Writing for Kenya
Page 37
52. ‘Come together’ is gwĩcokere, ‘return ourselves’.
53. In the 1940s only a tiny number of Kenyan Africans, mostly sons of chiefs, travelled overseas, especially to South Africa, for further education. See, Hélène Charton,
‘La genèse ambiguë de l’élite kenyane: origins, formations et integration de 1945 à l’indépendance.’ Université de Paris 7: PhD. dissertation, 2002.
54. Like almost all other politically-conscious Africans at the time Muoria looked forward to racial equality in Kenya, not African independence.
55. Few Africans shared Muoria’s enthusiasm for co-operative farming, although Kenyatta had shown interest in it in the 1930s, when shown examples by Prince Peter of Denmark: Jeremy Murray-Brown, Kenyatta (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), 188.
Th
e Kenya government made a few such experiments in African farming aft er the
war—a time when British offi
cials admired Soviet collective farming. Th
ese colonial
experiments failed in the 1940s, as independent Tanzania’s failed later, in the 1970s.
See, James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), chapter 7.
56. It was of course the case that in Kenya, as elsewhere, food prices rose during famines—and in central Kenya food shortages were normally expected every decade, severe famine every thirty years or so.
57. Th
is phrase is literally translated ‘the things of the person and the things of the many’. Muoria was correct. Kikuyuland was consumed by confl ict over property in the 1940s. See, Gavin Kitching, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: Th
e Making of an
African Petite-Bourgeoisie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), chapter X; David W. Th
roup, Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau 1945–53 (London: James Currey, 1987), chapters 4, 7 and 9; A. Fiona D. Mackenzie, Land, Ecology and Resistance in Kenya, 1880–1952 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).
58. Uiguano or ‘unity’ is, more literally, ‘cooperative listening’. See note 46 above.
59. Again, Muoria was correct. In the forty years aft er the Second World War, Kenyan (and Kikuyu) population grew at around 3% per annum, one of the highest growth rates in world history. See, John Blacker, ‘Th
e Demography of Mau Mau:
Fertility and Mortality in Kenya in the 1950s—A Demographer’s Viewpoint’, African Aff airs 106 (April 2007), 205–27.
60. ‘Our representatives’ in 1945 were, for Kenya’s Africans, two nominated members of the Legislative Council—the Revd. Leonard Beecher, Anglican missionary and Gikuyu linguist, later Bishop of Mombasa and then fi rst Anglican Archbishop of Kenya; and Eliud Mathu, son of a Kikuyu mundo mugo, member of Balliol College Oxford, and schoolmaster, formerly at the missionary Alliance High School and more recently headmaster of a Kikuyu independent school. Aft er independence he was President Kenyatta’s private secretary. See, Jack R. Roelker, Mathu of Kenya: A Political Study
246
chapter four
(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1976). Th
ere was in addition a proliferation of
advisory committees on which Africans were represented. In the middle of 1946
Muoria was himself appointed to a new Advisory Committee on African Publicity and Information: Joanna Lewis, Empire State-Building: War & Welfare in Kenya 1925–52
(Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 257.
61. ‘Divided people’ is andũ matangĩigũana, ‘people who cannot agree’, ‘people who cannot listen to each other’.
62. ‘To be intelligent’ here is kũhĩga, ‘be clever, wise, educated, sensible, intelligent’
(Benson, 549). Th
e same word also describes the ‘sharpness’ of a knife. Muoria is con-
tinuing the discourse he began above, in likening the sharpness that elders displayed in rhetorical argument with the knowledge gained from schooling.
63. Th
e Gikuyu text is corporeal here: the three knowledges that Muoria describes
are ‘of the heart’, ‘of the head’, and ‘of the hands’.
64. ‘Religious and sacrifi cial knowledge’ is ũgi wa ndini kana wa magongona. Ndini is the Swahili word that Gikuyu writers used for ‘denominations’ or ‘sects’. Magongona were the ritual actions that elders carried out under trees when propitiating immaterial powers. Whether these actions should be called ‘sacrifi cial’ is doubtful: Gikuyu elders’
ritual practices were pragmatic, not simply theological in nature. For divergent views here, see Peterson, Creative Writing, Chapter 2 and John Lonsdale, Jomo Kenyatta, God and the Modern World’, in Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst and Heike Schmidt (eds.), African Modernities (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002), especially 39–45.
