“The Same Frame of Mind, but a Different Villain”: Conspiracism and the Decolonization of Africa
"Dr. Christian Alvarado received his PhD in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis. His current research situates the event most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in late-colonial Kenya within the broader history of decolonization in 20th century Africa. Alvarado argues that Mau Mau serves as a way of probing contemporary and current debates regarding the ethics of (anti)colonial violence, the relationship between tradition and modernity, and the nature of decolonization. A historian by training, Dr. Alvarado’s interdisciplinary work is also in conversation with the fields of cultural studies, comparative literature, and political theory.”
Abstract: "This talk examines a key episode in the history of global conspiracist thought: speculative accounts and narratives regarding the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya across mid-20th century Britain and its empire. I argue that contemporary allegations about the uprising’s aim of “white genocide,” the Satanic rituals conducted by those who participated in it, and its role in international Communist plots should all be read as conspiracy theories which fundamentally shaped the history of the movement and attempts to suppress it. Moreover, conspiracy theories that invoked the specter of Mau Mau served as a touchstone in thinking the nexus of race and decolonization in the British Isles themselves. Situating such visions of Mau Mau as conspiracy theories allows us to see how speculative thinking about the uprising is part of a longer tradition of reading world events that continues to inform many of the most prominent iterations of conspiracism that shape Western politics and culture today. Drawn from my first book manuscript, this research launched my second major research project, which aims to understand how the history of conspiracist thought in European and African contexts shaped imperial governance and engagements with processes of decolonization on both of these continents.”