black historee month

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Claudette Colvin

http://rebellemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/colvin1955.jpg

When most people think of the infamous Montgomery Bus Boycott, they think of Dr. King, Rosa Parks, and countless other young black men and women. Few people know that a teenager in Montgomery, Claudette Colvin, was challenging transportation segregation laws before the Civil Rights celebrities were. Her incident preceded Parks by a mere nine months, but Rosa’s struggle got the most notoriety.

The Unintentional Activist

On March 2nd 1955 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was learning about Negro history at Booker T. Washington High School, one of Alabama’s segregated schools. Her classmates openly talked about the difficulties they faced each day, like not being able to eat at the same lunch counters or being allowed to try on clothing in white areas of the town. Soon after the school day was over Colvin boarded a Capital Heights bus downtown, ironically at the same place Parks would board a different bus nine months later. The bus driver ordered her to give up her seat for a white rider, but Colvin adamantly refused. She yelled that her constitutional rights were being violated and refused to budge.

Despite being a minor, she was handcuffed, booked on several charges(including disobeying segregation laws), and was put in jail. After a few tense hours behind bars her minister was able to pay her bail, and Colvin and the rest of her family spent a sleepless night waiting for possible violence from public retaliation. Eventually Colvin was tried and the jury found her guilty. She was put on probation, and she was forever known as a trouble maker in her town.

Colvin’s experience did help with Browder v. Gayle, the case that ended bus segregation on Montgomery public buses, but overall Colvin’s story was left out of the history books. It’s hard to believe that people wouldn’t know about a story as dramatic and shocking as Colvin’s, but there are several reasons why Colvin ended up not showing up in classrooms in February.

“Politics”

When Colvin was asked about why Rosa Parks got recognition for her acts and she didn’t, she chalked it up to politics. Rosa had the typical ideal “middle class African-American” look. Rosa was a sweet middle-aged woman, had a respectable background, and was “well behaved”. Colvin had been described as “mouthy, “feisty”, and generally out spoken. The NAACP and others involved in the Civil Rights Movement thought a mild mannered adult would be better suited for the difficult task of being the face of a movement. There was also another unspoken reason that Parks may have been chosen over Colvin: Parks was considerably lighter skinned than Colvin. According to a New York Times article, Colvin’s mother urged her to, “let Rosa be the one” because “white people aren’t going to bother Rosa, her skin is lighter than yours and they like her.”

Before Parks and Colvin

Now if you want to get technical about it, there were a plenty of other African American women before Colvin and Parks who were actively challenging transportation segregation. In 1854 Elizabeth Jennings Graham fought for her right to ride in a streetcar in NYC when a conductor ordered her to exit the crowded car so a white person could take her seat. In 1946 Irene Morgan fought to keep her seat on a Greyhound bus. Hell in 1955 there was yet another segregation court battle raging over a 1953 incident where Sarah Keys, a Women’s Army Corps private, was forced to give up her seat to a white marine. All of these women fought for their right for equality and their names don’t pop up in too many history books either, but there’s something about Colvin’s incident that just makes it a compelling and important piece of Civil Rights history. Colvin didn’t have an easy life after that fateful day in March. She got pregnant, was shunned by both white society and black society, and had significant difficulty finding work because of her arrest record. She eventually moved to New York to work as a CNA, but the incident changed her life forever.

Nobody is trying to take away credit from the other brave men and women of all colors who actively fought against segregation, but it’s time to recognize the people who didn’t get footnotes in our American history textbooks. If anything Colvin’s story can teach us that change can occur anywhere at anytime, whether we’re ready for it or not. Never forget your principles and beliefs; you’ll never know when the time will come to put them to the test.

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Black Women and Anti-Rape Activism the origin of civil rights

At the Dark End of the Street:
Black Women, Rape and Resistance —
A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks
to the Rise of Black Power
by Danielle McGuire
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010, 416 pages, $16.95 paperback

IN AT THE Dark End of the Street, Wayne State University historian Danielle McGuire persuasively and powerfully argues that the history of Black women’s anti-rape activism must be understood as an integral part of the Civil Rights Movement, but that standard accounts of civil rights have neglected the significance of these women’s efforts.

McGuire’s gripping narrative begins in 1944, a decade before the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycotts. Rosa Parks, branch secretary of the NAACP chapter in Montgomery, traveled to Abbeville, Alabama, to talk with a 24-year-old mother, Recy Taylor. Taylor had been kidnapped on her way home from church by seven armed white men who gang-raped and left her on the side of the road.

