Long thought lost, hidden, or destroyed, the transcript of Mau Mau anticolonial revolutionary Dedan Kimathi's 1956 trial during British colonial rule unsettles an already controversial event in Kenya's history and prompts fresh examinations of its reverberations in the postcolonial present.

Perhaps no figure embodied the ambiguities, colonial fears, and collective imaginations of Kenya's decolonization era more than Dedan Kimathi, the self-proclaimed field marshal of the rebel forces that took to the forests to fight colonial rule in the 1950s.