The British vs. Kenya's Mau Mau is a provocative and remarkable family and community memoir told with honesty, clarity, and suspense. The book captures the opportunities gained and many lost, the resilience of the Gȋkũyũ community told through the eyes of the protagonist from age nine, as she forges against the tide of her pre-determined farmhand lifestyle. She recalls when her family's homestead was tucked away in the backwoods, with only a footpath connecting them to the outside world. Political activists known as the Mau Mau Freedom Fighters were said to have taken up arms, taken to the forest, and waged guerilla warfare against the British colonizers. Henceforth, the colonial government declared a state of emergency in the entire country, threw political activists and their collaborators into jails and detention camps, and crammed the masses into fenced villages for containment. Unsure what to do with young children loitering in villages all day long when their parents worked in the plantations, the area British landowners organized a four-year school. At eight years old, our protagonist learns of the school. Then, despite the odds of an African living in 1950s Kenya getting an education, where education for a girl is an afterthought, and where our protagonist is already a full-time babysitter before she grows older to join the field hands, she is determined to negotiate a trade-off with her father so he can agree to register her for school, her only escape route from the daily drudgery of her community. The book shows the resilience and endurance of the human spirit in overcoming adversity despite the injustice and tiresome tug-of-war between the powerful and the powerless.