of envy, that they took the lead in nationalist politics.
But universal suff rage does not seem to have entered Muoria’s head.
Th
at can only be an inference from what he said about social inequality,
wisdom and ignorance, since he never had to face the question of the
franchise directly: it was not on off er to Africans in Kenya for another
decade. But one can pick up more of his social thought in looking at
what he had to say about the world of work. His ideas on wage workers
came, like others of his refl ections, from Plato; and perhaps too from
St Paul. His own career was also a good example of the case he argued.
Just as men must work, he maintained, so too must nations—and the
larger the nation the better its work. It could the more easily divide
its labour, just as human beings had diff erent limbs and organs.83 Th
e
81 Muoria, ‘What Should we do?’ idem, editorial, Mumenyereri, 21 June 1948: KNA, MAA.8/106.
82 Muoria, ‘Th
e goodness and help of meetings: meetings are more important to us
than to other African tribes’, Mumenyereri, 26 Jan. 1948. Kenyatta never carried his own argument about Kikuyu traders this far: see below, ‘Kenyatta is our Reconciler’, section headed ‘How to Conduct our Trade’.
83 See St Paul, I Corinthians 12: 14–26—a more likely source than Adam Smith.
50
chapter one
more people performed the tasks for which they were best suited the
more Kikuyu would prosper. Politics would give them the capacity to
coordinate their various limbs, another argument for more freedoms.
But politics was hard work. An idler was ‘an invalid as far as the aff airs
of his nation are concerned.’84 Nor was landlessness any excuse. Not
all Kikuyu could expect to farm their own land. Here too Muoria took
a totally diff erent line to Kenyatta, whom he reported as saying that
Kikuyu had the capacity to progress precisely because all enjoyed the
natural authority of landownership; they did not know the kind of
proletarian poverty he had seen in Europe.85
Kenyatta was myth-making for political ends. Muoria was more
realistic. Contradicting all that Kikuyu had written previously on the
subject, he argued for the dignity of wage-labour. His predecessors had
thought that labour had value only when working in and for one’s own
household. To work for others had been thought irresponsible, humili-
ating, and yet also a selfi sh neglect of one’s proper duty to build social
relations within one’s locality. Muoria urged, rather, that in working
for others Kikuyu must hear the same call to exercise responsibility as
if they were herding their own livestock. Th
ey should love paid labour
and not hate their employer, white or black. If they were poor, he urged
again and again, it was because they were lazy.86 His fi rst reaction to
trades unionism, when it emerged out of the Mombasa dock-strike of
January 1947, was entirely consistent. He thought that unionism was
an essential discipline in an otherwise disorderly workforce. Workers
must obey their leaders when, aft er successful negotiation, the latter
ordered them back to work. Negotiation was not collaboration. It fol-
lowed mature, proverbial, Kikuyu wisdom. Compromise preserved a
historically fragile social existence against the ever-present threat of
extinction.87
Here at last, in his disapproval of worker militancy, we fi nd a point
on which Muoria agreed with Kenyatta, the leader whose words he
reported with such care aft er the latter’s return from his long absence—it
84 Muoria, Life is War by Action.
85 See below, ‘Kenyatta is our Reconciler’, section headed ‘Kenyatta’s Words at Waithaka School: “We are not Poor People” ’. For the general lore of African respectability on which Kenyatta drew see, John Iliff e, Honour in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 14.
86 Muoria, ‘What Should we Do?’
87 Editorial, Mumenyereri, 1 Feb. 1947. KNA, PC/RVP.2/27/34.
henry muoria, public moralist
51
can scarcely be called exile—in England.88 But it has been necessary to
explore Henry Muoria Mwaniki’s vigorous moral approach to future
opportunity in order to appreciate the political caution with which his
returning hero, Jomo Kenyatta, faced future challenge.
Kenyatta and the imagination of nation(s)
Henry Muoria’s is the only fi rst-hand account we have of Kenyatta’s
return to Kenya in September 1946 and his fi rst public engagements
thereaft er. It is a period of Kenyatta’s political life that is not well
known. Yet it is clearly of vital importance for one’s understanding of
Kenyatta the man and Kenya’s early nationalism as a movement. Th
is
new edition of Muoria’s record of Kenyatta’s return not only gives us a
chance to join the eager listeners who crowded around him at the time
but also to appreciate how carefully Kenyatta had to feel his way back
into Kenya’s political life aft er an absence of sixteen years.89
Muoria’s accounts make Kenyatta’s difficulties clear from the
start. He had unrealistic expectations to rebuff , diff erent audiences
to please—each with barely compatible political interests, without an
agreed sense of who they were or wanted to become, and of whom the
most important—the Kikuyu elders—were also the most suspicious of
Kenyatta’s educated ambition and his political methods. To imagine
any nationhood, either Kikuyu or Kenyan, under such circumstances
was not going to be easy.
