Writing for Kenya
Page 45
time with Kenyatta when in Europe himself. When the time came for
him to come home [in 1938], Kenyatta had wanted to come too. As
he had no money for a ticket, he told Mbiyu to ‘take care of my home
for me’ on his return.
‘But today I am giving his home back to him.’ He also begged the
people to show their appreciation for the friend who had brought him
back from Europe and whose home was in Uganda. Th
e people clapped
to show their appreciation of the man from Uganda, Kenyatta’s friend,
whose name as we said earlier was Brother Francis Semakula.
People are at liberty to Invite Kenyatta wherever they want
Th
e next speaker was Joseph Kang’ethe, President of the KCA. He said
that what they had now was a religious sacrifi ce to welcome our great
guest home. People would have time to talk with Kenyatta later. All
those who wished to do so were free to invite him, wherever they lived.
People should therefore prepare for such future occasions, but for the
moment it would be better to let him have a rest.
Th
e Value and the Importance of our Soil
Aft er that Kenyatta got up and said he could not make a long speech.
But he would like everyone to know he was very happy to see them all
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Muthuri uria moimite nake Ruraya muganda niwe wacokire kuru-
gama. Muganda ucio arathiite guthomera uhoro wa Nga i Ruraya ni wa
ndini ya Gatoreki nake ena ndaraca ya undini egwitwo Brother Francis
ni muugi o kuigana nani oi Kibaranja. Nake ni mundu wendete Kinyatta
muno gukur na kuhona. Akirugama agikira ciugo cia muthamaki witu
hinya akiuga ati ni wega andu mende wira wa moko mao tondu kuruta
wira na moko niguo ugi uria wi bata. Akiuga andu aria ogi ni aria
marumagira mitugo yao tondu niguo ugima wao.
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303
and, further, to see our own soil. (Th
e people clapped their hands.) He
said that when he arrived that morning, the fi rst thing he did was to
press and pierce with his walking stick the soil which Almighty God84
gave to our ancestor Gikuyu. For our unifying factor is not the [Kikuyu
Central] Association but our limbs, which depend on that soil. For it
is from the soil that we grow the food we eat to keep ourselves alive.
It is on the soil that we tread and to which we return when we die, to
make it more fertile.
Th
en he said: ‘Since you sent me to Europe, I have spoken openly and
frankly, since I don’t depend upon anyone for food. What sustained me
in Europe was to ask myself what would ever bring great benefi t to our
African people? Th
at was the sort of thing I was saying in Europe—ask-
ing what would benefi t black people everywhere.’
Th
en he said something important, something not many people say,
which helps to show that the speaker’s knowledge, understanding, and
courage, have developed to a higher plane [than] in the normal course
of events:
‘My wife and my children are mine just as other African people are
mine. All the good work I did was associated with the name of the
Kikuyu people. I know that some came here because they are very keen
to see me with their own eyes, asking themselves what clothes I would be
wearing and what I had brought back with me. Th
ey should stop asking
such questions because the questions that should be in their minds are
about how can we eliminate poverty, what can we do about it?’
He said that many people probably knew about the recent Bomb85
which had been discovered, called the Atomic Bomb. He had not
brought it with him, nor had he brought a lot of money to distribute
to people. But he knew something more important than those Atomic
Bombs. Th
at was the Unity we ought to have, all of us. He again told
the people that he had not come to rule over them [by] telling them
do this and do that. He had come to tell them to love serving their
country and people, with good hearts.
He then said that if the people wanted him to serve them, they should
say so. If they did not want him to do so, they should tell him that,
too. Th
en he ended his fourth speech since he arrived in the country
by repeating what he had told his African audience at Mombasa.
‘Th
e life that is still left in me, as long as my arms are capable of
being stretched and my feet are able to move about, is committed to
serving the nation and the country. But if people do not want me to
serve them in that way, I will go home and sit down and begin to farm
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305
like other people. If we are prepared to work hard, with enough love,
our country could within a few years change greatly to our benefi t.’
