JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Boston University African Studies Center and Board of Trustees, Boston University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies.A decade of research on African women has raised serious questions about the kinds of historical reconstruction we do: when we study the men and women who made events, do we look at them as groups of undifferentiated migrants and militants, or do we see them as men and women whose behaviors were constructed and constrained by the times, places, and cultures in which they lived? Do we take gender as a given, or do we ask how genders were constructed, contested, and maintained? Do we see the sexual division of labor as a cultural absolute, or do we ask how it was arranged, struggled over, and rearranged? In recent years, feminist historians have used the testimonies of individual women to question these categories, and thus have given us a detailed picture of private life, power relations, and their relationship to political action.1 The use of men's life histories and autobiographies has not yielded the same kind of information. Men's lives are thought to take place in the public spheres of production, politics, and work. The conventional wisdom for twentieth-century Africa is that men's preferential access to political life, wage labor, and the cash economy meant that their lives were governed by class and economic interests, not personal ones. Therefore most studies of African men, particularly in the political arena, have tended to make men seem monolithic and homogeneous, either as resistors or collaborators; they have had factions, but no personal reasons for joining them. Men were motivated by land shortages, poverty, and decreasing real wages, but not by their qualms and anxieties about the changing rights and obligations of fatherhood.Such assumptions have omitted a gender from historical scholarshipthe male gender. Men's private lives are not seen as a site of contestation and strug-Women's Lives, 85-95. 4A possible exception, which I do not discuss here, is Muthoni Likimani, Passbook Number F.47927: Women and Mau Mau in Kenya (London, 1985), the nine fictionalized chapters of which are based on the observations of Likimani's sister and the story of her former housemaid. SDonald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within (New York, 1966) This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 11:18:35 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SEPARATING THE MEN FROM THE BOYS As source material, however, these books have not figured in academic studies of Mau Mau,6 possibly because of intellectuals' distrust of popular literature. But popular literat...