{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023097311624384703, 'fraction_numerical': 0.003029155622870125, 'mean_word_length': 4.8841870824053455, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Famine in Malawi

fictional literature and provides insights as to the ways in which changing views of history are reflected through that literature. Altogether less weighty in its intellectual self-proclamation, though substantially more readable, is Muthoni Likimani's selection of short stories on women and Mau Mau. The study is published as part of the Women in Society Series, and an introductory essay by Jean Barr tries (in a rather laboured fashion) to situate Likimani's work both in terms of the historiography of Mau Mau and in the broader context of womens' studies. Unfortunately, the introduction does little justice to the powerful simplicity of the stories told by Likimani. It is easy to place this volume within Maughan-Brown's categorization; this is unashamedly a novel of ' Freedom', asserting the glory of the struggle of the Mau Mau movement and keen to emphasise the overbearing oppression of the colonial authorities and especially the African 'Loyalists'. These nine stories capture Kenya of the 1950s vividly, based partly upon the author's recall of her own experience and partly upon later reflections on the role of women in Kenya's history and present politics. It is essentially a view 'from below', and lacks any sense of historical process or periodization; events are presented in a vacuum that is simply 'the Mau Mau years'. Each story deals with the experience of women in a particular aspect of the Emergency — the enforcement of pass laws, deportations, the movement of squatters, detention camps, interrogations, and so on. The strongest stories are those portraying life in Nairobi during the 1950s, where the pass system so impinged upon the daily lives of women. Viewed through the eyes of a woman, the tinderbox atmosphere of the African locations of the city seems closer to fear and chaos than the struggle for power that has echoed through the work of male writers. These fictionalised accounts of the woman's experience during Mau Mau should remind us that the State of Emergency in Kenya was about more than the struggle for political power between competing elites, and about more than the disengagement of the colonial power from its Empire. For many Africans the dislocations of these years were profound, and their social history remains to be written. A sense of tragedy and loss pervades these stories and reinforces the portrayal of Mau Mau as a 'Glorious', though bloody, revolution. It is both the weakness and the strength of Muthoni Likimani's work that it provides clues as to why, and how, historians should go about the task of writing a social history of Mau Mau 'from below'.