is was more for socializing
than for betting. Sometimes he got lucky, especially if my mother had a
dream of a horse that would win. Once, in the early sixties, my mother
won three hundred pounds on the football pools—a substantial windfall.
All the children received one pound each, and my parents also sent
money to our family in Kenya.
My niece Nuna, who came on visits regularly from Kenya in the
1980s, has described my father’s routine:
He used to go gambling, he used to go to the horses or something. . . . I
used to see him maybe every aft ernoon going off . And then he would
come back. And if he didn’t win he would just go straight up the stairs,
and then he would say, ‘Nuna’, that’s my grandmother’s name, ‘Nuna,
I’m so depressed, I’m going to sleep because I didn’t win.’ But he was
laughing at the same time.9
Upbringing and family relations
Even though all seven of us were born in London, our parents empha-
sized the fact that we were Kenyans. In my secondary school, I would
get into arguments with peers at school who would ask me where I came
from. I would confi dently reply Kenya’, but then they would argue that
if I was born in England then I was in fact British not Kenyan. I would
ask, why then do so many people demand non-white people to ‘go back
to their own countries’? Surely it was better to say that I was from Kenya
than say I was British especially as many of us, at that time, did not feel
accepted. Th
ere was a lot of negative press. I remember Enoch Powell,
9 Interview with Nuna Gichache, Oakland, April 2003.
the muoria family in london—a memory
115
the conservative politician who became a notorious public fi gure, who
wanted all foreigners to return to their country.
Our parents disciplined us as if we were in Kenya. Th
ey taught us
much about life through proverbs. Part of our tradition was that par-
ents must be respected and listened to and never challenged. We were
reprimanded if we tried to answer back and told that this was not the
custom. If we described in detail some of the things that our friends
did our parents made it clear that in Kenya we would never get away
with similar behaviour. We were taught that African girls were not
allowed to sit too close to their fathers, as this was disrespectful. My
father and mother were very happy-natured people and loved having
children. Th
ey never argued in front of us. Dad liked to joke with us
and ask us in Gikuyu, ‘Whose children are you?’ we would answer
‘ baba’s’ (dad’s) children’.
My father recounted many stories about when he was small, such as
when he fi rst went to school in just a cloth draped across his shoulder
with nothing underneath; how he learnt how to read and write against
his father’s wishes in order to attend the mission school. And also,
how with his mother’s permission he was able to sneak out during the
evening to attend night school: he made fast progress because of his
enthusiasm.
My father and mother spoke to us in Gikuyu, and although we replied
in English we understood every word. When my niece Nuna visited
she was struck by the Babel of language use:
My grandparents would speak to their kids in Gikuyu and they would
answer in English. Th
at was very surprising. My grandmother would
say something in Gikuyu with a very British accent. . . . And it would go
on like that. It was interesting, because even though they were born in
the UK they could still catch Gikuyu—it would fl ow. All the time the
parents would speak to the children in Gikuyu and they would answer
them in English. And you wonder, how is it? I think it is something in
the blood.10
Whenever we brought our friends’ home my father would greet them in
Gikuyu, which embarrassed us but amused him. He was very proud of
his language and enjoyed telling us what our names meant in Gikuyu.
In an autobiographical manuscript he has described a late aft ernoon
10 Interview with Nuna Gichache, Oakland, April 2003.
116
chapter three
in the family home. We had asked him what was the meaning of our
names:
To comply with their request, I found myself telling two of my daughters
that their names (Wangari and Wanjiro) are called aft er some of the
Kikuyu clans of Angare and Anjiro and the third one (Nyakenji) bore
the name which meant she was called aft er someone who was a female
hair dresser or shaver. All these answers were found to be so exciting
that each one was met by wild and unrestrained laughter on the part of
the children.
