Rethinking the Shifta War Fifty Years after Independence: Myth, Memory, and Marginalization

Abstract

In an influential piece on Kenyan nationalism written in 2003, E. S. Atieno Odhiambo noted: “what we have got so far is the political history of nationalism to 1963, rendered by those who won the political struggle” (Atieno Odhiambo, 2003, 45). Historians of Kenya, he argued, had not yet “documented fully … the social struggle of the non-winners” (p. 45). On the fiftieth anniversary of Kenya’s independence, there is much value in revisiting Atieno Odhiambo’s call to produce more inclusive nationalist histories—a project that remains unfinished. This chapter examines the struggle of PanSomali nationalists in Kenya, who were among the “non-winners” of decolonization.