Writing for Kenya

by Wangari Muoria-Sal

  e Myth of ‘Mau

  Mau’: Nationalism in Kenya (New York: Praeger, 1966). Ndegwa was Muoria’s chief source for the pamphlet on Kikuyu political history Ngoro ya Ugikuyu ni ya Gutoria ( Th

  e Gikuyu Spirit of Patriotism is for Victory) of 1947. Sources: Marshall S. Clough, Fighting Two Sides: Kenyan Chiefs and Politicians, 1918–1940 (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1990); John Spencer, KAU: Th

  e Kenya African Union (London: KPI, 1985),

  87–9, 93–7; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 43.

  the home coming of our great hero jomo kenyatta

  309

  22. Joseph Kang’ethe, schooled by Anglican missionaries, had been a sergeant in the Machine-gun Carriers in the First World War and then fi rst President of the KCA in 1924. Presented to the Prince of Wales who visited Kenya in 1928, in 1929 Kang’ethe led the KCA’s opposition to the attempted ban on female circumcision among Kikuyu Protestant Christians. Detained for supposed subversion in the Second World War and the Mau Mau Emergency, although no radical, he survived into the 1970s to act as an informant for Spencer’s KAU.

  23. While nothing is now known about Wachira, Karumbi had in the early 1940s been one of three vice-presidents of the Kikuyu Provincial Association, under its president Harry Th

  uku. Th

  e KPA’s members were largely landholders. Kariuki, on

  the other hand, had assumed the presidency of a factionalised KCA in the 1930s, was a very active politician from Fort Hall/Murang’a and a great organiser. Aft er release from wartime detention he became known as ‘the eyes of the Kenya African Union’

  because he knew so much about its many local branches. Detained in the Emergency, he showed little interest in national politics thereaft er. Th

  at both the conservative KPA

  and the more radical KCA were keen to welcome Kenyatta illustrates his appeal as a potential ‘reconciler’ of Kikuyu political faction.

  24. Th

  e Gikuyu text gives Beauttah the title muthuri mugathe, ‘benevolent elder’.

  Orphaned (like Kenyatta) in the great hunger that closed the nineteenth century in central Kenya, young Beauttah took domestic jobs with whites before enrolling at the Anglican High School in Mombasa. Trained as a telegraphist and employed by the Post Offi

  ce for two decades, he became a founder member of the KCA in 1924 and resigned his job in 1932 to become a full-time politician. While a local government councillor during the 1939–45 war, he became increasingly impatient with constitutional politics thereaft er and was jailed and detained for ten years from 1950, to emerge shortly before independence as another forgotten man. See, John Spencer, James Beauttah, Freedom Fighter (Nairobi: Stellascope, 1983). Th

  is was the second time Beauttah had

  welcomed Kenyatta in Mombasa, the fi rst occasion being in 1930 aft er the latter’s fi rst, brief, visit to London.

  25. Archbishop Alexander, a black South African, had in 1927 been consecrated Archbishop of the African Orthodox Church, off spring of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Although they had broken from white missionary control the Kikuyu independent schools’ leaders wished to have their own churches, staff ed by an ordained ministry validated by apostolic succession—something that Alexander supplied when he visited Kenya, at Kikuyu expense, in 1935. See, F. B.

  Welbourn, East African Rebels: A Study of Some Independent Churches (London: SCM

  Press, 1961), 79–81, 147–53.

  26. It is possible that Lilian Njeri was the ‘Njeri’ who as a leader of the Muumbi Central Association (founded in the 1930s to promote women from cooking for

  the KCA’s men to talking politics themselves) organised the funding of a 60-bed, stone-built, female dormitory at Githunguri school. She was to be detained, with thousands of other women, during the Emergency. See, Mbiyu Koinange, Th

  e People

  of Kenya Speak for Th

  emselves (Detroit: Kenya Publication Fund, 1955), 49–53; Cora

  Ann Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya (Boulder: Westview, 1992), 118. Regrettably, nothing further seems to be known about the other two women.