So saying, he sat down.
Th
e last speaker was Brother Francis of Uganda, who had been in
England to study Catholic theology and who loved Kenyatta very much.
He said, ‘It is good for people to love manual work because working
with our hands is the most important part of wisdom. Wise people
stand by their customs, because in these lies their maturity.’
Th
e End
By this time, the editor was beginning to feel the strain aft er reporting what had been happening since they left Nairobi four days previously.
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Endnotes
1. Th
e word Muoria translates as ‘hero’ is njamba, a ‘redoubtable warrior, man of prowess, fi erce character’; also an uncastrated bull or he-goat (Benson, 331).
2. It is hard to know how to translate muthamaki, the title here given to Kenyatta.
By the mid-twentieth century it meant not only an ‘authoritative elder’ or spokesman (customarily permitted to ‘rule’ in no household but his own) but also a ‘king’—a very diff erent role, unknown to Gikuyu history. Bible translators had earlier used muthamaki for ‘king’ when translating the Old Testament. King David was muthamaki and the two books of Kings were Athamaki. Whether Muoria meant ‘king’ or ‘spokesman’
here is not clear, and the ambiguity may have been useful. See, further, Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: Th
e Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (London: Secker and Warburg,
1938), 325; Benson, 489–90; P. N. Wachege, Jesus Christ our Muthamaki (Ideal Elder) (Nairobi: Phoenix, 1992); John Karanja, Founding an African Faith: Kikuyu Anglican Christianity 1900–1945. (Nairobi: Uzima, 1999), 152.
3. Kenyatta dictated this introduction to Muoria as he walked round the property of chief Koinange (soon to become one of his fathers-in-law) at Kiambaa, in the south-ernmost Kikuyu district of Kiambu which borders the city of Nairobi. But Kenyatta insisted that his own home address be given as his byeline.
4. Mumbi (now Muumbi) was the mythical mother of the Kikuyu people. Kenyatta is aware that they now live in a wide diaspora outside their originally-settled territory, as workers on white settler-owned farms, or in Nairobi and Mombasa.
5. Kenyatta uses the title Mwene-Nyaga to refer to ‘God’. Mwene-Nyaga was the
‘owner of brightnes
s’, one of several names by which Kikuyu referred to the awesome and unseen. Missionaries had used the word Ngai to name the Christian ‘God’; in his Facing Mount Kenya Kenyatta had used both Mwene-Nyaga and Ngai (or Mogai) to refer to divinity.
6. Th
at God had given them their fruitful country seems to have become the domi-
nant Kikuyu origin myth only in the 1920s, aft er appearing as the opening phrase in the Presbyterian missionary Marion Stevenson’s Gikuyu reading primer Karirikania, for which see Derek Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 2004), 97. For the other origin myths that had fl ourished earlier see, John Lonsdale, ‘Contests of Time: Kikuyu Historiography Old and New’, in Axel Harneit-Sievers (ed.), A Place in the World: New Local Historiographies from Africa and South-Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 201–54, especially 218–21.
7. In his own pamphlet ‘What Should we Do’ (above), Muoria had used the term ũũgĩ to contrast the wisdom of elders from the intelligence of education, githomo. It is not known if Kenyatta intended the same distinction here.
8. Kenyatta uses the word ng’ũndũ. Ng’ũndũ was not undiff erentiated ‘land’, but the separate ‘family or clan estates’ that Kikuyu cultivated, dividing their plots with stones ( igaya ng’ũndũ, ‘dividers of the estate’). For which, see Arthur Barlow, ‘Kikuyu Land Tenure and Inheritance’ Journal of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society 45–46 (1934), 56–66. For an earlier reference to land as mother see, Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 21.
