Karari Njama

Karari Njama is a former member of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (otherwise known as the Mau Mau. Karari was born of squatter parents on a European farm in the White Highlands. His family had lost the better part of its land in 1910, when it was alienated and included within the Forest Reserve. Driven by the same shortage of land which moved so many others, Karari's father migrated to the Rift Valley to become a squatter-laborer for a Boer settler. A former school-teacher, It was not until...See more

Karari Njama is a former member of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (otherwise known as the Mau Mau. Karari was born of squatter parents on a European farm in the White Highlands. His family had lost the better part of its land in 1910, when it was alienated and included within the Forest Reserve. Driven by the same shortage of land which moved so many others, Karari's father migrated to the Rift Valley to become a squatter-laborer for a Boer settler. A former school-teacher, It was not until early September 1952 that Karari, having felt the first sting of ostracism and isolation, finally got his chance to join the Movement. It had, over the preceding two years, grown to include a vast majority of his fellow villagers and Kikuyu; it had also, particularly since the introduction of the Warriors' Oath, became increasingly bold and militant. Karari's oath, in contrast to earlier versions of the Unity Oath, reflected this increasing militancy. He was arrested in 1955 by the British colonial forces. Today he lives in poverty, his contribution to the struggle for freedom ignored by the state. Donald Lucas Barnett was born on January 10, 1930. He died, of a heart attack, on April 25, 1975, at the age of 45. It is noteworthy that this was the very same day that Vietnam won the war ... a small country defying and defeating the world's greatest superpower.Don's political work began in earnest in 1960, when he moved with his wife and 4 children, to Kenya in 1960. His extensive interviews with veterans of the Mau Mau guerrilla resistance there, later consolidated and published as 'Mau Mau From Within', were the basis for his doctoral dissertation analyzing 'revolutionary potential in peasant societies'. Don earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1963. In 1964, he was hired to teach Cultural Anthropology at Iowa State University. There, he became controversial in his opposition to the Vietnam war, and in May of 1968, was fired as a result of his activism. See less