inspiring core values of Kikuyu moral economy. He had picked these
up from his parents and friends. Th
ey were values that sustained the
human will in any context, no matter how threatening or new.
Th
e two preceding schools of Kikuyu thought may be called ‘dynastic’
and ‘generational’. Both translated a partisan self-interest—of lineage
descent or generational solidarity—into general principles of social
progress and renewal. Dynastic thought concentrated on legal matters
to do with patriarchal seniority, clan affi
liation, and property. Dynastic
time was linear; it recorded migration, settlement, alliance, and the
clearance or purchase of land. Generational thought focused on moral
claims to authority. Kikuyu believed that each successive generation
became stained with ill-will and jealousy, the inevitable companions of
competitive lineage investment in land, marriage, clientage, and trade.
Every so oft en, about every three decades, Kikuyu enacted ceremonial
62 H. Muoria, Th
e Kikuyu Spirit of Patriotism is for Victory (1947), amplifi ed in Our Victory does not Depend on the Force of Arms but on the Word of Truth (1948), both reproduced in Muoria’s translation in I, the Gikuyu, 124–36 and 137–47 respectively.
For Kenyatta’s own hunt for convincing argument see, Bruce Berman & John Lonsdale,
‘Custom, Modernity, and the Search for Kihooto: Kenyatta, Malinowski, & the Making of Facing Mount Kenya’, chapter 6 in Helen Tilley, with Robert J. Gordon, Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, & the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 173–98.
38
chapter one
transfers of ritual and judicial power called ituika, when a new generation, unscarred as yet by successful intrigue or embittered failure, bought
out the compromised authority of its elders. Generational thought was
therefore cyclical or recursive. Th
e two modes of thought, linear and
recursive, were intimately entwined in the daily experience of all. Th
e
saying, ‘One can never escape one’s lineage or age-set’ was a rueful
refl ection on life’s complexity. So too was the proverb ‘birds which land
together fl y up separately’. Members of the same age-set—like Muoria’s
ndege—might as young men enjoy each other’s company; aft er mar-
riage they would then compete in wealth, reputation and power, like
well-fed birds. While the two strands of Kikuyu moral thought were
thus interwoven one can nevertheless detect periods in which fi rst one
and then another was the more prominent.63
Th
e fi rst Kikuyu spokesmen and writers of the colonial age came
from the more powerful families and espoused dynastic thought. Th
ey
claimed to be as deserving of government favour as white settlers, since
Kikuyu had a civilising mission equal to Britain’s. Like their white
colonisers they could boast a propertied history of improving the land.
Th
ey cultivated demarcated, inter-cropped, hillsides—some of them irri-
gated—where their predecessors, the uncouth Okiek (Dorobo) people,
had merely hunted the untamed forests for honey, meat, and ivory. Th
e
agents of this Kikuyu civilisation were the tree-felling, hard-digging,
land-buying, peace-bringing lineages at the core of each of Kikuyuland’s
many hundreds of mbari or ‘sub-clan’ settlements. Mbari history was one of progress in agriculture and law, as forgetful as any nationalist
history of such inconvenient setbacks as famine and war. Early British
offi
cials out in the Kikuyu districts—but not their seniors in the central
offi
ces of government—had shown much sympathy with this dynastic
view of the past. Dynastic thought scored its greatest political success
in 1929 when Kikuyu elders gathered before a travelling land-tenure
committee of two British offi
cials and the palaeontologist Louis Leakey,
Giteru’s Kikuyu-born son. Having listened to the elders’ evidence for all of six and one-half days the committee had recommended the reg-istration of lineage, mbari, title to land as it was determined by male descent, at the expense of dependent clients and women. It looked as if
63 See further, Lonsdale, ‘Contests of Time’.
henry muoria, public moralist
39
Kikuyuland had been saved from white settler greed by its patriarchal
lineages and, therefore, for their benefi t.64
Dynastic history crashed in ruins, however, barely fi ve years later.
Th
e British government, hoping to silence Kenya’s maddening whine of
racial confl ict, appointed a land commission under Judge Morris Carter,
formerly of the Uganda high court, to settle the boundary between
white and black, once and for all. Th
is Kenya Land Commission took
evidence from offi
cials, settlers and Africans. It was sympathetic not
only to settler tales of pioneer eff ort on allegedly empty African lands
but also to progressive, expert, ideas of how smallholder mixed-farming
would increase African production and welfare under state-enforced
rules of good husbandry, all within the existing racial distribution of
land. Th
e commission therefore declared that mbari, dynastic, history
was not only unbelievable as a version of the Kikuyu past but also
irrelevant to Kenya’s land problems. New forms of land husbandry
were the key to the future, not the redistribution of land according to
the dictates of past history.
