Writing for Kenya
Page 20
was political unhappiness. None of us got involved. Dad was very politi-
cally aware of what was going on in Europe and the world. He used to
read two newspapers, Th
e Times and Th
e Telegraph, I remember asking,
why are we reading these two, and he said, “Why would I want to read
Th
e Guardian, I know its opinions are like mine, I should read what the other opinions are.” Th
at is a classic journalist, isn’t it? Let me hear what
the opposition is saying.16
15 Letter to the Managing Director, Messrs Adamaster Press & Literary Agency, 22
November 1973.
16 Interview with Peter Mwaniki, London, July 2000.
the muoria family in london—a memory
121
England, Kenya, Africa
As children we never really thought that we could realistically grow
up to adulthood in the UK. It remained our belief that we would all
return to Kenya while we were still young. We always knew that our
father wanted to go back to Kenya. My mother was less enthusiastic
and more cautious as she worried for her husband’s safety and eco-
nomic hardship.
Our parents told us stories about life in Kenya. We learnt about
our sisters and brothers and our step-mothers. My mother had eleven
children with my father, and the fi rst wife Elizabeth Th
ogori had three
boys (she had had others who sadly passed away at a very young age).
Th
e second wife Judith Nyamurwa had two boys and a daughter. For
us in London it was strange to imagine our parents having so many
children and that my father had three wives. My parents would vividly
describe the home they had upcountry in Nyathuna—a big house and
plenty of land for us to play on. My father would compare our small
backyard to the land he had in Kenya and say that it was like our local
park. When my father talked about returning to Kenya, we used to get
very excited, as all we had to play in was our small back garden, in a
London terrace. We were eager and enthusiastic to go to see or indeed
live in our parents’ homeland. As time went on moving to Kenya proved
to be only a dream. It was too expensive and the political situation was
still too unstable for my father to go back.
Being the eldest, I was the fi rst of the children to start corresponding
with our sisters in Kenya. It was fun receiving letters. From time to time
we would also pay a visit to the photographic studios to have a family
photo taken so that the family in Kenya could watch us grow. In turn,
the family in Kenya would also send us family studio photographs.
I fi nally got to visit Kenya for the fi rst time in 1975, when I was
nineteen years old. When I was about to leave, my father asked me
what language I would speak to the family in Nyathuna who did not
speak English. I confi dently said, ‘in Gikuyu, of course.’ He challenged
me and said that I couldn’t speak it. When I replied that I could, he
said, ‘go on then.’ Seconds later I saw him laughing at me. It had just
dawned on me for the very fi rst time that although I understood the
language I could not articulate it. However, when I came to Kenya
it was useful to know some Gikuyu although people laughed at me
when I attempted to speak in my broken Gikuyu. Th
ey would say that
I sounded like the missionary priests in the colonial days.
122
chapter three
Only when I arrived in Kenya did I realise how respected and impor-
tant my father was. It was one thing hearing from my father about his
life in Kenya, but actually being in Kenya and hearing about him from
other people, and seeing his name in the newspapers was something
diff erent. For the fi rst time we felt very proud of our father. We were
received like children of a celebrity. We were given VIP treatment.
Margaret Kenyatta, Jomo Kenyatta’s daughter, was Mayor of Nairobi.
We were invited to her offi
ce for lunch along with our family from
Kenya, and we enjoyed the luxury of being served by waiters. We kept
looking at each other—we simply could not believe the story we found
ourselves in. It was a bit like the story of the ugly duckling. We had
been the ugly ducklings in England, where we were diff erent, and then
came to Kenya and realised that we were like swans amongst our own
people, and in our true environment.
Discovering Kenya for me was wonderful, the people were so warm,
hard-working and, even though there were problems with the economy,
the people would help one another and remain very cheerful. I enjoyed
the atmosphere when I visited my family upcountry. I spent a great deal
of time sitting inside the kitchen, which was a wooden house, outside
the main house. It was the custom to cook away from the house. Th
e
women would sit around the open-fi re and whilst cooking delicious
Kikuyu food such as irio, and we would laugh and make conversation,
while enjoying the smells of the open-fi re cooking. Th
e main house
would be for sitting, eating and sleeping. I enjoyed hearing stories
about my father’s earlier days in Kenya, and also hearing stories from
my grandmother about my mother, and getting to know the culture.
My older sisters who would tell me from time to time how I should
be behaving. However, living in Kenya was a culture shock. My father
wrote to me oft en whilst in Kenya, and his letters helped me to learn
about the Kenyan culture.
