The transcript from this historic trial, long thought destroyed or hidden, unearths a piece of the British colonial archive at a critical point in the Mau Mau Rebellion. Its discovery and landmark publication unsettles an already contentious Kenyan history and its reverberations in the postcolonial present. Perhaps no figure embodied the ambiguities, colonial fears, and collective imaginations of Kenya’s decolonization era more than Dedan Kimathi, the self-proclaimed field marshal of the rebel forces that took to the forests to fight colonial rule in the 1950s. Kimathi personified many of the contradictions that the Mau Mau Rebellion represented: rebel statesman, literate peasant, modern traditionalist. His capture and trial in 1956, and subsequent execution, for many marked the end of the rebellion and turned Kimathi into a patriotic martyr. Here, the entire trial transcript is available for the first time. This critical edition also includes provocative contributions from leading Mau Mau scholars reflecting on the meaning of the rich documents offered here and the figure of Kimathi in a much wider field of historical and contemporary concerns. These include the nature of colonial justice; the moral arguments over rebellion, nationalism, and the end of empire; and the complexities of memory and memorialization in contemporary Kenya. Contributors: David Anderson, Simon Gikandi, Nicholas Githuku, Lotte Hughes, and John Lonsdale. Introductory note by Willy Mutunga.

Kenyan-born novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his collaborator, Micere Githae Mugo, have built a powerful and challenging play out of the circumstances surrounding the 1956 trial of Dedan Kimathi, the celebrated Kenyan hero who led the Mau Mau rebellion against the British colonial regime in Kenya and was eventually hanged. A highly controversial character, Kimathi’s life has been subject to intense propaganda by both the British government, who saw him as a vicious terrorist, and Kenyan nationalists, who viewed him as a man of great courage and commitment. Writing in the 1970s, the playwrights’ response to colonialist writings about the Mau Mau movement in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is to sing the praises of the deeds of this hero of the resistance who refused to surrender to British imperialism. It is not a reproduction of the farcical “trial” at Nyeri. Rather, according to the preface, it is “an imaginative recreation and interpretation of the collective will of the Kenyan peasants and workers in their refusal to break under sixty years of colonial torture and ruthless oppression by the British ruling classes and their continued determination to resist exploitation,oppression and new forms of enslavement.”

La Gumas powerful, firsthand account depicts the dedicated South African people who risked their lives in the underground movement against apartheid. The main characters, Beukes and Elias, are among others determined to undermine apartheids blatant oppression and demeaning tactics. The authors knack for rich descriptions and weaving the past with the present transports readers to the grind of working in an underground political organization and the challenges of confronting hardships, change, and injustice on a daily basis.

The British captured extensive archives belonging to the Mau Mau, which to this day have not been made public. Here for the first time, as a result of years of village - level research, historian Maina wa Kinyatti has recovered some of the movement's - and its leader, Dedan Kimathi's - most important papers. Translated in to English, they make startlingly clear movement's own perspectives on their struggle and its difficulties, the relatively advanced nature of their goals as a national liberation movement, and their radical visions of a liberated Kenyan society. Dedan Kimathi became President of Mau Mau's ruling body in August 1953 and remained its overall head until his capture and death two years later. He ordered the movement to keep documentation for the purpose of providing, as he put it, 'concentrate evidence that we fought and died for this land'. By recovering some of this material, Maina wa Kinyatti has done Kenyan history a signal service.

The Nobel Prize–nominated Kenyan writer’s powerful first novel Two brothers, Njoroge and Kamau, stand on a garbage heap and look into their futures: Njoroge is to attend school, while Kamau will train to be a carpenter. But this is Kenya, and the times are against them: In the forests, the Mau Mau is waging war against the white government, and the two brothers and their family need to decide where their loyalties lie. For the practical Kamau, the choice is simple, but for Njoroge the scholar, the dream of progress through learning is a hard one to give up. The first East African novel published in English, Weep Not, Child explores the effects of the infamous Mau Mau uprising on the lives of ordinary men and women, and on one family in particular. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Award-winning author Mongo Beti presents The Poor Christ of Bomba, a cutting satirical critique on the role of Catholic missionaries and French colonialism in 1930s Cameroon. A revolutionary novel in its time. In the small village of Bomba, a French missionary priest is instructed to build a parish for its residents. Father Drumont has one important task; to save the village from heresy by preparing its girls for Christian marriage. A servant in Father Drumont's house, a young boy named Denis is reliant on the priest's generosity after the death of his mother. In the eyes of the Catholic church, Denis is the perfect example of the African heathen saved by Christianity – but the reality of what happens behind closed doors in much more sinister. 'One of the foremost African writers of the independence generation.' Guardian

A dazzling short story collection from the person Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls "one of the greatest writers of our time" Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, honed his craft as a short story writer. From "The Fig Tree, " written in 1960, his first year as an undergraduate at Makerere University College in Uganda, to the playful "The Ghost of Michael Jackson," written as a professor at the University of California, Irvine, these collected stories reveal a master of the short form. Covering the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence—and including two stories that have never before been published in the United States— Ngũgĩ's collection features women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society, big men in their Bentleys who have inherited power from the British, and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden. One of Ngũgĩ's most beloved stories, "Minutes of Glory," tells of Beatrice, a sad but ambitious waitress who fantasizes about being feted and lauded over by the middle-class clientele in the city's beer halls. Her dream leads her on a witty and heartbreaking adventure. Published for the first time in America, Minutes of Glory and Other Stories is a major literary event that celebrates the storytelling might of one of Africa's best-loved writers.

Postcolonial Justice addresses a major issue in current postcolonial theory and beyond, namely, the question of how to reconcile an ethics grounded in the reciprocal acknowledgment of diversity and difference with the normative, if not universal thrust that appears to energize any notion of justice. The concept of postcolonial justice shared by the essays in this volume carries an unwavering commitment to difference within and beyond Europe, while equally rejecting radical cultural essentialisms, which refuse to engage in “utopian ideals” of convivial exchange across a plurality of subject positions. Such utopian ideals can no longer claim universal validity, as in the tradition of the European enlightenment; instead they are bound to local frames of speaking from which they project world.