mende gũkũraga tondũ wa kũrakara. O metikagia ũndũ ũrĩa mendete
gwĩtĩkia, akorũo nĩ mwega kana nĩ mũru. Na kwaga meciria kũu kwao
kũgitagĩrũo na ũrũme mũingĩ mũno, o ta ũria tuonaga atĩ, hangĩkorũo
he mũndũ wĩna thirĩ waku, na mũndũ ũcio nĩ mũthĩni, ũmũrandũre
mbeca icio hĩndĩ ĩrĩa atarĩ nacio, no akaruta haro nene mũno na akenda
mũrũe. Githĩ ũguo tigwo?
Na tondũ wa kwaga kũiganania meciria kũu, nĩkĩo andũ amwe
matũraga metĩkĩtie ũrĩa metĩkĩtie tene, na arĩa angĩ magetĩkia ũrĩa
monete wega gwĩtĩkia.
what should we do, our people?
239
to think and know what will happen in the future—that when this and
that coincide, they produce forseeable consequences.
To face back or to the side is the moment when someone tells the
people further from the fence, the people at the rear, what he has seen.
Th
ose next to him are as intelligent as him—all who look alongside him
or who think together with him about what will happen in future, how
this and that can combine to be one thing and another.
Such a person tells others what will happen in the future, because
he understands that this begets that, and that there is a repetitive pat-
tern to events.
Th
e murmuring of those who are staring refers to the disagreements
between intelligent people, who argue over whether what one has said is
true or not. Th
e people who are not near the fence or are not intelligent,
just wait to be told, and start to murmur, asking whether it should be
believed. Th
e intelligent people start to think hard and investigate hard
if it is true or not.
Knowledge and ideas are not evenly distributed, so some know
a little, others know nothing, each according to the breadth or nar-
rowness of their mind. Th
ose who are not intelligent and those who
cannot be bothered to think just believe what they are told by those
who do think.
If you tell those who do not think that their belief is no longer true,
they may kill you out of anger. Th
ey just believe what they want to
believe, whether good or bad. Th
is lack of ideas is protected by their
stubborn courage, in the same way as we fi nd that, if somebody owes
you money and is poor, and you go for the money he does not have,
he provokes a fi ght with you. Is that not so?
Because our minds are not the same, some people still believe what
they used to believe in the past, and others believe what they want to
believe.
Th
at is why there are diff erent kinds of people with diff erent kinds
of belief.
But they all agree with the saying that ‘Loving is good and hatred is
bad.’ And so the story ends just as it began, when we said that to hate
is to destroy, and that to love is to build and is therefore good.
May God be praised for enabling me to write all these things.
Th
e end
240
chapter four
No tondũ ũcio-rĩ, nĩkĩo kũiyũrĩte andũ a mithemba yothe ĩna wĩtĩkio
ũtiganĩte mũno.
No rĩrĩ, othe-rĩ, nĩ maiguanagĩra harĩ ciugo ici:
Atĩ ‘Kwendana nĩ kwega na gũthũrana nĩ kũru’. Kwoguo ũhoro
ũkarĩka ota ũrĩa twambĩrĩirie hĩndĩ irĩa tugire atĩ gũthũrana nĩ
kũharagania, na kwendana nĩ gũcokanĩrĩria na nĩ kwega.
Ngai arogocũo o makĩria tondũ wa kũhotithia kwandĩka maũndũ
macio mothe.
Muthia
what should we do, our people?
241
242
chapter four
Endnotes
1. Muoria’s question (what should we do, or what might we do?) is addressed to ĩiya witu. Iya was a term of aff ection used between brothers and sisters; it was also used among those who had been circumcised together. In his title, then, Muoria imagines his readership as a family, related through blood—a theme which reappears in the poetry, below, which is addressed to ciana cia Muumbi, the ‘children of Muumbi’.
For iya, see Benson, 193.
2. ‘Jump about’ used to be a common Gikuyu fi gure of speech to describe how frivolous people behaved.
3. Th
e term translated as ‘adults’ here is andũ agima, ‘mature people’. Muoria uses the same phrase later in the essay, when distinguishing knowledge from foolishness.
His language is interesting in an era in which Kenyans would soon distinguish between elders’ responsibilities and Mau Mau’s ‘hooliganism’.