Carter had some reason for this harsh judgment. Th
e Kikuyu case
was fatally disputed between modest historical claims, pressed orally by
land elders appearing before the commission, and manifestly exagger-
ated ones submitted in print by their educated sons. Moreover, Okiek
witnesses stoutly maintained that it was more oft en by ‘force and chi-
canery’ than by honest purchase that Kikuyu had acquired their land.
Th
e Commission, accordingly, believed it was under no obligation to
restore the specifi c land that mbari spokesmen claimed was now under white-owned coff ee plantations—except in a very few cases like the
Church of Scotland mission estate in southern Kikuyuland that fea-
tures in the third of Muoria’s pamphlets reproduced in this volume.65
Otherwise Carter granted land to Kikuyu as a whole, as a general act of
compensation. But such land was available only because it was empty,
either too low, hot, and dry or too high, cold, and wet for smallholder
farming. Many Kikuyu later attributed the origins of Mau Mau to the
failure of their mbari elders, the dynasts, to achieve justice in the 1930s.
64 A Fiona D. Mackenzie, Land, Ecology and Resistance in Kenya 1880–1952 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 75–82.
65 See below, ‘Kenya is our Reconciler’, section headed ‘What Kenyatta Told the Kikuyu members of the Catholic Religion’.
40
chapter one
Less senior people must be allowed to take the political initiative, no
matter how much this off ended Kikuyu ideas of due order.66
Defeated dynastic histor
y had been largely oral. It was supplanted
by its rival, generational history, expressed increasingly in print. Th
e
fi rst athomi, ‘readers’, exploited the Kikuyu concept of restorative time and its appropriate social organisation, the candidate generation-set or
riika, in order to invest their self-interest with patriotic virtue, as the dynastic school of elders had done before them. During and aft er the
Great War—as Muoria was born—colonial time, Kikuyu, and Christian
time marched together in a dramatic conjuncture of disaster, confronta-
tion and hopes of renewal. Th
e Great War devoured Kikuyu manpower.
Th
ousands of porters were conscripted into the army’s Carrier Corps
to carry supplies for the long British campaign in German East Africa
(Tanzania). Many died, hungry and sick. Death even marked the end
of the war, with prolonged drought and a catastrophic local visita-
tion of the ‘Spanish’ infl uenza pandemic. Th
ose were the disasters of
colonialism. Th
e confrontation came between generations of Kikuyu.
A generational transfer of power, ituika, was becoming due, in which
junior elders challenged their seniors in a contest of virtue marked by
conspicuous sacrifi cial consumption. Th
e misery of the times certainly
suggested that a revival of ritual power was overdue.
But there was another goad to renewal: Christianity. White mission-
aries had had little success with Kikuyu in their decade of work before
1914. Th
e war, however, brought together two incentives to enter this
new ritual community in a moment of revelation. One was fortuitous,
the fi rst publication, in any large number, of vernacular Christian
gospels, over whose translation young Kikuyu had laboured for years
as language consultants to the missionaries. Harry Leakey, Muoria’s
teacher, was a particularly successful translator because he paid close
attention to Kikuyu advice.67 Many besides Muoria were intellectually
fascinated by the new literacy and sales of scripture boomed. Th
e second
attraction of Christian community came when scripture went to war.
White missionaries formed the Kikuyu Mission Volunteers, to forestall
the army’s intended conscription of their adherents, to join the many
thousands of unlettered Carriers who had been taken off to war before
them. Reverends became temporary gentlemen, offi
cers commanding
66 An argument made most cogently in Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below.
67 Karanja, Founding an African Faith, chapter 5.
henry muoria, public moralist
41
their former students, now military porters and hospital orderlies.
Unlike the massed ranks of the Carrier Corps, the Mission Volunteers
returned home with few casualties. Th
e saving grace of Christianity
could scarcely have asked for better proof.
By such means Christian time, enlightenment, became associated
with the generational version of Kikuyu time, renewal. Missionaries
permitted their young adherents to pay the goat-fees of ritual pro-
motion to their fathers, provided the beasts were eaten rather than
sacrifi ced. Athomi also struck out on their own, publishing the fi rst Kikuyu-owned vernacular newspaper. Its name Muigwithania, ‘Th
e
reconciler’, made explicit the link between Kikuyu and Christian time.
Muigwithania was an honorifi c title given to a persuasive elder, someone with enough authority to resolve local disputes, including those
between generations. In the pages of the Kikuyu New Testament Jesus
Christ had already been naturalised as Muigwithania, the mediator of
a new covenant between God and man. Moreover, his title of Saviour
was in Kikuyu derived from the cleansing or redemption of the land
that was anticipated when generations exchanged power at ituika. Th
e
Bible was as much Kikuyu as Christian, true to Christianity’s inherently
polyglot nature.68 Muigwithania’s fi rst editor, in 1928, was Johnstone Kenyatta, general secretary of the youthful Kikuyu Central Association (KCA). He was in his mid thirties, a few years older than Muoria
would be when he in his turn took to journalism. It was no accident
that when Muoria published a selection of Kenyatta’s speeches in 1947,
reproduced below, he did so under the title ‘Kenyatta is our Reconciler
(or Unifi er’). But Kenyatta was not to be the fi rst-published Christian
Kikuyu historian.
