In 1922 Muthoni Nyanjiru used the ‘curse of nakedness’ to damn Europeans who enslaved African girls to pick coffee. In the 1950s thousands of Kenyan women never surrendered in the Mau Mau war to expel the British. In 1992 old women on hunger strike threw off their clothes to protest dictatorship. In using oral histories to tell the stories of fifteen uprisings across the long 20th century, Land, Food, Freedom reveals the unity of Kenyan women and men in the defense of the ‘gendered commons.’

A major contribution to the study of Kenya's political history.
—Maina wa Kinyatti, Director, Mau Mau Research Center, Nairobi

Finally, a genealogy of African women’s pioneering feminism that invites a fresh understanding of contemporary struggles for the commons.
—Terisa E. Turner, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph, Canada

Brownhill’s careful analysis provides a thrilling account that both transforms Kenyan historiography and constitutes a great leap forward in building a truly global history of feminist struggle.
—Wahu Kaara, Executive Chair, Kenya Debt Relief Network

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LEIGH BROWNHILL is a co-founder of First Woman: The East and Southern African Women's Oral History and Indigenous Knowledge Network, which has been recording the life stories of elderly Mau Mau women in Kenya since 1994. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto.

CATEGORY
Women Studies, History/AFRICA