McGuire says, “After meeting with Recy Taylor, Rosa Parks helped form the Committee for Equal Justice. With support from local people, she helped organize what the Chicago Defender called ‘the strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade.’” Despite a national campaign in support of Taylor, two all-white grand juries refused to issue indictments to try the men accused in the case.

However, McGuire points out that “eleven years later” Parks and others involved in Taylor’s defense “would become better known as the Montgomery Improvement Association. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, often heralded as the opening scene of the Civil Rights movement, was in many ways the last act of a decades-long struggle to protect black women, like Taylor, from sexualized violence and rape” (xvii).

McGuire recounts a score of cases showing — not surprisingly — that the rape and subsequent failure of the justice system in the Taylor case was in fact typical. As Patricia Hill Collins demonstrates in Black Feminist Thought, historically the sexuality of Black women has been systematically dehumanized and hypersexualized to justify their sexual abuse by white men.

The resulting pattern of interracial rape was designed to terrorize and dominate the Black community, and consequently mobilized a vigorous defense of the bodily integrity of Black women. Slave narratives by women like Harriet Jacobs highlighted the sexual vulnerability of Black women, which served as a focal point of Black women’s anti-slavery activism.

After the Civil War, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper and other Black activists continued to challenge white supremacist sexual exploitation. At the same time that Black women were subject to interracial rape with very little legal recourse, Ida B. Wells argued that Black men were accused of rape as part of a larger “system of intimidation” (Wells, qtd. xviii).

Rosa Parks and her husband had hosted meetings of local defenders of the men accused in the Scottsboro case in their home in 1932. McGuire’s history of the activism of Parks and others against “sexualized violence” provides a context for the bus boycott that recasts it as “a women’s movement for dignity, respect and bodily integrity” (43).
Equal Justice and Protection

McGuire shows that already existing social and political structures in Montgomery enabled the “relative speed with which the 1955 boycott was begun.” These had been organized, in part, to seek “equal justice and protection for black women” (62, 54). One of these organizations was the Women’s Political Caucus, or the WPC, established by Mary Fair Burks in 1946 after a “run-in” with a “club wielding police officer” (63).

The WPC quickly decided to focus on registering voters. In 1950, Jo Ann Robinson took over leadership of the WPC. Like Burks, Robinson was a faculty member at Alabama State College. Under her guidance the WPC challenged segregation in city parks as well as police brutality. In 1952 they attended a City Commission meeting to protest segregation on city buses and “abuses heaped upon black female bus riders,” demonstrating years of Black women’s activism in regard to the bus system preceding the 1955 boycott (65).

Efforts to seek justice for Black women raped by white men also proved the effectiveness of political strategies later utilized in the successful effort to desegregate the Montgomery buses. One of these women was Gertrude Perkins, raped in Montgomery in 1949 by two uniformed police officers.

Perkins sought the help of Reverend Solomon Seay, who joined with E.D. Nixon, local president of the NAACP, and other groups to form the Citizens Committee for Gertrude Perkins. Although the grand jury refused to issue indictments in this case as well, Seay identified it as critical in politicizing “all the ministers” in Montgomery (57).

Another important case was that of Flossie Hardman, a 15-year-old raped in 1951 by her employer, Sam Green, one night when he was driving her home. When an all-white jury found Green not guilty after five minutes of deliberation, Rufus Lewis, a Black veteran and local businessman who had been involved in voter registration, organized a boycott of Green’s grocery store, which was in a “primarily black neighborhood.”

The campaign succeeded in closing the store, and “established the boycott as a powerful weapon for justice and sent a message to whites that African Americans would not allow white men to disrespect, abuse, and violate black women’s bodies with impunity” (58).
Open Season

In a chapter titled “There’s Open Season on Negroes Now,” McGuire discusses the backlash that followed the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in public education, when murder and sexual violence were used as weapons of terror against Black women and men. Segregationists insisted that “the goal of integration was ‘miscegenation’” at the same time that white men continued to rape Black women (115).

The 1955 murder of Emmett Till is infamous, but just one of the “530 acts of segregationist violence and economic intimidation against African Americans between 1954-1959” (129). McGuire says that while the period between 1956-1960 has been called the “fallow years” by one historian of the Civil Rights Movement, “federal sensitivity to world opinion, and the existence of a left-wing media that spotlighted black women’s testimony, brought the issue of white-on-black rape to the forefront of the freedom struggle,” and that campaigns for justice “led to trials and even convictions throughout the South” (130).

