The Lanet incident, 2-25 January 1964: Military unrest and national amnesia in Kenya

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 51-70

  Parsons, Timothy ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949558920     PISSN: 03617882     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. For the most part, Africanist scholars have been more concerned with the influence of memory and orality on the formation of individual and group identities than its role in the formation of collective identity on a national scale. This may be due in part to the disjointed nature of civil society and the relative weakness of nationalist sentiment in poslcolonial Africa. Historians of nationalism in other parts of the world have grappled extensively with the link between national identity and national memory. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York, 1983);
2. David Thelen, "Memory and American History," Journal of American History 75 (1989);
3. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1992);
4. Matt Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern (New York, 1996).
5. John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London, 1992), 104.
6. David Throup, "The Construction and Destruction of the Kenyatta State," in Michael Schatzberg, ed., The Political Economy of Kenya (New York, 1987), 37;
7. idem; Charles Hornsby, Multi-Party Politics in Kenya: The Kenyatta and Moi States and the Triumph of the System in the 1992 Election (Oxford, U.K., 1998), 7.
8. Cherry Gertzel, The Politics of Independent Kenya, 1963-8 (Evanston, Ill., 1970), 12-13.
9. Africa Digest 9, 1 (August 1961).
10. P. Anyang' Nyong'o, "State and Society in Kenya: The Disintegration of the Nationalist Coalitions and the Rise of Presidential Authoritarianism, 1963-78," African Affairs 88 (1989), 233-34.
11. For "majimboism," see Anderson, Imagined Communities.
12. W.R. Ochieng' and E.S. Atieno-Odhiambo, "Prologue on Decolonization," in B.A. Ogot and W.R. Ochieng, eds., Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940-93 (London, 1995), xvii; Nyong'o, "State," 240.
13. Nicholas Nyangira, "Ethnicity, Class, and Politics in Kenya," in Schatzberg, Political Economy, 19.
14. B.A. Ogot, "The Decisive Years, 1956-63," in Ogot and Ochieng, Decolonization, 50, 64;
15. and Christopher Leo, Land and Class in Kenya (Toronto, 1984), 77, 87, 144.
16. M.J.V. Bell, Army and Nation in Sub-Saharan Africa (London, 1965), 2;
17. Africa Digest, 11, 6 (February 1964), 99.
18. Marshall Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs: History, Memory and Politics (Boulder, Colo., 1998), 205.
19. Jomo Kenyatta, Harambee!: The Prime Minister of Kenya's Speeches, 1963-4 (London, 1964), 2.
20. J. Murray-Brown, Kenyatta (London, 1972).
21. For more on the King's African Rifles, see Hubert Moyse-Bartlett, The King's African Rifles (Aldershot, U.K., 1956);
22. Anthony Clayton and David Killingray, Khaki and Blue (Athens, Ohio, 1989);
23. Timothy Parsons, The African Rank-and-File (Portsmouth, N.H., 1999).
24. Committee of Supply, Vote 16 - Internal Security and Defence, 27 June 1961, Kenya Legislative Debates, Volume 87;
25. J. M. Lee, African Armies and Civil Order (New York, 1969), 44;
26. and Donald Rothchild, Racial Bargaining in Independent Kenya: A Study of Minorities and Decolonization (London, 1973), 208.
27. and Mark Baynham, "The East African Mutinies of 1964," Journal of Contemporary African Studies 8/9 (1989/90), 53-80.
28. Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru (New York, 1969), 281.
29. and Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru, 281.
30. C.H. Imray to J.K. Hickman, East Africa Political Department, CRO, 25 January 1964; and HCK to CRO, 29 January 1964, PRO/DO/213/54.
31. East African Standard, 8 February 1964.
32. Log Sheet, British Land Forces Kenya, 29 January 1964, PRO/WO/276/373;
33. For example, see Samuel Decalo, Coups and Army Rule in Africa (New Haven, Conn., 1976), 206;
34. Pat McGowan and Thomas Johnson, "African Military Coups d'Etat and Underdevelopment: A Quantitative Historical Analysis," Journal of Modern African Studies 22 (1984), 658.
35. Nyong'o, "State and Society," 231-32.
36. For a more detailed analysis of the differing legacies of the East African responses to the barracks unrest, see Timothy Parsons, The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa (Westport, Conn., 2003).