Rebekkah Hudson is a third-year undergraduate student double majoring in History and Linguistics with minors in African Studies and English. She was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, where she earned her Associate of Arts degree in 2022. Rebekkah is affiliated with the University of Florida’s Department of History, serving as a member of the Editorial Board for Alpata: A Journal of History, as an intern for Inquire Capitalism, and as an officer of Phi Alpha Theta, the history honor society. Additionally, Rebekkah is affiliated with the Center for African Studies, where she serves as a CAS Ambassador and takes a variety of courses related to African Studies, including African Intellectual History, Africans in the Americas, Beginning and Intermediate Swahili, and the Sociolinguistics of Writing, highlighting her interest in both History and Linguistics.
Her research interests include 20th-century East African history, intellectual history, eco-cultural history and the broader British Empire. Currently, her research seeks to uncover the untold African perspectives and histories within the “Men of the Trees,” a Forest Scout organization founded in 1922 in Kenya Colony, where Gikuyu ‘boys’ and men served as Scouts and Scoutmasters. As the previous coverage of this organization mostly centered on its colonial co-creator, Rebekkah aimed to reexamine the distorted role of the Gikuyu Forest Scouts themselves. Under the guidance of Dr. Philip Janzen, she conducted a comparative analysis between Gikuyu monographs and oral interviews, and colonial ethnographic observations. This project not only deepened her understanding of African and colonial historiographies but allowed her to use historical linguistics to uncover the changes and continuities of Gikuyu ideas.
After graduating in the spring of 2026, Rebekkah plans to pursue a Ph.D. in African History with the goal of becoming a professor. In preparation, she has presented her research, titled “Twahamwe: Reconceptualizing Gikuyu Agency in the Creation of Forestry Scouting in Kenya,” at three conferences: the Florida Undergraduate Research Conference at the University of South Florida on February 15, the Northeast Florida History Conference hosted by the University of North Florida on March 30, and the University of Florida Spring Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 8. These opportunities have allowed her to introduce her work to diverse audiences of student researchers and established professors from both the humanities and STEM fields. Furthermore, she has worked to deconstruct and complicate the misnomer “Forest Destroyers,” which was placed on Gikuyu members of the ‘Men of the Trees.’ In doing so, she has traced the intellectual and cultural changes and continuities within the Gikuyu community, as reflected in the “Dance of the Trees” initiation ceremony and the organization’s motto, Twahamwe, meaning “we all pull together as one.” Ultimately, her research argues that the ‘Men of the Trees’ was not merely a colonial invention, but a product born from the interaction between Gikuyu agency and colonial ideas.