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PART FIVE: THE UNHAPPY VALLEY
Bureaucracy and Incumbent Violence: Colonial Administration and the
Origins of the 'Mau Mau' Emergency - Bruce Berman
The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: The Problem - John Lonsdale
The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: Wealth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in
Kikuyu Political Thought - John Lonsdale
... a wide-ranging and masterly discussion of the colonial years in
central Kenya. Both authors display an admirable erudition, Berman
in concentrating on white-settler and colonial concerns and
administration, Lonsdale on African responses. Lonsdale's great
chapter in the second volume entitled 'The Moral Economy of Mau
Mau' is an approach to understanding them that achieves a grand
originality. -
*THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS*
... African history-writing retains enormous intellectual dynamism.
Nothing demonstrates this more strikingly than Unhappy Valley,
Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale's collection of essays on
colonialism, class and ethnicity; centred mostly on Kenya, which
includes some more general or theoretical pieces. The book
underlines, too, something of wider significance. However moribund
Marxism may seem today as a basis for political belief and action,
it still has unmatched resources as a tool-kit for historical
understanding. The kind of flexible, even eclectic Marxist method
Berman and Lonsdale employ can generate historical writing of great
subtlety and power; perhaps especially about the third world
societies Marx and his orthodox followers barely considered. ...The
real gold is in Lonsdale's long essay on Kikuyu moral economy, a
hundred pages of dense, detailed, but beautifully crafted
investigation of the intellectual roots of the Mau Mau revolt. It
is quite simply one of the most exciting historical works I have
ever read. Mau Mau has been interpreted by the colonial authorities
as more reversion to barbarism, by romantic Kenyan radicals as a
betrayed national liberation struggle, and by more recent
historians as a rural class conflict driven by purely economic
forces. Lonsdale uncovers something quite different, far more
complex and unfamiliar. He finds a search for a renewed social
order encompassing individual moral worth, conducted in the
language of Kikuyu tradition and Biblical interpretation, and
struggling to find psychic home in the alien and desperate world
created by colonialism. -
*THE NEW STATESMAN & SOCIETY*
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