Derek R. Peterson

The intellectual lives of Mau Mau detainees

This article illuminates the creative intellectual and social projects in which Mau Mau detainees were engaged. It draws on the private papers of Gakaara wa Wanjau, a Gikuyu writer who during his eight years of detention composed several plays, wrote ethnography and poetry, and carried on an extensive correspondence with his family. Gakaara and other detainees were doing more than defending a Mau Mau ideology. They were opening up new ways of doing Gikuyu culture, holding wives and children accountable, and representing themselves to a British public that could, they hoped, be brought round to their side.

Translating the word : Dialogism and debate in two Gikuyu dictionaries

Much of the literature on missionaries and translation in colonial Africa has tended to view missionary or colonial authored texts (Bibles, dictionaries, and grammars in particular) as instruments through which foreign ways of thinking were imposed upon unsuspecting Africans. In a detailed comparison of two Gikuyu dictionaries-one authored by an Anglican missionary and the other by a Presbyterian missionary some ten years later-this article locates significant contradictions in meanings, particularly in words associated with religion and authority. By situating these contradictions within the social history of early twentieth-century Gikuyuland, the author is able to demonstrate that these contradictions are not mistakes; rather, such inconsistencies evidence the complex ontological and political debates provoked out of early evangelistic activity. For the author, who draws theoretical insight from Homi Bhabha and M. M. Bakhtin, mission texts like dictionaries are fundamentally dialogical, the product of sustained and contentious conversations between missionaries and African interlocutors. Thus, they not only shaped Gikuyu life, as earlier scholarship contended, but were profoundly shaped by contemporary Gikuyu debates over religion, power, and authority.

Rethinking the state in Idi Amin's Uganda: the politics of exhortation

Abstract This article – the introduction to a collection of articles on Idi Amins Uganda – illuminates the infrastructure of Amins dictatorship. It was through the technology of the news media that Amins officials found it possible to summon and direct the actions of Ugandas people. The news medias apparently extensive audience made it possible for the authorities to address particular demographic groups who would otherwise fall outside the reach of government bureaucracy. When government officials did actually engage with the real people they addressed, they did so with measuring tapes and typewriters close at hand. In the paper reports they filed, Amins bureaucrats tidied up complicated social situations, generating statistics that illuminated a particular constituencys adherence to – or deviation from – the official directive. Ugandas command economy was constituted through exhortations, inflated statistics, and other fictions on paper.

Casting characters: autobiography and political imagination in central Kenya

the interpretation of African-language literature has been clouded by romantic assumptions about the organic connection between writers and their communities. this essay compares two Gikuyu-language autobiogra phies. The first, by the Presbyterian Rev. Charles Muhoro, works like a cast ing call: it lists duties, sketches heroic biographies, and summons readers to act as partisans of the church. The second, by Cecilia Muthoni Mugaki, is a tale of personal torment and salvation. Cecilia was an early convert to the east African revival, which reached central Kenya during the late 1940s. Where Muhoro propels readers to act on principle, Cecilia publicizes the controversies that divided Gikuyu people. Charles Muhoro and Cecilia Muthoni wrote their autobiographies differently because Gikuyu could not agree about how their private interests should be balanced against political consensus. once we dispense with the notion that vernacular literature must faithfully reproduce the values of local communities, we can glimpse the wider field of argument in which these texts took their place.

A history of the heritage economy in Yoweri Museveni’s Uganda

ABSTRACT When the National Resistance Movement (NRM) came to power in 1986, its cadres overflowed with reformist zeal. They set out to transform Uganda’s public life, put an end to ethnic division, and promote local democracy. Today much of this reformist energy has dissipated, and undemocratic kingdoms largely define the cultural landscape. This essay attempts to explain how these things came to pass. It argues that the heritage economy offered NRM officials and other brokers an ensemble of bureaucratic techniques with which to naturalize and standardize cultures. Discomfited by the enduring salience of the occult among the people they governed, and alive to the new opportunities that the global heritage economy offered, the secular men of the NRM turned to managers who could superintend cultural life. In the field of medical practice NRM authorities delegated considerable authority to an organization called “Uganda N’eddagala Lyayo” (Uganda and Its Medicines), which worked to transform the situational and occultist knowledge of healers into the standardized repertoire of traditional medicine. In politics, NRM authorities turned to kings as brokers of tradition and as spokesmen for their people. The commercial impulse to trademark cultures and identify heritage products went hand-in-hand with the creation of unrepresentative political hierarchies. The 2016 presidential election was a further occasion for the reinforcement of monocultural, undemocratic forms of local government.

Introduction: New Directions in the History of Missionsin Africa

This short article introduces a selection of papers originally presented at the conference, “Africans Meeting Missionaries: Rethinking Colonial Encounters,” held at the University of Minnesota in May 1997. Until quite recently much of the scholarship on missions in Africa tended to reproduce early eighteenth- and nineteenth-century images of the colossal, all-powerful missionary. Whether celebrated as an heroic, civilizing agent in mission accounts or branded as a cultural imperialist in nationalist-era scholarship, the European missionary remained an actor scarcely soiled by the cultural commerce of the people on whom he worked. In short, African religious or political initiatives were seldom taken seriously. The papers which make up this collection give voice to and extend current debates surrounding the contested history (and future) of the missionary enterprise in Africa.

CULTURE AND CHRONOLOGY IN AFRICAN HISTORY

Sources and methods in African history: spoken, written, unearthed. Edited by T. Falola and C. Jennings. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004. Pp. xxi+409. ISBN 1-58046-140-9. £50.00.Honour in African history. By John Iliffe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xv+404. ISBN 0-521-54685-0. £16.99.Black experience and the empire. Edited by P. Morgan and S. Hawkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xv+416. ISBN 0-19-926029-x. £39.00. Muslim societies in African history. By D. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xx+220. ISBN 0-521-533566-x. £10.99.The study of African culture stands in a uneasy relationship with the study of African history. Historians work by pegging people, places, and events to a place on times ever-lengthening yardstick. For the historical discipline, time is a structure that stands behind and lends meaning to human events. Culture, by contrast, is often claimed to be timeless, the unique inheritance of a distinct group of people. Culture builders work by short-circuiting chronology. They poach events, names, clothing styles, and other inspirational elements from the past and marshal them as a tradition to be proud of. The study of cultural history enters into a field where the partitions between past and present are being trampled by the traffic of human imagination.

Conversion and the alignments of colonial culture

This essay – composed to honor Of Revelation and Revolution on its twentieth anniversary – argues that conversion was a means by which hegemonic cultural discourses were rendered subject to examination. The focus is on the East African Revival, a Christian conversion movement that began in Rwanda and spread throughout east Africa over the course of the 1940s and 50s. Following the directions given in Bunyans Pilgrims Progress, revivalists sorted through cultural property, identified their sins, and set themselves in motion toward another world. Their path set them at a tangent from the dialectics of the colonial encounter. In the study of the Revival we can see conversion as a political action that unsettles the alignments of colonial culture.

Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914 (review)

encountered, rather than at where they belonged on a calculus of Christian commitment, he might have been better able to explain their particular outlooks concerning Sunday. For example, doing so likely would have enhanced Miller’s interpretation of Thoreau’s sly affront to the Sunday-Sabbath, for in nearly every written word, Thoreau challenged the American devotion to a narrowly defined field of work.