He told Mwaniki that he was named aft er his grandfather as was the
custom with the Kikuyu. He explained that the name was derived from
the Gikuyu verb, ‘kwanika’ which means to ‘display’ and that the name
was associated with beekeeping. On further questioning he told about
his father, a self-taught carpenter who worked for a British electrical
company in Nairobi, and compared his work as a linesman—having
to climb tall poles to which cables carrying electrical currents were
fastened—to that of beekeepers who had to climb the trees where the
bee hives were placed. He told us more about the bee-keeping pro-
fession, about how honey making was one of the jealously guarded
skills of the Kikuyu and how the profession gave rise to a number of
wise sayings, distilled from the experience of dealing with both the
sweetness and pain of honey extraction. One was ‘Murio niwiriagira’,
which means ‘sweetness tends to backfi re’. Th
e other boy’s names he
explained like this:
For the boys, I told one that his name (Karera) indicated that he was called
aft er someone who might have been used to moving from one place to
another since his name meant fl oating in the air. Another son (Mbari)
had a name that indicated he had been named aft er someone who had
visited a place known as Ubari-ini, reputed to have been headquarters of
Kikuyu witchdoctors. Th
e youngest member of the family (Mbugua) had
a name that indicated he had been named aft er someone of a well-known
age group whose circumcision might have taken place many years ago
before any white man set his foot in Kenya.11
My niece was also struck by the humorous and loving relationship
between my mother and father, and also by the freedom that was given
to the children in the family. She found relations between parents and
11 Th
ese stories are from ‘Th
e dilemma which faced me as an African parent whose
children were born in London and wanted to know more about Africa’, in Let the Truth Cast the Mau Mau Curse, unpublished manuscript, 1968.
the muoria family in london—a memory
117
children more free than what she was used to in Kenya. Th
is is how,
later, she has described her experience from visits to her grandparents
and aunts and uncles:
My aunties are very outspoken, and they would answer their mum back.
You know how children fi ght, but they would really fi ght among them-
selves. My grandfather was very calm, and then they would just go on,
even my grandmother would sometimes lose it and join them . . . she is also
loud. My grandfather would just talk to me and tell me in Gikuyu, ‘they
are always doing this’. He was very soft spoken. He was very humorous.
And he would tell me, ‘Oh, their mum is always joining them’, and he
would say, ‘Nuna, don’t listen to them’ in Gikuyu or something. Th
at
was the way, you know he loved my grandmother, he would truly call
her lovingly . . . When they came to Nairobi they used to attract a lot of
attention. Th
ey would hold each other in the street, and you know in
Nairobi people don’t always do that.12
As teenagers we presented a challenge for our parents, because the
culture in England was contrary to the culture our parents were promot-
ing at home. TV, magazines and friends infl uenced us. We would have
visiting relatives, such as our sister Rosabell, who came for two years to
study in Cheltenham, and my sister Mary, who also came to study in
the early 1960s, who would constantly remind us that in Kenya children
behaved diff erently, and that we were very Westernized children. We
became aware of the confl ict of two diff erent cultures.
My father’s writings
My father believed that writing was a way of telling the truth. He had
explained to us that proverbs passed from one generation to the next,
contained a great deal of useful knowledge. Kikuyu professional men,
such as beekeepers and blacksmiths, would ‘compete in . . . a national
pool of wise-sayings so as to prove the value of their professions to
the community as a whole. . . . In other words their eff orts served the
same purpose as that of writers of books in other countries.’13 So, he
saw his authorship fi rst in Kenya and then in Great Britain, as a way
of expressing the morals that his forefathers had put into proverbs. He
wanted us to be critical of power and understand how it works, using
12 Interview with Nuna Gichache, Oakland, April 2003.
13 Let the Truth Cast the Mau Mau Curse, unpublished manuscript, 1968, n.p.
118
chapter three
examples from his own life. He saw it as his duty to break the British
monopoly on truth and knowledge. My brother Peter tells what it has
meant to him:
It is something I have taken in my life. Dad said to me, ‘all knowledge is
objective, to acquire knowledge, like science, you can, anyone can apply
themselves to it.’ Of course that is what got him into trouble. He learned
how power operated. Th
e colonialists did not like that because what we
are doing is true, we are messengers of this knowledge, we must pass it
on and then you must apply it and that’s it. Th
ey did not want that, they
thought “hold on here, what about our role.” Africans were very aware of
this. And Dad told me how power operates—they are determined to kill
the man who tells the truth, so that you can keep the people subjugated.
If you can convince people that hey are not worthy, and you start it from
very young, and you set up structures and institutions which refl ect the
icon of whiteness so that the great majority will believe it until you get
men and women who stand up. . . . You always counter deception with
the truth because at the end of the day deception must bow because it is
deception, it is untrue.14
My father pursued his ideals by becoming a journalist. He felt he had
a purpose to fulfi ll which was to give a voice through his newspaper to
the Africans. He was very proud of his country and wanted so much
for Africans to work towards bettering themselves and not to depend
solely on the white man. He always appreciated the white man bringing
the literary skills of reading and writing to Africa, but he wanted Afri-
cans to take the next steps for themselves and work positively towards
actively developing the nation together. In publishing his newspaper he
fought for Africans’ freedom, and he wanted Africans to have a voice.
