‘reserves’, that the British allowed Africans some freedom to determine
their own priorities and spend their own money in the fi elds of educa-
tion, health, agriculture, markets, and law reform. It is in a return to
this decentralised past of the late-colonial period that many Kenyans
see the best hope for political peace in the future.
Why, back in the 1940s, was Kikuyu domination of KAU inevitable?
Th
ere were many reasons, if only one was crucial. In an era of poor
communication, their territory was the most central, nearest to Nairobi
and cheapest of access. At a time when most African education was
in missionary hands, the cool, green, Kikuyu hills—at an altitude less
susceptible to malaria—were more thickly dotted with mission schools
than elsewhere. Many Kikuyu also made a profi table business supplying
Nairobi with the charcoal fuel, vegetables, grain, and milk with which
other African producers, more distant, could not compete. Kikuyu
women traders had for long invested in the slum property market.
Where African workers from further afi eld were long-term migrants,
travelling perhaps annually by train, daily Kikuyu commuters enabled
Kikuyu road transporters to prosper. As these Kikuyu advantages
multiplied, so too did their ability and incentive to invest in politics.34
All Kenyan opinion of whatever colour was agreed, whether in pride
or from envy or fear, on the fact of Kikuyu leadership in and around
African Nairobi. Some were determined to exploit its strategic energy,
others accepted it as a practical necessity, still others feared that such
ethnic inequality foredoomed Kenya’s future to increasing strife.
Muoria was therefore far from ethnocentric, or alone, in asserting that
his Kikuyu people were ahead of other Kenyan peoples in the work of
creating the wider Kenyan nation-to-be.35 What did make him unusual
34 Edward W. Soja, Th
e Geography of Modernization in Kenya: A Spatial Analysis
of Social, Economic, and Political Change (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1968); Gavin Kitching, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: Th
e Making of an Afri-
can Petite-Bourgeoisie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), Parts 1 & 2; David W. Th
roup, Economic & Social Origins of Mau Mau (London, Nairobi, & Athens OH: Currey, Heinemann Kenya, & Ohio University Press, 1987), chapter 8; Luise White, Th
e Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Claire C. Robertson, Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men, and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Frederiksen, ‘African Women’.
35 Muoria, ‘How it Feels to be Born a Kikuyu’, 85–8, 97–8, 112–14. And see below for discussion of What Should we Do, Our People?
henry muoria, public moralist
21
was his belief that such group advantage incurred an obligation to
help other Kenyans not so well advanced. Unfortunately for Muoria’s
attempt to moralise Kikuyu leadership, not all Kikuyu were suffi
ciently
privileged to look forward, with him, as politically generous patrons of
hope. Th
ose who had cause to despair were increasingly attracted to
the secret militancy of Mau Mau. Th
ey could not aff ord the negotiated
compromises and leaked confi dences that were the nerve-wracking
price of pan-ethnic alliance.
Th
at was the fi nal, crucial, reason why Kikuyu dominance of KAU
was inevitable. Th
e conservative and radical wings of Kikuyu opinion
competed with each other for leadership of KAU. Moderates invested
in the politics of hope; militants demanded huge fees from their follow-
ers to pay for their defence against social extinction—another reason
for Mau Mau to be called the ‘greedy eaters’. No other ethnic group
was divided enough for opposing wings to feel so driven to impose
one political vision on KAU rather than another. One cannot now
tell how much Muoria knew of this deepening competition, which by
1951 the militants had won. He cannot have been ignorant of it. His
newspaper, Mumenyereri, gave space to diff erent strands of opinion. In his editorials he constantly espoused discussion and deplored violence.
He disapproved of strike action; he published a detailed exposition of
the British view that the royal charter granted to Nairobi in 1950 did
not permit the city to expand further at Kikuyu expense—a fear that
is oft en cited as a stimulus to Mau Mau insurgency.36 But later edi-
tions of the paper carried dozens of advertisements for ‘tea-parties’
to be held in Nairobi’s African locations. Chai, tea, was a common
euphemism for a Mau Mau oath.37 Nevertheless, Kikuyu militants were
clearly not content with Muoria’s brand of journalism, to judge by the
emergence of half-a-dozen of what the British thought to be ‘intensively
subversive news-sheets’ in 1951–52.38 But these Kikuyu divisions were
confusingly blurred. Th
ere were even diff erent Mau Maus—the moder-
ate, land-based, ‘Kenyatta Mau Mau’ of southern Kikuyu’s elders; the
militant, oft en landless, Mau Mau of Nairobi and the more northerly
Kikuyu districts, Fort Hall (now Murang’a) and Nyeri; and a still more
combative Mau Mau, originating among the squatters of the White
36 Editorial, Mumenyereri 12 Mar. 1950: KNA, MAA.8/106.
37 See the issue of 20–22 September 1952, reproduced in Frederiksen, ‘ “Th
e Pres-
ent Battle” ’.
