Mau-Mau Rebels’ Doctor in Mount Kenya East Forest (1952–1960): Retrieving the Revolutionary History of Milton Munene Gachau

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julius M. Gathogo
Keyword(s):  
National Level ◽  
Medical Doctor ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Armed Struggle ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Mau Mau ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolutionary History ◽  
Second World

The Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), otherwise known as Mau-Mau revolutionary movement was formed after returnees of the Second World War (1939–1945) ignited the African populace to militarily fight for land and freedom (wiyathi nai thaka). John Walton’s theory of reluctant rebels informs this article theoretically, as it is indeed the political elites who inspired this armed struggle. To do this, they held several meetings in the capital city of Nairobi, drew the war structures from the national level to the sub-location level, especially in the central region of Kenya, and tasked locals with filling in the leadership vacuums that were created. In view of this, the article seeks to unveil the revolutionary history of the Mau-Mau medical Doctor, also known as Major Judge Munene Gachau (born in 1935), whose contribution in the Kenyan war of independence (1952–1960) remains unique. This uniqueness can be attested to by considering various factors. First, he is one of the few surviving leaders who joined the guerrilla forest war while he was relatively young. Normally, the Mau-Mau War Council did not encourage people below the age of 25 to join the rebels in the forest of Mt. Kenya, Aberdare Mountains and/or other places. Nor did they encourage adults past the age of 35 to join as combatants in the forest fight. Second, he is the only known Mau-Mau rebel in Kirinyaga county of Kenya to have gone back to school after the war had ended, traveled abroad, and studied up to a Masters degree level. Third, Munene Gachau belongs in the category that joined the rebels while still relatively educated and eventually got promoted to the rank of Major, upon being confirmed as the Mau-Mau Doctor.

Private letters of Siberian exiles about the ‘Turukhansk revolt’: 1908–1912

2018 ◽  
pp. 508-521
Author(s):  
Dmitrii A. Baksht ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Police Department ◽  
General System ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
State Management ◽  
Management Institutions

The article studies the Turukhansk region as a territory with distinct climatic conditions and, consequently, with distinctive state management institutions and does so in the context of modernization processes of late 19th – early 20th century. This part of the Yenisei gubernia having become a region of mass exile after the First Russian Revolution of 1905–1907, its integration into a general system of management slowed down. Private letters of exiles are an important historical source, they reveal many aspects of the daily life of the persons under supervising in the inter-revolutionary period. The ‘Turukhansk revolt’ in the winter of 1908/09 revealed not only the ineffectiveness of exile as a penal measure, but also severel major problems of the region: archaic and scanty management institutions, lack of transport communication with southern uezds of the gubernia, underpopulation, and also gubernia and metropolitan officials’ ignorance of local affairs. The agencies of the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs expanded the practice of perlustration as involvement in the revolutionary movement grew. Siberian exiles had their correspondence routinely inspected, and yet in most cases they were inexperienced enough not to encrypt their messages. Surviving perlustration materials offer an ambivalent picture of the ‘Turukhansk revolt’: there were both approval and condemnation of the participants’ actions. The documents tell a tale of extreme cruelty of the punitive detachments even towards those who were not involved in the resistance. The subject of the Siberian exile of the early 20th century has research potential. There is virtually no scholarship on the exiles’ self-reflection concerning the ‘common violence’ of both anti-governmental groups and state punitive agencies. Diversification in political/party or social/class affiliation is not enough. The new materials have revealed a significant gap between several ‘streams’ of exiles: those banished to Siberia in midst of the First Russian Revolution differed from those exiled in 1910s. The article concludes that, having departed from the previous approach to studying the exile, ego-sources cease to be of lesser importance than other types of historical sources. Their subjectivity becomes an advantage for a high-quality text analysis.

Foucault, Lenin, and Western Marxism

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-267
Keyword(s):  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Marxist Tradition ◽  
Western Marxism