88 For Kenyatta’s preference for orderly trades unionism, as opposed to strike action see, Rosberg & Nottingham, Myth, 267; Makhan Singh, History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement to 1952 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969), 158; Spencer, KAU, 172; Askwith, From Mau Mau to Harambee, 47–8.
89 Th
ere are in fact two other eye-witness accounts, but they were recorded long
aft er the event and are not easily available. See, John Spencer, James Beauttah: Freedom Fighter (Nairobi: Stellascope, 1983), 69–73; Eliud Mutonyi, ‘Mau Mau Chairman’
(307pp typescript, Nairobi, c. 1968), 72–3. Copy in the possession of John Lonsdale, courtesy of Robert Buijtenhuijs. For secondary accounts, some of which make use of reportage in the semi-offi
cial Swahili-language newspaper Baraza, see, Rosberg &
Nottingham, Myth of ‘Mau Mau’, 215–17; Spencer, KAU, 164–84; Murray-Brown, Kenyatta), 227–45; Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below, 199–201. For two European eye-witnesses of Kenyatta and his times more generally see Elspeth Huxley, Th e Sorcerer’s
Apprentice: A Journey through East Africa (London: Chatto & Windus, [1948], 1956), 56–61; Negley Farson, Last Chance in Africa (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950) chapter XI, ‘Jomo and his Kingdom’.
52
chapter one
Th
e Mombasa crowds’ excitement certainly showed that much was
expected of Kenyatta, the man returning from the heart of empire. He
himself took care to respond that the fate of his well-wishers lay in
their own hands, not in his. Neither magic nor atom bomb could bring
about political change. Mature eff ort was needed for that—a sentiment
with which Mu
oria was naturally delighted to agree. Given the choice
between English and Swahili, the crowd demanded that Kenyatta speak
to them in Swahili, the workers’, not the rulers’ tongue. But who were
the workers? Were they Kenyans? Th
e dockers in Mombasa were very
largely local people, Swahili-speakers, Muslims. Elsewhere in the town
upcountry migrants were more prominent, mainly Kikuyu and Luo,
and oft en adherents of Christian churches.90
While, therefore, many diff erent ethnic associations in Mombasa
provided hospitality, and women were accorded a prominent role, the
chief organisers of the welcome were all leading men of the Kikuyu
Central Association. Th
ey had been released from wartime detention
in the previous year but the KCA was still a banned organisation, sus-
pected of having contacted the Italian enemy at the beginning of the
Second World War, on evidence provided by Canon Harry Leakey’s
palaeontologist son Louis.91 Th
e KCA’s leaders thought it more impor-
tant for Kenyatta to get their ethnic association legalised than for him
to lead a pan-ethnic confederation, despite Kenyatta’s exhortation that
Africans should no longer think in tribal terms but take pride in their
common black skin—and common human brains. Moreover, Muoria
reported events in Kikuyu, not in Swahili, and in his preface, deplored
any Kikuyu who became detribalised, an undiff erentiated Swahili, a term
of disgrace. As if to echo this sentiment, Kenyatta’s own preface was
addressed to the House of Muumbi, the mother of all Kikuyu according
to the myth of ethnogenesis he had narrated in his book, Facing Mount
Kenya. He could off er no similarly primordial vision of a House of
Kenya, no myth of national-territorial genesis. In his second pamphlet,
Kenyatta is our Reconciler, Muoria would praise Kenyatta’s ability to speak with equal sympathy to many diff erent audiences, African and
90 Frederick Cooper, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 28–9, 39–41, 69–71, 80, 244–5.
91 Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, ‘Louis Leakey’s Mau Mau: A Study in the
Politics of Knowledge’, History and Anthropology 5 (1991), 143–204.
henry muoria, public moralist
53
Asian, but many years would pass before Kenyatta became known as
the father of the Kenyan nation.
Kenyatta faced a further diffi
culty, not noticed by Muoria. He would
soon forfeit the trust of many of the Kikuyu elders whose support he
needed above all. Th
ey came to feel that some of his younger associates
were trying to hustle Kikuyu into an ethnic unity that would usurp the
particularistic self-determination which was proper to lineage seniors.
Lineages were numbered in their thousands; each lineage head owed
his authority to his inherited responsibility for increasingly fi ercely
demarcated ancestral land. In one of the fi rst speeches reported by
Muoria, Kenyatta spoke as if the soil united Kikuyu. He must have
known better than that. Trusteeship for the land did not unite Kikuyu.
It divided them by confl icting claims to ownership, it separated them
between owners and clients, landed authorities and landless nobodies.92
Kenyatta was letting his imagination of nationhood run away with him,
but his Kikuyu nation’s natural leaders would have none of it.