When Kenyatta, now Jomo not Johnstone, brought out his Facing
Mount Kenya ten years later, in 1938, he had been preceded by Parmenas Githendu Mukiri, an Anglican from central Kikuyu or Murang’a (the
colonial district of Fort Hall), and Stanley Kiama Gathigira, a Presby-
68 John Lonsdale, ‘ “Listen while I Read: Patriotic Christianity among the Young Kikuyu’, chapter 24 in Toyin Falola (ed.), Christianity and Social Change in Africa: Essays in Honor of J. D. Y. Peel (Durham NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), 563–93.
Th
e fi rst vernacular Kikuyu newspaper, Wathiomo Mukinyu or ‘Th
e True Friend’ had
fi rst appeared in 1916—but it was owned and edited by the Consolata Catholic Mission. For extracts from its pages: Edmondo Cavicchi, Problems of Change in Kikuyu Tribal Society (Bologna: EMI, 1977).
42
chapter one
terian from the northern district of Nyeri.69 In their books both had
focused, in the early 1930s, on the question of how to reconcile Kikuyu
custom with social change. Th
is was a vital issue for ‘readers’. Th
ey
wanted to persuade other Kikuyu of the truth of what they themselves
believed—that to be Christian and literate was the truest expression of
Kikuyu patriotism, the best form of generational renewal. Not only had
they become equal citizens of the wider, literate, world, as all patriots
must claim to be, but their literacy also—or so they wrote—made them
better able than their elders to reform Kikuyu morals from within. In
their correspondence with Muigwithania the readers’ printed words
could be read away down in Nairobi; elders could be heard only on
their own hillside. And it was in Nairobi, not in the Kikuyu ‘reserve’,
that the lost, potentially detribalised, souls of migrant male labourers
must be reclaimed no less than the bodies of Kikuyu women who sold
beans and, it was said, themselves, in city markets. Readers could advise
all Kikuyu, a new people; elders could admonish only their own kin
and neighbours, the people of old.70
Mukiri and Gathigira resolved the question of custom and change by
denying that the problem existed. For both, repeated renewal was the
very stuff of Kikuyu history. Change was customary. Previous ituika
had been revolutions. Each past generation had made its own history.
Th
eir own Christian generation was doing no more than its predeces-
sors. Christian education was a new way of Kikuyu renewal but fi rmly
in the tradition of ituika. Gathigira had less to say than Mukiri about ituika but his message was the same. Insofar as Kikuyu had anything
like a ‘government’ in the past, he said, it had lain in the executio
n of
elders’ judgments by young adult warriors—and as Christians never
tired of repeating, the pen was the spear of today, protective of prop-
erty and honour. Gathigira added that just as Kikuyu had learned new
farming techniques in the past, so too there was no shame in learning
agricultural and veterinary practice from white settlers now. For him
as for Mukiri the past gave youth the authority to adapt, to change.
Christianity and literacy were not foreign to the genius of Kikuyu his-
tory. Christians, as Muigwithania’s correspondents asserted, were rural 69 Mockerie, An African Speaks for his People; S. K. Gathigira, Miikarire ya AKikuyu (Church of Scotland Mission, 1934, reprinted by Scholars Press, Nairobi 1986). For translation of the latter I am indebted to James Njenga, research associate of Derek Peterson’s.
70 For the women’s side of the story see the sources in footnotes 34 and 46 above.
henry muoria, public moralist
43
pioneers of a new ituika, not, as their elders believed, urban prostitutes who were becoming chomba, strangers, detribalised Swahili.
By the late 1930s their contemporary Kenyatta no longer shared
their belief in Christianity’s patriotism. He knew both Mukiri and
Gathigira. Th
e former had accompanied him to London as the KCA’s
representative in 1930. Th
e latter was a local councillor, leader of the
Nyeri opposition to the KCA. For all their assurance that Christianity
was no betrayal, Mukiri anticipated a future in which Kikuyu culture
would be but a memory; and Gathigira openly admitted that while the
future must build on the past—his rationale for writing—the past had
many practices too shameful for him to record. In Kenyatta’s retro-
spective view, both had conceded too much both to modernity and to
their missionary tutors. Nobody, he argued in 1938, in Facing Mount
Kenya, could make responsible choices in their lives unless they were proud of their inheritance; how otherwise would one know what was
worth fi ghting for? Without a didactic past as one’s guide, all that could
be expected of anybody was unprincipled drift , a spineless laziness,
detribalisation.
Kenyatta was the more certain of this, not only because of the general
Kikuyu crisis over female circumcision in 1929–30 but because of two
further learning experiences that were peculiar to him. One had been
Writing for Kenya Page 8