One of these trials was of four white men who raped Florida A&M student Betty Jean Owens. Owens was with three other students in a car after a dance, when the four men, who had decided to “’go out and get a nigger girl’ and ‘have an all night party’” kidnapped her at gunpoint (130).

The rapists were apprehended with Owens bound and gagged in a car. The men were found “guilty with a recommendation for mercy,” saving them from the electric chair (149). Clearly their life sentences in the case were not commensurate with penalties typically meted out to African Americans “charged with raping white women” — 37 of whom had been electrocuted “in the 34 years since Florida began sending convicted rapists to the electric chair instead of the gallows” (138).

Yet as McGuire argues in regards to another similar case, the conviction and sentence should be “considered a significant milestone in the modern civil rights movement” because “it destroyed a pillar of white supremacy that was rooted in slavery — the ability of white men to rape black women without legal consequences” (199).

McGuire’s discussions of the climate of racial and sexual hysteria surrounding the summer of 1964, when SNCC brought white students from the North to register Black voters in Mississippi, as well as the Selma, Alabama, campaign of 1965, show that both have “an important history rooted in sexualized violence the historians have not yet explored” (xxi).

The final case that McGuire discusses is that of Joan Little, on trial in 1975 for the murder of Clarence Alligood, a guard in the North Carolina prison where Little was serving a sentence for breaking, entering and larceny. Alligood entered Little’s cell with an ice pick and demanded that she “suck him” (222).
An Important Victory

A host of civil rights and women’s organizations organized in support of Little. And just as she did for Recy Taylor more than 30 years earlier, Rosa Parks worked to secure justice for Little, helping to “found a local branch of the Joan Little Legal Defense Committee in Detroit, where she had fled two years after the Montgomery bus boycott” (215).

McGuire points out that the campaign in support of Little is often understood “as the product of second wave feminism, which finally enabled women to break the code of silence surrounding sexual violence and “speak out” against rape” (221). But as McGuire has shown in her book, African-American women had been speaking out “for more than a century (227).

While the prosecutor attempted to show that Little had seduced Alligood, Little’s attorneys, Karen Galloway, the first African-American woman to graduate from Duke Law School, and white civil rights lawyer Jerry Paul, emphasized the “history of white men’s lawlessness and indifference toward black women’s humanity” (224). McGuire argues that Little’s acquittal marked a significant victory in that centuries-long battle.

While At the Dark End of the Street is painful reading, it also importantly reconfigures the way we understand not only the Civil Rights Movement, but the Women’s Movement as well. It is because of this that the students in my Introduction to Women’s Studies classes will be reading the chapters in this book focusing on the Montgomery Bus Strike.

I want my students to understand the way in which the two movements have been inextricably related — but that Black women’s role in each has not been adequately understood. Doing so, both in terms of the past and the present, is critical to our ability to create a most just society.

As bell hooks argued in the title essay of her important work in feminist theory, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, the needs of Black women must be moved from the margin to the center of feminist theory. McGuire makes this conceptual shift in understanding the Civil Rights movement, with powerful results.

http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/3775

[Gen]

woo iss imm?

dis mekk mi lafff

[Wahalla]

Claudette Colvin

http://rebellemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/colvin1955.jpg

When most people think of the infamous Montgomery Bus Boycott, they think of Dr. King, Rosa Parks, and countless other young black men and women. Few people know that a teenager in Montgomery, Claudette Colvin, was challenging transportation segregation laws before the Civil Rights celebrities were. Her incident preceded Parks by a mere nine months, but Rosa’s struggle got the most notoriety.

The Unintentional Activist

On March 2nd 1955 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was learning about Negro history at Booker T. Washington High School, one of Alabama’s segregated schools. Her classmates openly talked about the difficulties they faced each day, like not being able to eat at the same lunch counters or being allowed to try on clothing in white areas of the town. Soon after the school day was over Colvin boarded a Capital Heights bus downtown, ironically at the same place Parks would board a different bus nine months later. The bus driver ordered her to give up her seat for a white rider, but Colvin adamantly refused. She yelled that her constitutional rights were being violated and refused to budge.

Despite being a minor, she was handcuffed, booked on several charges(including disobeying segregation laws), and was put in jail. After a few tense hours behind bars her minister was able to pay her bail, and Colvin and the rest of her family spent a sleepless night waiting for possible violence from public retaliation. Eventually Colvin was tried and the jury found her guilty. She was put on probation, and she was forever known as a trouble maker in her town.

