African Oral Law and the Critique of Colonial Modernity in <i>The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his book The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta(1955), author Montagu Slater claims to offer a “fair” and “true” account of the Kenyan nationalist leader’s trial in a British colonial court. However, by including a mere fraction of the 2000+-page trial transcript, Slater amplifies certain aspects of the proceedings, including an instance of literal amplification: at one point, the judge considers whether or not an audio recording of one of Kenyatta’s public speeches to a group of mostly illiterate Kenyans is admissible as documentary evidence. In this moment, the question is asked: what, according to the law, is a “document,” particularly when the culture in question is an oral culture? This essay situates Slater’s representation of this question, and the court’s answer, in the context of African oral law, conflicts between orality and literacy in colonial Kenya, and the war with Mau Mau, the militant liberation movement that Kenyatta was accused of leading. Slater’s text ultimately offers, through selective amplification, a crucial critique of colonial law, showing how its claims to modernity are undermined by its inability to keep up with its own narrative of progress, whereas African “traditions” freely adapt to and, thereby, redefine modernity in a moment of intense political, cultural, and legal crisis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".