9. ‘Full trust in one another’ is kwĩhokana, to ‘hope together in ourselves’. Kenyatta had met such pan-Africanists as George Padmore and C. L. R. James in London in the 1930s, he had met the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie when the latter was driven into exile by the Italian invasion of 1935, and had represented East Africa at the 1945
Pan-African conference in Manchester, England. He also knew the distinguished African-Americans Paul Robeson and Ralph Bunche, of whom the latter was in 1946
in the American State Department. Bunche was soon to join the United Nations and in 1948 negotiated the Arab-Israeli peace agreement, a diplomatic feat for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
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10. Kenyatta has chosen to highlight Githunguri not only because of its importance as a Kikuyu project of self-development but doubtless also as a courtesy to his host at Kiambaa, chief Koinange. Chief Koinange wa Mbiyu had founded Githunguri school in 1938, to act as a teacher-training college for the Kikuyu independent schools—independent of missionary control but Christian in culture and in general following a government-approved curriculum. Kenyatta was soon to take over the headship of Githunguri from his brother-in-law Peter Mbiyu Koinange. Th
e British, later believing
the school to be the ideological seedbed of the Mau Mau revolt, turned the buildings into a court and erected a gallows in the school’s grounds for the execution of Mau Mau convicts, for which see David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), 155, 174, 349–50. For the very diff erent signifi cance of Githunguri for the Kikuyu project of self-generated enlightenment, see especially, Greet Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), 193–5, 217–19, 227–9, 251–3; James A. Wilson, ‘Th e
Untold Story: Kikuyu Christians, Memories, and the Kikuyu Independent Schools Movement in Kenya, 1922–1962’, (Princeton University PhD., 2002).
11. In the Gikuyu Kenyatta opens the school to ciana cia mihiriga yothe, ‘children of all mihiriga’. According to the Beechers’ 1938 dictionary, a muhiriga was not a ‘tribe’
but a ‘clan’, a ‘division of a tribe or race’ (Beechers, 125; the root of mũhĩrĩga was said to be hĩra, to ‘partition off ’ or ‘divide up’ the inside of a house). By 1964, Benson was more specifi c: a mũhĩrĩga was a ‘clan; one of the ten clans named aft er the daughters of Gikuyu and Muumbi’ (Benson, 158). Writing in 1946, however, Muoria and Kenyatta seem to have embraced a broader meaning of mũhĩrĩga. Th
ey defi ned it not as a Kikuyu
‘clan’, which could be internally divisive, but as a ‘tribe’, then the largest imaginable moral community, for which Kenyatta urged mutual cultural and political respect.
12. Mumenyereri is derived from the verb - menya, to ‘know’ or ‘understand’. A mumenyereri is one who ‘takes care’ or ‘knows well’ (Benson, 257–8).
13. An astute alignment between patriotism and profi t. For ‘tribe’ Muoria uses the Swahili kabira, not the Gikuyu term bũrũrĩ, nor yet Kenyatta’s mihiriga, employed above.
14. Tũika Muthwairi, ‘to become Swahili‘ meant, in eff ect, to become ‘detribalised’, someone presumed to have no moral compass. For earlier Kikuyu concern lest urban living would detribalise them, see Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 122, 132–3, 135, 233, 251, 317; 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), 572–4; Peterson, Creative Writing, 147–8.
15. It is not clear if Muoria writes fi guratively of people ‘getting on their horse’
(that is, in an English turn of phrase, riding their favourite prejudice) or literally.
