Mamdani (1996a) has rightly rejected the debate between those who see Mau Mau as a tribal movement and those who see it as a nationalist one. It was evidently both, being overwhelmingly an organisation whose main adherents were peasants and workers of the Kikuyu nationality who demanded both ‘land and freedom’ and an ‘African government’, demands that were obviously nationalist in content and that could be supported by all the colonised (Barnett and Njama, 1966: 278 and passim). Obviously the distinction is quite impossible to make in this particular case, a fact that clearly illustrates the limits placed on understanding by historicist and positivist conceptions, governed as they are by their distinction between tradition and modernity. Yet we can also note that whether the literature stresses the socio-economic location of the participants or cultural characteristics, it is always their supposed ‘interests’, in the form of class, ‘tribe’, ethnicity, race or nation, which are seen to be the fundamental explanatory foundation of consciousness (e.g. Maughan-Brown, 1985; Throup, 1987; Furedi, 1989). The guerrilla rebels themselves are then simply depicted in historical accounts as ‘bearers’ of their socio-economic location within a structural context, not as subjects of their own history.
However, there has been one attempt to paint a picture of what participants themselves may have thought and of their motivations, that provided by John Lonsdale (1992). Lonsdale criticises those accounts produced by the colonial state based on tribe, atavism and socio-pathology, by nationalists founded on state nationalism, and by Marxists based on class, and proposes a ‘many stranded narrative’ that connects some of these factors, while he grounds his own account ultimately in a set of cultural practices which he refers to as ‘moral economy’ and a sense of civic virtue and reciprocity which he refers to as ‘moral ethnicity’ (1992: 403, 405, 467). While Kikuyu nationalists did not have one voice, ‘they still argued about one ideal, the civic virtue of self-mastery, some voices were light with hope, others hoarse with despair’ (p. 402). There was simultaneously, he argues, a battle for Kikuyu authority along age and class lines for which ‘the issue was civic virtue, achieved by one party but seemingly out of the other’s reach’ (p. 403). Those for whom ‘civic virtue’ was out of reach were precisely the poor, the young, particularly men without access to land, without the exercise of economic independence and political participation, and without the ability to fulfil their moral and civic duties within their ethnic domain. In the absence of these capacities they were simply excluded and could not be full ethnic citizens, for what ‘the ancestors had taught, or were said to have taught, on the relation between labour and civilization was the only widely known measure of achievement or failure in man- or womanhood’ (p. 316).
In sum, for Lonsdale, ‘Mau Mau fought as much for virtue as for freedom’ (p. 317). Asked by the colonial official, ‘Why did you join Mau Mau?’, a former guerrilla answered, ‘to regain the stolen lands and to become an adult’ (p. 326). In this manner, Lonsdale interprets the answer of the guerrilla to the colonial authority’s question as giving ‘Mau Mau’s open purpose and its inner meaning. His political language ... linked external power to internal virtue. His personal maturity depended on a public power to win land.’ Without ‘moral agency’ Kikuyu men could not achieve the full maturity exercised by elders (p. 326). Lonsdale thus distinguishes what he calls ‘moral ethnicity’ from ‘political tribalism’. The former ‘creates communities from within through domestic controversy over civic virtue’, the latter ‘flows down from high-political intrigue; it constitutes communities through external competition’ (p. 466). He concludes:
Moral ethnicity may not be an institutionalized force; but it is the nearest Kenya has to a national memory and a watchful political culture. Because native, it is a more trenchant critic of the abuse of power than any Western political thought; it imagines freedom in laborious idioms of self-mastery which intellectuals too easily dismiss. High-political awareness of the vigilance of moral ethnicity may be, as much as canny political tribalism and a lively civil society, what keeps Kenya at peace (p. 467).
The merit of Lonsdale’s argument is that it brings out quite clearly the idea that ‘ethnic identity’ is always contested, although for him it appears that the Mau Mau contestation concerned simply the position of various (age) actors within the hierarchy, though, importantly, not the character of the hierarchy itself. His distinction between an idealised moral conception of the ethnic and an authoritarian personalised and communitarian (‘tribal’) politics is welcome, as it reminds us that not all politics which use traditional and cultural idioms are of necessity communitarian. Yet, at the same time, that Lonsdale finds it necessary to explain what the response of the Mau Mau activist ‘really meant’, and thus to develop a culturalist argument that goes beyond merely pointing to the fact of cultural idioms as forms of resistance, seems to counterpose an idealised ahistorical version of ‘ethnic consciousness’ in ‘moral ethnicity’ to a despised (colonially produced) ‘tribalist’ one, while simultaneously anthropologising what could be easily read as a simple demand for dignity. The danger of Lonsdale’s argument is that it fails to completely transcend the Western colonial image of the Kikuyu as tribal or ethnic ‘subjects’, and therefore fails either to allow the militant rebel to speak for himself or herself, or to provide at least an opening for an understanding of politics as subjectivity in Africa that does not collapse into culturalism of the neo-colonial variety.
I want to suggest in what follows that this problem, illustrated here by Lonsdale’s argument, is largely inherent in what, following Foucault, could be called the ‘epistemic reason’ of the human sciences as presently constituted, and is not simply the result of bias, of the limits of Lonsdale’s choice of theory, or indeed of the scientific method itself. In order to do this, I wish to discuss some of the debates that arose within the Indian Subaltern Studies Collective, as they constitute to my mind one of the most sophisticated ways currently available of addressing this particular question of the Eurocentrism of the human sciences and the subjectivity of the subaltern. Before this, however, a few words are required on the origins of the concept of ‘moral economy’. Fortunately there is not much to say on this score as, if we put aside the normative accounts regarding what an economy should be, the expression seems to have been first popularised by the historian E.P. Thompson (1971) to refer to the idea of social justice – the defence ‘of traditional rights and customs’ (p. 50) – among the English working class in order to counterbalance economic deterministic accounts of popular riots. It was then picked up and organised into a general principle by James Scott (1979), in his study of the ‘subsistence ethic’ of peasants in Southeast Asia, in which he argued that it was precisely the violation of this ‘moral economy’ by colonial power that had turned peasants into revolutionaries. However, the idea of ‘the moral’ in the Mau Mau case seems to be a signifier of the fact that Western categories are inapplicable (or applicable only with difficulty), rather than providing a coherent alternative conceptual proposal which would allow the consciousness of the subaltern to speak for itself in its own categories.4
There are three general points to make regarding this notion that are of importance for the present discussion. Firstly, it is applied to the situation of ‘outsiders’ or those ‘marginal’ to a capitalist market economy, who, it is said, propose a distinct social ethic in the face of expanding and encroaching capitalist relations; this ethic is to be celebrated in opposition to capitalism, as it exhibits features of a ‘non-capitalist’ economy extolled as ‘virtuous’. Of course, few seriously celebrate