John Lonsdale says in his introduction:
This is the oral evidence of the Kikuyu villagers with whom Greet Kershaw lived as an aid worker during the Mau Mau Emergency in the 1950s, and which is now totally irrecoverable in any form save in her own field notes.
Professor Kershaw has uncovered long local histories of social tension which could have been revealed by no other means than patient enquiry, of both her neighbour s memory and government archives
Nobody, whether Kikuyu participant, Kenyan or European scholar, has provided such startlingly authoritative ethnographic...

"This is the oral evidence of the Kikuyu villagers with whom Greet Kershaw lived as an aid worker during the Mau Mau 'Emergency' in the 1950s, and which is now totally irrecoverable in any form save in her own field notes. Professor Kershaw has uncovered long local histories of social tension which could have been revealed by no other means than patient enquiry, of both her neighbour's memory and government archives... Nobody, whether Kikuyu participant, Kenyan or European scholar, has provided such startlingly authoritative ethnographic insights into the values, fears and expectations of...

This text is based on the oral evidence of the Kikuya villagers with whom the author lived as an aid worker during the Mau Mau emergency in the 1950s. The data suggests that there was never a single Mau Mau movement, and that none of its members ever saw it as such, not because they did not have a political aim, but because that agenda was contested within different political circles over which they had no control and of which they may scarcely have had any knowledge. This importance of this is that almost all the enemies of the Mau Mau did see it as a whole movement, in order to try and...