for us, at least as translated for the offi
cial record. Since whites took
so little notice, black politics was apparently a story of failure. Th
is
seeming powerlessness appeared to change dramatically in the early
1950s, when the brain battle was succeeded by insurgent violence. Th
e
militants of Mau Mau seized the initiative from the senior politicians
whom Muoria knew. Th
e subsequent state of emergency lasted over
seven years, from late 1952 until early 1960. Possibly 50,000 black
Kenyans died, perhaps half of them children, more from deprivation
and disease than from violence.11
9 Although there were strained relations with a senior member of President
Kenyatta’s cabinet.
10 For Muoria’s eff orts to break into the public sphere, fi rst in Kenya and then in Britain see, Bodil Folke Frederiksen, ‘Writing, Self-realization and Community: Henry Muoria and the Creation of a Nationalist Public Sphere in Kenya’, Current Writing 18, 2 (2006), 150–165.
11 John Blacker, ‘Th
e Demography of Mau Mau: Fertility and Mortality in Kenya in
the 1950s; A Demographer’s Viewpoint’, African Aff airs 106 (2007), 205–27. For the fullest accounts of the Mau Mau war see, David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London & New York: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, Norton, 2005); Huw Bennett, ‘British Army Counterinsurgency and the
henry muoria, public moralist
9
Muoria was fortunate to have been in London at the time the emer-
gency was declared. Th
e internationally infl uential Moral Rearmament
movement, keen to show that unequal race relations could be improved
as much by personal acts of goodwill as by political reform, had fl own
him there with two other Africans, both of them trade unionists, the
militant Fred Kubai and the moderate Meshack Ndisi, en route to
the MRA headquarters at Caux in Switzerland. Muoria had taken the
opportunity to look for a new printing press in London.12 Had he still
been in Kenya the authorities would have detained him indefi nitely
behind barbed wire, in harsh conditions, under emergency rules, on
suspicion of association with terrorist conspiracy, with tens of thousands
of others, to extract from him confession of the alleged sin of taking
a supposedly bestial oath and in hope of his ‘rehabilitation’. He was
among the prime suspects on whom the Kenya Police Special Bureau
had kept their eye.13 But the British also needed African allies to sup-
port them in their repression of Mau Mau.
Counter-insurgency strategy therefore had two prongs, one military,
the other civil. Th
e ‘second prong’, as it was called, included radical
measures of agrarian and labour reform. Th
ere was political reform too.
In the midst of the Emergency the British introduced a limited African
franchise—qualifi ed by a points system for ‘loyalty’, education, age,
and income—to elect black representatives to the colonial legislative
council. Until 1948 ‘Legco’s’ white elected members had outnumbered
the non-whites. Since then, white councillors had had to be content
with ‘parity’ as it was called, an equality of number, with non-white
representatives. Almost all the ‘offi
cial’ members, civil-servant heads of
department on the government benches, were white too. Th
e British had
long known that an African electorate was inevitable. Th
e diffi
culty was
to create one that was suffi
ciently small in number and reasonable in
its expectations. Political reform would otherwise defeat its social and
Use of Force in Kenya, 1952–56’ (University of Wales PhD., 2006). For a brisk summary, Piers Brendon, Th
e Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (London:
Jonathan Cape, 2007), chapter 19.
12 Henry Muoria, Editorial in Mumenyereri, 20 Sept. 1952, reproduced in Frederiksen,
“ ‘Th
e Present Battle” ’, 304; and information from Victor Lal, working on the history of the MRA in Kenya.
13 Former member of the Special Bureau to the author, e-mail, June 2004; and see Colonial Offi
ce, Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau (London:
HMSO, Cmnd. 1030, May 1960) [referred to hereaft er as Corfi eld Report], 79, 81–2, 84–5, 128–9, 195–6, 301.
10
chapter one
economic purpose by frightening off white settlement and international
capital, then the only offi
cially-imaginable tools of African progress
and, in the longer run, of African freedom. Government-nominated
black spokesmen had sat in the legislature since 1944, joining the few
elected South Asians. Th
eir presence did not discourage investment
but it scarcely satisfi ed African opinion. Sensing the need for further
political advance, in 1950 Britain had promised a constitutional con-
ference within a few years, with the implicit purpose of reconsidering
the racial ratio of legislators. Th
is was before the outbreak of violence.
Muoria’s was one of the many African voices that, despite the ostensible
failure of the brain battle, had clearly persuaded the British that they
must transform colonial rule into local partnership. In this anti-impe-
rial age, London well knew, empire would at some point have to be
superseded by new nation states. It was important that these should
be friends, not enemies. Th
eir nationalisms must so far as possible be
co-opted, not demonised.