38 Corfi eld Report, 195.
22
chapter one
Highlands. But all, militant and moderate, emphasised the paramount
moral need to work one’s own land in order to achieve self-mastery.
All had the same ambition for household respectability. Any insurgent
in slum or forest would have agreed with the desk-bound, car-borne,
Muoria that without private self-discipline there could be no worthy
public ambition.
Th
ere was, then, no ideological diff erence between Kikuyu moder-
ates and militants.39 What was at issue was political responsibility and
strategy, a committee of landed elders who could argue with proper-
tied authority, or a militant cabal that could act with urgent decision.
Th
e British were clearly not wrong to fear the power of Muoria’s pen.
Equally, Muoria had good reason to wonder what vile conspiracy could
conceivably have caused the British so to misunderstand him and others
who supported Kenyatta the elder.40 But such is the fate of men and
women who deal in words. An unspoken word will convince no one,
a proverb Muoria was fond of repeating. But a word once uttered or
written may end up convincing anyone, not only those the author had
most in mind. Print has unexpected audiences, audiences hear what
they want, and no audience will agree what that might be. Muoria
intended to inspire men of maturity. He was still more inspiring to
men who feared that maturity might, for them, be permanently denied.
One of the militants’ new newspapers, Inoorio ria Kikuyu, ‘Th
e Kikuyu
> Sharpener’, founded in late 1951, pirated its news from preceding issues
of Mumenyereri.41 No public moralist can dictate how an audience
interprets his words, still less how they then put them into action.
Public moralist
Henry Muoria hoped his words would fi re up an audience not yet
convinced of its own Kikuyu, let alone Kenyan, existence. He wanted
to inspire a patriotic self-awareness that would drive forward the hard,
potentially dispiriting, work of collective, social, self-improvement, the
39 Lonsdale, ‘Moral Economy’; Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below; Derek Peterson,
‘Writing in Revolution: Independent Schooling & Mau Mau in Nyeri’, in Atieno Odhiambo & Lonsdale, Mau Mau & Nationhood, 76–96; Branch, ‘Th
e Enemy Within’.
40 Th
e question at the heart of his autobiography, I, the Gikuyu and the White Fury.
41 Bildad Kaggia, Roots of Freedom 1921–1963 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1975), 82–3, 117.
henry muoria, public moralist
23
key to political self-determination. In pursuit of this goal, he tried to
reconcile what he understood to be Kikuyu tradition with Christian
education, common interest with personal ambition. To reconcile such
discords gave direction to Muoria’s sense of public mission. As a self-
educated man to whom nothing had come easily he spoke from the
heart. Kikuyu had a duty, if only they could be made to see it, fi rst to
themselves and then to other Kenyans. To catch their attention and stir
their enthusiasm he had to address their common, daily, preoccupations.
Kenyatta and Muoria spoke or wrote to audiences very diff erent from
those of today, subject to images, fears, and aspirations that in some
respects are no longer familiar to us, even if we recognise their human
spirit to be like our own. Only when the texts of a previous century are
put into their intellectual context can we catch their intended mean-
ing, reinforced by homely allusion.42 To do this we need a better sense
of the other voices of the time whom Muoria listened to, agreed with
and argued against.
Muoria’s audiences will immediately have grasped his purpose. He
would not otherwise have been a best-selling author. Th
ose who read
him today, however, need a little help. Th
is chapter, accordingly, hav-
ing explored his time and place, must go on to situate Muoria within
his Kikuyu intellectual tradition, show how his thought departed from
that of his predecessors and how, too, within his own polemical arena,
he diff ered from some of his contemporaries.
Henry Muoria was what scholars call an organic intellectual. He was
certainly an intellectual. He refl ected unusually deeply on the condition
of his society, he drew general lessons about proper human behaviour
from what he saw around him and from what he read. He was also
‘organic’, in the sense that he derived more of his thought from his
own experience of life than from his education, although he was an
inveterate reader of other men’s wisdom. Like most other Kikuyu, too,
he was self-employed. A freelance journalist and independent press edi-
tor was at least as insecure as any peasant farmer or casually-employed
migrant worker. Nor did Muoria have any of the educational or social
privilege that might have separated him from his readers. His formal
education fell short of a full primary schooling. He mixed, however, with
that small minority of Kenyan men who had been to a full secondary
42 Th
e explication of Muoria’s language and allusions is attempted in the footnotes to the three texts reproduced in this volume.
