Nathan Newman looks at colonial violence, the racism of imperial historiography, and the cold war.

The savage African, the trope of global racism, was carefully nurtured by

European and American writers for centuries. In the mid-20th century, the Kenyan

Mau Mau rebellion was pictured as the epitome of this brutal savagery, so much

so that when the trope of African savagery was borrowed to indict the black

power movement in the US, writers like Tom Wolfe would borrow the image in his

famous piece Radical

Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers...