From the Publisher:
This volume of essays span four decades of active scholarship by Professor Bethwell Allan Ogot, both in the academy and as a public intellectual. The essays reflect the range of his concerns: from the methodology of African history with his own emphasis on oral traditions, into the attendant need to debunk the myth of the role of the outsider as the genius behind African achievements in the past, as well as the need to eviscerate radical African sloganeering in the production of History, on to an engagement with the trendy postmodernism that has come into vogue as we enter the twenty-first century. Moreover, they reflect his concern with interdisciplinary scholarship in the reconstruction of the African past, the engagement with the present as his own people, the Kenyans, seek to construct a meaningful legacy out of the Mau Mau War, as well as his own concerns and reflections on the pitfalls of African independence.