The History Department invites you to an upcoming talk by Dr. Christian Alvarado entitled “The Storm in Kenya:” The Mau Mau Uprising and pan-Africanist Thought in the mid-20th Century.

Join us in person from 1:30 – 3:00 pm (PT) in Humanities 1, Room 202 or join via Zoom here.

Historical work on the event most commonly known as the “Mau Mau Uprising”—which roiled late-colonial Kenya in the 1950s and captivated audiences the world over—has long been preoccupied with examining the political and economic origins of anticolonial resistance in the colony, the operations of British counter-insurgency efforts, and the legacy of each of these for post-independence Kenyan society. In distinction to these orthodox approaches to the study of Mau Mau, Alvarado’s current book project considers how this event impacted the political, economic, and cultural history of other parts of the African continent, as well as Europe and the Americas. This talk presents an account of the role “myths of Mau Mau” played in pan-Africanist thought both within and far beyond the borders of the colony during this period. Across the globe, understandings of this event served as a key touchstone in the attempt to forge international solidarities among communities both in support of colonial rule and those who sought to bring about its end. This talk focuses in particular on debates about Mau Mau as they arose in two important contexts in the contemporary pan-Africanist movement. First, an array of conferences, forums, and political meetings held on the continent during the late 1950s and early 1960s; second, in contemporary Garveyite political thought both in Africa and abroad. Considered together, these visions of what George Padmore called “the Storm in Kenya” illuminate new dimensions in the transnational history of not only Mau Mau, but African decolonization more broadly.

Dr. Christian Alvarado received his PhD in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis. His wide-ranging research situates the event most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in late-colonial Kenya within the broader history of decolonization in 20th century Africa. By tracing how understandings of this event circulated across transnational networks and cultural formations, this work aims to show how the frameworks to which Mau Mau is put illuminate novel insights into global dimensions in the history of African decolonization. These frameworks include, but are not limited to, the history of the social sciences, notions of African ‘race relations,’ pan-Africanism, diverse memory communities, and conspiracist discourses. Across these seemingly disparate realms, Alvarado argues that Mau Mau serves as a way of probing contemporary and current debates regarding the ethics of (anti)colonial violence, the relationship between tradition and modernity, and the nature of decolonization. A historian by training, Dr. Alvarado’s interdisciplinary work is also in conversation with the fields of cultural studies, comparative literature, and political theory.