Writing for Kenya
African Sources
for
African History
Editorial Board
Dmitri van den Bersselaar (University of Liverpool)
Michel Doortmont (University of Groningen)
Jan Jansen (University of Leiden)
Advisory Board
RALPH A. AUSTEN UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, USA
WIM VAN BINSBERGEN AFRICA STUDIES CENTRE LEIDEN, NETHERLANDS
KARIN BARBER AFRICA STUDIES CENTRE BIRMINGHAM, UK
ANDREAS ECKERT UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG, GERMANY
JOHN H. HANSON UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA, USA
DAVID HENIGE UNIVERSITY OF MADISON, USA
EISEI KURIMOTO OSAKA UNIVERSITY, JAPAN
J. MATTHIEU SCHOFFELEERS UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN, NETHERLANDS
VOLUME 10
Writing for Kenya
Th
e Life and Works of Henry Muoria
By
Wangari Muoria-Sal, Bodil Folke Frederiksen,
John Lonsdale and Derek Peterson
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2009
Cover illustration: From the frontispiece of Henry Muoria’s fi rst pamphlet ‘Tungika atia iiya witu?’ or ‘What should we do, our people?’ (1945). For the text, see pp. 136-37.
Th
is book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Writing for Kenya : the life and works of Henry Muoria / by Wangari Muoria-Sal . . .
[et al.].
p. cm. — (African sources for African history ; v. 10)
Biographical material in English; texts of Muoria’s political pamphlets in Kikuyu with English translation.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-17404-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Muoria, Henry. 2. Muoria,
Henry—Family. 3. Journalists—Kenya—Biography. 4. Kenyans—England—
London—Biography. 5. Kenyatta, Jomo. 6. Kikuyu (African people) 7. Kenya—
Politics and government—To 1963. I. Muoria-Sal, Wangari. II. Muoria, Henry.
III. Title. IV. Series.
PN5499.K42M868 2009
070.92—dc22
[B]
2009010954
ISSN 1567-6951
ISBN 978 90 04 17404 7
Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Th
e Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by
Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to
Th
e Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910,
Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
CONTENTS
List of Figures and Photographs .....................................................
vii
Preface ..................................................................................................
ix
SECTION I
LIFE
Chapter 1 Henry Muoria, Public Moralist .................................
3
John Lonsdale
Chapter 2 Th
e Muorias in Kenya: ‘A very long chain’.
An Essay in Family Biography ....................................................
59
Bodil Folke Frederiksen
Chapter 3 Th
e Muoria Family in London—A Memory ........... 105
Wangari Muoria-Sal (with Bodil Folke Frederiksen)
SECTION II
WORKS
Editorial note on Henry Muoria’s three political pamphlets ...... 131
Chapter 4 What Should We Do, Our People? ........................... 137
Chapter 5 Th
e Home Coming of Our Great Hero Jomo
Kenyatta ........................................................................................... 253
Chapter 6 Kenyatta Is Our Reconciler ........................................ 317
Bibliography ........................................................................................
393
Index .................................................................................................... 403
LIST OF FIGURES AND PHOTOGRAPHS
Figures
1. Muoria Family Tree ................................................................... xiii 2. Map of Henry Muoria’s Kenya, 1945 ......................................
xiv
3. Map of Southern Kikuyuland, 1945 ........................................
xv
Photographs
1. Henry Muoria (second right) and friends, early 1930s .......
57
2. Henry Muoria in his East African Railways uniform, and
friend ............................................................................................
58
3. Wedding photo of Henry Muoria and his fi rst wife
Elizabeth Th
ogori, best man Mr Charles Karau and his
wife Mrs Karau as maid of honour, 1932 ...............................
98
4. Ruth Nuna joins Henry Muoria in London, 1954 ................
99
5. Henry Muoria and Elizabeth Th
ogori with their two
fi rst-born children (John Mwaniki and Peter Kigia) ............ 100
6. Henry Muoria, his children and his motorbike (John
Mwaniki, Peter Kigia and Wambui who passed away) ........ 101
7. Th
ree generations of Nairobi women: Ruth Nuna, her
mother Grace Njoki and her daughter Christine
Gathoni ........................................................................................ 102
8. Henry Muoria received by his two fi rst wives, Elizabeth
and Judith, children and grandchildren in Nairobi, 1975 .... 103
9. Henry Muoria greets his mother-in-law, Grace Njoki,
Nairobi, 1975 ...............................................................................
