Writing for Kenya
Page 11
for Kikuyu who could not share Kenyatta and Muoria’s confi dence in
the possibility of the constitutional politics of hope. Desperation and
secrecy went together. Th
ey were the twin seed of Mau Mau. But with
secrecy there also grew mistrust, as much between Kikuyu themselves
as between Kikuyu and other Kenyans. To openly imagine a plural
nation was one thing, to secure a singular commitment to fi ght for the
liberation of a nation—but which one?—was quite another.
Muoria and Kenyatta in the 1940s speak to us across a gulf of des-
peration, violence, and the tumultuous politics of decolonisation that
95 See below, ‘Kenyatta is our Reconciler’, section headed ‘Kenyatta Speaks to the Kenya African Union’.
96 See below, ‘Kenyatta is our Reconciler’, sections headed ‘What Kenyatta Said to the Akamba Tribe at Machakos’ and ‘Kenyatta’s Speech to the Nyeri District Council’.
97 Th
e Reverend John Gatu, briefl y Muoria’s assistant editor, remembers him as
publishing anything submitted to Mumenyereri, without much concern for content (in conversation at Cambridge, 25 April 2008). See also, Corfi eld Report, 196; Muoria, I, the Gikuyu, chapters 14 and 16; Frederiksen, ‘ “Th
e Present Battle” ’, 288–99.
56
chapter one
then remade a governable Kenya. Far from invalidating their thought,
Kenya’s subsequent history makes it all the more important to listen
to Kenyatta’s caution as much as to Muoria’s enthusiasm. Both the era
and the men need to be remembered. Muoria trusted in the power of
individual will to bring political progress, Kenyatta was more aware of
the collective diffi
culties that stood in the way. Private determination
and political discretion are not bad partners for restoring a politics of
hope.
henry muoria, public moralist
57
1. Henry Muoria (second right) and friends, early 1930s
58
chapter one
riend
d fn
rm, ao
ys unif
waail
n R
rica
ast Af
ria in his Eou
y M
enrH
2.
CHAPTER TWO
THE MUORIAS IN KENYA:
‘A VERY LONG CHAIN.’ AN ESSAY IN FAMILY BIOGRAPHY
Bodil Folke Frederiksen
Introduction
In September 1952 Henry Muoria (1914–1997), a Kenyan newspaper
owner, journalist and writer, travelled to London on what was meant
to be a visit. He left his wives and children behind: one branch in rural
Kiambu, one in the colonial capital, Nairobi. Muoria was an active and
well-known fi gure in the increasingly militant nationalist politics, and
the state of emergency in Kenya, declared a few weeks later, prevented
him from returning to his home country. Th
e government closed down
his profi table and widely read Gikuyu-language newspaper, Mumenye-
reri, and arrested and detained his wife, Judith, who had taken over as the temporary editor of the newspaper. With her young child she was
interned in one of the quickly erected detention camps.
When he left for London, Muoria was an established writer and oppo-
sitional political fi gure in Kenya. His newspaper, Mumenyereri came
out regularly for seven years—between 1945 and 1952. It reported on
international and national news, debated ideologies, everyday politics
and social issues, and published a number of Jomo Kenyatta’s speeches
following his return from Britain in 1946. Mumenyereri was one of
a group of nationalist papers, and because of its regular appearance
and well-established network, especially in southern Kikuyuland, it
was infl uential as a platform for Kikuyu and broader nationalist senti-
ment and closely watched by the authorities. Muoria wrote features,
editorials and news reports for his newspaper. In the 1940s and early
1950s he translated pamphlets on social issues from Swahili and Eng-
lish into his mother tongue, and, himself, wrote political and didactic
essays in Gikuyu, which were published as booklets. Th
ree of them are
reproduced in this volume in their original Gikuyu versions and in
annotated English translations: What Should We Do, Our People from
1945 is a long essay on politics, morality and everyday life in modern
60
chapter two
Kenya. Th
e Home Coming of Our Great Hero Jomo Kenyatta is a lively,
step-by-step account of Kenyatta’s reception by his fellow Africans in
Mombasa where he landed on the ship Alcantara on September 24,
1946. It goes on to report his words in conversations and speeches over
the next days. Kenyatta is Our Reconciler from 1947 is a collection of Kenyatta’s political speeches in Nairobi and Kikuyuland with Muoria’s
refl ections on context, setting and audiences.
