& Wishart, 1958), chapter 5; Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, ‘Mau Mau’ Detainee (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1963), 5; Obadiah Kariuki, A Bishop Facing Mount Kenya: An Autobiography 1902–1978 (Nairobi: Uzima Press, 1985), chapter 2.
32
chapter one
enough to take over as herdboy that Muoria, aged about twelve, felt
able to go to Leakey’s school. In April 1927 he was circumcised into the
ndege, or ‘bird’ age-set, the year in which an aeroplane was fi rst seen in central Kenya. In this he observed convention, taking a necessary step
towards maturity and manhood. Yet his observance was far from con-
ventional. He was not initiated with all customary ritual in the company
of his age-mates. Th
e then tiny minority of Christians—and Muoria
seems to have seen himself as one, although not yet baptised—thought
that much of the social and educational procedure of initiation was
embarrassingly obscene. He underwent the surgery but avoided the
celebration. His father was furious at this eccentricity, not so much
because it looked like cowardice but because it prevented a parade of
parental honour. Unsupported by his parents at school and longing for
the smart clothes appropriate to his circumcised status, Muoria’s next
attempt at independence was to get a labourer’s job in Nairobi. Find-
ing the racial indignities of manual labour in town insupportable he
returned to his rural school, maintaining himself by selling vegetables
at weekends in the Nairobi market.
Henry—as he now became, taking his name from powerful English
kings—was baptised in 1930 at the age of sixteen. Th
is was a tense
moment in the history of Kikuyu Christianity, when hard choices
had to be made. Probably no more than fi ve per cent of Kikuyu were
then ‘readers’, deeply suspect to their elders. Th
e protestants among
them were asked or even pressurised by their missionaries, to make
themselves more unpopular still, by opposing ‘female circumcision’
as it was then called, female genital mutilation as many term it today.
Catholic priests made no such demand, since they saw clitoridectomy as
a cultural matter on which Christianity was neutral. Henry was among
those who signed the kirore, ‘thumbprint’, petition. Th
is requested a
ban—at least with respect to the daughters of Christians—on the genital
surgery. Th
is had hitherto been integral to the initiation of adolescent
Kikuyu girls into the painful responsibilities of womanhood. Th
e peti-
tion called therefore for a radical change in domestic culture. It is not
clear if Henry made up his own mind to join what many thought was
a still more treacherous minority within the Christian minority, or if
his local church community gave him no option.57 Few of Muoria’s
Christian contemporaries felt able to take so bold a step or even saw its
57 I, Th
e Gikuyu, 35, is silent on the matter and memory was not clear.
henry muoria, public moralist
33
need. Most ‘readers’, along with Kikuyu generally, saw clitoridectomy
as an essential mark of sexual discipline, moral maturity, and household
obedience. It was seen to protect Kikuyu property rights, still under
threat from white settlement, and social discipline too, endangered by
youthful labour migration and the selfi sh pleasures of town. Angli-
can Kikuyu like Muoria were under less missionary pressure to sign
than were adherents of other Protestant missions. Young Henry may
therefore have followed his conscience but we cannot know that for
certain. Anglicans in Kiambu were sharply divided in their attitude to
clitoridectomy and the views of Reuben Karanja, the pastor to whom
Muoria was closest, are no longer known.58
Nor can it now be known how far the divisive, oft en physically aggres-
sive, local politics of female circumcision persuaded the youthful Muoria
to leave home and take his next step into the unknown. But in 1931,
at the height of the controversy, unable to aff ord further schooling but
avid for knowledge, he took himself off to the railway training school in
Nairobi. Th
ere he learned the morse code, the dot-and-dash language of
telegraphy. In all Kenya this was, next to teacher training, probably the
best training in responsibility then available to Africans. Th
e Railway
administration, seeking economies during the 1930s depression, was
increasingly employing Africans in jobs that had hitherto been reserved
to Asians on their higher, racially determined, pay scale. Henry was
appointed as signalman. He could aff ord to marry. He chose a rare
woman ‘reader’ from his home area, Elizabeth Th
ogori, who had been
at the Kabete mission’s girls school. Aft er a second training course he
58 Th
e ‘female circumcision crisis’ has generated a large literature. See, especially: Jocelyn Murray, ‘Th
e Kikuyu Female Circumcision Controversy, with Special Refer-
ence to the Church Missionary Society’s Sphere of Infl uence’, (University of California at Los Angeles PhD. dissertation, 1974); Charles Ambler, ‘Th
e Renovation of Custom
in Colonial Kenya: Th
e 1932 Generation Succession Ceremonies in Embu’, Journal of
African History 30 (1989), 139–56; Marshall S. Clough, Fighting Two Sides: Kenyan Chiefs and Politicians 1918–1940 (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1990), chapter 7; Susan Pedersen, ‘National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: Th
e Sexual Politics of Colonial
Policy-making’, Journal of Modern History 63, 4 (1991), 647–80; John Lonsdale, ‘Moral Economy of Mau Mau’, 388–95; Claire Robertson, Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men and Trade in the Nairobi Area 1890–1990 (Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1997), chapter 7; Lynn Th
omas, ‘Imperial Concerns and “Women’s Aff airs”: State Eff orts to
Regulate Clitoridectomy and Eradicate Abortion in Meru, Kenya, 1910–1950’, Journal of African History 39 (1988), 121–45; Karanja, Founding an African Faith, chapter 6; Peterson, Creative Writing, chapter 4; Bodil Folke Frederiksen, ‘Jomo Kenyatta, Marie Bonaparte and Bronislaw Malinowski on Clitoridectomy and Female Sexuality’, History Workshop Journal 65 (2008), 23–48.
