“Blackshirts” and “Blacklists”: The Politics of Late-Colonial Central Kenya, 1958–1963

Guest Blog by Bernard Thomann (Ifrae/Inalco, Paris, France)

Abstract. Anti-colonial conflict and the process of decolonization produced fractions within communities that manifested in local debates about ideology, colonial legacies, and the spatialization of postcolonial power. This process appears particularly clearly in the aftermath of the Mau Mau uprising in Central Kenya, where rivalry between colonial loyalists and former anti-colonial insurgents persisted despite the postcolonial elite's homilies of reconciliation. This article focuses on the position of the “chief,” a local agent of the central state whose occupants had been at the vanguard of the colonial State of Emergency. In demanding that chiefs be elected after independence, radical nationalists and ex-fighters in the branches of the Kenya African National Union party sought to reshape for whom and how political power was to be exercised. Across the region, controversies erupted as some colonial chiefs stayed in place, outspoken radicals replaced others, and elsewhere, former Mau Mau became loyal servants of centralized power. This local lens reveals these fractures within local communities along the lines of class and power, rewriting a narrative of Kenyan postcolonial statehood that has so often emphasized ethnicity and the overweening power of the bureaucratic apparatus. Decolonization hereby appears as a continuously negotiated and incomplete process.