104
10. Henry Muoria, his third wife Ruth Nuna and their seven
London-born children ............................................................... 126
11. Henry Muoria visiting Nairobi December 1989 at his
home in Nyathuna, Lower Kabete ........................................... 127
12. Henry Muoria in Kenya, 1975 ................................................. 128
PREFACE
Th
is volume is intended to give twenty-fi rst century readers around the
world access to the life and works of a signifi cant African nationalist
and publicist, Henry Muoria, who wrote in the middle of the last cen-
tury principally for the Kikuyu people, then around one million strong
in the equatorial highlands of the British colony of Kenya. Th
is son of
peasants in Kenya
’s rich and fertile Central Province who became a
respected spokesperson of his people, Muoria is not well represented
in the political and cultural history of Kenya, despite his pioneering
writings and his extraordinary career. In his Gikuyu-language news-
paper Mumenyereri wa Maundu Mega ma Ugikuyu (‘Th
e Guardian of
the good things of Kikuyu’) and in his political and moral pamphlets,
written between 1945 and 1952, he was an outspoken and clear-sighted
critic of colonialism and a proponent of Kenyan and African self-reli-
ance. He was a self-taught ‘organic intellectual’ with a remarkably global
outlook. His writing enterprises were followed and discussed eagerly by
his widespread African audiences and watched closely by the colonial
authorities. A few weeks before the October 1952 Emergency in Kenya,
declared in order to create conditions for the eff ective combating of
the Mau Mau insurrection, Muoria left for Great Britain. It became his
fate to remain in exile until his death in 1997. He married three gift ed
women and had large families both in Kenya and in Great Britain.
During his work at the University of Cambridge on ‘the moral
economy of Mau Mau’, that became part of the two-volume Unhappy
Valley: Confl ict in Kenya and Africa (1992 , co-authored with Bruce Berman), John Lonsdale met Henry Muoria, who had recently retired
as an underground-train guard with London Transport. Th
ey had long,
valuable conversations about the inner workings of Kenyan nationalism,
and Kikuyu enterprise and ideas of enlightenment, fuelled by curries
cooked in Holloway, North London, by Ruth Nuna, Henry Muoria’s
third wife. Meanwhile, in Kenya, Bodil Folke Frederiksen, from Roskilde
University, Denmark, was doing research on youth culture and urban
livelihoods in a poor neighbourhood in Nairobi. She met two bright and
intelligent local young men, George Muoria and Julius Mwaniki, who
became her research assistants. Th
ey turned out to be the grandsons of
Henry Muoria and Ruth Nuna Muoria. Th
is coincidence contributed to
x preface
John Lonsdale’s determination to devote a publication to Muoria’s life
and works and to do so in collaboration with his daughter, Wangari
Muoria-Sal, the family archivist, the Gikuyu scholar and historian Derek
Peterson, and Bodil Folke Frederiksen.
Our key enterprise has been to publish a selection of Henry Muoria’s
central writings in a context that makes them intelligible and readable
for a present-day audience. We do so in the belief that Muoria still has
something of importance to say to Africans, to Kenyans more particu-
larly, and to students of African contemporary history more generally.
We have chosen three pamphlets, ‘What should we do, our people?’
(1945), ‘Th
e Home Coming of Our Great Hero, Jomo Kenyatta’ (1946),
and ‘Kenyatta is Our Reconciler’ (1947). For the latter two pamphlets
we have worked from the English texts translated by Henry Muoria
himself about thirty years aft er they were fi rst published in Gikuyu.
We commissioned a re-translation of the fi rst pamphlet, ‘What Should
We Do, Our People?’
Muoria was clearly anxious to bring his 1940s Gikuyu-language
pamphlet’s literature before a wider, English-reading audience, and it
is a source of satisfaction that we are now able to bring his wishes to
fruition, if only aft er his death. Th
e fi rst pamphlet, ‘What Should we
Do, Our People?’ has already been reproduced (with other pamphlets
not reprinted here), in English, in Henry Muoria’s autobiography, I,
the Gikuyu and the White Fury (Nairobi, 1994). Th
is book, produced
for a local readership, has scarcely been noticed outside Kenya. More-
over, Muoria re-worked the pamphlet’s English-language text in order
to make it intelligible to an audience ignorant of Kenya’s history. His
emendations were so extensive that much of the urgent immediacy of
the original Gikuyu was lost. In this case we have therefore gone back
to the original Gikuyu, translated for us by Joseph Muriithi Kariuki,
whom Derek Peterson used as research assistant in the work that bore
fruit in Peterson’s Creative Writing: translation, bookkeeping, and the
work of imagination in colonial Kenya (2004). Muoria’s English texts of the other two pamphlets were close translations of his Gikuyu originals,
but we have kept the explanatory additions he made in his English ver-
sions, to illustrate his professional journalistic instinct that everything
must be immediately intelligible to his readership.
