The incomplete rebellion: Mau Mau movement in twenty-first-century Kenyan popular culture

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Periodical article

Title:	The incomplete rebellion: Mau Mau movement in twenty-first-century Kenyan popular culture
Author:	Mwangi, Evan
Year:	2010
Periodical:	Africa Today (ISSN 1527-1978)
Volume:	57
Issue:	2
Pages:	87-113
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Kenya
Subjects:	Mau Mau images popular culture 2000-2009
External link:	http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/africa_today/v057/57.2.mwangi.pdf
Abstract:	This paper concerns the simultaneous and contradictory conceptions of Kenyan history by rereading popular representations of the Mau Mau war of Kenyan independence and its postindependence consequences. It examines twenty-first-century evocations and appropriations of Mau Mau in relation to earlier discourses in literature and politics. It discovers that contemporary artists and citizens deploy references to Mau Mau outside of its historical context to address, in highly emotive language, contemporary problems in Kenya, such as runaway corruption and police brutality. It reads emergent artists and writers against the background of more dominant and canonical work to demonstrate the evolution of popular memory and the need to consider everyday, marginal, and liminal texts in a postcolonial context where the perspectives of ordinary people are excluded from official archives. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]