The name is absent

This article represents the dominant and mostly distorted writings about the Mau
Mau oath. It shows how words, imagery, and descriptions in print were able to
invent oathing ceremonies and fantasies to shape what has been the long-
standing Mau Mau historiography. The Corfield report and other primary
documents written during the Mau Mau revolution are important sources and
snapshots of the varied historical creations of the time. However, these
documents reveal the problems with text, especially those looming in the colonial
archives that created a lop-sided position serving colonial interest. Micheal
Foucault for example, states that “the questioning of the document” remains a
task for scholars. This point is indeed relevant for the archival files pertaining to
Mau Mau.⁴²

The oath that emerged as a result of the Mau Mau movement was one
that was transformed from ancient oathing to twentieth century oathing, most of
which was lodged between commitment and cursing oath types. The detailed
evolutionary backgrounds of the oaths during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries have been outlined in secondary sources.⁴³ However, the Mau Mau
oaths were viewed as oaths of colonial resistance and their nature permitted new
boundaries of oathing norms and behavior. The Mau Mau oath was a reaction to

⁴² Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 6-7. According to
Foucault,’’...ever since a discipline of history has existed, documents have been used, questioned, and have
given rise to questions; scholars have asked not only what these documents meant, but also whether they
were telling the truth, and by what right they could claim to be doing so, whether they were sincere or
deliberately misleading, well informed or ignorant, authentic or tampered with. But each of these questions,
and all this critical concern, pointed to one and the same end: the reconstitution on the basis of what the
documents say.. .history has altered its position in relation to the document: it has taken as its primary task,
not the interpretation of the document, nor the attempt to decide whether it is telling the truth or what is its
expressive value, but to work on it from within and to develop it..

⁴³ For example, See Kershaw, Mau Mau From Below, 229 and Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau
Mau, 116.

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