It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  It was an astonishing admission to make before the man who had been given the remit of eliminating corruption. Kiraitu’s confident assumption that John would nod quietly in agreement, rather than leap to his feet and start working the phones in sleaze-buster mode, might seem bizarre to the outsider. In fact, it was based on one all-important fact, a keystone on which, in the eyes of the ministers and their colleagues, a solid edifice of cooperation and mutual protection could be built: John was one of them, John belonged. John was a Kikuyu.

  7

  The Call of the Tribe

  ‘You’re my older brother and I love you. But don’t ever take sides against the family again.’

  MICHAEL CORLEONE, in The Godfather

  If you drive north-east from Nairobi, aiming for Mount Kenya, it takes a while to shrug off the city slums. Traffic slows to a crawl while doing its best not to stop entirely at Githurai roundabout, notorious for cut-throats and thieves, then bombs in relief down the Thika road. Some of the worst accidents in Kenyan history have occurred on this stretch of road, but few drivers let that deter them. Ordinary cars compete with crammed matatus, yellow jerrycans bobbing from roof racks like party balloons, to see who can flirt most outrageously with death while remaining on the road.

  You know you’ve reached Thika when you start passing a series of wooden trestle tables, buzzing with tipsy wasps, where pineapples borrowed from the Del Monte plantation, a purple-grey expanse of scrubby sprouts, are cheekily sold. The motorway then crosses the swirling Chania river, whose falls are a favourite with lovelorn suicides, running briefly parallel to the railway. Then it is time to abandon the main road and turn west. If, seen from space, most of Kenya appears an arid expanse of yellow semi-desert, Central Province is its lush emerald kernel. In pre-colonial times, caravans heading towards the fearsome kingdom of Buganda would load up here with provisions. Awed by the farming skills of the locals, admiring travellers described these green valleys as ‘one vast garden’. And that is still the impression today. The waters from two mountain ranges, Mount Kenya to the north-east and the Aberdares to the west, have carved the land into a series of moist valleys and mist-swathed ridges, the historic building blocks of Kikuyu society.

  Take a detour to the top of one of these, and you will find yourself gazing across a vaporous Hobbitland of bottle-green dales, each ridge echoing the line traced by its neighbour until the blue layers, like a watercolour’s delicate washes, blur into an inky distance. This is a man-friendly landscape of tamed shires, generous waterfalls and accessible horizons, a world away from the annihilating vistas of Turkana and Marsabit. Rich in laterite, the earth here is rust-coloured and sucking wet. After the rain, it boils thick and greasy under tyres and cars glide uncontrollably across its surface like drunken ice-skaters. When spattered on clothes it leaves indelible marks behind, like stale blood. So fertile is the soil, it’s easy to succumb to a panicky claustrophobia when venturing onto the unmarked feeder roads, as the napier grass crowds in, cutting out the sunlight, making orientation impossible. ‘True Kikuyu country,’ gloats my Kikuyu driver as we slither past orchards of glossy coffee bushes and giant fronds of banana, fluttering like sails at sea. ‘No one here will ever die of hunger, like in Ukambani.’ But this giant allotment is straining under the press of population. It bears the marks of having been divided and subdivided, the strips of land that drape the hillsides like elastoplasts–each with its own shamba– signs of a paterfamilias’s doomed attempt to do right by each member of an overly large family. The pressure on the soil here is so intense, the ability to coax life from the earth so instinctive, even road verges serve as vegetable plots, carefully tended seedlings growing within inches of speeding wheels.

  Keep heading north on the main road, through meadows grazed by hobbled goats, and you eventually reach the market town of Muranga. It’s easy to drive through this unremarkable place, perched on a rocky escarpment, without suspecting it was ever of strategic significance. But once, in an earlier manifestation as Fort Hall, one of the first British outposts, it played a vital part in a colonial empire’s drive to pacify, occupy and settle East Africa’s hinterland. A dozen kilometres beyond Muranga, a signposted dirt track veers off to the left and heads uphill, passing playgrounds of screaming school-children in DayGlo jerseys, their bare feet coated in ochre. At the top of the ridge there is a sky-blue gate with the words ‘Mukurwe Wa Nyagathanga’–The Tree of Gathanga–painted upon it.

