Word: kikuyu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...report said the deaths were clinical killings. "Almost all the cadavers bear classic execution signs of a bullet behind the head exiting through the forehead," it said. The Mungiki (meaning multitude in the Kikuyu language) draw their inspiration from the Mau Mau guerrillas who rose against British colonial rule in the 1950s. They began in the 1980s as a quasi-religious movement to rid Kenya of cultural imperialism and return the country to its African traditions. Followers were believed to face Mount Kenya to pray and many grew their hair into dreadlocks...
...kept out of Africa. The next decade would include frequent trips and a year-long stay as a 1989 Fulbright scholar.It was not a wealth of information, but a paucity, that drew Elkins again—and again—back to Kenya. While researching social changes among Kikuyu women from the pre-colonial period to independence for her thesis, the Princeton senior learned of a detention camp for women during the 1950s Mau Mau Revolt, a failed insurgency movement that set the stage for Kenyan independence. But there was no secondary literature. Elkins handed in her thesis and decided...
...fluid narrative tells the story of Mau Mau—a term whose origins are unclear even today—a rebellion incited after the British settled in the traditional homeland of the Kikuyu, which pushed 1.5 million people onto reservations governed by puppet “chiefs.” Kikuyu resentment of British settlers escalated into Mau Mau, a rebellion whose adherents hacked to death about 2,000 European settlers and Kikuyu “loyalists.” While these deaths have been well-documented, Elkins’ work focuses, by contrast, on the many Kikuyu...
...were killed in action. The embarrassed British destroyed most incriminating documents years ago, so instead Elkins sought out private collections that escaped incineration and talked to now-elderly Mau Mau adherents. Where no damning official record exists, she has analyzed population records, piecing together the number of Kikuyu missing or killed under the auspices of the British...
...British repression of Mau Mau was an act of injustice—but not a genocide. First and foremost, Mau Mau was not an ethnic group—although it was an almost entirely Kikuyu uprising—and sometimes Elkins intermingles the two terms. There was never any shortage of Kikuyu loyalists willing to point fingers at Mau Mau, and the British were always pleased to promote these Kikuyu to the highest position any African could attain. Moreover, membership in Mau Mau unambiguously hinged on a specific induction oath that created an ideological distinction within a larger ethnic community...