Reviewed by: The Boy is Gone: Conversation With a Mau Mau General by Laura Lee Huttenbach Ishmael Irungu Munene Huttenbach, Laura Lee. 2015. THE BOY IS GONE: CONVERSATION WITH A MAU MAU GENERAL. Athens: Ohio University Press. 251 pp. $28.95 (paper). Much has been written about the Mau Mau, the armed liberation movement in central Kenya that played a central role in the country’s independence from British colonial rule. Historians and political scientists have analyzed its effects during colonialism and postindependence state formation. Deviating from academic analysis of it by university intelligentsia, Laura Lee Huttenbach’s book The Boy Is Gone: Conversation with a Mau Mau General presents a lucid personal account of the movement through the prism of a biographical account of Japhlet Thambu, a well-known retired general. The title of the book epitomizes Kenya’s evolution, from the childhood innocence of precolonialization to the complexities of adolescence, adulthood, and middle age (as evident in colonialism), the liberation movement, and the postindependence epochs. The running motif in the biography is one of personal, community, and national betrayal. Huttenbach divides her account into five sections, through which she weaves Thambu’s life into the fabric of Kenya’s precolonial and colonial history, the resistance, and its contradictions to the promises and risks of independence. The first section, “How I Grew,” describing Thambu’s life in the early twentieth century, describes precolonial Meru society, steeped in tradition and governed by robust social mores. Tribal wisdom and practices in governance, agriculture, medicine, manufacturing, and religion reveal an orderly, self-sufficient society, well-equipped to manage natural calamities. Incipient colonial penetration through taxation, schools, and Christian missionaries did not violently disrupt this way of life. Some elected to become [End Page 109] Christians, while others, like Thambu, opted to go to school, in a subtle betrayal of tribal life. The second section, “Black Market,” looks at how Thambu’s ingenuity permitted him to find accommodation in the emerging colonial economy. He became a successful teacher, married an uneducated girl, and began a family. Quitting teaching, he became a successful black-market timber merchant—a lucrative occupation for those seeking quick fortune. Adaptating to the colonial economy required negotiating cultural imperatives and modernity needs, including the education of girls: “so educate girls, educate boys—they are the children of the country” (p. 34). Thambu succeeded as a teacher because, as he believed: “Teaching is not a business. It is a body-building—a culture-building. … What you build—they can become the business people and run hotels or rule the country” (p. 35). The seeds of protest began to germinate as he resigned from teaching over racial discrimination, just as the independent African school movement was gaining ground, the Kikuyu Central Association’s political party was launched, and the African carrier corps from the second world war returned to energize the rebellion. In the timber trade, we see the genesis of the culture of corruption in Kenya’s police force. In Thambu’s resignation from teaching, we see how local jealousy and betrayal converged to thwart promising professional growth. “The Forest,” the third section, delves into the Mau Mau as a military organization and the war it fought. A scaffolding of interrelated human interactions is captured in a cinematographic vision that defines the heightened war of political liberation. Mau Mau is seen as a well-structured, hierarchically organized, and strategically focused fighting machine, rather than a ragtag army of bandits. Recruitment and promotion was a multifaceted web of rituals involving oath administration and pledges of allegiance to the cause of liberation. Thambu’s magnetism, education, and hard work propelled him through the military ranks to become a full general; however, military life in the forest is anchored in indigenous knowledge, as well as practices and a network of undercover collaborators in the villages. Betrayal ran deep, both within the Mau Mau and its antagonist, the home guards. Cordial family relationships and communal bonds gave way to suspicion, hatred, and violence. In the end, military activity was insufficient to guarantee independence, as “toward the end of 1955, practically everybody, even the big people left the forest. By then, even [I] myself got...