What follows is wholly speculative but it is just possible that he had Louis Leakey in mind. Born in 1903 at the Kabete Anglican mission, son of Muoria’s schoolteacher Harry Leakey and brother to Gladys Beecher, Louis was by the 1940s white Kenya’s leading intellectual—while often critical of official policies that supported white settlement. In the 1940s Leakey had riding stables, principally for his children, at his home in the Langata suburb of Nairobi. He and his wife Mary helped to found the Langata Pony Club, which engaged in weekend riding safaris (L. S. B. Leakey, By the Evidence: Memoirs 1932–1951 [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1974], 158; Virginia Morell, Ancestral Passions: Th
e Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind’s
Beginnings [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995], 252–3). Muoria came to believe that an envious desire to discredit Kenyatta motivated Leakey to fan the fl ames of Mau Mau—all because Kenyatta published Facing Mount Kenya before Leakey brought out his own Kikuyu ethnography (not in fact published until aft er his death). Muoria learned of this literary rivalry from George Ndegwa, acting general secretary of the KCA, with whom he travelled to Mombasa. Leakey had certainly maintained a Kikuyu spy network throughout the Second World War, reporting to the Kenya Police Special
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Branch. See, Henry Muoria, I, Th
e Gikuyu and the White Fury (Nairobi: East African
Educational Publishers, 1994), 60–68, where Leakey is ‘the ambitious white man’; also Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, ‘Louis Leakey’s Mau Mau’: a study in the politics of knowledge’, History and Anthropology 5 (1991): 143–204. Information about Ndegwa’s part in informing Muoria’s own theory of Mau Mau’s causation comes from many
conversations between Muoria and Lonsdale.
16. Th
e verb here is thithimũka, to ‘shudder; have a creepy feeling in the spine’
(Benson, 518). Muoria does not specify who the ‘enemies’ were but presumably had in mind—besides Louis Leakey—the colonial government and white settlers, possibly also missionaries.
17. Muoria must have in mind what he later called ‘the brain battle’, for which his pamphlet What Should We Do was the opening shot. See Bodil Folke Frederiksen,
‘ “Th
e Present Battle is the Brain Battle”: Writing and Publishing a Kikuyu Newspaper in the Pre-Mau Mau Period in Kenya’, in Karin Barber (ed.), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and the Making of Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 278–313.
18. When rev
ising and translating this text in London for a hoped-for English audience Muoria made clear that he meant the independent schools which had broken from missionary control.
19. While Kenyatta, when in London, had given evidence to the British government’s Kenya Land Commission in June 1932—for which see, Kenya Land Commission
Evidence vol. I (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1933), 422–34—it cannot be said that he infl uenced the Commission’s recommendations, which ‘gave back’ very little Kikuyu land but compensated Kikuyu with land elsewhere, available for settlement mainly because both Africans and white settlers had thought it unsuitable. But see Kenyatta’s representations to the Church of Scotland in the pamphlet below, ‘Kenyatta is our Reconciler’, section headed ‘What Kenyatta told Kikuyu members of the Catholic religion’. Th
e British would also deny that Kenyatta had infl uenced the promotion of
African representatives on to offi
cial committees and in Legislative Council: for which
see George Bennett, ‘Imperial paternalism: the representation of African interests in the Kenya Legislative Council’, in Frederick Madden and Kenneth Robinson (eds.), Essays in Imperial Government Presented to Margery Perham (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 141–69; for Muoria’s membership of the Advisory Committee on African Publicity and Information see, Joanna Lewis, Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya 1925–52 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 257.
20. For Judith Nyamurwa see above, Bodil Folke Frederiksen, ‘Th
e Muorias in
Kenya’.
21. George Kirongothi Ndegwa had in 1924 been the sole founder member of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) to come from Kiambu district; the others were from Fort Hall, now Murang’a, the ‘central’ Kikuyu district of the three (the northernmost being Nyeri). Aft er factional disputes had disabled the KCA in the mid-1930s, he revived the KCA in 1938 as its general secretary, only to be detained with its other offi cials
when in 1940 the KCA was banned for allegedly consorting with the Italian enemy in Ethiopia. Released aft er the war, he was imprisoned for a year in 1948 for signing himself as secretary of the still-banned KCA, aft er an aff ray in which some Kikuyu farm squatters in the ‘white highlands’ refused to take a KCA oath of solidarity. Ndegwa was detained in 1952 at the start of the Mau Mau Emergency but later became, in eloquent English, an oral source for Carl G. Rosberg and John Nottingham’s Th