24
chapter one
school, the Protestant missionary Alliance High School (AHS), in the
hills above Nairobi, not far from his family home. Ex-AHS boys, a few
of them with university diplomas and even degrees, were to dominate
KAU, oft en known as ‘the teachers’ party’. Later, over half of President
Kenyatta’s fi rst cabinet ministers were old AHS boys.43 Muoria lacked
their self-confi dence and polish. His writing is altogether more earnest
than any of theirs in its calls for self-improvement. Th
eir elite education
had included Shakespearian drama, the singing of English folksongs,
and tennis. Muoria, like Kenyatta, could also quote Shakespeare but
had learned most from his railway apprenticeship, from correspondence
courses in English and journalism and, above all, from the proverbial
wisdom he had picked up from his unlettered parents.44 None of his
writings was without its cluster of Kikuyu proverbs. Even his English
was partly self-taught as, with dictionary in hand, he pored over novels
while on duty as a railway guard. What he learned from books, perhaps
especially from the Bible, built on what he and his elders already knew
they had to achieve: an honourably productive life within their local
moral community of self-respect.
Muoria the organic intellectual was also a ‘public moralist’. He
cannot be described as a political thinker although, as will be seen,
he had original thoughts on the relationship between rural capitalism
and political freedoms. What he did was to articulate the social values
he saw embedded in Kikuyu—and other African—cultural traditions,
draw lessons for his contemporaries, and inspire their daily life with
new insights. He wrote for a public that his words helped to create; he
reminded them of inherited civic virtues that many no longer thought
about or perhaps even knew; he taught that any political claim would
lack authority without the backing of private and corporate virtue.
He demanded more of individual will than he expected of political
reform.
43 B. E. Kipkorir, ‘Th
e Alliance High School and the Origins of the Kenya African
Elite 1926–1962’, (PhD. dissertation, Cambridge, 1969); amplifi ed by Hélène Charton,
‘La genèse ambiguë de l’élite kenyane’ (PhD. dissertation, Paris 7—Denis-Diderot, 2002).
44 For the continued importance of a familiarity with Shakespeare among the Kenyan elite see D. W. Cohen & E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, Burying SM: Th
e Politics of Knowl-
edge and the Sociology of Power in Africa (Portsmouth NH & London: Hienemann & Currey, 1992).
henry muoria, public moralist
25
Like similar public moralists in Victorian England,45 Muoria had
supportive public institutions and social circles to help him order his
thoughts and reach his public. In the 1930s and ‘40s ethnic welfare
associations blossomed in Nairobi and other Kenyan towns as fi rst-
generation Christian literates tried to bring some social order into what
they saw as urban chaos and corruption. Th
e British-run municipal
authorities also began to encourage and fund social halls and reading
rooms, not least for propaganda purposes in the Second World War.
Once the wartime rationing on newsprint was relaxed the African press
could fl ourish, subject to offi
cial surveillance and strict laws against any
attempt to stir up racial hatred,
a concept that could too easily apply
to any African expression of dissent. African social and intellectual life
did indeed suff er many restrictions and indignities. Poverty also meant
that for Muoria’s public, food and rent were far greater priorities than
reading matter. For all the fact that one can detect the fi rst signs of a
distinctively urban civilisation in post-war Kenya it is a source of wonder
that a voice like Muoria’s should emerge at all in such an environment
as Nairobi’s in the 1940s, let alone permit him to profi t from his calls
to courage and resilience.46
Muoria was by no means alone in his literary enterprise in the Africa
of his time. Th
e 1940s saw a great effl
orescence of African literature,
artistic and political, all over the continent. Th
e Second World War had
caused a widespread political awakening everywhere, not just in Kenya.
Many towns, especially the port cities that entered the global public
sphere by welcoming in the passing allied soldiers of every colour and
nation, now had a growing literate public, eager for both self-improve-
ment and intellectual entertainment, for moral guidance in new urban
settings—an eager audience for newspapers, penny pamphlets and,
very soon, more substantial novels. Th
is was particularly true of the
maritime cities of west and southern Africa. To meet this demand there
were also increasing numbers of African writers, literate in English or
45 For whom see Collini, Public Moralists.
46 For African life in Nairobi at this time see references in footnote 34 above, to which should be added: Bodil Folke Frederiksen, ‘Making popular culture from above: Leisure in Nairobi 1940–60’ in L. Gunner (ed.), Collected Seminar Papers (London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1992), 68–73; Tom Askwith, From Mau Mau to Harambee, ed. by Joanna Lewis (Cambridge: African Studies Centre, 1995); Joanna Lewis, Empire State-building: War and Welfare in Kenya 1925–52 (Oxford, Nairobi, & Athens OH: Currey, EAEP & Ohio UP, 2000); chapters by Achola, Anderson, Lonsdale, Frederiksen, Hyde & Atieno Odhiambo in Burton, Urban Experience.
26
chapter one
French, second or third-generation products of mission-schooling. In
west Africa, Senegal, the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Nigeria all witnessed
a rapid expansion of popular literature; South Africa’s inner-city black
Writing for Kenya Page 5
