In Upsetting the Familiar, Mugo Theuri, a Kenyan writer and former political prisoner, delivers a rigorous critique of socialist political organising in postcolonial Kenya. Drawing on his lived experience in the Mau Mau region, his imprisonment under the Moi regime, and decades of political engagement, Theuri argues that the Kenyan Left has failed to build a sustainable movement because it has uncritically adopted imported ideologies and organisational structures. The book posits that true liberation requires moving beyond imported slogans and elite-driven party politics. Instead, Theuri advocates for a politics rooted in indigenous political intelligence—the participatory, consensus-based governance systems like the Gikuyu kiama and grassroots formations like Bunge za Wananchi (People’s Parliaments) and chamas (mutual aid groups). A central theme is the need to reclaim suppressed histories, particularly the radical legacy of the Mau Mau and the erased contributions of women like Mekatilili wa Menza and Muthoni Nyanjiru. Theuri critiques the co-optation of opposition movements, the institutionalised caution of the Left, and the betrayal of socialist ideals by post-independence elites. Ultimately, he calls for a fundamental reimagining of democracy—one that is culturally grounded, feminist, and built from the ground up by the people themselves.
Mugo Theuri was born on February 2, 1953, at Gathuthi village, Tetu sub-county, Nyeri county. This was during Kenya’s state of emergency—a turbulent moment that imprinted itself on his political imagination. His father, Allan Theuri Wanderi, who served briefly as…
Keywords: Amílcar Cabral, Mau Mau, Indigenous political intelligence, Socialist organising, Elite co-optation, Feminist decolonisation, , Grassroots democracy, Postcolonial, betrayal, Cultural memory, Revolutionary vanguard,
BISAC: POL057000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / African, POL005000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism, POL045000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
THEMA: JPFF Political ideologies and movements: Marxism, Communism, Socialism; JPW Political activism / Political engagement; NHH African history
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This book examines citizenship, identity and belonging in Kenya through an analysis of literature, film, music, and theatre. Reflections on women, statelessness and refugees are central considerations.
In Decolonization and Afro-Feminism, Sylvia Tamale presents a powerful and urgent call for Africa’s intellectual, cultural, and political liberation through an Afro-feminist lens. The book critically examines how colonialism has deeply entrenched systems of oppression—based on race, gender, sexuality, class, and knowledge production—and argues that true decolonization requires more than political independence; it demands a radical rethinking of African identities, histories, and futures.
Tamale challenges Eurocentric and patriarchal frameworks that continue to dominate African societies, institutions, and academia. She explores themes such as:
The coloniality of gender and sexuality, using case studies like Caster Semenya to expose how Western norms pathologize African bodies.
The importance of intersectionality in understanding overlapping systems of oppression.
The role of Afro-ecofeminism in reconnecting African ecological wisdom with social justice.
The need to decolonize African academia, law, and family structures to recenter Indigenous knowledge and epistemologies.
The potential of Ubuntu as a framework for justice, community, and relationality.
The book is both a scholarly critique and a visionary roadmap, emphasizing that decolonization must be a feminist, inclusive, and holistic project—one that reclaims Africa’s dignity, autonomy, and intellectual sovereignty.
Written with clarity and passion, Decolonization and Afro-Feminism is essential reading for students, activists, scholars, and anyone committed to understanding and advancing Africa’s liberation in the 21st century.
Kitabu hiki kinaturudisha katika kipindi cha kusisimuwa cha miaka ya vita baridi, kipindi ambacho, sambamba na kipindi cha leo, madola ya kibeberu yamekuwa yakifanya njama za kubadilisha serikali zilizokuwepo na kuziweka madarakani zile zenye kufuata amri. Kwa kutumia kumbukumbu za picha za Johari, nyaraka za siri za Marekani na Uingereza, pamoja na mahojiano ya kina, kitabu kinatowa uchambuzi juu ya nafasi na satwa ya Chama cha Umma Party nchini Zanzibar na kiongozi wake mwenye upeo mkubwa wa mambo, Mwanamapinduzi mfuasi wa Itikadi ya Karl Marx, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu. Kwa kuangalia kwa njia ya uwiano wa mifano inayokwenda sambamba ya wahka wa Marekani kuhusu Uchina ya Kikomunisti katika miaka ya 1960 na woga walionao hivi sasa kuhusu ushawishi wa Uchina, kitabu kinatafakari juu ya mivutano mipya iliyopo katika kupigania rasilmali za Afrika, kuundwa kwa kikosi cha AFRICOM, na jinsi Wanasiasa wa Afrika Mashariki wanavyoshiriki katika kuimarisha udhibiti wa Marekani katika nchi zao, na “Vita dhidi ya Ugaidi” katika ukanda wa Afrika Mashariki hivi sasa.
Now available from Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania: http://www.mkukinanyota.com
These letters and poems are invaluable fragments of a living conversation that portrays the indomitable power in humans to stay alive in the face of certain death – to stay alive even in death.
Reading through the treasure trove of the letters and poems compiled here as The Last Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa evokes intense memories of his resolute struggles against an oil behemoth and a deaf autocratic government. His crusade frames one of the most tumultuous periods of Nigeria’s history; his tragic story evokes anger and demands action to resolve the crises that first led the Ogoni people to demand that Shell clean up Ogoni lands or clear out of the territory.
The inside story of the struggles of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, referred to by British colonialism as the ‘Mau Mau rebellion’, is little known today. The autobiographical material written by Karari Njama (a senior leader in the Mau Mau hierarchy) and compiled by Donald L. Barnett was first published by Monthly Review Press in 1966 as Mau Mau From Within: An Analysis of Kenya’s Peasant Revolt. It was reprinted in 1970; it has remained out of print for many years. As the late Basil Davidson put it in his review of the first edition: “Njama writes of the forest leaders’ efforts to overcome dissension, to evolve effective tactics, to keep discipline, mete out justice … and to teach men how to survive in those merciless forests. His narrative is crowded with excitement. Those who know much of Africa and those who know little will alike find it compulsive reading. Some 10,000 Africans died fighting in those years . Here, in the harsh detail of everyday experience, are the reasons why.”
The book is an extraordinary story of courage, passion, heroism, combined with recounting of colonial terror, brutality and betrayal. It is a story of how the very idea of being ‘Kenyan’ was intimately linked to the idea of freedom, a connection that was destroyed not only by the firepower of the British, but also by those who collaborated and established themselves as the beneficiaries of neocolonial rule. Disconnecting notions of freedom from identity left only a caricature that rapidly descended into tribalism and ethnicity.
This momentous story of the struggle for freedom described here is relevant not only for a new generation of Kenyans but also for all those engaged in emancipatory struggles internationally. For so long as the experiences arising from the struggles described in this book are perceived as merely ‘African’ or ‘Kenyan’, it is not possible to fully grasp the contributions they have made to the struggle for a universalist humanity.
What is recounted in this publication is more than an ‘analysis of a peasant revolt’. It is, above all, a history of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. As Ngūgī wa Thiong’o points out in his Preface to this new edition, ‘we don’t have to use the vocabulary of the colonial to describe our struggles.’ We were tempted to rename the book ‘Kenya Land and Freedom Army from Within.’ But because the original title has wide recognition, and one of the characteristics of movements of the oppressed is to appropriate derogatory terms
Written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, this publication celebrates the birth of Black studies as a liberated academic zone. Professor Mũgo reflects upon the significance of Africana studies, specifically within the context of America’s predominantly White universities, revisiting the hers/his/torical context that birthed Black studies as a field of knowledge. She reflects on the ownership of knowledge, its production, dissemination and custodianship while proposing utu/ubuntu as imperatives in defining transformative education. The hypothesis and heart of the argument is that knowledge and scholarship can either be colonizing, alienating and enslaving; or, alternatively, they can be conscientizing, humanizing and liberating, creating new human beings with the agency to transform life and the world, for the better. he dismisses the false myth of dominating, colonizing and imperialist cultures that claim to have a monopoly of knowledge and whose purpose is to justify the dehumanization of the conquered, the attempted erasure of their knowledges, heritages and ultimately, entire cultures.
The pamphlet begins with two letters written by Paul the Apostle in which Christianity first acquires a universal address. The new religion came to exclude people who were not Christians from the count of the human. This became explicit around a thousand years later when Pope Urban II authorised the First Crusade.
In 1492 planetary history was split in to two. Muhammad XII of Granada conceded defeat to Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic monarchs of Portugal and Spain, who went on to expel the Jews from the territory under their control. Europe became a Christian project. In the same year Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean and Europe also became an imperial project with a planetary reach.
The origins of the racial ideology can be seen in this period, in which ideas about religion came to be entangled with fantastical ideas about the imagined purity of blood. But it was in the English colony of Virginia in the seventeenth century that the legitimation for the exclusion from the count of the human began to move from claims made in the name of religion to claims made in the name of science. This is the point at which modern racism, rooted in the appearance of the body, began to cast its malignant shadow across the planet.
The author argues that the struggle to put an end to the epoch of world history that opened in 1492 will require new ideas, and new practices. It follows the Caribbean tradition that runs from Aimé Césaire to Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter in affirming the need for a counter-humanism, a radical humanism, a humanism that, in Césaire’s famous phrases, is “made to the measure of the world”. There is a need for a shift in the ground of reason towards the lived experience and struggles of people rendered, in Wynter’s phrase, as ‘pariahs outside of the new order’.