Abstract
Abstract This chapter offers a reading of the novels of Mau Mau, focusing extensively on the early fiction of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Godwin Wachira’s seminal Ordeal in the Forest, among others. The novels are looked at in the context of recent human rights histories of the conflict. Written against the backdrop of Jomo Kenyatta’s appeal to the Kenyan people to forget the painful history of the Mau Mau conflict, the novels take on varied approaches to the project of reconciliation that can be mapped on shifting aesthetic registers of modernist irony, sentimentalism and naturalism. Neil Lazarus’s assertion that the negativity of the naturalist aesthetic is a form of resistance is key to understanding the depiction of torture and detention camps. The idea of political responsibility is theorized through Frantz Fanon’s claim that in anticolonial struggle there are no neutral parties, or bystanders.
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