In 1954 Muoria persuaded his third wife Ruth, the mother of fi ve
children, to join him in England. Th
e couple settled in modest rented
rooms in north London. She had to leave her children behind in the
care of her mother, Grace. A son died before she left , and she left behind
their three daughters and a daughter from her previous marriage—a
painful sacrifi ce that has thrown shadows over the couple’s married life
and the lives of wives and children who remained in Kenya. In Britain
Muoria was not able to fi nd work as a journalist but he did not stop
writing. His writings took a new turn. Over and over, he recounted the
story of his childhood, when he straddled the world of traditionalist
Kikuyu rural life and mission modernity. He told of his early youth as
a labourer, his marriages and his training and work for the railways,
which took him far away from his known surroundings in Kikuyuland
and Nairobi. He kept up his interest in politics, philosophy and morals
and wrote long essays and semi-fi ctional novel-length tales in his Lon-
don attic, now in English, meant for publication in the U.K. In order to
make a living and support his family, he returned to his fi rst profession
and worked as a train guard on the London Underground.
Although Muoria wished to, he never managed to go back to Kenya
to live. Th
e journey from his homeland, deep in the struggle for inde-
pendence, to permanent exile in the imperial nation was decisive in the
fashioning of the Muoria family history. Th
e exile of Ruth and Henry
Muoria aff ected all branches of the extended polygamous family. Th
e
outcome was a far-fl ung family, consisting of several clans, spread over
London, Nairobi and rural Kikuyuland.
Like other families the Muoria clan has been shaped and sustained
by the stories members tell of themselves in dialogue with those told
by others. Certain foundational myths of beginnings, breaks, loss and
reunion, acted out by protagonists, enemies and helpers, have been told
in agreement. Other stories, branching off from the core versions, have
been contested and modifi ed according to the narrator’s personality, age
and gender and pos
ition within the family and in society more broadly.
Th
e story of the Kenyan nationalist Henry Muoria and his extended
the muorias in kenya
61
family, as told by diff erently situated members, is a story of loss and
recovery. Some family members have emphasized loss—others recount
their version of the family story in the light of eventual recovery.
Muoria’s enemies were colonialism and racism, embodied in the Brit-
ish regime. At the time of his departure, it was in a panic over African
nationalism and resistance, which had crystallized into the Mau Mau
movement. His immediate helper was Moral Rearmament, a movement
that in this period supported African business and political leaders. Th
e
organisation helped him pay the ticket to Europe. Muoria’s long-time
helpers were his wives, Elizabeth, Judith and Ruth, and the previous
generation of women, Judith’s and Ruth’s mothers. Together, they took
care of the family’s children, fi nances and property in Kenya aft er he
had left . What enabled him more broadly was African resistance against
colonialism and his own success as a publicist and newspaper editor,
embedded in patriotism and African political organisation.
Th
e early story of Henry Muoria resonates with that of his twenty-
year-older mentor Jomo Kenyatta. In their interpretation of family
history, Muoria’s surviving wife Ruth, his children and his grandchil-
dren constantly referred to the friendship between the two men and
marvelled at parallels and at their very diff erent fates. Both men began
their working lives as herdboys in the southern part of Kikuyuland, not
far from Nairobi, and were driven to the city by curiosity and poverty.
Th
ey were mission-educated moralists and Kikuyu cultural proponents.
Th
ey were polygamous patriarchs and married highly independent
and gift ed women. Both were ambitious and energetic entrepreneurs
and writing was one of their enterprises. Th
ey authored and published
Gikuyu newspapers and perfected their writing skills in Britain. Th
ey
devoted their writing to a critical celebration of African and Kikuyu
culture and to the liberation of their country from the degrading British
colonialism. Kenyatta’s account of Kikuyu history and customs, Facing
Mount Kenya (1938), written as a student of anthropology at London
School of Economics under the tutelage of Bronislaw Malinowski, is a
foundational text of modern anthropology and a manifesto of Kikuyu
cultural nationalism. Muoria’s writings on politics, philosophy and
everyday morals, emerging out of Kikuyu and African political culture
and resistance ten years later, deserve to be better known.