  The compound inside may be officially gazetted as a tourist site, but it looks unkempt, virtually abandoned, the only sounds coming from the weaver birds chattering in the bush. The small office is locked up, leaving a posse of local villagers the task of hauling open the gates and showing visitors around. The mildewed skeleton of an unfinished hotel, intended to host the crowds some entrepreneur convinced himself would one day flock here, dwarves what those imagined tourists were meant to see: two traditional red-earth rondavels, huddled under a slim mukurwe tree which vaults across the clearing. The neglect is puzzling, given that this is supposed to be the spot where Kenya’s biggest tribe first saw the light of day. This is the birthplace of a Chosen People, the Kikuyu nation’s very own Garden of Eden, complete with symbolic Tree of Life. But then, the Kikuyu have always been a pragmatic people, their gaze firmly trained on the future, not the past.

  According to the legend, an intriguing blend of history and religion, Kirinyaga–today’s Mount Kenya, the peak the site looks towards–was the focal point of the Kikuyu world. Sitting just south of the equator, yet boasting a permanent giant moustache of snow, the summit was believed to be the seat of Ngai, God the Creator. The two licks of snow on the 5,200-metre peak, Kenya’s highest, were said to be made from precious dust on which Ngai took his rest, and the mountain’s name was derived from ‘nyaga’–‘ostrich’–a local bird to which the mountain, with its black volcanic base and white cap, bore a passing resemblance. Ngai created Kikuyu–the first man–in his own image, then took him up onto Kirinyaga to survey his future kingdom, a land whose forests teemed with fruit and rustled with wildlife, its valleys constantly watered by rivers from the mountain’s permanent snows.

  ‘Build your homestead on that spot where the fig trees grow,’ Ngai told Kikuyu, pointing to Mukurwe Wa Nyagathanga. So Kikuyu settled here, and when he needed a helpmate, Ngai sent him beautiful Mumbi, the world’s first woman. When the couple asked for children, Ngai sent them first daughters and then some handsome sons-in-law. It was from these youngsters’ loins that the founding clans of the Kikuyu tribe sprang, one to each ridge. Each of the clans was named after a daughter–Wanjiku, Wangari, Wanjeri, etc.–for the Kikuyu were originally a matriarchal society. Quixotically, it was considered bad luck to specify how many daughters, or founding clans, the House of Mumbi contained. Whether discussing offspring, livestock or goods, it was safer to stick to a vague ‘nine plus…’, rather than a specific ‘ten’. To quantify was to play into the hands of one’s enemies, offering them potentially dangerous information.

  Thus ran the myth, a monotheistic creation story with much in common with the one found in the Bible. Ethnologists tell a slightly different story. Along with a smattering of other Bantu tribes, the Kikuyu probably arrived in what is now Kenya after an infinitesimally slow migration that began in around 2000 BC in what are today’s Nigeria and Cameroon. Responding either to the drying of the Sahara or the press of alien peoples, these Bantu communities arrived in Tanzania after tracing a continent-wide loop. Some then turned towards southern Africa, where their descendants were destined to become the Zulu and Shona. Others headed north-east, aiming for the coast before swerving back into the hinterland, where some settled in the Kamba hills. The group that became the Kikuyu called a halt in today’s Central Province, edging out a local population of forest-dwelling pigmies. They had been wise in their choice of new home: these highlands were not only cool and fertile, they were located above the malaria line and were largely free of the tsetse fly, sparing them two of Afric
a’s most devastating diseases. Numbers surged so dramatically that by the sixteenth century Muranga was unbearably crowded. Some then moved north to Nyeri, the well-watered area between Mount Kenya and the Aberdares. Others trekked south, crossing the Chania river and heading into the district of Kiambu, which now lies on the fringes of Nairobi, buying land as they went from the honey-gathering Dorobo tribe.

  In his book Facing Mount Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta attempted to capture the essence of Kikuyu culture–fast becoming a romanticised memory–before it was lost to view, swamped by the white man’s ways. Writing in 1938, when the Kikuyu population, today estimated at 7.4 million, was just one million strong, Kenyatta paints a rose-tinted picture of a stateless society in which extended families, known as mbari, lived in harmony on the ridges, herding goats, growing beans and brewing beer. Their tranquillity was disturbed only by occasional small wars with the nomadic Maasai, whose region stretched on either side of the Kikuyu escarpment. But the two communities’ contrasting obsessions usually allowed them to rub along together peacefully enough. ‘Wherever there is grass belongs to us,’ was the motif of the cattle-herding Maasai, ‘Wherever there is soil belongs to us,’ said the agriculturalist Kikuyu.

