The Trial of Dedan Kimathi

Ngugi wa Thiong'o · Micere Githae Mugo

oct 2013 · Waveland Press

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Kenyan-born novelist and
playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his collaborator, Micere Githae Mugo,
have built a powerful and challenging play out of the circumstances
surrounding the 1956 trial of Dedan Kimathi, the celebrated Kenyan hero
who led the Mau Mau rebellion against the British colonial regime in
Kenya and was eventually hanged. A highly controversial character,
Kimathi’s life has been subject to intense propaganda by both the
British government, who saw him as a vicious terrorist, and Kenyan
nationalists, who viewed him as a man of great courage and commitment.
Writing in the 1970s, the playwrights’ response to colonialist writings
about the Mau Mau movement in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is to sing the
praises of the deeds of this hero of the resistance who refused to
surrender to British imperialism. It is not a reproduction of the
farcical “trial” at Nyeri. Rather, according to the preface, it is “an
imaginative recreation and interpretation of the collective will of the
Kenyan peasants and workers in their refusal to break under sixty years
of colonial torture and ruthless oppression by the British ruling
classes and their continued determination to resist
exploitation,oppression and new forms of enslavement.”