34
chapter one
was promoted to be a railway guard. Its long and lonely hours at the
back of a train made it an ideal occupation for a young man with a
devouring appetite for self-education, now able to read in English.
Aft er the Second World War, and in his early thirties, Muoria aban-
doned dependent wage-labour for yet another adventure, as freelance
entrepreneur in the realm of words. Elisabeth left him, thinking him
mad to give up his secure, well-paid, job with the railway. Henry mar-
ried another, Judith Nyamurwa, better educated than he, who shared his
adventurous spirit. Together they epitomised the new age of national,
even international, awareness that was so exciting for young Africans
who aspired to be citizens of the world and so unnerving to colonial
Europeans who much preferred local natives. Muoria was then elected
assistant general secretary of the new nationalist congress, the KAU,
at
its second annual meeting, in Nairobi in 1946. His relations with his
fellow offi
cials were never particularly happy and he apparently never
read, before he signed, the KAU’s impressive memorandum to the
Secretary of State for the Colonies in August 1946.59
While helping to run KAU Muoria was at the same time a patriotic
Kikuyu, acting as secretary to his ndege, ‘aeroplane’, age-set association.
With more senior Kikuyu politicians he also helped to raise the funds
that brought Kenyatta home from Britain. In late 1946, aft er his return,
Kenyatta established himself at Githunguri college, apex of the Kikuyu
independent schools that had multiplied since 1929, and funded in part
by competition between Kikuyu age-sets.60 Muoria hoped to make a big
59 British National Archives (BNA, hitherto the Public Record Offi
ce or PRO), CO
533/537/38672, enclosure in No. 1: ‘Th
e Economical, Political, Educational, and Social
Aspects of the African in Kenya Colony’. Arthur Creech Jones, then parliamentary under-secretary of state for the colonies, minuted on 23 Sep. 1946 that the fi ft y-three page typescript was ‘a most interesting and important statement and some parts will call for a reasoned reply’. Th
ere is however no indication on the fi le that the KAU ever
received one. Muoria signed as one of the four-member KAU standing committee; the others were the president, James Gichuru; Joseph Otiende, vice-president; and Francis Khamisi, secretary. Th
irty-one district representatives also signed. Muoria, ‘How it
feels’, 98, for his failure to read the memorandum.
60 For independent churches and schools, see, F. B. Welbourn, East African Rebels: A study of some East African Independent Churches (London: SCM Press, 1961); Murray, ‘Kikuyu Female Circumcision Controversy’; idem, ‘Th
e Kikuyu Spirit Churches’,
Journal of Religion in Africa 5 (1974), 198–234: Philomena Njiri, ‘Th e Akurinu Churches:
A Study of the History and some of the Basic Beliefs of the Holy Ghost Church of East Africa 1926–1980’ (University of Nairobi, Religious Studies MA, 1984); Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below, 188–95; Th
eodore Natsoulas, ‘Th
e Rise and Fall of the Kikuyu
Karing’a Education Association of Kenya 1929–1952’, Journal of Asian & African Studies 23 (1988), 219–33; Francis K. Githeiya, ‘Th
e Church of the Holy Spirit’, chapter 11
henry muoria, public moralist
35
splash on behalf of his own by hiring an Auster light aeroplane, piloted
by a European, to fl y over the college on a sports day. Th
e British dis-
trict commissioner refused him permission. But Muoria was not easily
deterred from fresh adventures. ‘He whose crops have failed does not
stop planting.’ He built his stone house, he bought his Citroën car. He
continued his pamphleteering and popular journalism. And for this,
to consider now his place in the intellectual and political tradition of
modern Kikuyuland, the seed had been sown in 1939.
