UC Santa Cruz

In late October 1952, the Pan-Africanist leader George Padmore sent a letter to Kwame Nkrumah, the future first president of Ghana. “Brother,” he wrote, “since the storm in Kenya I have been working night and day.” Padmore was referencing an event in Kenya that had occurred only two days prior: Operation Jock Scott, during which the British colonial administration rounded up thousands of suspected supporters and leaders of the notorious “Mau Mau” movement. “Brother,” he continued, “it is hell let loose. Only the gods of Africa know how it will end.” Padmore’s letter was penned in London and travelled over 4,000 miles to reach Nkrumah in what was then the Gold Coast. It was through such transnational networks that the meaning of particular anticolonial African conflicts was articulated, discussed, and contested. And within both colonial and anticolonial networks on the Continent during the post-WWII era, few historical moments held more salience than that of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-1960).This dissertation (“‘The Storm in Kenya’: Mau Mau in Systems of Thought”) examines the international impact and legacy of the Mau Mau Uprising through analyzing a diverse body of source material drawn from archival collections located in Kenya, Great Britain, Portugal, France, and the United States. I reconstruct visions of Mau Mau in order to show how this event came to be understood in both other parts of the African continent and the wider world—visions which often compete against, or overlap with, one another. Through examining how Mau Mau was understood outside of Kenya, I show that the ways in which Mau Mau was embedded in broader networks and knowledge systems grants us novel insights into the political, intellectual, and social history of decolonization in Africa. “The Storm in Kenya” covers not only the period of the Mau Mau Emergency (which comprised most of the 1950s), but also historicizes the conceptual frameworks brought to bear on this movement both prior and subsequent to this period. The broader arc of the dissertation also engages with the comparative study of European imperialisms, Pan-African thought, and the history and theory of post-WWII counter-insurgency.