It was a new and wonderful experience to have older brothers and
sisters, aunts and uncles because in London we were alone. However,
because of the long separation and splits in the family, getting to know
my family in Kenya was sometimes very diffi
cult, as there was some
resentment. It must have been experienced as unfair that, as soon as
we arrived, we got recognition, simply because we were brought up in
London, yet we were all from the same father. I think that my older
sisters there felt that the family in London were favoured by our parents.
In a certain way they considered my maternal grandmother, who had
looked aft er them aft er my mother left Kenya, as their mother. I found
myself trying to explain that my parents loved us all equally and it was
the muoria family in london—a memory
123
circumstances that kept us apart for so long. I felt hurt for both sides
as I knew how my parents felt, and tried to imagine how I would have
felt had I been one of the ones left behind.
Looking back, this is how Peter sees the experience of exile and how
it aff ected our father and the rest of the family:
I listened to him from when I was very young about his life in Kenya
and what he had achieved. So I looked at it from the exile point of view.
Th
ere was a great sadness in him, that he did not fulfi ll his full potential.
I grew up with a man who was just left as an observer. He kept writing. I
believe he would have wanted to make far more of a contribution, being
part of that. He mention
ed that once we were educated, or even before
that we would go back. Th
is was not our home. We always knew it, it was
not our home. But life and circumstances just took their turn.
Looking at both families in UK and Kenya there has always been a
longing for a reunion. We grew up yearning for this wonderful land,
and our indigenous family grew up longing for their UK family to
return home. Although we had both our parents with us, unlike the
children left behind in Kenya, I still feel that deep down in my father’s
heart he was agonizing being so far away from the country and fam-
ily he loved so much. Th
is meant that even though we had a father
physically present, he was mentally present in Kenya. Sometimes we
envied our family in Kenya—as far as we were concerned, we were the
unlucky ones who had to live in cold, dreary England. I think Peter
has given a good description of the complex experience our family
became caught up in:
Dad . . . was aware that he was exiled here with the family. We grew up
with mum and dad and we realised when we went to Kenya that this was
a privilege for us in comparison to the family who did not grow up with
mum and dad, they all missed dad—the two wives and children. And
those realities are real, that pain is there although they knew that things
were not personal. Th
ough it was a personal pain it was a political reality
that was much bigger than any one of us. 17
Dream come true
Th
inking about my father’s story, it is hard to imagine how far this
young herdboy had come. From being a little lonely boy, with just a
sheet draped over one shoulder and a stick, looking aft er his father’s
17 Interview with Peter Mwaniki, London, July 2000.
124
chapter three
goats and sheep in the fi elds of the family farm, north of Nairobi in a
place called Nyathuna, to a lonely man living in a studio fl at round the
corner from fashionable Marble Arch in Seymour Street, London W1.
From discovering how to read and write at the age of eleven, to becom-
ing the editor and owner of an infl uential newspaper. From being a
young man deep in thought about life and the future of his own country,
to becoming an old man in a foreign land, deep in thought about life
and the past. From being a well-known fi gure in his country to dying
in a foreign land, unknown to but a few. Like Moses, he struggled to
bring his people to the promised land, but never made it himself.
Even though my family in Kenya felt that they had missed out by
my parents living so far away, I felt that we in England also missed out.
When my father passed away in 1997 I thank God that his wish had
fi nally come true when his spirit fi nally saw all his fourteen children and over thirty grandchildren together on his home land. Eighteen family
members travelled from England to repatriate our father’s body.
Looking at my father’s life, it is clear to see that for every negative
experience in which he encountered, he made positive counter measures.
Where he could have decided to end his life from the grip of the spirit
of despair, he decided to make something of his life, even if it was not
what he had hoped for. Our parents provided for us even though it
was a struggle to bring up seven children alone without outside help.
We were rich in love from our parents, and we look back and feel that
we were blessed in that way . Aft er my father’s death, my sister Juliet came across a note in the attic amongst my father’s many papers where
he had jotted down a short prayer—on his manual typewriter dated
15th March 1967.
O Almighty God on whom I place all my trust
I pray and thank you for having enabled me to rise in the East
Where you used me in the service of truth
Help me not to go down like a setting sun in the West
Where everything is supposed to be at its best.
But where for the last fi ft een years in spite of my eff orts
I have not been able to fi nd a friend on whom I can trust
And having entrusted me with seven children who have been born
here
I hope you will help them to grow up to be useful citizens
With a lot of friends to help them and whom they can trust
And I pray and beseech you in the name of the only Son Jesus Christ
the muoria family in london—a memory
125
Who lives and reigns with you at all times here on earth and the whole
Universe. Amen.
