Mau Mau’s Children: the making of Kenya’s postcolonial elite by David P. Sandgren (review)

Despite the title, this is not another study of the trials and tribulations of Kenya’s nationalist rebellion of the 1950s, but is in fact a remarkable, intriguing and elegant volume that charts the life experiences of a cohort of schoolchildren whom the author, David Sandgren, taught between 1963 and 1967. The boys whom Sandgren taught at a rural school in Giakanja, near Nyeri Town in Central Kenya, were the sons of Gikuyu farmers, born during the years before the Kenya Emergency (which ended only in January 1960) and coming into their maturity as Kenya took its first exciting steps as an independent state after December 1963.

These were heady days, filled with hopes, aspirations and expectations. The boys were Kenya’s first generation of postcolonial elites. They would become the aspiring young middle classes of the 1970s, the stalwarts of Kenya’s relative economic success. Sandgren reconnected with these boys from 1995, some three decades after he taught them. He spoke with them about their lives, their memories of growing up in the turmoil of Mau Mau, their views on education and its significance in shaping their careers, the changing character of Kenya’s nationalism, and the new kinds of conflicts that now mark the Kenyan state. It is an engaging and revealing read, and notably original in its approach and formulation.

The book follows the lifecycle of the Giakanja boys. The opening chapter describes late colonial childhoods, while Chapters 2 and 3 focus on secondary education and its importance. The next chapter is devoted to how these boys made a career, while Chapter 5 describes how the more successful among them became members of a strong economic elite. This is followed by a discussion of their personal lives, showing how interconnected this generation of rural elites has become. Their reflections on the next generation in the final chapter suggest that the experience described here may well prove to be unique – the product of a particular and highly distinctive historical moment, never to be repeated.

The most important theme in the book is, of course, education. The changing generational opportunity for education represented by this group and their families is profound. The majority were boys whose parents had no education, or low-level primary education at best. They then finished secondary school, gaining the Cambridge School Certificate (CSC) –‘the ultimate credential’. Passing the exams opened the door to a good job, or entrance to further education: it was ‘the prerequisite to a good life’, according to Sandgren (p. 63). Those students who made it into secondary school in the mid-1960s represented only about 1 per cent of their Kenyan age cohort, and maybe only one-quarter of these made it to Form 4 and a pass in the CSC. They were, undeniably, an elite. But maybe not the top elite: Giakanja was a day school, and its pupils were outshone by the very best of those from the more expensive and longer established rural boarding schools. Nonetheless, many at Giakanja did very well in the newly independent Kenya.

Sandgren’s boys represent a good cross-section of Kenya’s postcolonial African middle classes. He selected three cohorts, each of thirty students, and managed to make contact with seventy-five of the ninety students in all. In contrast to their parents, who lived traditional lives in rural communities, most of these boys went on to form nuclear families and to live in modern housing complexes, often among multi-ethnic communities, and in cities or market towns. They had but a single wife, and a relatively modest average of four children. Wives usually came from their home areas, however, with relatively few making marriages far from home.

Yet the elite lives that this class enjoyed into the 1980s and 1990s have not been fully replicated for their children. Despite greater and higher educational opportunities...