  27. Grace Wahu was educated at Kabete, the Anglican mission to which Muoria later went. Marrying Kenyatta aft er the Great War, she gave birth to Peter Muigai in 1920

  and in 1928 to Margaret Rose Wambui. Th

  e latter’s baptismal names were adopted

  from the future Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister. Th

  e princesses’ parents, then Duke

  and Duchess of York, had visited East Africa in 1924–5 and their uncle, the Prince of Wales, made a great impression on Kikuyu when visiting in 1928. See John Lonsdale,

  ‘Ornamental Constitutionalism in Africa: Kenyatta and the Two Queens’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 34 (2006), 87–103). Grace had not seen Kenyatta

  310

  chapter five

  since 1931 and did not live with him aft er his return. She died in 2007, at over 100

  years of age.

  28. Kilindini is the proper name for the Mombasa docks.

  29. Th

  e Sagana is one of the many rapid rivers of Kikuyuland, rising on Mount

  Kenya to fl ow through Nyeri district before joining the River Tana.

  30. Kiama gia kunyamara is ‘the committee of destitution’ or ‘committee of poverty’.

  Ûnyamari is habituated poverty, not simply a fi nancial shortfall (Benson, 340–41).

  Beauttah had helped to found the Kiama in 1929 as an undercover branch of the KCA (Spencer, James Beauttah, 17).

  31. For amaramaru, as ‘naughty, wicked people’, see Benson, 253. (Mau Mau fi ghters were later known by many as imaramari or hooligans). For the informal role of the Kikuyu General Union and other ethnic welfare associations in repatriating prostitutes and runaway wives see, Luise White, Th

  e Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial

  Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 190–94.

  32. Muoria recollected this remark when in exile. Th

  e Aga Khan’s Ismaili Shi’a

  Muslim sect had many South Asian followers in Kenya. He was one of the few non-whites made welcome in white-settler society, especially among race-goers.

  33. For ‘hotel’ Muoria uses an English loan-word, hutiri.

  34. Muoria was unwise thus to show that a still-banned organisation was politically active, as he later realised: see below, ‘Kenyatta is our Reconciler’, section headed

  ‘Jomo with the Elders who Sent Him to England’, in which ‘KCA’ becomes ‘Th

  e Th

  ree

  Letters’’.

  35. Kenyatta was around 50 years old in 1946. For uncertainty about his date of birth see, Jeremy Murray-Brown, Kenyatta (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), 323–25.

  Th

  e Kihiumwiri age-group was circumcised in 1913—Kenyatta himself under clinical conditions at a Church of Scotland Mission—at an approximate average age of 17.

  36. Th

  e word horeri is derived from the verb – hora, the ‘dying down’ of a fi re; the imagery here is of a benevolent elder.

  37. Muoria appears to be referring to Nana Sir Ofori Atta (1881–1943), Omanhene of the state of Akyem Abuakwa in the Gold Coast Protectorate from 1912, whom

  Kenyatta may well have met in London Th

  e proverb, sometimes given as ‘Th

  e elephant

  is not defeated by its tusks’, signifi es a readiness to carry responsibility.

  38. ‘Witchdoctor’ here is mundu mugo, a ‘wise man’. Kenyatta stressed apprenticeship to his mundo mugo grandfather as a qualifi cation for writing about his people: Facing Mount Kenya, xx.

  39. Th

  ere were then 20 Kenyan shillings to the £sterling. In sterling Kenyatta’s stake was a ‘half-crown’ or one-eighth of £1. Each prize of 100 shillings was £5, or nearly

&
nbsp; £150 in to-day’s (2007) money. Kenyatta made to-day’s equivalent of nearly £300 on the voyage.

  40. In addition to Facing Mount Kenya and articles for the British press (including the Communist Daily Worker—from which the British wrongly deduced that he was a Communist), Kenyatta published two pamphlet histories while in England, My People of Kikuyu and the Life of Chief Wang’ombe for the United Society for Christian Literature in 1942, and Kenya: the Land of Confl ict, for the Pan-African publisher Panaf Service in 1945. Muoria later published the latter, in Gikuyu translation. See, Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, ‘Th

  e Labors of Muigwithania: Jomo Kenyatta as Author, 1928–45’,

  Research in African Literatures 29 (1998), 16–42; idem, ‘Custom, Modernity, and the Search for Kihooto: Kenyatta, Malinowski, and the Making of Facing Mount Kenya’, in Helen Tilley, with Robert J. Gordon (eds.), Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 173–98.

