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REVIEW:
'... a wide-ranging and masterly discussion of the colonial years in central Kenya. Both authors display an admirable erudition, Berman in concentrating on white-settler and colonial concerns and administration, Lonsdale on African responses. Lonsdale's great chapter in the second volume entitled "The Moral Economy of Mau Mau" is an approach to understanding "them" that achieves a grand originality.' - Basil Davidson in The London Review of Books '... African history-writing retains enormous intellectual dynamism. Nothing demonstrates this more strikingly than Unhappy Valley, Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale's collection of essays on colonialism, class and ethnicity; centred mostly on Kenya, which includes some more general or theoretical pieces. 'The book underlines, too, something of wider significance. However moribund Marxism may seem today as a basis for political belief and action, it still has unmatched resources as a tool-kit for historical understanding. The kind of flexible, even eclectic Marxist method Berman and Lonsdale employ can generate historical writing of great subtlety and power; perhaps especially about the third world societies Marx and his "orthodox"e; followers barely considered... 'The real gold is in Lonsdale's long essay on Kikuyu "moral economy", a hundred pages of dense, detailed, but beautifully crafted investigation of the intellectual roots of the Mau Mau revolt. It is quite simply one of the most exciting historical works I have ever read. 'Mau Mau has been interpreted by the colonial authorities as more reversion to barbarism, by romantic Kenyan radicals as a betrayed national liberation struggle, and by more recent historians as a rural class conflict driven by purely economic forces. Lonsdale uncovers something quite different, far more complex and unfamiliar. He finds a search for a renewed social order encompassing individual moral worth, conducted in the language of Kikuyu tradition and Biblical interpretation, and struggling to find psychic home in the alien and desperate world created by colonialism.' - Stephen Howe in The New Statesman & Society 'In Unhappy Valley, Berman and Lonsdale challenge the interpretations of both liberal and Marxist scholars to suggest a new approach to twentieth-century Africa and, by implication, a new approach to nationality and ethnicity in the contemporary world as a whole.' - International Journal of African Historical Studies 'Unhappy Valley ultimately adds up to a manifesto about the conception and writing of African History. Along the way its separate chapters accumulate a remarkable range of insights and provocations about the experiences of Kikuyu people, Kenyans and African colonialism. This book will surely become a landmark contribution to African historiography.' - Charles Ambler in 'All these essays are packed with original thought, often expressed in memorable phrases.' - Roland Oliver in The Times Literary Supplement '...especially pleased to find a good historian sympathetic to anthropological and sociological research...' - T.O. Beidelman, Professor of Anthropology, New York University '...The book has great strengths. As political scientist turned historian Berman has a wide grasp of theories of the state.' - Richard Waller in The Journal of African History 'Livre magnifique, decidement...' - Jean-Francois Bayart in Revue francaise de science politique
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