identity, family and clan, division and cohesion, separation and home.
Some of Muoria’s daughters and grandchildren wrote down what they
wanted to say and parts of their accounts are included in the essay. Th
is
material is supplemented with stories of Muoria’s life and that of his
family from his autobiographical writings,3 and features and interviews
in Kenyan newspapers. Some members of the family have read earlier
versions of the narrative and let me know their interpretations and
disagreements, but also their appreciation that Henry Muoria would
be remembered.4
3 Th
e most important are Th
e Inquisitive Karamando Gets Work in London (1954)
revised in 1970, unpublished typescript, privately held; How it Feels to be Born a Kikuyu (1955), revised 1987, unpublished typescript, privately held; Th e British and
my Kikuyu Tribe (1982), unpublished manuscript. Kenya National Archives (KNA): 85–498/325.34109626 MUO; I, Th
e Gikuyu and the White Fury (Nairobi: East African
Educational Publishers, 1994).
4 I am deeply grateful to Ruth Muoria, Wangari Muoria-Sal, Peter Mwaniki, Julius Mwaniki, George Muoria and other members of the Muoria family in Britain, Kenya and the United States who have been more than generous with their stories, interpretations and hospitality.
the muorias in kenya
65
Th
e essay opens up by giving an account of Muoria’s early days, his
youth, his marriages and working life. Th
en follows the story of his third
wife, Ruth, as an illumination of the role of the women in his family,
their history and resilience. She is a third generation urbanite, belonging
to a lineage of independent women who established themselves in the
changing social and economic environment of the Nairobi neighbour-
hood of Pumwani, from the 1920s onwards. Th
is part of the story is
based on interviews with Ruth and her daughters and grandchildren in
Kenya. In the next sections daughters of Henry and Judith and Henry
and Ruth, his second and third wives, tell about their upbringing, one
branch in Nairobi, the other in rural Kiambu, and discuss issues of
identity. Finally, the word is given to groups of grandchildren: David,
Patrick and Julius refl ect on the role of women in the Muoria family,
and on what it means to be a Kenyan and a descendant of a highly
respected national fi gure. Th
eir cousins, two sisters, Nuna and Terry,
born and raised in Nairobi and resident in the United States, discuss
identity, home and exile. And Alex Muoria, a grandson of Henry and
his fi rst wife Elizabeth, who has stayed in the rural family home in
Nyathuna and carries on with the agriculture that has sustained the
family for so long, tells of the pleasures and diffi
culties of being a Muoria
grandson and cultivating a farm. Together, the diff erent voices express
the mixture of pride and loss which marks the history and present
situation of the Muoria family.
Henry Muoria—early life, literacy, marriages and career
Muoria wa Mwaniki was born in 1914 to what he calls an ‘ordinary
Kikuyu couple’ Mwaniki wa Muoria and Wambui wa Mbari.5 His
grandfather, the founder of the Muoria mbari, established himself with his two wives and children on the fertile lands near Kabete in Kenya’s
Central Province. His son Mwaniki, Henry’s father, worked with electri-
cal installations for ‘white people’ in Nairobi, and only returned home
to his family and land during weekends. Lillian Gathoni, Muoria’s sister,
5 His daughter Wangari tells, ‘Upon questioning his mother about his precise age, he was told that there were many planes fl ying and men were taken away to fi ght in the war. He deduced that he must have been born during the First World War, around 1914. As to the date it always remained a mystery as there was no written record’.
Interview, London, July 2000.
66
chapter two
tells that until their mother converted to Christianity and started going
to Church their parents would not let Henry go to school, ‘we used to
do as we were told by our mother.’ Both children worked around the
farm and were quite happy, ‘we wanted to be where we could feel at
home—among cows and goats.’6 Muoria, however, pursued his plan of
learning to read and write, fi rst in Gikuyu, and managed to get himself
to evening classes at Kirangari, the Anglican mission, where he learned
English. Two years later, when his younger brother was old enough to
look aft er the cattle, Henry entered day school. Conversion and literacy
were two sides of the same coin, and in 1930 the famous Canon Harry
Leakey, one of the pioneers of Kikuyu literacy and a translator of Th
e
New Testament into Gikuyu, baptised Muoria who was now sixteen.