Th
e Kikuyu intellectual tradition
Shortly aft er he became a railway guard, Muoria had read Kenyatta’s
Facing Mount Kenya, one of the fi rst books to be published by a black Kenyan. Muoria was then on duty on the cold night run from the
highest station in the empire, Timboroa, to Eldoret, furthest point of
the Afrikaner trek from the poverty that had affl
icted South Africa at
the turn of the twentieth century in the aft ermath of the (second) Boer
War. It was at Eldoret, in 1939, that Muoria had ordered Kenyatta’s
book from a kindly Englishwoman, owner of a local bookshop. Reading
Kenyatta was a revelation. Muoria realised that Africans could write as
well as any white man.61 He thereupon decided to study journalism. He
subscribed to a correspondence course, one of the indisputable benefi ts
of empire, advertised in the East African Standard. Muoria then wrote his fi rst pamphlet, the one-hundred page What should we do, Our People? while working on the hottest sector of the railway, down to the Magadi soda works at the bottom of the Rift Valley. Published early in
1945, its sales at the Anglican missionary bookshop in Nairobi encour-
aged him to leave the railway and found his own Gikuyu-vernacular
newspaper, Mumenyereri, Th
e Guardian.
in Th
omas Spear & Isaria N. Kimambo (eds.), East African Expressions of Christianity (Oxford, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi & Athens OH: Currey, Mkuki na Nyota, EAEP & Ohio University Press, 1999), 231–43; James A. Wilson, ‘Th
e Untold Story: Kikuyu Christians,
Memories, and the Kikuyu Independent Schools Movement 1922–1962’, (Princeton
University, PhD. dissertation, 2002); Peterson, Creative Writing, chapter 6.
61 How far Kenyatta was solely responsible for the published text remains a matter for argument. Mbiyu Koinange told an English friend that he was the author (interview with Nora Williams in Hendon, north London, 22 July 1990); other candidates are Kenyatta’s close friend Dinah Stock, and David Goodfellow from South Africa, a fellow student at the London School of Economics.
36
chapter one
In editorials and further pamphlets Muoria developed conventional
Kikuyu thought in entirely new directions. Kikuyu were insistent that
human labour, self-disciplined sweat, was the means to wiathi or self-mastery—that is, a ‘straight’, fully accomplished, honourable, life that
deserved to be remembered by one’s heirs. It was an ideal held before
women as much as men. Such stern insistence was not surprising. In
a troubled late-nineteenth century many Kikuyu households had per-
ished, and lineages died out, thanks to drought, famine and smallpox.
Wealthier families, with wider investments in marriage and commer-
cial alliances, had the greater chance of survival. Th
eir persistence on
the land, their continuing ability to honour their forebears, not only
conferred the civic virtue of managing local aff airs but also proved
the unseen blessing of their ancestors. Kikuyu strove for such wealth
through household industry on land that had then been generally avail-
able to any man who proved himself a forceful leader, a reliable client,
or ‘diligent child’—as a favourite proverb reminded them. Since land
was thus accessible to all they had good reason to deplore poverty as
the mark of idle irresponsibility.
Kenyatta had discussed all this in Facing Mount Kenya. He had there-
fore stressed that colonialism’s chief sin was its destruction of ‘man-
hood’, in taking away from Africans the right to decide for themselves
how best to master themselves. But Kenyatta was not at all clear how
Kikuyu could retain their Kikuyu moral fi bre under modern condi-
tions. Muoria had far more confi dence on that score. His own experi-
ence silenced all conservative fears. He shared none of Kenyatta’s later
doubts about the compatibility of Christianity with Kikuyu materialism.
He also argued the Kikuyu need for democracy more eff ectively than
Kenyatta, and on diff erent grounds. Unlike Kenyatta he did not insist
on the need to respect one’s parents. Muoria also promoted the need for
a wider education, and set out the self-respecting duties of wage labour
whereas, in
Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta had been confused about
the moral worth of both. In all, Muoria’s well-read, but still organic,
moral thought added up to a formidable call for patriotic self-discipline
in precisely those modern fi elds of activity that Kenyatta feared would
lead to detribalisation, disrespect for tradition and, in consequence, the
destruction of one’s will to overcome life’s challenges.
It is vital to realise quite how radically Muoria departed from previous
Kikuyu political and moral philosophy. In that, too, he was a self-taught
man. Two diff erent schools of thought had preceded him between the
wars. Each had mobilised a collective version of Kikuyu history to resist
henry muoria, public moralist
37
colonial threats to their land, culture, and minds. While Muoria was
less interested in collective history than in individual responsibility, he
wrote two histories of the Kikuyu Central Association, as told him by
one of its offi
cials, George Kirongothi Ndegwa. Th
eir main message,
more confi dent than Kenyatta’s in Facing Mount Kenya, was that the
Kikuyu love of convincing argument, kihooto, enabled people to triumph over the ‘enslaving ideas’ of colonial subjection.62 But Muoria did not, as
Kenyatta would have done, draw on precolonial precedent to reinforce
this argument. He was a member of a generation perhaps beginning
to be ignorant of this earlier history—a history pre-eminently of land
settlement and entitlement that aft er the First World War became a
reproachful mirror to colonial expropriation and, therefore, a claim
for reparation. Muoria’s apparent lack of interest in the more distant
past perhaps also refl ected the fact that his household was not powerful
enough to exploit the claims of a laborious, sweated, history of ancestral
achievement. To the contrary, he lived at a time when more and more
Africans found themselves in situations for which history off ered little
guide. He was inspired, rather, by what he understood as the individually
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