  41. Th

  e word Kenyatta uses is umihiriga. By the 1960s a mũhiriga was once again a

  ‘clan’, one of the ‘nine full’ clans of the Gikuyu people (see note 11 above). But Kenyatta here was plainly warning against ‘tribalism’, not competition between Gikuyu clans.

  the home coming of our great hero jomo kenyatta

  311

  42. Th

  e Gikuyu original gives this section the title ‘Th

  e great meeting at the thingira

  (young men’s house) of the railway’.

  43. In the Gikuyu text this phrase is not capitalized.

  44. As Kikuyu politics grew more radical in later years, so tie-wearers, presumed to be allied with the whites, became ridiculed as tai-tai.

  45. Uiguano, ‘cooperation’ or ‘unity’, comes from the verb - iguana, to ‘listen together’.

  46. For his more forceful denunciation of informers six years later, at KAU’s mass meeting near Nyeri on 26th July 1952 see Colonial Offi

  ce, Historical Survey of the

  Origins and Growth of Mau Mau (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Offi

  ce, Cmnd.

  1030, 1960) [Th

  e Corfi eld Report], 302–03.

  47. Muoria had not needed to translate this Swahili proverb for his Kikuyu readers but clearly felt he had to do so for his proposed British readership.

  48. Kenyatta protested against the ‘Kakamega gold rush’ in Western Kenya in the mid-1930s, became honorary secretary of the International Friends of Abyssinia when the Italians invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and opposed the compulsory culling of Kamba cattle in 1938.

  49. In London Muoria added that with empty pockets Kenyatta could not help

  anyone.

  50. Atomiki Bomu is a good example of a modern Gikuyu loan-word. Th

  e Americans

  had conducted an atom bomb test in the Pacifi c only two months earlier. Th

  e white-

  owned Swahili-language paper Baraza reported Kenyatta diff erently here, as saying ‘I have no sword but if you give me one I shall fi ght for my people’ (quoted in Spencer, KAU, 164). But one must ask what sort of sword, a fi gurative sword of unity or a literal sword of steel?

  51. ‘Brother Francis’, Semakula Mulumba, was a Catholic lay teacher from Buganda, returning from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (where Kenyatta had been a language assistant in the 1930s). He shared a cabin with Kenyatta on the Alcantara. Mulumba became a leader of the populist Bataka movement in Buganda, which rioted in 1949 against south Asian cotton dealers and African offi

  cials of the

  Kabaka’s government. He had a choice turn of phrase, calling Uganda’s governor ‘a wild dog longing for black blood’ and, in contrast to Kenyatta, thought whites deserved

  ‘jail shooting the atomic bomb the gallows the guillotine because of your humbug and lies’—all this in a telegram from the safety of north London, where for a time he shared a house with Mbiyu Koinange. See, D. A. Low (ed.), Th

  e Mind of Buganda: Documents

  of the Modern History of an African Kingdom (London: Heinemann, 1971), 141–2. Such incendiary telegrams were oft en read out at Bataka party meetings in Uganda’s capital Kampala—for which see, Carol Summers, ‘Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940s’, Journal of Social History 39 (2006), 741–70. See further, David Apter, Th

  e Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study in Bureaucratic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), chapter 12. Th

  e police reported that Mulumba asked

  Muoria in 1948 to inform the KCA of his activities, and rumour made Mulumba the fi rst non-Kikuyu member of Mau Mau: for which see Corfi eld Report, 79, 309.

  52. A rickshaw is a two-wheeled, hooded carriage, generally pulled by men—a

  vehicle originating in Japan and widely adopted in southern Asia, introduced to Kenya by British rule. Today the motorised three-wheeler ‘tuk tuk’ has replaced it in Kenya—as in south Asia.

  53. Bejuti is clearly a Swahili corruption of an Indian insult, either Bheju Nuthee, to mean ‘Brainless!’ or Bhenchodya, even more off ensively implying an incestuous degree of carnal knowledge. (Information from Warris Vianni, lately of Mombasa).

  54. Th

  e verb here is ĩtigĩra, ‘be afraid’, from the root -tiga, to ‘leave’. Kenyatta was correct: see, Kathryn Tidrick, Empire and the English Character (London: I. B. Tauris, 1992), chapter 5.