  This was a devout society, which respected the spirits of its ancestors while worshipping Ngai as supreme being. When the Kikuyu prayed they turned to face Kirinyaga, and sacrificed goats at the foot of sacred giant fig trees, nature’s churches. It was a society which practised polygamy and marked the transition to adulthood with elaborate circumcision rituals which established special bonds of intimacy between members of the same age-set. The Kikuyu did not congregate in villages, and power was similarly decentralised, with councils of elders, known as kiama, taking key decisions and one generation passing responsibility to the next at a riverbank ceremony staged every thirty to forty years. Kikuyu warriors went about armed with spears and bows and arrows, but the community had no need of a standing army. The solitary individualism of Western thought could not have been further from the Kikuyu’s collective vision of existence, in which a man’s very identity was rooted in the group. ‘Nobody is an isolated individual,’ wrote Kenyatta. ‘Or rather his uniqueness is a secondary fact about him: first and foremost he is several people’s relative and several people’s contemporary.’18

  Crucially, Kenyatta also described a complex system of land ownership. Contrary to what the white settlers assumed, communal ownership of land was not a Kikuyu characteristic. Formally bought, carefully demarcated and privately owned, land was the bastion on which the tribal economy was founded. The ability to force the land to yield its riches was what made a Kikuyu superior, in his own eyes, to the feckless Maasai pastoralists who roamed the Rift Valley. ‘There is a great desire in the heart of every Gikuyu man to own a piece of land on which he can build his home. A man or a woman who cannot say to his friends, come and eat, drink and enjoy the fruit of my labour, is not considered as a worthy member of the tribe,’ wrote Kenyatta. Land not only conveyed status, it also provided a spiritual connection with past and future. ‘It is the soil that feeds the child through lifetime; and again after death it is the soil that nurses the spirits of the dead for eternity. Thus the earth is the most sacred thing above all that dwell in or on it.’

  It was this precious possession that colonialism placed in jeopardy, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the Kikuyu showed themselves very far from docile in their early encounters with the white man. Count Samuel Teleki von Szek, a Hungarian explorer who led the first white expedition to northern Kenya in 1887, came under constant arrow attack while travelling through Kikuyu country, and claimed he had never come across more hostility during all his East African travels. A decade later, Francis Hall, the British District Commissioner after whom Fort Hall was named, found the Kikuyu ‘exceedingly intractable’ in the face of his attempts to hammer obedience home by setting fire to hundreds of their homesteads and confiscating tens of thousands of their goats and cattle. ‘Too treacherous to be trusted to any extent, of a cunning, distrustful and treacherous nature, accustomed to look upon strangers as enemies,’ he complained.

  The implacable British Captain Richard Meinertzhagen, posted to Muranga in 1902, was also surprised by the ferocity of Kikuyu resistance. ‘I must own, I never expected the Wakikuyu to fight like this,’ he recorded in his diary after a successful punitive raid. He watched with sceptical disbelief as the first British settlers–including the ebullient Lord Delamere, most prominent of a clique of rollicking, black-sheep-of-the-family British aristocrats making Kenya their home–confidently started drawing up grandiose plans. These breezy new arrivals, regarded by a visiting young Winston Churchill as little more than ‘ruffians’, were determined to transform Kenya into ‘White Man’s Country’, whatever the British government might feel about the matter. ‘Sooner or later it must come to a clash between black and white. I cannot see millions of educated Africans–as there will be in a hundred years’ time–submitted tamely to white domination,’ wrote Meinertzhagen. And as he prepared to leave, he correctly guessed who would be the source of future trouble. ‘I am sorry to leave the Kikuyu, for I like them. They are the most intelligent of the African tribes that I have met; therefore they will be the most progressive under European guidance and will be the most susceptible to subversive activities. They will be one of the first tribes to demand freedom from European influence.’19

