New Books In Law

In 2015, University of Toronto professor Julie MacArthur decided to follow a couple more leads in the search for the long-missing, feared-lost transcript of the trial of legendary Mau Mau leader Dedan KImathi. She found herself amidst the papers of an anti-colonial London lawyer Ralph Millner who assisted the august barrister Dingle Foot in defending Kimathi before the Court of Appeals in colonial Kenya. There she found the full file of not only the appellate case, but the original trial as well, transcripts, exhibits, and police reports. The file showed that a dubious file of the trial transcript in the Kenyan National Archives to be a forgery, but its discovery prompted the release of further files in Kenya. This momentous discovery not only sheds light on this key figure in Kenyan history, and the trauma and the Mau Mau rebellion, but also unstable nature of archives and historical memory. Dedan Kimathi on Trial: Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion (Ohio University Press, 2017)