We introduce these pamphlets with a chapter on the political and
intellectual setting of Muoria’s thought and activities by Lonsdale; a
biographical chapter on the Muoria family in Kenya by Frederiksen;
and a chapter on the life of the London Muorias by Muoria-Sal. We
preface xi
bring the texts of the pamphlets in their original Gikuyu and in Eng-
lish translations with linguistic annotation by Peterson and historical,
contextual commentary by Lonsdale.
Th
is has been a happy collaboration around an unusual project,
and we have been supported in our venture by a number of people
and institutions. Our most valuable and stimulating supporters have
been members of the Muoria family in Great Britain and Kenya, fi rst
and foremost Henry Muoria’s widow Ruth Nuna Muoria, his son Peter
Mwaniki and his daughter Wangari Muoria-Sal; in Kenya particularly
Christine and George Muoria, Julius Mwaniki, Hellen and John Gich-
ache, the late Charles Mwaniki, Alex Muoria and Rosabell Mbure. We
thank them all for their generosity and insights, now over many years.
Th
e translation of ‘What Should We Do, Our People?’ was carried
out by Joseph Kariuki. We have been supported by the Centre for the
Advanced Study in the Humanities in Copenhagen, in particular by
Birgitte and Jesper Possing; by the managers of the Smuts Memorial
Fund of the University of Cambridge; and by Selwyn (Peterson) and
Trinity (Lonsdale) Colleges of that University. For valuable advice,
information, and encouragement we also thank our many colleagues,
more especially Karin Barber, Bruce Berman, Catherine Burns, Myles
Osborne, Tabitha Kanogo, Warris Vianni, Richard Waller, Th
e Right
Revd Gideon Githiga and the Revd Dr John Kimani Karanja.
Our spouses, Preben, Moya, Salim, and Becky, have, as is customary
and following the example of Henry Muoria’s wives, borne the greater
burdens.
Bodil Folke Frederiksen, John Lonsdale, Wangari Muoria-Sal, Derek
Peterson.
In Nyathuna, located in Lower Kabete the home land is known as
(Mbari Ya Muoria) which means the clan of MUORIA
One of Muoria’s wives was known as Gathoni
First son to Gathoni – MWANIKI WA MUORIA
MWANIKI WA MUORIA married Wambui wa Mbari
and had three children
Karuiki
John Mwaniki – 1933–1989
Mwaniki
Gatho
ni, Lillian – 1905
Kimengi wa Karuiki
Wambui – died as a child
Njoki
Peter Kigia – 1936–1964
Mungai
Mbari – died as a child
James Gitau – 1942–1992
Married 1932 Thogori, Elizabeth wa Kinuthia
Charles Mwaniki – 1946–2008
Rosabel Wambui
Muoria, Henry – 1914
Married 1947 – Nyamuruwa Judith wa Kinyanjui
Walter Kinyanjui – 1952–1998
Married 1948 – Nuna, Ruth wa Karera (stepfather)
Grace Njoki
1945
Helen Wambui
1949
Christine Gathoni
1950
Immaculate Waringa 1951
Married to Nyambura,
Wambui
Mbari, Samuel – 1922
(Mwaniki
1952–1953)
Hannah wa Njoroge
Ngina
Jean Wangari
1955
Gathoni
Juliet Nyakenji
1956
Mwaniki
Peter Mwaniki
1957
Njoroge
Josphat Karera
1959
Njeri
Margaret Wanjiro
1960
Kariuki
David Mbari
1962
Mbogo – deceased
Simon Mbugua
1964
From the family above Muoria was grandfather to 43 grandchildren
And over 45 great grandchildren
Fig. 1. Muoria Family Tree
SUDAN
ETHIOPIA
80 km
160 km
0
50 m
100 m
Lake Rudolf
N
(Turkana)
UGANDA
ex-
(ITALIAN)
SOMALILAND
Eldoret
Timboroa
Mt. Kenya
Meru
R.
Victoria
Ta
Nyeri
n
Nyanza
a
3
2
1
Thika
Nairobi
Magadi
Machakos
Hola
Indian Ocean
Railway
Mt. Kilimanjaro
‘White Highlands’
Mountain
TANGANYIKA
1
Kiambu district
Mombasa
2
Fort Hall (Murang’a) district
3
Nyeri district
Writing for Kenya Page 1
