authority in Kenya. The colonial response enforcing laws to criminalize the Mau
Mau oath as a means to stop what appeared at the time as unstoppable and
irrational acts of resistance. The criminalization of the oath during the 1950s
made an already deadly activity, more dangerous. According to David Anderson,
there was a total of 1090 “known” convicted Mau Mau oathers and participants
that were executed by the colonial courts between October 1952 and March
1958 to stop “the unlawful society known as the Mau Mau.”8
With this background in mind, this chapter argues that the colonial
criminalization of the oath served as another battleground for fighting the Mau
Mau movement in the courts and in the written texts of the archive files by
inventing oath criminality, a connection that did not exist prior to the Mau Mau
period. The Mau Mau war was fought one case at a time in the courts and in the
archive files with each execution and recorded text. The vast and detailed court
documents on Mau Mau cases served as colonial evidence and proof that the
Mau Mau movement and oathing were barbaric, irrational, violent, and
deplorable.
This chapter is divided into three sections designed to trace the evolution
of the oath from a ceremony of honor to one of criminality. This work examines
oathing and its relationship to pre-colonial African systems of law and order. The
next section turns to colonial systems of law to see how they were invented and
negotiated to promote colonial interests and domination under the banner of
justice. The last section examines the criminalization of the Mau Mau oath
8 Language used in case files notes to describe the nature of the conviction. Execution statistics from
Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 353. For a complete breakdown of details statistics and categories of
Mau Mau convictions see Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 353-356.
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