How far the holding of the fi rst African general election in 1957
represented a victory for Mau Mau is therefore debatable. Five years
earlier senior British officials had thought its murderous violence
made the proposed political reform all the more diffi
cult to discuss,
since it had so embittered white opinion.14 And when at last the time
came for reform, when Mau Mau was clearly losing the shooting war,
the British saw the African franchise as very far from a concession to
Mau Mau. To the contrary, in order to complete the defeat of militant
black insurgency by force of arms while restoring Kenya to peaceable
governance they had to isolate the militants, reward the ‘loyalists’ and
moderates, and retain the assent of the mass of Kenya’s black popula-
tion by other, political, means.
Th
at is not the only complication in the relationship between Mau
Mau and Kenya’s freedom. It may with hindsight seem that the new
African right to vote, no matter how limited initially, and despite Mau
Mau’s defeat, must inevitably lead to black majority rule at indepen-
dence. Th
at is not how it appeared to many at the time. It seemed more
likely that there would be some fancy, ‘multi-racial’, constitution that
would continue to reward the supposed indispensability of the white
and South Asian immigrant minorities with an electoral weight dispro-
14 Philip Rogers at the Colonial Offi
ce, minute to W. Gorrell Barnes, 24 Oct. 1952,
&nbs
p; British National Archives, CO.822/444/195.
henry muoria, public moralist
11
portionate to their tiny numbers. While the British had no means to
manage the politics of decolonisation other than by gradually widen-
ing the franchise, they also thought it essential not to frighten these
economically dominant minorities. But the British soon lost control of
this gradualist political calculus. Th
e new, elected, African members of
legislative council, led by the brilliant young trade unionist Tom Mboya,
seized the initiative and forced the pace by refusing to take part in any
government that did not immediately give them more parliamentary
seats. In 1958, therefore, within a year of their election, they forced the
British to concede a non-white majority on the ‘unoffi
cial’ benches of
legislative council, much sooner than any British offi
cial had intended,
or feared.15
So it was that a British Secretary of State for the Colonies had to
admit that it was ‘[racial] Arithmetic and African nationalism’, not
British policy, which so swift ly put paid to white political privilege.
But it was a moderate, pan-ethnic, nationalism, not Mau Mau, which
ensured that political power in this way mirrored racial arithmetic.16
Since independence in 1963 the politics of Kenya’s national memory
has split accordingly, on the question of how to relate the Mau Mau
war to freedom. Was it a war of national liberation or a fi ght for
ethnic privilege? Was its violence patriotic or sectarian? Further, who
can claim the freedom struggle as their own, the fi ghters or the politi-
cians, neither of whom trusted the other? Was not violence essential,
in order to give weight to previously fruitless political argument? If so,
Kenyans should perhaps commemorate gun and ballot-box together.
Or should the nation give the greater honour to all the dark-suited,
tie-wearing, politicians of many ethnic backgrounds—lampooned in
15 Kenya’s geographical situation in British East Africa further complicates the story. In deciding decolonisation’s timetable and format Britain had to appease the supposedly moderate Julius Nyerere in Tanganyika, respect the new independence of Somalia in 1960 and fi nesse old treaty relations with the Sultan of Zanzibar. See, John Iliff e, ‘Breaking the Chain at its Weakest Link: TANU and the Colonial Offi
ce’, chapter
11 in Gregory H. Maddox & James L. Giblin (eds.), In Search of a Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence in Tanzania (Oxford, Dar es Salaam & Athens OH: Currey, Kapsel & Ohio University Press, 2005), 168–97; James Smither, ‘Nation-building & the Limits of Self-determination in Somalia 1950–69’ (Cambridge University: MPhil dissertation in International Relations, 2000); James Brennan, ‘Lowering the Sultan’s Flag: Sovereignty and Decolonization in Coastal Kenya’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, 4 (2008), 831–61.
16 Reginald Maudling, Note on Kenya Constitutional Conference for Cabinet
Colonial Policy Committee, 30 Jan 1962: British National Archives, CAB 134/1561, CPC(62)3.
12
chapter one
Mau Mau songs as tai-tai—who exploited their legally representative
status to such good eff ect? Indeed, was not so-called ‘loyalism’—to
whose social respectability Mau Mau enviously aspired—a more eff ec-
tive nationalism than violent subversion?17 Many would now claim that
only politicians could have persuaded the British that decolonisation
was no disgrace and that it was therefore necessary that the Kenya
nation marginalise Mau Mau, as happened soon aft er independence.
Some go further still, to argue that only constitutionalism could have
nursed the political culture that has from time to time prevented later
governments from complete suppression of Kenya’s civic freedoms and,
now, that a return to constitutionalism is the only thing that will save
Kenya’s future as a nation.
