Myths on the March: the Kenyan and Zimbabwean liberation struggles in colonial fiction

Abstract

On 20th October 1952 the Kenyan Government declared a State of Emergency in response to settler calls for action against African Nationalism in general, and the movement known to the settlers as 'Mau Mau' in particular, and in so doing triggered off what is now known as the 'Mau Mau' revolt. Four years later the arrest of Dedan Kimathi marked the effective end of an armed peasant resistance to colonial rule which, if it didn't regain for the peasants the land which was their main object, did hasten a nominal Independence. Just over twenty years after the declaration of the state of emergency in Kenya, on 21st December 1972, the guerrilla attack on Altena Farm in north-eastern Zimbabwe signalled the start of the final and decisive phase of the Zimbabwe war. Seven years later, to the day, the formal agreements marking the end of the war and opening the way to an internationally recognized Independent Zimbabwe were signed at Lancaster House. 'The guerrillas', as Martin and Johnson put it, 'had brought Rhodesia to a point where it needed the end of the war even more than recognition and the lifting of sanctions.' 2 The Zimbabwe war, like the 'Mau Mau' revolt, was aimed by its black fighters at regaining control over their land and their political destiny, and was directed against white settlers. In each case armed resistance to the status quo provoked extremes of repression (often modelled by the Rhodesians on their Kenyan counterparts) on the part of what were, ironically, known as the 'security forces'. In each case the war produced a substantial body of propaganda and myth-making aimed at justifying or disguising both the social, political and economic dispensations which had been the causes of the war, and the measures taken to counter it. And in each case a substantial body of 'popular' fiction, written by settlers and their sympathizers, was an important, perhaps the most important, component of that propaganda.