4. ‘Muoria values the personal eff ort that went into his search for education, and is here thinking chiefl y of his correspondence courses. ‘Certifi cates’ are marua, ‘letters’. ‘Th
e world over’ is important. Muoria wants Africans to see themselves as world
citizens.
5. Gwĩtua mũgima, ‘to shape themselves into a mature person’, a personal responsibility.
6. ‘Helping ourselves’ is gũteithania, a reciprocal verb meaning ‘to help each other’.
7. Kũharagania is to ‘cause to spread out, break up, scatter, disperse in all directions’ (Benson, 142).
8. Each stanza here is composed so as to rhyme in Gikuyu. For example, the last words in the third stanza are ngemi, mũgeni, ũguni, and ageni.
9. ‘Compassion’ is tha, which is also mercy, pity, or sympathy (Benson, 485).
10. Th
e Gikuyu verb here is -ĩtĩkia, to consent or believe.
11. ‘Brother’ is mũrũ wa maitũ, a brother of the same mother.
12. Th
roughout this text, the Gikuyu ũrimũ is rendered as ‘ignorance’. Ũrimũ is a form of kĩrimũ, which is an idiot, a fool, or (importantly for Muoria) an untaught person. Fift een years later, African nationalists commonly stated their aim to be to eliminate poverty, ignorance, and disease.
13. Th
is reference is obscure, but in the nineteenth century the Ruiru area had for a time been the southern Kikuyu frontier—and perhaps therefore a place of danger.
14. To cry out in greeting a distinguished visitor, in this case ‘wisdom’.
15. Th
e word rendered here as ‘wisdom’ is ũgĩ. By the time Muoria wrote this tract, ũgĩ had come to mean ‘cleverness, cunning; wisdom . . . skill, sharpness, perspicacity’
(Benson, 549). An older defi nition is found in A. W. McGregor’s 1904 dictionary, which defi ned ũgĩ as ‘tact’, ‘sense’ and ‘acumen’ (McGregor, English-Kikuyu Dictionary
[London, 1904]). Ũgĩ was the rhetorical skill that elders used in oral argument. Early missionary translators therefore worried over the word ‘wisdom’: they thought that ũgĩ
connoted ‘guile’ or ‘cunning’ more than seasoned insight (KNA: NBSS 1/81: Barlow,
‘Translator’s diffi
culties, 27 April 1944).
16. It may be that Muoria is here thinking of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, an abridged Gikuyu version of which was published in 1914, and sold in mission schools for one rupee. (PCEA: 1/A/17: Rogers to Arthur, 27 July 1914). More generally, see Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
17. Th
e word here is igũta, a term of reproach. A 1933 dictionary defi ned the singular kigũta as ‘one so habitually lazy that he has not the wherewithal to marry; a woman so lazy in her domestic aff airs t
hat no one would wish to marry her’ (Beechers).
18. ‘Knowledge’ here is ũmenyo. Ũmenyo was a novel word used by early ‘readers’
to distinguish what they learned in school from the ũgĩ (rhetorical skill, or wisdom) that elders possessed. Kũmenya, to ‘know’, was to possess certain skills or aptitudes. See
what should we do, our people?
243
Derek Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, bookkeeping, and the work of imagination in colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, N.H., 2004), chapter 3.
19. Th
e Gikuyu word rendered as ‘education’ here is githomo, from the verb - thoma,
‘to read’. Early Christian converts in Gikuyuland were known as athomi, ‘readers’.
20. Muoria is making a play on words here. Th
e Gikuyu says that ũmenyo, ‘knowl-
edge’, is ũgi. Ũgi is one way to refer to the rhetorical wisdom of elders (see note 17
above). It is also ‘sharpness’, as possessed by a machete. Muoria here expands the seman-tic range for ũmenyo, an argument he carries forward below. Cutting down trees was one of the most arduous of Kikuyu tasks; for this, and ‘sweat’ (below) see John Lonsdale,
‘Th
e Moral Economy of Mau Mau’, in Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy
Valley: Confl ict in Kenya and Africa (London: James Currey, 1992), 332–34.
21. ‘Repulsive’ is gũthũka, ‘be bad, inferior, unbecoming, be spoiled, useless’ (Benson, 534).