Colvin’s experience did help with Browder v. Gayle, the case that ended bus segregation on Montgomery public buses, but overall Colvin’s story was left out of the history books. It’s hard to believe that people wouldn’t know about a story as dramatic and shocking as Colvin’s, but there are several reasons why Colvin ended up not showing up in classrooms in February.

“Politics”

When Colvin was asked about why Rosa Parks got recognition for her acts and she didn’t, she chalked it up to politics. Rosa had the typical ideal “middle class African-American” look. Rosa was a sweet middle-aged woman, had a respectable background, and was “well behaved”. Colvin had been described as “mouthy, “feisty”, and generally out spoken. The NAACP and others involved in the Civil Rights Movement thought a mild mannered adult would be better suited for the difficult task of being the face of a movement. There was also another unspoken reason that Parks may have been chosen over Colvin: Parks was considerably lighter skinned than Colvin. According to a New York Times article, Colvin’s mother urged her to, “let Rosa be the one” because “white people aren’t going to bother Rosa, her skin is lighter than yours and they like her.”

Before Parks and Colvin

Now if you want to get technical about it, there were a plenty of other African American women before Colvin and Parks who were actively challenging transportation segregation. In 1854 Elizabeth Jennings Graham fought for her right to ride in a streetcar in NYC when a conductor ordered her to exit the crowded car so a white person could take her seat. In 1946 Irene Morgan fought to keep her seat on a Greyhound bus. Hell in 1955 there was yet another segregation court battle raging over a 1953 incident where Sarah Keys, a Women’s Army Corps private, was forced to give up her seat to a white marine. All of these women fought for their right for equality and their names don’t pop up in too many history books either, but there’s something about Colvin’s incident that just makes it a compelling and important piece of Civil Rights history. Colvin didn’t have an easy life after that fateful day in March. She got pregnant, was shunned by both white society and black society, and had significant difficulty finding work because of her arrest record. She eventually moved to New York to work as a CNA, but the incident changed her life forever.

Nobody is trying to take away credit from the other brave men and women of all colors who actively fought against segregation, but it’s time to recognize the people who didn’t get footnotes in our American history textbooks. If anything Colvin’s story can teach us that change can occur anywhere at anytime, whether we’re ready for it or not. Never forget your principles and beliefs; you’ll never know when the time will come to put them to the test.

Colvin the other reason given eas that she pregant at the time.... and the NAACP wanted a church woman.. also look at the Rosa Parks story and her actions was not as spontaneous as is always told... it was planned... not like Colvin who was jusgt a teenager..

the civil rights movement had the De bois factor, they wanted people like Debois, church going, middle class people..without trade union affiliation, single mother, worlijg class or even a Malcolm X life style....and no way could they have proffesed a socialist agenda like Robeson... or that gays... (yes chi chi black man...Like Bayard Ruskin.)

I suggest a person to research is the pastor before Martin Luther king at his church

[blugiant]

dis mekk mi lafff

tapp eeth

imm oyinbo vasian aff god

mii awlway wandaer y wen dem chatt bout god dem chatt bout man as god. guess oomen cyaan bee god even dough we doan kno da sex as god.

[blugiant]

Colvin the other reason given eas that she pregant at the time.... and the NAACP wanted a church woman.. also look at the Rosa Parks story and her actions was not as spontaneous as is always told... it was planned... not like Colvin who was jusgt a teenager..

the civil rights movement had the De bois factor, they wanted people like Debois, church going, middle class people..without trade union affiliation, single mother, worlijg class or even a Malcolm X life style....and no way could they have proffesed a socialist agenda like Robeson... or that gays... (yes chi chi black man...Like Bayard Ruskin.)

I suggest a person to research is the pastor before Martin Luther king at his church

colvin was awlso dark skinned so doan figgit da dubois ann naacp color factor aff favorinn lita skinned blakks

da wan ting dem chi chi knew back den was fe kno dem place

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wandar iff atlantablackstar.com read diss tredd

6 Common Misconceptions About the Enslavement of African People




The Beginning of the Slave Trade

While Portugal is widely know as the first European country to enter the trans-Atlantic slave trade, it was not the first to take part in the trade and abduction of African people.

As Elikia M’bokolo, the renowned historian from the Democratic Republic of Congo, wrote in Le Monde diplomatique: “The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth). … Four million enslaved people exported via the Red Sea, another four million … through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean.”

