This article explores the imaginative meanings of Mau Mau which white and black protagonists invented out of their fearful ambitions for the future of Kenya. Within the general assumptions of white superiority and the need to destroy Mau Mau savagery, four mutually incompatible European myths can be picked out. Conservatives argued that Mau Mau revealed the latent terror-laden primitivism in all Africans, the Kikuyu especially. This reversion had been stimulated by the dangerous freedoms offered by too liberal a colonialism in the post-war world. The answer must be an unapologetic reimposition of white power. Liberals blamed Mau Mau on the bewildering psychological effects of rapid social change and the collapse of orderly tribal values. Africans must be brought more decisively through the period of transition from tribal conformity to competitive society, to play a full part in a multi-racial future dominated by western culture; this would entail radical economic reforms. Christian fundamentalists saw Mau Mau as collective sin, to be overcome by individual confession and conversion. More has been read into their rehabilitating mission in the detention camps than is warranted, since they had no theology of power. The whites with decisive power were the British military. They saw the emergency as a political war which needed political solutions, for which repression, social improvement and spiritual revival were no substitute. They, and the ‘hard-core’ Mau Mau detainees at Hola camp who thought like them, cleared the way for the peace. This was won not by any of the white constructions of the rising but by Kenyatta's Kikuyu political thought, which inspired yet criminalised Mau Mau.

By drawing on the current Marxist debate about the nature of the capitalist state, this article argues that the colonial state was obliged to be more interventionist than the mature capitalist state in its attempts to manage the economy, since colonies were distinguished by the way in which they articulated capitalism to local modes of production. This posed severe problems of social control, since the capitalist sector required the preservation of indigenous social institutions while also extracting resources from them. In early colonial Kenya this problem was mitigated by a rough compatibility between the needs of settler capital and the patronage exercised by African chiefs within a peasant sector which was expanded to solve the colonial administration's initial need for peace and revenue. The peasant sector was not destroyed, rather it was represented in the state, which never ceased thereafter to be plagued by the conflicts between the two modes of production over which it presided.

This survey can only be one historian's view of a large and controversial matter. African states are contested objects of study on two grounds, the one particular to the changing preoccupations of Africanists, the other common to the humanities in general. European colonialism was a living denial of the ability of Africans to organize their own sovereignties. African studies emerged out of colonialism's decay, in part a sort of recantation, in part a dimension of informal empire. The analysis of past and present African states could not fail to act as a lightning conductor of warring emotions, ideologies, and theories, categories which have often not been very distinct. The first African histories after the colonial era tended to be, as the first studies in political science were necessarily, studies in state-formation as achievement. In more recent years, it has been objected that these were really chronicles of injury, not, as was thought, of pride; for states were and are engines of oppression, not civilization (for early protests, see Soyinka, 1967; Wrigley, 1971; Chanock, 1972b; and later, Markovitz, 1977: 25-55). Moreover, most Africans did not actually live in states until colonial rule fastened Leviathan's yoke upon them. Indeed, the most distinctively African contribution to human history could be said to have been precisely the civilized art of living fairly peaceably together not in states. The dispute was really over the evolutionist assumption that it is in some sense “better” to live in states, a premise so deeply rooted in most of us that it can seem almost an insult to explore analytically “the notion of statelessness, long abandoned by historians of Africa” (Uzoigwe, 1980: 115).

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