Underneath this text there is an addition in hand writing: ‘By 1970
March, I am writing my third or should I say fourth book. Could my
present eff orts be said to be the answer to the above prayer? I will keep
on praying and writing since God’s help comes in a mysterious way.’
126
chapter three
10. Henry Muoria, his third wife Ruth Nuna and their seven London-born
children
the muoria family in london—a memory
127
11. Henry Muoria visiting Nairobi December 1989 at his home in Nyathuna,
Lower Kabete
128
chapter three
ya, 1975en
ria in Kou
y M
enrH
12.
SECTION II
WORKS
EDITORIAL NOTE ON HENRY MUORIA’S
THREE POLITICAL PAMPHLETS
Spelling
How to spell the name of Muoria’s ‘nation’, ‘tribe’, or ‘people’ is not
agreed. In their own speech they talk of themselves as ‘Agikuyu’, ‘the
people of Gikuyu’. Th
e nineteenth-century Ki-Swahili pronunciation,
‘Kikuyu’, was adopted by British offi
cials and European settlers, as
also by most scholars, in the twentieth century. Th
e people themselves
increasingly ask to be called Gikuyu. One editor, Derek Peterson, nor-
mally employs this version; the other, John Lonsdale, has shift ed from
‘K’ to ‘G’. Th
ere is an acceptable compromise, which we have adopted
here, namely to use ‘K’ for all things Kikuyu, since this is the name
most widely recognised, except for the language, which we call Gikuyu.
We hope that this convention will lead to greater clarity rather than
confusion. We have, similarly, adopted the spelling Muoria throughout,
although Henry at times used Mworia.
Translations
In all three pamphlets the original Gikuyu text is that of Henry Muoria,
as it stood in 1945, 1946, and 1947 respectively. Th
e English translations
of the two pamphlets that focus on Jomo Kenyatta, ‘Th
e Homecoming
of our Great Hero’ and ‘Jomo Kenyatta is our Reconciler’, are based on
Henry Muoria’s own renderings, made during his London exile, in the
1970s and ’80s. We have simplifi ed his language to some extent, while
remaining faithful to his meaning. Th
e fi rst pamphlet, ‘What Should
we Do, Our People’, was published in English translation in Muoria’s
I, the Gikuyu, and the White Fury (Nairobi: East African Educational
Publi
shers, 1994). Th
ere are signifi cant diff erences between this English
translation and the Gikuyu original. We therefore commissioned a fresh
English translation from Joseph Muriithi Kariuki, who had proved
invaluable to Derek Peterson as a research assistant in the 1990s. It is
Kariuki’s translation that is printed here.
132
editorial note
Gikuyu etymologies
In explicating Muoria’s Gikuyu writing we have made liberal use of
three sources:
a) Leonard and Gladys Beecher’s mimeographed Kikuyu-English
Dictionary, produced in 1938 by the Church Missionary Society
in Nairobi. Consulted at the Presbyterian Church of East Africa
archives in Nairobi, box I/Z/26.
b) Arthur Barlow’s very extensive notes on Gikuyu etymologies, which
are held as part of his private papers in the Edinburgh University
Library, deposits Gen. 1785 and 1786.
c) T. G. Benson’s Kikuyu-English Dictionary, published by Oxford
University Press in 1964.
Th
ese three sources were produced out of the cooperative language
work done by missionaries and their Kikuyu interlocutors. Arthur
Barlow was colonial Kenya’s most prolifi c Gikuyu linguist. Arriving
in central Kenya in 1903, he had by 1906 translated several dozen
hymns, a book of daily services, a short catechism, and part of two
gospels into Gikuyu. His Tentative Studies in Kikuyu Grammar and
Idiom, brought out in 1914, was conceived as an aid to the transla-
tion of the New Testament. Th
e Beechers’ 1938 dictionary grew out of
language notes that the Anglican missionary Harry Leakey, the father
of Gladys Beecher, composed in dialogue with the Kikuyu convert
Mathayo Njoroge. During the 1940s Barlow, working with the Kikuyu
schoolteacher Reuben Muriuki, elaborated and revised the Beechers’
dictionary. In 1953 Barlow was called out of retirement to head the
Kenya government’s Translation Bureau. Th
ere he agreed with Benson,
a lecturer in Bantu languages at the School of Oriental and African
Studies, to collaborate on the production of a comprehensive Gikuyu
dictionary. In 1956 Barlow sent Benson a list of some 29,000 words.
His typed notes on the letter ‘G’ ran to some forty foolscap pages.1 By
1962 Barlow was infi rm, unable to move more than the index fi nger