SocialistStories حكايات اشتراكية

This book (277pg) by Kenyan marxist Ngugi wa Thiong'o takes place after the end of the Mau Mau struggle. The book follows certain people and shows how they were affected by the "state of emergency" that the british colonialists declared during the Mau Mau struggle. It shows how the colonialists systematically disrupted Kenyan society, destroying villages and relocating them in easily controlled, guarded, areas (this "strategy" was aped by the amerikkkans in Vietnam, they called it the "strategic hamlet program"); rounding up people randomly and imprisoning them in the massive concentration camps that were built during the emergency; lining up all the villagers and having a masked collaborator identify those who were involved with the Mau Mau; the brutal torture and brutality that prisoners in the concentration camps had to face when the colonialists and their puppets wanted information or for people to renounce the Mau Mau oath; the forced slave labor villagers were forced to do by the occupying colonial army; the land grabbing from peasants that was carried out by the collaborationist Kenyans, etc...

As the book takes place after the emergency, just around the time of "Uhuru" ("independence"), there is lot of reminiscing by the characters, but also of course a lot of the novel is taken up with the then present time. Thus it also focuses on the after affects of the mass repression and dispersal of people during the emergency and also shows the collaborators who benefited from it, and who were later to run the neo-colonial Kenyan state. The novel is very well written and especially so in my opinion since it not only focuses on the mass enormous crimes of the british collonialists and their Kenyan running dogs during the emergency, but it also focuses on the trauma this caused and how greatly Kenyan society was upset by this, and shows the collaborators in their full disgusting and subservient light, especially important as they were to very soon take over running Kenya from their british masters and run it just as horribly and brutally and still for the benefit of the british and the other western imperialists. Enjoy comrades:

Liberation:

A Grain of Wheat - Ngugi wa Thiong'o.pdf