65. By the 1940s kiharĩro commonly meant ‘foundation’. A mũndũ ũtari kiharĩro, for example, was a ‘person of no standing, no credentials, one whose origins are unknown, irresponsible person’ (Barlow, fi le Gen. 1785/2).
66. ‘Vagabond’ here is mbũrũrũ, from the verb ũrũra, to ‘roam, loaf, wander about aimlessly’ (Benson, 558).
67. ‘Spiritual knowledge’ here is ũgi wa ngoro, the ‘wisdom of the heart’.
68. Is Muoria here showing envy of Africans better educated than he?
69. Th
e word Muoria uses here is gĩtina, the ‘base’ of a multi-stemmed plant.
70. Th
e word rendered as ‘truth’ is ma. Th
is seems to have connoted the author-
ity gained in making an eff ective argument: Gikuyu talked of ũhoro wa ma, a ‘true argument’, and kũũga na ma, to ‘speak with truth’ (Beechers, 105). Early translators thought ma was unsuitable for the abstract concept ‘truth’, and the fi rst dictionaries did not attempt to defi ne the word (KNA: NBSS 1/81: Barlow, ‘Translator’s diffi culties,
27 April 1944). But in 1926 the New Testament, translated by a team of missionaries and Gikuyu converts, rendered ‘the truth’ ( John 8:32) as ũhoro ũrĩa wa ma. By 1938, Leonard Beecher could defi ne the word ma as ‘true things’ (Beechers, 105); by the late 1940s, Arthur Barlow could argue that ma was also ‘fact’ (Barlow, comments on the Beechers’ dictionary, Gen. 1785/2).
71. This could be a railwayman’s memory of freight wagons being shunted
together.
72. Th
e word rendered as ‘love’ is kwenda, which might also be translated as ‘desire’.
Early missionary translations rendered ‘will’ as kwenda, as in the petition in the Lord’s Prayer kwenda gwaku kugie thi, ‘thy will be done on earth’ (Barlow, fi le 1786/5: Kikuyu Language Committee minutes, 17 June 1908).
73. ‘House’ is nyũmba, which by the 1940s meant ‘house’ or ‘hut’. It had formerly referred to the separate homes that the wives of polygamous men created (Benson, 354).
74. Th
e word here is mũgiro, a ‘ban’ or ‘ritual prohibition’ (Benson, 112).
75. Th
e Gikuyu sentence represents the custom as a closed door, mũhingo.
76. Th
e ‘end’ here is mũthia, ‘tip’ or ‘end’, as in the end of a maize cob (Benson, 506).
77. Muoria clearly expected opposition when he later built the fi rst rectangular stone house in his neighbourhood although in the next section he tries to justify himself.
78. ‘Disaster’ here is mũtino, ‘misfortune, bad luck, calamity’ (Benson, 449).
what should we do, our people?
247
79. ‘Association’ here is ngwatanĩro, from the verb gwatana, to ‘take hold of together’.
Labour-sharing arrangements for clearing fi elds and breaking up soil for cultivation were ngwatio. By 1938, ngwatanĩro meant ‘fellowship, community, society’ (Beechers, 38).
80. Price-infl ation was caused more by the wartime lack of consu
mer goods and rising rural producer incomes than by individual traders’ practices.
81. An example of ‘self-help’ blacksmithing was soon to emerge with Mau Mau’s artisanal manufacture of fi rearms. Some guns had the patriotic message ‘Made in Kenya’ stamped on them (Tom Colchester, formerly secretary to the Governor of Kenya’s War Council, in interview with John Lonsdale, 9th Feb. 1977). Closer to what Muoria had in mind was the later development of ‘jua kali’ or ‘informal sector’ artisan manufacture. See, Kenneth King, Th
e African Artisan (London: Heinemann, 1977);
idem, Jua Kali Kenya: Change and Development in an Informal Economy 1970–95
(London: James Currey, 1996).
82. Kenya has virtually no known mineral resources.
83. While Muoria was right to stress the dangers of soil erosion, the government’s conscription of African (oft en female) labour to dig hillside contour-terraces to defend against it was a source of mounting popular discontent aft er the war—for which the correspondence pages of Muoria’s newspaper Mumenyereri provide good evidence.