Muoria then followed as many of Kenyatta’s week-end speaking
engagements as possible before bringing out his twenty-eight page, one
shilling pamphlet, Kenyatta ni Muigwithania Witu ( Kenyatta is our Reconciler). In this he recorded eleven speeches in four months. In this post-war era of hope Kenyatta was clearly much in demand, despite his
constant repetition of only three simple themes. Th
ese were, the need
to respect one’s father and mother, tradition; the need, therefore, to
respect the diff erences between the various peoples of African Kenya,
even multi-racial Kenya; and the requirement, therefore, for a true
education that did not uncritically accept the superiority of the whites
who taught it. All these views could have been quoted, more or less
verbatim, from the pages of Facing Mount Kenya, published almost a
decade earlier. All, therefore, betrayed what to many would have seemed
a conservative cast of mind, with little to say to the growing number of
Africans, Kikuyu especially, deprived of access to land and with little
hope of skilled employment in town. Nor could Kenyatta yet be said
to have anything approaching a political programme. As with Muoria,
public morality came fi rst.
Kenyatta’s most oft en-repeated theme, found in no less than ten of
his speeches, was the importance of ethnic loyalty, the best moral com-
pass one could imagine, the sternest encouragement to self-disciplined
92 For this last point see, Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below, especially 199–201.
54
chapter one
eff ort, supported as it was by the authority that came from ownership
of the soil. Detribalisation could only mean a loss of purpose, perhaps
the central message of his earlier book. Self-determination had to be
rooted in propertied, rural, cultural confi dence. It was not to be found
in urban cosmopolitanism. Kenyatta had no message of comfort to
landless workers in Nairobi. Th
e consequence of this view, secondly,
was that all Kenyans should respect each others’ cultural diff erences.
Only mutual respect would permit them to agree together—a senti-
ment he expressed most lyrically when speaking to a transport-drivers
association composed of both Kikuyu and Kamba members.93 Th
is
was a problem that Muoria the pamphleteer had never faced. But to
Kenyatta it was only too obvious that there was no single Kenyan moral
community on which to build a political movement, let alone found a
sovereign nation. Th
e only requisites for political unity that he could
demand therefore were equality of respect between the races and tribes
that constituted the colony, equality before the law, and a refusal to
humiliate others in return for political favours. Self-determination was
at odds with cultural unity in any future nation. In advocating such
cultural relativity Kenyatta may also have been consciously promoting
his own leadership. Th
anks to his travels overseas he could claim more
comparative knowledge than his listeners of what other people thought,
while weighing it against what Kikuyu tradition had taught him.94 Such
globally aware patriotism was a demonstration of the self-respect that
he preached. One should value other people’s learning only insofar as
it reinforced and enlarged one’s own.
In this assertion Kenyatta was also, implicitly, distancing himself
from the common run of educated Africans. Th
ese, it was popularly
supposed—and he adopted this perspective as his third theme—despised
the uneducated masses whom they purported to lead, and were too oft en
seduced by the whites
whom they were expected to oppose. Educated
men were too proud to be comfortable with their followers, too insecure
to stand up to the British. Th
ey had lost all pride in tradition, and, a
subsidiary criticism, were too oft en divided by their church denomi-
nation. It was a mark of his political courage that Kenyatta was most
damning in such criticism when speaking to members of the Kenya
93 See below, ‘Kenyatta is our Reconciler’, section headed ‘What Kenyatta Said to the Akamba Tribe at Machakos’.
94 See below, ‘Kenyatta is our Reconciler’, section headed ‘Kenyatta’s Main Speech to the Kikuyu Tribe at the Home of Koinange’.
henry muoria, public moralist
55
African Union, months before he was elected their president.95 But it
was also a mark of how diffi
cult it was to imagine a Kenyan nation.
Such coherence as ‘Kenya’ possessed it owed to the shared experience
of British conquest and colonisation. Such ability as Kenyans might
possess to control the state that had created them could come only
from mastery of the coloniser’s skills.
But with European skills came European divisions, the diff erent
Christian denominations that, like weevils in the grainstore, ate away
at Kikuyu unity. Here was a political conundrum indeed. It is not dif-
fi cult to detect a note of despair in much of what Kenyatta had to say.
What he said he most hated was factional intrigue, which encouraged
secrecy between Africans and earned the contempt of the British. It is
noticeable that in the last two speeches that Muoria has recorded for
us, Kenyatta stressed the need to speak openly, to confront the British
with uncomfortable truths.96 One wonders if he was even at this early
stage aware of the dangers of political ambition going underground;
it may also, perhaps, suggest a degree of impatience with his old col-
leagues in the banned KCA.
In his journalism Muoria continued to take the same view. He
seems to have published every letter that was sent to him as editor of
Mumenyereri, exercising little editorial control. Th
is laxity cost him
several scrapes with the British authorities, who were never quite able to
press home a charge of sedition.97 But speaking openly was impossible
Writing for Kenya Page 10
