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Reading and Resources

Please find below a general bibliography for the course and links to further resources.

Note: required readings for each seminar, including primary sources, are listed in the Seminar Programme.

General Bibliography

You may wish to purchase one or more of the texts marked 'highly recommended'.

  • David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London, 2005). Highly recommended.
  • E.S. Atieno Odhiambo & John Lonsdale (eds), Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority, Narration (Oxford, 2003). Highly recommended.
  • Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in Kenya (Cambridge, 2012).
  • Bruce Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination (Oxford, 1992).
  • Bruce Berman & John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (Oxford, 1992)
  • Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Civil War, Counterinsurgency and Decolonization (Cambridge, 2009). Highly recommended.
  • Caroline Elkins, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London, 2005).
  • Frank Furedi, The Mau Mau War in Perspective (Oxford, 1989).
  • Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau (London, 1987).
  • Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (London, 1938).
  • Greet Kershaw, Mau Mau From Below (Oxford, 1997).
  • W.O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt (Bloomington, 1993). Highly recommended.
  • Godfrey Muriuki, A History of the Gikuyu (Nairobi, 1974).
  • Derek Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth NH, 2004).
  • David Sandgren, Mau Mau's Children: The Making of Kenya's Postcolonial Elite (Madison WI, 2012).
  • David Throup, Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau 1945-52 (London, 1988).
Further Resources

The Master Reading List contains an extended list of readings which you may wish to consult when preparing essays and presentations.

The archive at the Modern Records Centre here at the University of Warwick also contains materials that are relevant to this course. You can begin to explore these sources here.

Histories of the Hanged

Defeating Mau Mau