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SUMMARY:Mau Mau: The Face of International Terrorism in the 1950's in the 
 Contemporary Perspective' - Prof Bruce Berman\, Professor Emeritus of Poli
 tical Studies and History\, Queen’s University\, Ontario
DTSTART:20160523T160000Z
DTEND:20160523T170000Z
UID:TALK66027@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Victoria Jones
DESCRIPTION:For more than 30 years until the end of the1980’s\, Mau Mau 
 in Kenya was to the Western world the terrifying face of African savagery.
  The British colonial authorities depicted it as an atavistic terrorist mo
 vement among a “primitive” people unable to cope with the pressures of
  modernity. This image of Mau Mau was vigorously propagated by the British
  through the Western media and was used to justify one of the first counte
 r-insurgency campaigns against anti-colonial terrorism. Almost nothing abo
 ut the official version of Mau Mau was true\, however. ­­­­­­­ Some
  sixty years of research has revealed Mau Mau to have been an initially in
 choate and later more organized response of a Kikuyu underclass of disposs
 essed peasants\, urban workers and the unemployed. In contemporary perspec
 tive\, what Mau Mau history suggests is the shared origins of the far more
  violent and ideologically extreme movements from Boko Haram and al Shabaa
 b to the ISIS in the catastrophic impact of capitalist modernity on the un
 derclass of indigenous societies. These consequences have been misundersto
 od\, dismissed or ignored completely by all of the dominant theories of 
 ‘development’ of the past seventy years. What we can learn from Mau Ma
 u is what one veteran told a visiting researcher\, that he joined “to ge
 t land and become an adult”.
LOCATION:Seminar Room S1\, Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambrid
 ge CB3 9DT
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