“Despite the long history of slavery in the Arab World and in other Muslim lands, little has been written about this tragedy,” writes Murray Gordon in the introduction of “Slavery in the Arab World.”

While Gordon acknowledges that at times the Islamic version of slavery could be more “humane” than the European colonial practice, he provides many facts that indicate that slavery under Muslims could be extremely cruel as well.

One particularly brutal practice was the mutilation of young African boys, sometimes no more than 9 or 10 years old, to create eunuchs, who brought a higher price in the slave markets of the Middle East. Slave traders often created “eunuch stations” along major African routes where the surgery was performed on the children in unsanitary conditions.

Slavery is still practiced today in two Islamic nations: The Sudan and Mauritania.

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6 Common Misconceptions About the Enslavement of African People

http://d39ya49a1fwv14.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/slave-triangular-trade-route.jpg

Where the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Began

The men, women and children needed to fuel the trans-Atlantic slave trade were initially snatched from their lives in Senegambia (Senegal and The Gambia) and the Windward Coast. Around 1650, slave traders moved their operations to West-Central Africa (the Kingdom of the Kongo and neighboring Angola).

According to author Alistair Boddy-Evans, the triangular slave trade – named for the rough shape it makes on a map – occurred in three stages.

“The first stage of the triangular trade involved taking manufactured goods from Europe to Africa: cloth, spirit, tobacco, beads, cowrie shells, metal goods, and guns. The guns were used to help expand empires and, ultimately, obtain more captured Africans (until they were finally used against European colonizers). These goods were exchanged for captured Africans.

The second stage of the triangular trade (the middle passage) involved shipping the captives to the Americas for enslavement.

The third, and final stage of the triangular trade involved the return to Europe of the produce of the slave-labor plantations: cotton, sugar, tobacco, molasses and rum.”

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6 Common Misconceptions About the Enslavement of African People

http://d39ya49a1fwv14.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/trans-atlantic-slave-route.jpg

Where Captives Were Taken During the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

The Caribbean and Brazil were the largest receivers of Africans for enslavement, according to conservative estimates made by historian Hugh Thomas in his book, ”The Slave Trade.”


brazil got 4 million enslaved afrikkans

spanish empire got 2.5 million enslaved afrikkana

british west indies got 2 million enslaved afrikkans

french west indies got 1.6 mil enslaved afrikkans

british north america ann united states got 500,000 enslaved afrikkans

dutch west indies got 500,000 enslaved afrikkans

danish west indies got 28,000 enslaved afrikkans

europe ann islands 200,000 enslaved afrikkans

veree cansevative figgars

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6 Common Misconceptions About the Enslavement of African People



How Often Rebellions Occurred

The popular anti-slavery medallion, designed in 1786, depicted a Black man kneeling on one knee with his shackled hands held up. This reflected the view held by many that Africans were complacent in the fight for their freedom.

The truth is that enslaved Africans – especially in the Caribbean and South America – fiercely fought against their oppressors through numerous uprisings or rebellions.

Rebellions were less common in North America, as Africans taken there were greatly outnumbered by whites. Nat Turner’s rebellion of 1832 is the most commonly referenced uprising, while smaller acts of subversiveness were known as day-to-day-resistance.

This included breaking, hiding or stealing tools, burning crops and structures, running away, feigning illness, killing domestic animals and deliberate work slowdowns.

By contrast, rebellions were common in the Caribbean where the Africans sometimes outnumbered whites by more than 90 percent.

The first major slave rebellion was in 1522. The enslaved Africans on the Spanish island of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti) tried to escape. Revolts were a regular feature of the plantation life after that. Before the end of the 17th century, there had been rebellions on the islands of St. Kitts, Barbados, Guadeloupe and Jamaica. Uprisings continued into the 18th century, and intensified in the early 19th century as the Black population heard rumors of the approaching end to slavery.

The problems caused by the frequent rebellions were a severe threat to the continuation of slavery and the economic viability of the plantation system.

http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/02/18/6-common-misconceptions-enslavement-african-people/4/

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6 Common Misconceptions About the Enslavement of African People


The End Of The Slave Trade Was Not The End Of Slavery

While Britain has been lauded as the great liberator of enslaved African people after becoming the first to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and pressuring other countries to follow suit, it should be noted that Britain was the biggest exporter of Africans during the 18th century.