This article others a brief historical account of the complex relationship between Michel Foucault and certain theorists in the Western Marxist philosophical tradition. In the context of the history of the “short twentieth century,” Western Marxism is an intellectual trend based on an interpretation of non-Western revolutionary praxis (by Bolsheviks, Maoists, Guevaristas, etc.). Comparative analysis of several schematic portraits - of Lenin’s revolutionary intellectual, of traditional as opposed to organic intellectuals in Gramsci, and of Foucault’s public intellectual - shows that Foucault in a certain instances was not an external enemy of the Western Marxist tradition, but rather its internal critic. Foucault comes across as a revisionist who engaged in a debate with Lenin about the strategy of the revolutionary movement in France of the 1960s and the 70s. Foucault’s criticism of Leninism unexpectedly turns out to be consistent with the basic struggle of post-WWII Western Marxism to find an alternative to the Bolshevik experience of revolution. This deliberate concurrence makes Foucault one of the significant figures in the history of late Western Marxism, but this becomes a real problem for current historians of neo-Marxist thought when coupled with his generally anti-Marxist views. The article discusses two possible solutions to this problem devised by Perry Anderson and Daniel Bensaid. Anderson’s description of the role of Foucault in the fate of Western Marxism is limited to conceptual questions about the relationship between Marxism and (post) structuralism. Bensaid tries to explain how Foucault fits into the Marxist tradition by appealing to social changes, specifically the changing ideology of capitalist society (in the spirit of The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello). Building on Bensaid’s work, the article shows the link between Foucault’s position on public intellectuals and the crisis of the revolutionary movement of the last half-century, in particular by reference to the famous “Iranian episode” in Foucault’s biography.

The Common Law in Colonial America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
American Law ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
The Law ◽  
Substantive Law ◽  
The Revolution

This volume begins where volumes 2 and 3 ended. The main theme of the four-volume project is that the law of America’s thirteen colonies differed profoundly when they first were founded, but had developed into a common American law by the time of the Revolution. This fourth volume focuses on what was common to the law of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, although it also takes important differences into account. The first five chapters examine procedural and substantive law in colonies and conclude that, except in North Carolina and northern New York, the legal system functioned effectively in the interests both of Great Britain and of colonial localities. The next three chapters examine changes in law and the constitution beginning with the Zenger case in 1735—changes that ultimately culminated in independence. These chapters show how lawyers became leading figures in what gradually became a revolutionary movement. It also shows how lawyers used legal and constitutional ideology in the interests, sometimes of an economic character, of their clients. The book thereby engages prior scholarship, especially that of Bernard Bailyn and John Phillip Reid, to show how ideas and constitutional values possessed independent causal significance in leading up to the Revolution but also served to protect institutional structures and socioeconomic interests that likewise possessed causal significance.

Resilienz und Konstruktion von Sicherheit

2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 415-445
Author(s):  
Amerigo Caruso ◽  
Linda Hammann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Social Resources ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Regime Changes ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Political Turmoil

AbstractProspero Balbo, the head of a leading Piedmontese noble family, followed a career path similar to that of the versatile French statesman Talleyrand. In the aftermath of 1789, Balbo served under four different regimes: the Old Regime monarchy, the Russian provisional administration of Piedmont in 1799, the Napoleonic empire, and the restored Savoy monarchy. After the short-lived revolutionary movement of 1821 in Sardinia-Piedmont, Prospero lost his job as interior minister and his son, Cesare, was forced into exile. The revolutionary waves of 1820–1821 were the most recent of numerous disruptive events and regime changes that jeopardized Europe and the Atlantic world between the late 1770 s and the early 1820 s. These five decades of revolutionary upheavals, wars, and persistent insecurity forced the traditional elites to mobilize their material, cultural, and social resources to preserve their prestige and power. Based on extensive archival research, this article examines the resilience-strengthening resources and strategies implemented by members of the Balbo family during periods of political turmoil. In doing so, the article aims to develop an analytical and conceptual framework to describe historical processes in terms of resilience and vulnerability. This new approach enables us to look afresh at elite transformations and at the dynamics of political change and continuity in early nineteenth-century Europe.

Spirit of Bandung beyond Colonial Mobility

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-209
Author(s):  
Jeong Eun Annabel We
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
Current Paradigm

This article argues that the spirit of Bandung’s relevance in a time of resurgent fascist mobilization is in the new logic of movement that the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indonesia espoused. The critiques of liberal humanism and its relation to fascism by Ernst Bloch, Takeuchi Yoshimi, and Aimé Césaire reveal that an underlying problem of coloniality and movement remain in current paradigm of liberalism. The article situates conceptual reworkings of colonial-fascist movement by the thinkers Takeuchi Yoshimi, Frantz Fanon, and Ch’oe In-Hun within the trajectory of the spirit of Bandung. Through this engagement, the article argues that the spirit of Bandung has called for revolutionary movement beyond the grids of colonial mobility in the transpacific.

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