Th
is was how he got the name Henry. Instead of becoming a mundu
mugo, a traditional Kikuyu seer and wise man, as had been prophesied
at his birth, he was ‘converted to Christianity . . . through his great desire to know how to read and write.’7
Muoria was one of a very small number of African children in the
British Kenya Colony who was in a position to seize the chance of
entering the world of reading and writing, and he was able to do so
only aft er overcoming resistance from his surroundings. He ended fi ve
years of schooling with the so-called ‘vernacular exam’. Aft er that he
interrupted school briefl y and found work in Nairobi with an Indian
plumber’s fi rm. He left his urban job aft er having suff ered the indignity of being slapped by his Asian employer for a small mistake. He now
joined the East African Railways as a trainee telegrapher. He was given
work as a guard on trains crisscrossing Kenya Colony. Around this time
he met Elizabeth Th
ogori who was to become his fi rst wife. She was a
student at the Anglican Mission in Kabete, close to Nairobi, where she
was learning knitting and tailoring. Th
ey celebrated a church wedding
in 1932 aft er Muoria had been transferred to Voi, a desolate station
on the railway line to Mombasa. A year later their fi rst son was born,
and in the same year Henry’s father died. Henry was transferred to
Athi, south east of Nairobi, arid and deserted, and worked as an assis-
tant station-master for three years. In 1935 Th
e East African Railways
off ered him a place at their training school for further education, and
aft er he had fi nished he was sent to Eldoret in Western Kenya. His
6 Interview, Kiambu, October 2000.
7 Th
e British and my Kikuyu Tribe, 8.
the muorias in kenya
67
work with the railways took him far away from his home area and the
nationalist and regional politics he was becoming involved in. In 1942,
saddened by the loss of a baby daughter and pining for home, he asked
for and was granted a transfer to Nairobi. Th
is meant that he was back
in more familiar country, ‘among his tribespeople’, as he wrote in his
autobiographical account.8 He settled on the Muoria land in Nyathuna,
Kiambu, with his wife an
d children.
During his long hours of travel Muoria worked his way through a
journalism correspondence course, which he had ordered from London.
He wished to make his views on African and Kikuyu problems and
progress known to a broader public. In his autobiographical writings he
attributes his determination to become a journalist to having a letter to
the editor containing strong criticism of the British presence in Kenya
rejected by the East African Standard, Kenya’s leading newspaper. His return to Kikuyuland inspired him to write his fi rst book, Tungiika
Atia Iiya Witu? or What Should We Do, Our People? that came out in 1945. Its aim was, as he wrote, to ‘provide his tribespeople with a
lot of ideas which they could discuss among themselves for their own
benefi t.’9 Th
e book covered education of children, modern homes,
jealousy, the necessity of work, a fair profi t, co-operative farming, the
study of books, the dangers of drunkenness, and more broadly moral
issues concerning right and wrong and the importance of choosing the
right path. Th
e sale of Tungiika Atia Iiya Witu? and other pamphlets
from the Church Mission Society bookshop in Nairobi, among other
places, provided start capital for setting up his newspaper Mumenyereri, a forum for news, education and discussion among Gikuyu-speaking
people.10
Muoria was in contact with several other writers and journalists,
among them one of the other prominent, independent Kikuyu pam-
phleteers, Gakaara wa Wanjau, who used Muoria’s newspaper and
network to advertise his own works.11 At the time similar didactic
8 Th
e British and my Kikuyu Tribe, 10.
9 Th
e British and my Kikuyu Tribe, 10.
10 He noted that Ngoro ya Ugikuyu ni ya Gutoria, (‘Th
e Gikuyu Spirit of patriotism
is for victory’), which he later included in I, the Gikuyu, sold out its fi ve thousand copies in a week. Th
e British and my Kikuyu Tribe, 15.
11 Th
anks to Derek Peterson for drawing my attention to this connection. On
Gakaara wa Wanjau and political writers of the 1940s and 1950s see Christina Pugliese,
‘Complementary or Contending Nationhoods? Kikuyu Pamphlets and Songs 1945–52, in Atieno E. S. Odhiambo & John Lonsdale (eds.), Mau Mau and Nationhood (Oxford,
68
chapter two
books on modern life for Africans were being written by colonial ser-
vants, and solicited from African writers by colonial institutions like
Christian missions or the East African Literature Bureau. Th
e Bureau
also published guidebooks for aspiring African writers and held Gikuyu
literature competitions. Muoria was aware of these activities, but not
particularly infl uenced by them. He translated Hanahela into Gikuyu, a didactic novel written by A. T. Culwick, a colonial offi
cer from Tang-
yanika. More important than colonial enlightenment, the source of
his modern outlook was frustration at what he occasionally called the
‘backwardness’ of his own people and a strong conviction that reform
was needed, based on his own experience all over Kenya, but particu-
larly in his home region. Th
e thrust of his work was towards education
and the value of individual enterprise. In an unpublished manuscript,
written in 1944, he emphasized that ‘people are not determined by
parents, but have free will’, a statement which mirrored his own suc-
cessful social and spatial mobility.12 His reforming zeal was, however,
combined with a strong respect for Kikuyu values and morality. Both
ambitions are caught in the title of his newspaper, Mumenyereri: the
one who guards and the one who observes.