84. Muoria uses the English word ‘tractor’ in the Gikuyu text.
85. Th
is proverb was fi rst printed in Father Barra’s 1939 collection (G. Barra, 1,000
Kikuyu Proverbs (Nairobi, 1994 [1939]). Th
e phrase was popularized in 1945, with
the publication of Mwanĩki Mũgweru’s pamphlet Kamũingi Koyaga Ndirĩ (Nairobi, 1945).
86. Muoria’s phrase here is githomo na athomi. Both nouns come from the verb thoma, ‘to read’. Th
is section appears to refl ect most directly Muoria’s experience of
long-distance learning by correspondence course.
87. Th
is phrase equates githomo, ‘education’, with ũmenyo, ‘knowledge’, but not with ũgĩ, the term Muoria uses for inborn wisdom.
88. Th
uranĩra comes from the verb -thura, to ‘choose’.
89. Kĩama, used here, is ‘miracle’ or ‘marvel’.
90. Th
e phrase rendered as ‘nature’ is ũrĩa mombĩtwo, ‘how they are made’.
91. Ihumo, here translated as ‘elements’, referred to ‘sources’, ‘origins’, or ‘ancestries’
(Benson, 169).
92. Muoria names the elements in English in his Gikuyu text.
93. Th
e ability to fertilise one’s soil with animal or green manure depended on
the size of one’s property and wealth. Very small holdings could not support the livestock that provided manure, and manure bought on the market increased rapidly in price in these years despite a Local Native Council subsidy (from which only the relatively wealthy Kikuyu landholders could benefi t). Perhaps unwittingly, because he may have been unaware of the economics of manuring, (for which see Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below, 168, 174, 288–9), Muoria is here equating wealth and wisdom.
For his explicit denial that there was always such a direct relationship see, especially, section 28 below.
94. ‘Self promotion’ is mathara, ‘the scramble for loot’ (Benson, 495).
95. Muoria appears to echo the rhetorical question posed in Christ’s ‘sermon on the mount’: ‘Do men gather grapes of thorns, or fi gs of thistles? Matthew 7: 16.
96. While Muoria blames idle irresponsibility on a fault of character, Gakaara wa Wanjau would here blame colonial repression for depriving Africans of the chance to bear responsibility. Kenyatta, as we shall see in the third pamphlet, was in two minds.
97. Muoria appears to be adding to his criticism of ‘born-again’ Christian Revivalists.
See above, note 36.
98. In the past, this anti-social wealth ran the risk of being attributed to sorcery. See Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 119: ‘Th
e selfi sh or self-regarding man has no name or
248
chapter four
reputation in the Gikuyu community. An individualist is looked upon with suspicion and is given a nickname of mwebongia, one who works only for himself and is likely to end up as a wizard [who could be publicly burned to death].’
99. Th
e Gikuyu word here is ihĩtia, from hĩtia, to ‘miss a mark’ or ‘go astray’
(Benson, 159).
100. ‘Comprehend’ is menyaga, to know.
101. Th
is aphorism is from Barra, 1,000 Gikuyu Proverbs, 86.
102. Again, one may reasonably speculate that this is a Biblical echo—from
Ecclesiastes 3:4, ‘A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.’
103. Th
e verb here is kũgũrũka, ‘to be wild’ or ‘to go mad’ (Benson, 130). Th e word
places the self-indulgent person outside the arena of sociable human conduct.
104. Gichukia was a young person’s dance, performed at nighttime. Mugoiyo was a riddling song, with obscure language, and was more oft en performed by elders. For which, see Barlow, fi le Gen. 1785/6: Mugoiyo dance, notes, 1905.
105. Th
e verb here is kũhoreria, ‘quieten down’; in adjectival form it means ‘peace-loving’.
106. As with the question of manure (above) Muoria again seems unaware of the degree to which diff erential wealth aff ected the ability to own livestock. One of the bitterest Gikuyu sayings was to ask, ‘How can a man of one goat speak to a man of one hundred?’ Th
e feasting he refers to was generally sponsored by wealthy men seek-
ing social acclaim.
107. Muoria may have picked up this commercial advice from his correspondence course. Th
e colonial government issued pamphlets with similar advice in the years
aft er the war.
