Blue Bicycle Books, Charleston, SC

Laura Lee Huttenbach, The Boy Is Gone: Conversations with a Mau Mau General. Sat., Sept. 12.

Join us, Sat., Sept. 12, 5 – 7  pm as Laura Lee Huttenbach signs copies of her book, The Boy Is Gone: Conversations with a Mau Mau General. (Ohio University Press, hb., 256 pp., $29).

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A story with the power to change how people view the last years of colonialism in East Africa, The Boy Is Gone portrays the struggle for Kenyan independence in the words of a freedom fighter whose life spanned the twentieth century’s most dramatic transformations. Born into an impoverished farm family in the Meru Highlands, Japhlet Thambu grew up wearing goatskins and lived to stand before his community dressed for business in a pressed suit, crisp tie, and freshly polished shoes. For most of the last four decades, however, he dressed for work in the primary school classroom and on his lush tea farm.

The General, as he came to be called from his leadership of the Mau Mau uprising sixty years ago, narrates his life story in conversation with Laura Lee Huttenbach, a young American who met him while backpacking in Kenya in 2006. A gifted storyteller with a keen appreciation for language and a sense of responsibility as a repository of his people’s history, the General talks of his childhood in the voice of a young boy, his fight against the British in the voice of a soldier, and his long life in the voice of shrewd elder. While his life experiences are his alone, his story adds immeasurably to the long history of decolonization as it played out across Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

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Laura Lee Huttenbach is an Atlanta native and graduate of the University of Virginia, has written extensively about her travels in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. Her essay, “Stuck in Bulawayo,” appears in the 2010 Best Travel Writing Anthology. Laura Lee has presented her work at annual conferences for the International Oral Historians’ Association, the Oral History Association, and the 2013 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is the founder of The General History Project, which seeks to record the life stories of aging community leaders in their own words, promoting cultural awareness, creating historical documentation and enriching the lives of all people, young and old. Currently she lives in Miami Beach, where she is working on her next book, the biography of Robert “Raven” Kraft, a legendary streak runner in Miami who has jogged through the ruination and rebirth of a great American city.

 

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