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“The dregs of the Mau Mau barrel” : permanent exile and the remaking of Late Colonial Kenya, 1954–61
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Boender, Niels (2023) “The dregs of the Mau Mau barrel” : permanent exile and the remaking of Late Colonial Kenya, 1954–61. Journal of Social History, 57 (1). pp. 128-155. doi:10.1093/jsh/shad018 ISSN 0022-4529.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad018
Abstract
This article seeks to illustrate the emergence and significance of permanent exile in the latter years of British rule in Kenya. Drawing on concepts of the “state of exception” in the imperial context, the analysis places Kenyan policy into a longer history of penal practice. Exile as a mode of punishment was a permanent fixture in the repertoire of the British Empire as a method of controlling rebellious subjects. In Kenya, it was a tool to ostracize “troublemakers” from their home community, stabilizing the body politic in fractious moments. However, during the State of Emergency declared against the anti-colonial Mau Mau movement, the legal and spatial production of spaces of exception, settlements in the far-flung corners of the colony, reached its apotheosis. Drawing on long histories of colonial banishment, and specific legal precedents shrouded in liberal language, administrators hoped to make Kenya safe for a loyalist ascendancy by excising the “irreconcilables.” Critically, permanent exile was deemed necessary for a section of the population “infected” with Mau Mau ideology. In large exile settlements, rebellious subjects were expected to be remade into pacified workers. Colonial correspondence, as well as the petitions of the displaced, reveal the production of exile during these years as well as its misdiagnosis of the various imaginations of the exiled. “Settlers,” at exile camps like Hola, retained an autonomous vision of “land and freedom,” refusing their forced migration, and eventually precipitating the collapse of the scheme.
Item Type: | Journal Article | |||||||||
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Subjects: | D History General and Old World > DT Africa H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare J Political Science > JC Political theory |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | |||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Kenya -- History -- Mau Mau Emergency, 1952-1960, Mau Mau -- History -- 20th century., Counterinsurgency -- Kenya -- History -- 20th century, Kenya -- Colonial influence, Nationalism -- Kenya, Kenya -- Politics and government -- To 1963, Exile (Punishment) -- Kenya | |||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Journal of Social History | |||||||||
Publisher: | Oxford University Press | |||||||||
ISSN: | 0022-4529 | |||||||||
Official Date: | September 2023 | |||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 57 | |||||||||
Number: | 1 | |||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 128-155 | |||||||||
DOI: | 10.1093/jsh/shad018 | |||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | |||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | |||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | |||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 31 May 2023 | |||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 31 May 2023 | |||||||||
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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