108. ‘Profi t’ is umithio, from the verb uma, to ‘come out’. Th e verb umithia is ‘to
help to take out’ (Benson, 541).
109. Muoria uses the word mũtungatĩri for a good trader. Mũtungatĩri was the same word that Presbyterians used to refer to their ordained pastors.
110. Th
e verb here is - honwo, to be recovered from a disease.
111. Muoria may have had two biblical passages in mind: Matthew 19: 16–26, when Christ says it is diffi
cult but not impossible for a rich person to be ‘saved’, and
St Paul’s fi rst letter to Timothy 6:10 ‘For the love of money is the root of all evil.’
(Emphasis added).
112. In his London exile Muoria later expanded on this passage to say that to attribute one’s poverty to piety was an insult to God who gave us hands and brains in order to work, and that not to use these gift s was a sin ( I, the Gikuyu, 109).
113. Kũhorera ia to ‘become quiet’ or ‘cool down’. Coolness was a virtue Gikuyu elders possessed: they carried staves of medicinal leaves that metonymically cooled heated confl icts. For a description of kũhorohia, see Louis Leakey, Th e Southern Kikuyu
Before 1903 (London: Academic Press, 1977), 1269; also Peterson, Creative Writing, Chapter 2.
114. Th
e term ũtheru comes from the verb thera, ‘to be bright, shine, sparkle’
(Benson, 504).
115. How far was Muoria refl ecting on racist insults suff ered during his employment?
116. It is not clear what Muoria had in mind here but no white person convicted of unlawfully killing an African in Kenya was executed before 1960—although capital punishment was prescribed.
117. Th
e phrase here is ũhoro wa kanua, ‘matters of the mouth’. For similar, earlier, Kikuyu views on the diff erence between speech and writing see, John Lonsdale, ‘”Listen while I Read”: Patriotic Christianity among the Young Gikuyu’, in Toyin Falola (ed.), Christianity and Social Change in Africa: Essays in Honor of J. D. Y. Peel (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), 563–93.
what should we do, our people?
249
118. Th
ũkũma is ‘to push’ (Benson, 535),
or to work for wages. One might read thũkũma as a comment on the unprofi tability of wage labor: while work done on one’s own land built up human relationships and multiplied kin, migrant workers pushed themselves for other people’s benefi t. Th
e links between agricultural labor and moral
agency in Gikuyu thought are adumbrated in Lonsdale, ‘Th
e Moral Economy of Mau
Mau’.
119. Muoria later explained, ‘even if horns are blown into their ears’ ( I, the Gikuyu, 112).
120. Th
e word Muoria uses here is Comba, a derogatory term derived from the
Swahili mjomba that originally meant ‘maternal uncle’, was then applied by ‘upcountry’
Kenyans to the coastal Swahili in general, and then to Europeans as well. Kenyatta called Nairobi Gecomba-ini, to mean ‘place of strangers’.
121. Muoria could here be saying one of three things: (a) that he disagrees with those who think Europeans were unreasonable employers; or (b) that he believes that, if Africans work hard now, they will not in future need to work for whites; or (c), as he refl ected later in London, that he disagrees with those who thought that work for white men should really be white man’s work. For this last possibility see Muoria, I, the Gikuyu, 113.
122. ‘Decent’ is rũagĩrĩru, from the verb - agĩra, ‘be good, nice, becoming in appearance in quality’ (Benson, 3). It became a common, if sympathetic, Kikuyu criticism of the Mau Mau movement that its leaders took on the responsibility of elders without being landed elders themselves. See Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below, chapters 6 and 7.
123. ‘Heroes’ are njamba, a ‘redoubtable warrior, man of prowess, fi erce character’ (Benson, 331). Th
e word also refers to an uncastrated he-goat or bull; ngũkũ ya
njamba is a cock.
124. Th
at young people now drank alcohol, previously a privilege reserved to their
elders, was a common complaint throughout East Africa at this time. For Kenyatta’s criticism of the youthful habit of drinking (European) bottled beer, see his speech to the mass rally of the Kenya African Union near Nyeri on 26th July 1952, shortly before the declaration of the (Mau Mau) state of emergency—in Colonial Offi
ce, Historical
Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau (London: HMSO, Cmnd. 1030, May 1960 [Th