In the mid-1940s, aft er having proved that it was possible to make
a profi t from publishing a book, Muoria decided to leave his job with
the railways in order to start his newspaper. His wife was not willing
to support him in his venture into journalism and thus the danger-
ous world of nationalist politics. Th
e couple by now had three sons to
look aft er and she thought that by doing so he put the family at risk.
Events proved her right. However, Muoria had made up his mind and
the couple were formally divorced. Th
is is how Muoria explained the
disagreement to a journalist who interviewed him in London forty years
later: ‘My wife could not comprehend how a man of my calibre could
leave a high paying job and a respectable one at the Railways to go into
a trade where I had very little time even to sleep, while returns were
not handsome.’13 In 1945 Muoria entered into a customary marriage
with his second wife, Judith Nyamurwa. Judith was a teacher, trained
at Kahuhia Teachers’ College, and a writer in her own right. She shared
Nairobi & Athens OH: Currey, EAEP & Ohio University Press, 2003) 97–120, and Derek Peterson, ‘Th
e Intellectual Lives of Mau Mau Detainees’, Journal of African
History 49 (2008): 73–91.
12 Th
e Inquisitive Karamando, 193.
13 Daily Nation 12 February 1987.
the muorias in kenya
69
Muoria’s critical views of the British, was committed to the fi ght against
colonialism and supported him in his journalistic and political activities.
Th
ey wrote a book together, Muturiri wa Kiriu, on modern living, or
‘what it takes to live sociably’.14
Muoria met his third wife Ruth in 1947. She was the only daughter
of a Kikuyu woman, Grace Njoki, who was a house-owner in Pumwani,
the core of African Nairobi. Aft er their marriage, she also moved to
Nyathuna and, like Judith, assisted her husband in the writing and pro-
duction of Mumenyereri. Muoria and his extended family lived in two
houses he had built on a ridge in the middle of fertile fi elds of Kiambu.
One is a beautifully designed smaller house, which Muoria built of bricks
in the mid 1940s in order to show his fellow tribesmen that indigenous
materials lent themselves to building modern homes. Brick houses had
several advantages over the traditional round mud houses, an issue he
had dealt with in his published book. Th
is building enterprise, where
he showed in action and not only in words what could be done, was
part of his didactic enlightenment project. Th
e second larger building,
where Judith lived, a substantial house that he fi nished in 1952 with
the help of his age mates, is the fi rst stone house built by an African
in the area. Th
e family farmed and traded in agricultural produce. Th
e
children were educated on the income from farming, from paid work
undertaken by Judith and, for a few years, from the newspaper, which
from 1950 onwards made a profi t.
Journalism and the city
Starting a newspaper was not easy, especially in 1945 when war-time
restrictions still applied. Paper was rationed and it was not until Muo-
ria convinced the colonial authorities that he was reviving an already
existing Gikuyu newspaper, Muthithu (‘Th
e Treasure’), which had been
published by the well-known nationalist politician, James Beauttah, that
he was able to push ahead. Th
e fi rst issue of Muthithu/Mumenyereri in
Gikuyu and English was published in May 1945, and the paper quickly
became popular. For a short period it came out every second week,
it then speeded up and became a weekly, then a bi-weekly, now in
14 Th
anks to Derek Peterson for this translation. Unfortunately, I have not been
able to locate a copy of the book.
70
chapter two
Gikuyu only. It grew from a circulation of two thousand copies to one
of around twelve thousand towards the end of its existence.15
It is not surprising that a political paper in Gikuyu such as Mumenyer-
eri should be in high demand in Nairobi at this time. Nationalist politics were gaining strength aft er a lull during the war. In 1946 Muoria was
one of the group of infl uential Africans, most of them active in the
leading nationalist political organization, Kenya African Union, who in
Mombasa welcomed Jomo Kenyatta back from his British exile. Over
the next years Muoria followed Kenyatta closely and made sure that
Mumenyereri reported the important speeches which he made—activi-
ties that were stepping stones in the careers of both men as nationalist
political spokesmen. Th
e paper reported fully and openly on political
issues and brought letters from Africans who were dissatisfi ed with
the politics of the colonial regime. Muoria wrote carefully considered
but strongly worded editorials, and the paper announced a host of
political meetings and Mau Mau oath ceremonies under the guise of
‘tea parties’.
Muoria’s working environment as a newspaperman was the volatile
and politically fraught atmosphere of the city. At this time the ownership
and governing of Nairobi, the colonial capital, was extremely contested.
In 1950 the colonial authorities decreed that the town of Nairobi had
existed for fi ft y years and celebrated its elevation to city status. Th
is
symbolic and self-congratulatory event was turned into a celebration
of fi ft y years of colonial rule. Th
e achievements of the African and
Asian populations of the city were neglected. Th
e preparations for the
Jubilee and its actual celebration served to focus and dissatisfaction on
Writing for Kenya Page 12
