Book: Land, Food, Freedom

In 1922, Muthoni Nyanjiru threw off her clothes during an anti-colonial protest to confront, shame and curse the Europeans’ colonizing forces who were enslaving African girls to pick coffee on white settler estates. In the 1950s, thousands of Kenyan women joined and never surrendered in the Mau Mau war to expel the colonialists. In 1992, grandmothers on hunger strike in Nairobi threw off their clothes in a protest in a public park to protest dictatorship and political imprisonment. Land, Food, Freedom reveals Kenyan women’s determination to get back their stolen land, and uses oral histories to tell the stories of Kenyan women in fifteen uprisings across the long 20th century.

Local men who collaborated with British colonial officials and settlers in colonial “male deals” found themselves repeatedly challenged by the organizations and actions of these and other women. By acting against their collective dispossession, they inspired a different set of men to stand with them in alliances to defend and rebuild the gendered commons.
 

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