He did not believe in violence to achieve one’s aims; he used to tell
us through an African proverb that if a person fi ghts with sticks their
enemies would keep on coming back again, but a person who fi ghts
with strong words will win. His words were a source of inspiration and
encouraged the Africans at that time, giving them hope for the future.
Th
e title he gave to one of his numerous pamphlets epitomised this:
‘Ngoro Ya Ugikuyu Ni Ya Gutoria’, meaning ‘Th
e African’s Spirit is
for Victory’.
Looking through my father’s letters it is clear to see how determined
he was for his works to be published. He saw his own endeavours as
part of the struggle for the truth to be known. When he realised that
14 Interview with Peter Mwaniki, London, July 2000.
the muoria family in london—a memory
119
his stay in London would be longer than he anticipated, he decided
to enroll for a course in journalism, and later he participated in other
short courses on how to write short stories and other fi ction. He hoped
to be able to make money from his writing, as he had done in Kenya.
One of my early memories of my father is when I was three years
old, when he took me shopping with him to purchase a typewriter. It
soon became indispensable for him. When at home, he spent most of
his time reading and typing very fast with one fi nger on his Olympia
typewriter. He did not even have a desk, but would put the typewriter
on a chair. He was working on his manuscripts, which he hoped to
publish in Great Britain, since he had been prevented from continuing
his publication enterprises in Kenya.
I came across a letter to a prospective agent written in the early
1970s, in which my father describes his life in England and the work
he has been doing:
I arrived in London over 21 years ago as a proud prosperous man who
not only owned the most popular newspaper among the Kikuyu tribe,
which was known as Mumenyereri but also as the sole proprietor of the printing press in which such newspapers and other publications were
printed. . . . Everyone black and white at that time knew that the secret
of my success was that of expressing myself in writing as an African who
was free from slavery mentality which made many of my fellow Africans
to believe that they were incapable of doing anything without the white
man’s help.
Leaning on his extensive prior experience as a journalist in colonial
Kenya, characterised by control and censorship, my father believed
that a handful of infl uential white people had succeeded in spreading
negative rumours to the world about Kenya with the help of a group
of Africans, who were handsomely paid off to sell out their own people.
He believed that he was unfairly being associated with the Mau Mau
movement,
and that that was part of his problem. In his letter to
the agent he goes on to explain his belief that some British people
wish to
discredit and to belittle me as they were doing to thousands of my fel-
low tribesmen of the Kikuyu tribe at that time in Kenya. . . . So owing to
the stigma which was associated with the word Mau Mau in the minds
of all decent thinking men black or white everywhere . . . it has not been
possible for any of the British publishers to undertake the publication of
any of my manuscripts.
120
chapter three
However, Great Britain is diff erent from colonial Kenya:
. . . what my political opponents white and black, seemed to forget is that
England’s greatness is based upon a deep-seated respect of the individual
and his right to express his views. So as a trained journalist who believes
that the truth is always victorious, I have been trying to use such freedom
of being on English soil in the service of truth, which I regard as greater
and more important than individuals who are mere mortals.
He ended his letter by reasserting his belief that truth will prevail:
It is because I believe in the value of my work that I am now daring to
write to you to ask you whether you would be so kind as to agree to act
as my literary agent. I believe the eff ect of truth is to remove stigma of
any kind.15
Nothing seems to have resulted from the proposal—however, that did
not deter my father: by the time he stopped writing he had fi nished
nine manuscripts. One of them, I Th
e Gikuyu and the White Fury, was
published by East African Educational Publishers in 1994. Even though
my father was not in good health at that time, he still registered and
was pleased that he had fi nally seen one of his books published.
My father followed politics in Britain and the rest of the world
closely, but all his writings dealt with home, with Kenya. My brother
Peter recalls,
Over the years it was very much British politics he was aware of, he
couldn’t follow what was going on in Kenya, unless people visited.
In the early years he was in touch. We were always invited to Kenya
Independence Day celebrations, and Dad and Mum would talk to lots
of Kenyans and know what was going on. We were aware of what was
happening in Kenya, not in any great depth, we were aware that there
Writing for Kenya Page 19
