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Showing posts with the label "mau mau"

British History

Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes Related Many Brits know of the Russian gulag and Sozhenirsyn, but very little is taught about English atrocities. That ignorance shapes one's outlook at what is happening in the rest of the world and strengthens the belief that Britain is a good force in the world (philanthropy, aid ornganisations, charities, missionary celebrities , etc). Similar outlook can be found in France, Belgium and other countries. Excerpts from   Britain's Gulag – The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya   by Caroline Elkins
Educating Britain I have just read this book. The following excerpts are no replacement in reading the whole account. Excerpts From John Newsinger’s  The Blood Never Dried, A People’s History of the British Empire
"This is the importance of Ngugi. Born in 1938, the son of a tenant farmer in rural, British-occupied Kenya, Ngugi grew up working the pyrethrum farms that were once the property of his ancestors. He came of age during the Mau Mau rebellion, followed by the Churchill government’s violent ​response, which included​ the detention of 150,000 Gikuyu people in concentration camps where they were electrocuted, whipped and mutilated. He vividly describes this period in his novels “ Weep Not, Child ,” the first East African novel published in English, “ A Grain of Wheat ” and “ Petals of Blood .” "Such a rich body of work [Wizard of the Crow] is of potentially tremendous importance to our understanding of how the world came to be as it is. Ngugi captures the progression from the raw plunder and violence of colonialism to the corruption of national Third World elites by the predatory forces of global capitalism, which he cheekily represented in “Wizard of the Crow” by the ...