For 200 years, 1440-1640, Portugal had a monopoly on the export of Africans for enslavement. It is estimated that during the 450 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Portugal was responsible for transporting over 4.5 million African captives (roughly 40 percent of the total).

During the 18th century, however, when the slave trade accounted for the transport of a staggering 6 million Africans, Britain was the worst transgressor – responsible for the enslavement of almost 2.5 million people.

Britain would continue the practice of slavery for another 26 years, after abolishing the slave trade that proved too costly thanks in part to rebellions. The United States also abolished the slave trade in 1807, but did abolish slavery until 1865. Portugal followed in 1869, with its former colony Brazil abolishing slavery in 1888.

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6 Common Misconceptions About the Enslavement of African People


The Greatest Atrocity in Human History

In Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History, author Matthew White listed the Mideast slave trade (7th to 19th century) at 18.5 million deaths, and the toll of the Atlantic slave trade (1452–1807) at 16 million. That amounts to 34.5 million deaths of one single group of people.

That estimate does not account for the deaths as a result of the practice of slavery across the Diaspora, which ended in Brazil in 1888. Nor does it account for the centuries of colonialism across the continent.

According to White, the deadliest episode in human history was World War II (1939– 1945), with a toll of 66 million.

[Blackstar*]

Africans in Science by Dr. Ivan Van Sertima

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Africans in Science by Dr. Ivan Van Sertima

wan aff da gretest blakk scholar

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The Mau-Mau & the end of the Colony (1947-1963)

In 1949, Richard Meinertzhagen, who was the scourge of the Kikuyus in the early 20th century and later converted to the African cause, made one of his visits to Kenya. He was then warned by one of the Kikuyu chiefs about a secret society that was shaping to throw the whites away from the country. The society was called Mau-Mau and was born from the fusion of the Forty Group and other organisations. Meinertzhagen wrote to the governor warning him about the possible danger for the settlers' safety, but he was not listened. That new movement which the Colony preferred to ignore would become the final detonator of Kenyan independence, and the horror of many children's nightmares over the following years.

European children of the 1950's only had access to one version of the story, the one that showed triumphant British soldiers seizing those wild, bloodthirsty and cannibal black terrorists. But this version always forgot to show the deep desperation of the Kikuyu people, the hunger, misery, illness, human stacking and exploitation, the usurpation of their farming lands to be colonized, but just by the bush. Many years of humiliation were required for a people that was never warring to rebel in one of the most violent guerrillas in history.

The Mau-Mau was born in 1947, taking its name from the range of mountains bordering the Rift Valley at its western side, northeast of Lake Naivasha. Other sources attribute its name to the Kikuyu's cry of war. Its inspiration was a blend of political, religious, economic and magical interests. The Mau-Mau was the political heir of the associations that thrived in the 1920's, in a moment when the land problem was unbearable. The magical roots of the Kikuyu tradition were patent in the initiation ceremonies. In a hut hidden in the forest, the group members cut the throat of a goat whose blood was then mixed with that of the ones taking the oath. Blood was then spilt over banana leaves and handfuls of earth following a liturgy based on the number 7. The initiated were admitted to the group after taking their vows: may I be struck down if I refuse to bring the head of a white that I've been asked for, may I be struck down if my mates decide to do something and I refuse to obbey,...

The first Mau-Mau operations, in 1949, were directed against the Africans who collaborated with the Colony, the so-called loyalists. Deaths were brutal, showing the typical mutilations of ritual slaughters. Violence grew next year, mainly in the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru regions. Attacks to farms were performed mostly around Mount Kenya and Aberdares, the two demarcations were the Mau-Mau had their headquarters. Meanwhile, in Nairobi, the sympathizers gathered funds, ammunition and information for the guerrilla.

In February 1952, Princess Elizabeth of England and her husband Prince Philip visited Kenya. Their itinerary included a visit to a singular place very linked to Kenyan history, the Treetops Hotel. It was built in 1932 as a two-room timber structure fixed to the top of a fig tree, next to a waterhole where the Aberdare forest's animals come to drink. Visitors climbed to the rooms and there spent the night all alone, watching the local wildlife roaming below their feet. On the occasion of the royal visit, the structure was reinforced and the hotel was extended to four rooms in total, three for the visitors and a small cabin for the escort hunter on duty. That night, while the young Princess was thrilled by the mortal fight between two waterbucks, her father King George VI died in London. The Princess did not know then, but the young lady who descended from Treetops the next morning was Queen Elizabeth II of England.