Th
ese remain live issues of national memory, periodically revived
by such crises as the disputed election of 2007. Th
e offi
cial view of
Mau Mau has oscillated between suppression and commemoration, in
parallel with popular anxiety over how far ethnic identity and national
citizenship can be reconciled in a daily practice of civic trust.18 In this
national debate on Kenya’s historical foundations the pre-Emergency
years have either been forgotten or else are judged retrospectively as
simply the prelude to the divisive era of Mau Mau. But these earlier
years deserve to be remembered for their own sake, in their own time.19
Th
ey produced valuable political and social thought, much of it from
Muoria’s pen, concerned less with ethnic competition—although that
certainly existed—than with social trust and co-operation, personal
rights and honourable obligation, in the context of social inequality
and rapid social change. Muoria can still be read with profi t by all,
whether Kenyan or not.
One benefi t in now reproducing his writings might be to remind
Kenyans how much there may still be to learn, or re-learn, from the
civic politics of moderation and mutual respect that Muoria helped to
imagine, to inspire, and to report upon in this, Kenya’s second great age
of political pamphleteering. Th
e fi rst polemical outburst had occurred
17 Daniel Branch, ‘Th
e Enemy Within: Loyalists and the War against Mau Mau in
Kenya’, Journal of African History 48 (2007), 291–315, especially 302.
18 Marshall S. Clough, ‘Mau Mau & the Contest for Memory’, in Atieno Odhiambo and Lonsdale, Mau Mau & Nationhood, 251–67. More generally, Bruce Berman, ‘Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State: Th
e Politics of Uncivil Nationalism’, African
Aff airs 97, 388 (1998), 305–41.
19 B. A. Ogot, ‘Mau Mau and Nationhood: Th
e Untold Story’, in Atieno Odhiambo
and John Lonsdale, Mau Mau & Nationhood, 8–36.
henry muoria, public moralist
13
twenty-fi ve years earlier, aft er the First World War, when Britons and
Indians disputed the possession of Kenya between them, each claiming
to be the more responsible trustee for ‘native interests’. In this second
wordy age, aft er another great war, Muoria and his contemporaries
began to awaken African hopes that Kenya could, instead, be theirs, to
share with others on their own maturely adult terms.20
Ethnicity and nationhood
If that was Henry Muoria’s unremembered time, what then of his
Kenya as a political place? Ernest Renan had a keen sense of the his-
torical contingency of the nation states that his fellow Europeans had
so recently imagined as political homes. In the past, he recalled, there
had been tribal irruptions, empires, feudalities, dynasties. For the future
he foresaw a European confederation. Meanwhile he was living in a
nineteenth century when nations happened to be the sovereign arenas
of political action, thanks to the imaginative political labour of past
rebels and reformers. Renan’s refl ections on changing political com-
munity can well be applied to Kenya.
Muoria and his contem
poraries lived, as they came to realise, at a
time when European empires in Africa were increasingly in question.
He and his fellow political writers asked, accordingly, how Africans
could build societies that better answered their human need for cre-
ative liberty, free association, and self-mastery. As one of the most
powerful voices in this exploratory, pioneer, era of Kenya’s nationalism
Muoria had stern views on how Africans should meet these moral and
political demands. To begin with, his ambition went no further than
an equality of racial esteem within a multi-racial Kenya—not yet a
fully African state. Th
e future racial allocation of power, however, was
not the only political, intellectual, or ethical dilemma that he and his
fellow nationalists faced.
All nationalisms have been, and are, alliances of many voices and
tongues, not least in Kenya. Oft en their only shared goal will have been
to win a sovereign statehood, the international recognition of their right
to rule themselves. Th
e imagination of a shared national community,
20 For a comprehensive study of the Kikuyu-language pamphlets see, Cristiana Pugliese, ‘Complementary or Contending Nationhoods? Kikuyu Pamphlets and Songs 1945–52’, in Atieno Odhiambo & Lonsdale, Mau Mau & Nationhood, 97–120.
14
chapter one
as Renan recognised, is necessarily contentious cultural labour.21 Tom
Mboya would have agreed; he thought it dangerous to air diff erences
of opinion on social and other issues before independence was safely
achieved.22 Black Kenyans of the 1940s were indeed deeply competi-
tive, between genders and generations, town and country, worker and
landowner. Th
eir fi rst pan-ethnic nationalist organisation, the Kenya
African Union (KAU), was increasingly divided, making it diffi
cult
for its president, Jomo Kenyatta, later the fi rst President of Kenya
and ‘father of the nation’, to speak with authority to all its diff erent
constituencies. Th
ese early nationalist arguments have only recently
begun to be studied in the context of their time, with a view to their
democratic resonance today—in the multi-party politics to which, aft er
a quarter century of one-party rule, Kenyans returned only in the 1990s
and whose procedures they have yet to agree.23
Writing for Kenya Page 3