62
chapter two
Background and approach
Th
is essay will stitch together a history of the Kenyan branch of the
Muoria family, beginning with Henry Muoria himself and continuing
with those who were left behind when he travelled. Th
e master narrative
is that of a remarkable man whose favourite proverb was ‘an unspo-
ken word convinces no one’, who believed that truth would always be
victorious and that writers and journalists no matter where they found
themselves had a duty to tell the story. In order to capture both the
social environment that made Muoria’s thinking and career possible
and his unique independence two routes will be pursued: the dramatic
story of Muoria himself who dedicated his life to writing and politics,
but learned to cook and make clothes for his children and invented new
livelihoods in exile, when times were tough. And the no less dramatic
story of the family’s women, several of whom shared Muoria’s intel-
lectual and political pursuits, and who all struggled during a danger-
ous and changeable period in Kenya’s history to get along and make
meaningful and secure lives for themselves and their children. As it will
turn out, unsurprisingly perhaps, the ties and networks that have kept
together generations and sub-clans have been craft ed by women more
than by men. Muoria’s freedom of movement and political infl uence,
like that of other powerful men, depended on the skills and labour of
resourceful women. Th
e story’s time span is from the end of World
War I to the present. Th
e account is necessarily selective. It is refracted
primarily through the memories and refl ections of Muoria himself, his
widow Ruth who joined him in London and started a new family there,
their London-born daughter Wangari, and the accounts of several of his
daughters and sons and grandchildren who stayed behind in Kenya.
In 1995 I was in Kenya, gathering material on urban livelihoods and
popular culture in African Nairobi. I was based at the old Anglican
Church Mission Society Centre—now St. John’s Community Centre—in
Pumwani, a poor area of the city. Here, I got to know two local young
men, then in their mid-twenties, George Muoria and Julius Mwaniki,
who became friends and helped me in my work. Th
ey were the grand-
sons of Henry and Ruth Muoria, as I found out when I was invited to
their near-by home, met their mother Christine and saw a photograph
of Henry Muoria’s characteristic smiling face on the wall. I knew about
the muorias in kenya
63
the career of this Kenyan journalist from John Lonsdale’s ‘Th
e Moral
Economy of Mau Mau’.1
Th
ese young men and their mother took me by the hand and invited
me into the family. Th
ey were part of the widely dispersed Nairobi
Muorias—Henry and Ruth’s four daughters who grew up in Kenya, and
their children and grandchildren. Th
ey were the fi rst to tell me about
the extraordinary fate of this gift ed Kenyan family. Th
ey were keen
to talk about their grandfather, who was well known locally, and they
always did so in the light of the infl uence his life and ideas had on the
whole family. Th
ey told me that the extended family—as constituted by
livelihood opportunities, political events and pure chance—consisted
of three clans: the rural clan in Kiambu, sons and daughters of Henry
and his fi rst wives, Elizabeth and Judith, and their spouses and children;
the clan in London, made up of Ruth and Henry himself and their
London-born children and grandchildren; and fi nally their own clan,
the Nairobi Muorias, daughters and grandchildren of Ruth and Henry.
Socially and economically the three sections of the family seemed far
apart, but no matter where, family members identifi ed strongly with
the Muoria mbari.2
At the time I was struck by the thought that the conditions in which
the two young men had grown up and now live in independent Kenya
may in several respects be more restricted than those in which their
parents and grandparents had found themselves. I was interested in
fi nding out whether their grandf
ather’s private and public political and
social ideals had any relevance for a generation of Kenyans born aft er the
country’s independence. George and Julius are talented, well educated
and keen to work, but they share the hardships of contemporary urban
living with millions of young Africans, who, aft er having left school,
have great diffi
culties in fi nding work and a social role for themselves.
Growing up and living in an urban slum, as they do, means exposure
to unhealthy surroundings, crime and insecurity, few economic oppor-
tunities, political instability and harassment from the authorities, but
also support from networks of family, neighbours and age mates.
1 Bruce Berman & John Lonsdale Unhappy Valley: Confl ict in Kenya and Africa, Book Two, Violence & Ethnicity. (London, Nairobi & Athens OH: James Currey, Heinemann Kenya & Ohio University Press, 1992).
2 A mbari is a landowning sub-clan. It may be used more loosely about an extended family.
64
chapter two
However, in spite of these beginnings, my research into the history
and the present realities of the family in Kenya has had more to do
with the question of what constitutes a family than with deprivation
and economic diff erentiation. How did members imagine the family
in a situation in which historical circumstances meant that it had been
radically divided in terms of space and ‘culture’? What unites and
what divides? Are boundaries between nations easier to negotiate than
those between town and countryside? Which traits did they think of
as characteristic of their family and clan? And what has it meant for
the Muorias in Kenya to lose to exile a wonderfully alive and forward
looking husband, father and grandfather, and a high spirited, tolerant
and warmhearted mother and grandmother? Th
e nation of Kenya also
lost out. Why did Henry Muoria not return to the independent Kenya
he and his families had fought and made sacrifi ces for?
Th
ese questions emerged early in the research process as a result of
dialogue with family members. I address them in the form of an essay
and not in a fully-fl edged generational biography, which the history of
this family might well deserve. Th
e questions have organized the pro-
cess of collecting material, directing my attention to key persons in the
family network. In interviews they were asked to refl ect on themes of