In October the same year, the confrontation with the Mau-Mau broke out as an open war. The governor decreed the state of emergency, requesting reinforcement troops from England. After accusing the native political leaders of supporting the guerrilla and instigating the people to rebellion, he arrested 150 of them, including Jomo Kenyatta, who was then heading the KAU. Kenyatta was condemned to seven years of prison and hard labour north of Mount Kenya. Repression was headed by Oliver Lyttleton, lord Chandos, Secretary of Colonies of the Churchill cabinet.

In reply to the Colony's measures, in 1953 the Mau-Mau established a third base in the outskirts of Nairobi and intensified their actions, which became real military operations against settlers' farms or loyalist towns. In the massacre of Lari, 93 Africans were murdered by the partisans. The rebels' violence upswing was responded with the same brutality by the British army and the Home Guards, native loyal troops. The slaughter of Europeans pushed many settlers to leave the country.

The Mau-Mau started to decline in 1953, possibly because of internal disputes. However, punishment actions by the English were not successful as expected, reason why a new strategy was adopted. The Colony created the pseudo-gangs, units made up of deserters and collaborators whose mission was to infiltrate as spies in the guerrilla's ranks.

The new strategy was fruitful. In late 1954 the British arrested general China, Mau-Mau's main leader at the Mount Kenya demarcation. Subsequently, activity in this area subsided. Meanwhile, in Aberdares, the guerrilla fighters burnt down the Treetops, an institution in Kenya but also a colonial symbol. The hotel would be re-built three years later, on top of a chestnut tree at the opposite side of the waterhole, where it has remained till the present day.

In 1955, of the 120,000 partisans that started the revolt, only some 15,000 were still alive and free. In October 1956 general Dedan Kimathi, leader of the Aberdares Mau-Mau, was captured. At the moment of his arrest, only 13 loyals remained beside him. Kimathi, self-proclaimed "Knight Commander of the African Hemisphere and Lord of the Southern Hemisphere", had built up his first clandestine government in the Aberdare forests in 1955, which he named Parliament of Kenya. After his arrest, he was hanged in early 1957.

Despite the detention of the main leaders, the Mau-Mau did not disappear completely until the release of Jomo Kenyatta and the country's independence. It is difficult to appraise the actual numbers of deceased, since they vary depending on the source. Official figures published in 1956 cited 11,000 losses among the guerrilla members, 2,000 collaborator Africans murdered and 30,000 suspects arrested. More recent data from English historians refer 30,000 deceased of the Mau-Mau and 80,000 detained, whilst other sources talk about 14,000 dead Africans and 100,000 arrested.

The Mau-Mau conflict was an independence war, but also a civil war. The loyalists, mostly Christians or followers of their village chiefs that had been bribed by the police or the settlers, were a major target for the guerrilla, which eliminated them systematically. A good part of the deceased among the natives corresponded to this fratricide fight. On the other hand, the civil face of the conflict defined a social structure that still persists today: the lands grabbed to the rebels were given to the collaborators, which originated the core of an African middle class that lasted until the present day. Today in Kenya, a great part of the land belongs to the native dominant elite, which thrived by the light of those circles sponsored by the colonial regime.

During the Mau-Mau war, political movements did not cease. In 1954, the Colonial Office created a council of ministers that replaced the executive council created during World War II. The new body would be made up of three Europeans, two Asians and one African.

In 1957, with the main leaders of the Mau-Mau arrested or dead, seven African moderate political leaders were admitted to the Legislative Council. Nonetheless, natives were unsatisfied with this measure that still did not confer them a proportional representation. Next year, the number of Africans in the Council was doubled, which allowed them to boycott the new Constitution proposed by the Colonial Secretary Lennox-Boyd, while they claimed a Kenyan Constitution.

Outside the Legislative Council, the leaders of minority ethnic groups engaged themselves in a sterile game of tribal alliances. More productive was the position of other moderate politicians, like Ronald Ngala, Daniel Arap Moi and Tom Mboya, who started to join efforts and to seek the support from other African leaders. In 1958 Tom Mboya joined Julius Nyerere, president to-be of Tanzania, to form the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East and Central Africa.

A key element for the resolution of the conflict was Harold Macmillan (1894-1986), British Prime Minister since 1957. Macmillan was appointed after the resign of the former Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, as a consequence of the Suez crisis. It was a delicate moment for British economy. With the purpose of controlling the public expense, he initiated a process to release the colonies that were enourmously costly for the British treasury. Kenya, under a state of emergency, was clearly unprofitable.

