The boy is gone : conversations with a Mau Mau general / Laura Lee P. Huttenbach.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Huttenbach, Laura Lee P., 1982- author.

Series:

Africa in world history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Thambu, Japhlet, 1922-2014.

Thambu, Japhlet.

Mau Mau--Biography.

Mau Mau.

Generals--Kenya--Biography.

Generals.

History.

Kenya--History--20th century.

Kenya.

Kenya--History--Mau Mau Emergency, 1952-1960.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xlii, 252 pages : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2015.

Summary:

A story with the power to change how people view the last years of colonialism in East Africa, The Boy Is Gone portrays the struggle for Kenyan independence in the words of a freedom fighter whose life spanned the twentieth century's most dramatic transformations. Japhlet Tambu was born into an impoverished farm family in the Meru Highlands, but lived to be resistant fighter, educator, businessman, and successful tea, farmer. The General, as he came to be called from his leadership of the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, narrates his life story in conversation with Laura Lee Huttenbach, a young American who met him while backpacking in Kenya in 2006. A gifted storyteller with a appreciation for the power of language and a sense of responsibility as a repository of his people's history, the General keenly recalls, his boyhood, his fight against the British, and his the life he built as a farmer. While his life experiences are his alone, his story he tells adds immeasurably to the long history of decolonization as it played out across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Book jacket.

Contents:

How I grew

We were wearing skins

Our good things were called evil

My message came through measles

No longer a boy

A time when Hitler laughed

Black market

Paid from the center

Somebody to help me

These Africans are not fearing now

Timber

The emergency

The shot you have heard

The forest

A violent rainstorm blames the wind

The one who dug the hole is the one who fell in

Die without noise

Take him to Kimathi

"The year of Mau Mau"

Uhuru

Surrender

Eating sand

Kenyatta won't come to Manyani

Following the pipeline

I was fearing politics

Who was first becomes last

Wazeehood

"Forget the past"

I will stop dancing when I see my child coming to dance

Too much of anything is poisonous

Nothing culture

Epilogue: now is the time I prayed to see.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780896802902

0896802906

9780896802919

0896802914

9780896804883

0896804887

OCLC:

895302130