More European civilians would die in road traffic accidents between 1952 and 1960," notes Anderson. Other Mau Mau victims included some 200 British regimental soldiers and police and 1800 African civilians. The numbers explode when we come to count the Mau Mau dead. The official figure is that of 12,000. Anderson says it is "more than 20,000." But Elkins presents a radical reappraisal of the counter- insurgency both in scale and human cost: "If the Kikuyu population figure in 1962 is adjusted using growth rates comparable to the other Africans, we find that somewhere between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are unaccounted for. … I now believe that there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people"

We argue that there is a resurgence of Mau Mau in Kenya and that at its forefront are the demands and actions of landless women. The Mau Mau war against colonialism inspired millions in their struggles during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The continuation of the anti-imperial struggle on the African continent in the 1980s and 1990s expanded into the anti-corporate globalization movement of the 2000s. The gendered demands for communal land and autonomous production during the 1952–60 Mau Mau war were suppressed by compromises or "male deals." The subsistence voices of land-poor women and dispossessed men were silenced in the 1950s and again in the 1980s by the elite clamor for commodified land and crops. Widespread landlessness has produced a new Mau Mau, which asserts a feminist life economy.

The Mau Mau leaders were very fully aware that the Kikuyu are by nature an intensely religious people, who could not do without a religion of some sort—people who needed the mental comfort of a "belief". They knew too that among their own people there were hundreds of thousands who had lost all faith in the religion of their ancestors but who had never accepted Christianity except in a nominal way. The failure of so many to accept Christianity in a deep and real sense arose from the fact that the Christian mission churches had not been content to teach only the simple teaching of Christ but had added to them much that was not in the New Testament, but which was the doctrine of the particular mission or Christian sect to which they belonged. Nevertheless, these tens of thousands of nominal Christians were people who were well acquainted with the outward forms of Christian worship and who had attended church services, so the pattern was a useful one to use. This was more particularly so since this was also the pattern used by the separatist African churches which existed in the tribe, churches which were linked with the Independent Schools movement. And so the outward patterns of Christianity, hymn-singing, formal prayers, sermons, and the recitation of a creed, were adopted as the foundations of the Mau Mau religion, which was to draw the Kikuyu to the political cause of the K.C.A.

Part 1: Unveiling the world of Mau Mau oaths -- Discoursing Mau Mau and the Mau Mau oath -- The evolution of the Mau Mau oath -- The Mau Mau oath process and architecture -- Part 2: Breaking traditions and taboos -- Shifting from lawful to unlawful: Mau Mau oath criminalization -- Gender and the Mau Mau oath -- Mau Mau oath purification

In dem Maße, in dem die Ereignisse von 1989/90 zur Geschichte werden, verwandelt sich das Gesicht des ehemaligen Grenzbereiches - ein sehr kompliziertes System mit bis zu einem Dutzend aufeinander abgestimmter Bestandteile - grundlegend. Die Erinnerung an den konkreten Verlauf verliert sich - auch für Berliner: Sehr anschaulich und überzeugend wird hier der Verlauf der Mauer dokumentiert. Auf je einer Doppelseite werden schwarz-weiße historische und heutige Fotos (vom gleichen Standort aufgenommen) gegenüberstellt. Der Fotograf hat seit Ende der 70er Jahre bis heute 50 prominente und abseits der Touristenziele befindliche Stellen dargestellt, die ehemals Schnittpunkte zwischen Ost und West waren. In der Einleitung geht der Stadthistoriker Friedrich auf Vorgeschichte und Geschichte des Mauerbaus 1961 ein und kommentiert sachkundig die Fotos. Mit Literaturverzeichnis. Ein wichtiges Buch, ergänzend zu vorhandener Literatur ("Berlin ohne Mauer", BA 8/93; "Die Mauerschneise", BA 6/94; Jodock: "Die Mauer entlang", BA 9/96). (LK/J: Meyer)

In Kenya there's fierce disagreement about what the Mau Mau were fighting for