complexity of modern Kenya. This work traces how Mau Mau impacted various
women as wives, mothers, members of the community, and participants.28
One of the most focused studies on the accounts of women in Mau Mau
was published in 1998, Mau Mau’s Daughter: a life history by Wambui Waiyaki
Otieno.29 The typical Mau Mau oathing woman was young. Her youth provided
the movement with fervor, and she could use her beauty and sex appeal as an
offensive strategy for collecting valuable information from colonial administrators.
It was this type of woman who had the most to gain from an Independent Kenya
and the least to lose under the existing economic constraints. Otieno shows the
complexity of modern Kenya by looking at the intersecting issues of gender,
class, and ethnicity. Despite her legal silence based on the 1987 S.M. Otieno
burial case, Otieno’s narrative reveals the internal thinking of a privileged,
Christian, and uncircumcised young women who joins Mau Mau. Her Mau Mau
involvement breaks from the typical image of women involved in the struggle.
Although her work provides detailed accounts of her experiences in Mau Mau
and detention camps, Otieno is telling a much more complicated narrative of
gender through her eventual defeat in her husband’s burial case. The book tells
the story of a modern problem of Kenya, a story based on gender that also
wrestles with the realities of ethnicity and nationalism.30
Finally, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in
Kenya by Lynn Thomas also focused on a gendered and political account of
28 Jean Davison, Voices From Mutizα. Change in the Lives of Rural Gikuyu Women, 1910-1995 (Boulder:
Lynne Rienner Publishers 1996)
29 Wambui Otieno, Mau Mau Daughter: A Life History (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers 1988)
30 Otieno, Mau Mau Daughter.
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