22. ‘Mind’ is meciria, ‘thoughts’ or ‘reasoning’.
23. ‘Ignorance’ here is kwaga umenyo, to ‘lack umenyo’, the knowledge that early
‘readers’ claimed for themselves.
24. ‘Not mature’ is ndũri mũgima, ‘you are not an adult’.
25. Years later, in his London exile, Henry Muoria thought this argument to be too harshly deterministic and rephrased it to suggest that the consequences of immature poverty were possible rather than certain. See, Henry Muoria, I, the Gikuyu and the White Fury (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1994), 86.
26. ‘Country’ is bũrũrĩ, one of several Gikuyu terms referring to a region, or to the people of a particular region.
27. ‘Companies’ are makambũni, a word Muoria imported from English. Th e ‘other
people’ Muoria had in mind were most probably South Asians (‘Indians’ before the Partition of India and Pakistan at independence in 1947). Th
ere were very few African-
owned businesses before 1945. See below, sections 9, 10, 11, 13, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, and 29 for Muoria’s thoughts on African entrepreneurship in commerce, building, blacksmithing, farming, herding, entertainment.
28. ‘Th
inking and doing’ is gwĩciria na gwĩka. Muoria is almost certainly carrying on his rhetorical competition with his elders here. Kuuga na gwika, ‘say and do’, was and is a popular political maxim which holds that the authority to ‘say’ comes from public achievement, from being seen to have ‘done’ something (Lonsdale, ‘Moral economy’, 337–38). Muoria argues that (educated) thought must come even before words. Two years later, in 1947, the ‘40 Group’ emerged, adopting the slogan kuuga na gwĩka, (Gucu wa Gikoyo, We Fought for Freedom (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1979), 295, where kuuga wa gwika is evidently a misprint). Th
e 40 Group was composed of young
men, mostly Nairobi residents, known for their criminality, whom some believe to have been a forerunner of Mau Mau, which also adopted the ‘say and do’ motto. Among the ‘Forty’s’ leaders was Victor Wokabi, a writer and editor who must have known Muoria: one might speculate that Wokabi’s comrades saw Muoria as their rhetorical competitor, just as Muoria competed for public authority with earlier elders.
29. Muoria is here echoing a very common white-settler complaint at the time, but from within his own culture.
30. ‘Belief ’ here is wĩtĩkio, ‘assent’. Th
e verb ĩtĩkia refers to the sound that elders
made when agreeing to an argument made by their peers. Protestant missionaries used wĩtĩkio to defi ne the Christian’s ‘belief’ in an other-worldly deity. See Peterson, Creative Writing, chapter 2.
31. ‘Resolved’ is ngoro imwe, ‘with one heart’. For the importance of ‘resolve’ in Kikuyu culture see Greet Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below (Oxford: James Currey, 1996), 15–18.
32. Muoria uses the word mũthigiti, from the Swahili msikiti, ‘mosque’.
33. ‘Delusion’ is kũrigwo, ‘fail to recognize, understand; fail to know, be ignorant’
(Benson, 382). In a diff erent form, the same verb refers to tangled string (Beechers, 178).
244
chapter four
34. It appears that Muoria’s Christianity was shaped by conventional Kikuyu belief that God ‘must not needlessly be bothered’. See, Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: Th
e Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938), 237–40.
35. ‘Civility’ is gũkirĩrĩria, ‘patience, forbearance, patient endurance’, from the verb kira, to ‘be quiet, stop making noise’ (Beechers, 85).
36. Muoria is here voicing a common complaint voice by conservative Kikuyu
against the ‘born again’ Christian enthusiasts of the East African revival movement that had been spreading from Rwanda and Uganda since the early 1930s. Th
is indig-
nation can be seen in Muthoni Likimani’s novel Th
ey Shall be Chastised (Nairobi:
Kenya Literature Bureau, 1971), where the two chapters concerning Revival are titled ‘Confusion’. Likimani is the daughter of the Rev. Livai Gachanja, an Anglican clergyman and a contemporary of Henry Muoria. See also, Derek Peterson, ‘Casting Characters: Autobiography and Political Imagination in Colonial Kenya’, Research in African Literatures 37, 3, (2006), 176–192; and idem, ‘Wordy Women: Gender Trouble and the Oral Politics of the East African Revival in Gikuyuland’, Journal of African History 43 (2001), 469–489.