In 1959 and after the failure of his Constitution, Lennox-Boyd headed the Chequers conversations with four East Africa governors. The result was a proposal of provisional dates for independence of the three countries: Tanganyika in 1970, and Kenya and Uganda in 1975. Under the auspices of Macmillan's speech of "winds of change", Lennox-Boyd defended a multiracial society in the colonies, which would mean the suppression of the settlers' privileges, a greater contribution of Africans to the government and the protection of the Asian minority.

With the same view, Macmillan himself travelled the African Colonies in 1960, intending to involve the settlers in his vision of change towards a multiracial society. His words did not find a wide endorsement, but they served for promoting initiatives that until then were unimaginable. One of them was from the settler Michael Blundel, who founded the New Kenya Group to support the process of transformation.

In spite of the settlers' resistance, international views clearly sided with the Africans. The United Nations Assembly agreed a Declaration of Concession of Independence to the Colonial Countries and Peoples. Even John Fitzgerald Kennedy, president of the United States, pleaded for an Africa for the Africans.

In Kenya, the winds of change started blowing. In April 1959, Kenyatta was released from prison, though he was kept on probation in a remote village. In 1960 the government put an end to the state of emergency, and the same year the British government arranged a conference in London to speed up the process. In the conference, celebrated at Lancaster House, the African delegates presented a common front demanding independence and the immediate release of Jomo Kenyatta. But the requests were far too demanding and Great Britain did not accept the proposal straight away. Even though, a new Constitution was established confering the Africans 33 seats out of 65, and the transfer of 186,000 land acres from white settlers to African farmers with the World Bank's financial support. The date for independence was set for late 1963, including the celebration of elections to set up a legitimate African government. Many settlers, in view of the direction events were taking, sold their lands and left the country.

Anticipating the celebration of elections, the political panorama in Kenya started to define. In March 1960, KAU split into two parties, KANU (Kenya African National Union) and KADU (Kenya African Democratic Union). The former, supported mainly by Kikuyus and Luos, defended a central government in Nairobi, whilst the latter, preferred by the minority ethnic groups and by Great Britain, proposed a federal political system to avoid concentrating power in Kikuyus' hands.

The Lancaster agreements were submitted to popular vote in February 1961. KANU defended immediate independence, the release of Jomo Kenyatta and redistribution of lands and jobs. On the other hand, Ronald Ngala's KADU was more moderate, though it also demanded Kenyatta's release. KANU obtained 19 seats, for 11 of KADU. Both Europeans and Asians had reserved seats. Faithful to their proposals, KANU leaders refused forming government as long as Kenyatta remained on probation, reason why the appointment was passed on to Ngala, who designed a provisional cabinet. This option favoured the Colony's government, as well as settler Blundel's New Kenya Party and the Asian minority.

Finally, in August 1961, KADU achieved Kenyatta's release. The leader was admitted to the Legislative Council on the next year, thanks to one of the counsellors that handed over his seat. Based on his idea of a common goal, Kenyatta attempted to unify both parties, but after failing he accepted to lead KANU together with syndicalist Tom Mboya. The provisional government was replaced by a coalition government between KADU and KANU, in which Kenyatta assumed the portfolio of Constitutional Affairs and Economic Planning.

In January 1962 the second Lancaster Conference took place. Jomo Kenyatta attended as the uncontested leader. During the conversations, the calendar for independence was defined, including the celebration of elections for the next year. Further agreements included implementation of the "one million acres" land sale system. However, the constitutional issue remained pending, since KADU supported a federalist model which KANU rejected.

In the 1963 elections, which were boycotted by the northeastern Somalis who refused to integrate in Kenya, Kenyatta's KANU obtained absolute majority with 83 seats out of 124. This was the final backing for the centralist model. On the 1st of June, Madaraka Day, Jomo Kenyatta became Prime Minister of the autonomous government of Kenya. There was still much to be defined before proclaiming the Republic, but independence was a fact and one man had been appointed to begin the process of national construction. From the start, Kenyatta requested the settlers not to leave Kenya, since he knew that only them could keep the farms profitable for boosting economic development in the country.

On December 12, 1963, Kenya took control over foreign affairs, fulfilling the process of independence. During the solemn ceremony for celebration of independence at Ruringu Stadium, the last Mau-Mau fighters handed over their weapons to Jomo Kenyatta.

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