  With the arrival of the white settlers, life for the Kikuyu became increasingly bleak. The issue was not so much the wazungu’s confiscation of traditional Kikuyu land. According to the British Land Commission Report of 1933, whose charting of Kikuyu boundaries prior to white settlement has never been seriously questioned, only 6 per cent of that would ever be grabbed by the colonial powers, most of it in southern Kiambu. ‘There is no doubt that the hardest-hit victims of land alienation were the Maasai and not the Kikuyu, the latter’s clamour notwithstanding,’ writes Kikuyu historian Godfrey Muriuki.20 No, the wazungu represented a devastating challenge because they had effectively stolen the Kikuyu’s future. Previously, the Kikuyu had always successfully negotiated access to an ever-widening area for their growing population with either the Dorobo or the Maasai. That territory had now been swallowed up by the White Highlands, future expansion permanently blocked. Forced for the first time to pay hut taxes by the ‘traditional chiefs’ imposed on them by the British, more and more young men migrated out of the Kikuyu Reserve. They either sought work in Nairobi’s expanding slums or became squatters, farming fields in the White Highlands that they could never hope to own.

  Unlike the Maasai, whose rejection of modernity doomed them to marginalisation, many Kikuyu eagerly embraced the new ways, deciding that the route to success lay in adopting Christianity and Western customs. The athomi, ‘people who read’, replaced banana leaves on their roofs with corrugated iron, goatskins with shirts and trousers. Under the influence of the missionaries who had fanned across Kikuyuland they gradually abandoned polygamy and female circumcision, and insisted on learning English, language of the master race, rather than the Kiswahili the British thought appropriate. Writer Binyavanga Wainana pokes fun at these ‘progressives’, whose loyalty to the white man could be measured by the amount of Vaseline they used. ‘You can see it in old photos: a generation of clean-cut, Vaseline Kenyans who had regular features, seemed to have no ethnicity, and carefully combed down their hair.’

  Yet still they found the playing field pitched against them. In Kikuyu culture, the quality most admired is to be ‘muthuri wirugamitie’–an upstanding man, a man who earns his living from the sweat of his brow. Land ownership, traditionally, was what allowed a Kikuyu male to become captain of his destiny. Now Kikuyu males found themselves demeaned. Unable to marry because they owned no property, thwarted in their desire to found family dynasties, they had assimilated faster than any other Kenyan community, yet what had this flexibility brought them?

  Decades of grievances reached a head in the late 1940s, when a banned o
rganisation, the Kikuyu Central Association, began secretly administering traditional oaths of loyalty to young Kikuyu, effectively signing up secret fighters for a coordinated campaign of civil disobedience.

  As oathing quietly spread through the Kikuyu community, veteran activist Jomo Kenyatta returned from long exile in London to take the leadership of the Kenya African Union, an organisation pushing, through parliamentary channels, for black rule. When the British government refused in 1951 to bow to demands for the number of elected Africans on the colony’s Legislative Council to be raised above five for a population of five million–as compared to fourteen for 30,000 white settlers–the possibility of compromise between settlers and Africans receded. One year later, alarmed by the growing number of attacks on white farms and the murders of suspected Kikuyu informers, Kenya’s governor declared a state of emergency, deployed troops and arrested a hundred black leaders, including Kenyatta. It was a move which betrayed the degree of panic in the colonial administration. Despite time spent in Moscow, Kenyatta was no radical. He had so little sympathy for the revolutionary credo of the Land and Freedom Armies, the movement which would swiftly be dubbed ‘Mau Mau’, that its hardliners would discuss his assassination. The British decision to sentence this supposed ringleader to seven years’ hard labour simply turned him into a national hero.

  British press coverage of the Mau Mau rebellion would play on all the traditional Western stereotypes of the dark continent. This war in ‘Terrorland’, the British public was told, pitted plucky settlers’ wives on lonely homesteads against a disturbingly irrational enemy in whose breast the Mau Mau’s macabre nocturnal oathing ceremonies, involving animal sacrifice and, perhaps, bestiality, had awakened the most primeval impulses. The Kikuyu, it was said, had been plunged too suddenly into the modern world–‘Only fifty years down from the trees,’ muttered the settlers21–and the jarring shock of the encounter between primitive culture and Western life had triggered some sort of psychological meltdown.