37. Muoria explicitly evokes photography here: to ‘take a picture’ is kũhũra mbica.
Th
e word mbica is a Gikuyu pronunciation of the English word ‘picture’. Th e phrase
fi rst appears in the Beechers’ 1938 dictionary (Beechers, 56). A 1904 dictionary defi ned
‘picture’ as muhianano, from the verb hana, ‘be like, look like, resemble’ (McGregor, 132). Photography played a large role in African life from the 1920s on: see, Anthony Howarth, Kenyatta: A Photographic Biography (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967), in which the earliest photo of Kenyatta was taken in 1910. Kenyatta got his brother to take photos of Kikuyu daily life to illustrate Facing Mount Kenya, published in 1938, and for the frontispiece had himself pictured in the garb of an authoritative elder. Muoria’s portrait oft en occupied a prominent place in his own publications.
38. ‘Wise person’ is mũndũ mũgi, a person possessing ũgi, ‘wisdom’.
39. Tiga kwĩgana, literally, ‘stop telling a tale about yourself ’, from the verb gana, to ‘sing the praises of ’ (Beechers, 24).
40. Another echo of the conventional Kikuyu belief that God ‘loves or hates people according to their behaviour.’ See, Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 233.
41. Muoria seems to see little value in the customary household education he left behind in order to go to school and on which Kenyatta set such store in Facing Mount Kenya.
42. Maundu ma tene na ma riu, literally, the ‘matters of long ago and of now’.
43. See our ‘Editorial Note’, above, for the diffi
culty of translating the gender-neutral
pronouns of the Gikuyu language—something of which Muoria was aware when making his own translation into English at this point. See, I, the Gikuyu, 89, for ‘him or her’.
44. Kĩhumo kiega, literally a ‘good origin’, from the verb uma, to ‘come out of ’.
45. One can see here the germ of Muoria’s
argument three years later, expressed in editorials in Mumenyereri in 1948, that for their commercial enterprises to succeed Africans must be granted freedom of association, to enable them to iron out their jealousies. See above, Lonsdale’s, chapter, section headed ‘What then should our people do?’
46. Wendani na ũiguano, literally, ‘reciprocal love and reconciliation’. Ũiguano is derived from the verb - igua, ‘to hear’; -iguana is ‘to hear each other’.
47. A common self-criticism at the time, shared by Kenyatta on his arrival back in Kenya the following year. See below, ‘Th
e Home Coming of Our Great Hero’.
48. Muoria’s justifi cation for African capitalism was echoed twenty years later, doubtless unwittingly, by Josiah Mwangi (‘JM’) Kariuki when, as Member of Parliament, company director and racehorse owner, he was asked to justify himself: ‘ . . .I do not consider myself a capitalist at all . . . All I have is suffi
cient to keep me and my family
going, plus of course, when I work hard to get more money, then I am bringing a lot of money to the nation . . . It is better to have a lot of money to help people and to
what should we do, our people?
245
encourage other young men to work hard and get more money . . . [W]hoever does have
[money] should try to share it with his own people in one way or another.’ Interviewed by Tony Hall for the Sunday Nation, 6 Nov 1966, and reprinted in Cherry Gertzel, Maure Goldschmidt and Donald Rothchild (eds.), Government and Politics in Kenya: A Nation Building Text (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969), 78–83.
49. ‘Knowledge’, again, is ũmenyo, knowledge that comes from school. See note 18 above.
50. In the late 1940s white immigration increased faster than at any other time in Kenya’s history.
51. ‘Eradicated’ is gũthira, ‘be fi nished, come to an end’, as in the drying up of a spring, or the burning out of a lamp (Beechers, 206). Muoria feared that anxiety, poverty and ignorance could eradicate Africans. Others feared that whites might try to exterminate them—perhaps prompted by growing knowledge of the Nazi holocaust.
See the Kenya African Union’s 1946 memorandum ‘Th
e economical, political, educa-
tional and social aspects of the African in Kenya Colony’. BNA: CO 533/537/38672, enclosure in No. 1.
Writing for Kenya Page 36
