LAUSR

Dedan Kimathi on Trial demonstrates the extent to which the Mau Mau uprising remains an imposing scholarly theme in Kenyan, African, and, one can argue, global history. Of all prominent Mau Mau leaders, none has generated as much attention or proved as enigmatic as Dedan Kimathi. As the book demonstrates, this was true among Kimathi’s colonial nemeses, both British and the Kikuyu—his clansmen—and to his apologists or followers in the postcolonial state. Edited by Julie MacArthur, this book is centered on this historical figure, focusing on the proceedings of the controversial Nyeri trial of 1956 by the British colonial administration that condemned Kimathi to the gallows. This book is the most recent of studies that deal with imperial justice (Martin J. Weiner 2008), most notably those focusing on colonial Kenya (David Anderson 2005; Caroline Elkins 2005). Indeed, like the foregoing studies by Anderson and Elkins, Dedan Kimathi on Trial was prompted by the “recovery” of the missing Kimathi trial file and fits the category of “colonial cover-ups” histories (1, 4). The academic value of the book lies in its central subject, Kimathi, especially in the enigma of the individual generated by the complexities of his involvement with Mau Mau and its forest fighters and the perception of and response to those fighters by the British colonial state and its Kikuyu faithful. That value is reinforced by recent trends of renewed nationalism in Kenya, stoked by what MacArthur refers to as renewed memorialization of Mau Mau centered on Kimathi (4). Micere Githae Mugo and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o provide an apt foreword to the book, a fitting contribution from two preeminent African playwrights who also provided the earliest critical analysis of Dedan Kimathi’s role in the nationalism and decolonization of Kenya in their celebrated play, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976). Both scholars perceive Dedan Kimathi on Trial as a re-affirmation of the unmerited colonial demonization of Kimathi and the Kenya Land and Freedom Army that he led in the Mau and Aberdare Forests. For them, Kimathi’s trial was a farce, a practice in “colonialist and imperialist injustice” (xiii). Kimathi’s refusal to cooperate with his colonial