  55. ‘Kavirondo’ was by now a distinctly rude term with which to refer to the Luyia peoples of western Kenya—and perhaps the Luo too, although by the late 1940s the

  312

  chapter five

  group term ‘Luo’ was widely used. ‘Kavirondo’ was used by Swahili long-distance traders to refer to western Kenya (Nyanza) and both its Luo and Luyia peoples from the mid-nineteenth century and was then adopted by the British. Of unknown etymology, it has been speculated that it originated from traders shouting kafi ri ondoka! (infi dels, go away!) to unwelcome crowds of onlookers. Th

  e Luyia did not become widely known

  as such until the 1950s.

  56. Again, Kenyatta was right. Th

  e forecast that Kikuyu and others would have been

  crushed between Masai and Somali but for the arrival of the British is fi rst found in J. W. Gregory, Th

  e Great Rift Valley: Being the Narrative of a Journey to Mount Kenya

  and Lake Baringo (London: John Murray, 1896), 369. It is noteworthy that while Sir Charles Eliot, Kenya’s second governor (in fact second Commissioner of the East Africa Protectorate) and the man most responsible for the policy of white settlement, had read Gregory, he seems deliberately to have ignored the latter’s forecast (see Eliot’s Th e East

  Africa Protectorate (London: Arnold, 1905). Ethnographically the most observant of early offi

  cials, C. W. Hobley, was likewise sceptical, arguing instead that pax Britannica assisted Somali penetration southwards (see his Kenya from Chartered Company to Crown Colony (London: Witherby, 1929), 177–8. Gregory’s analysis was taken up again by Father C. Cagnolo, in his Th

  e Akikuyu (Turin: Istituto Missioni Consolata, 1933),

  17—and it may be that it was this account that Kenyatta had in mind. Th

  is white view

  of their own redemptive local history was revived in the early 1950s, lending strength to the European belief that the Kikuyu Mau Mau rising was an act of base ingratitude.

  See, C. T. Stoneham, Mau Mau (London: Museum Press, 1953), 26, for reference to Cagnolo, and Christopher Wilson, Before the Dawn in Kenya (Nairobi: Th e English

  Press, 1952), 123, which went back to the original, J. W. Gregory.

  57. For the battle of Githunguri gia Gichamu, in a Maasai raid on southern Kikuyu in 1892, see Godfrey Muriuki, A History of the Kikuyu 1500–1900 (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1974), 19–20. Th

  e fullest accounts of Kikuyu military defence and


  off ence, which argue that Kikuyu were a match both for their Masai neighbours and for early Europeans, are in L. S. B. Leakey, Th

  e Southern Kikuyu before 1903 (London:

  Academic Press, 1977), Vol. I, 34–39, 53–86; Vol. II, 707–37; Vol. III, 1035–73. In 1955

  Dedan Githegi, a leading member of the group of British and Kikuyu liberals who aimed to ‘rehabilitate’ men detained on suspicion of Mau Mau membership, reported that young men in Kiambu were singing a song that went Ingitwika munene ndanenehia ngari wa Gichamu. Tondu niarerire wa Gichamu. Ngeca utiri Mau Mau. Th

  is meant ‘Should

  I become a big man I can promote Ngari wa Gichamu because he raised up Gichamu.

  In Ngeca (a village near Limuru) there are no Mau Mau followers’. It is possible that

  ‘Ngari wa Gichamu’ is an eponym, and that the singers were reminding themselves of their ancestors’ valour in fi ghting the Masai. For contemporary Ngeca see, Carolyn Pope Edwards and Beatrice Blyth Whiting (eds.), Ngecha: A Kenyan Village in a Time of Rapid Social Change (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

  58. Beauttah had spent many of his years in the Post Offi

  ce stationed in Mombasa,

  fi nally leaving in 1932.

  59. As for other public facilities (except lavatories) there was no open racial segregation on the East African Railways. Th

  ere was however much covert segregation—which

  could be got round with social bravado and inside knowledge, as Muoria shows later in this account. Th

  e sole legal segregation was in land ownership, for two decades

  from 1939 to 1959. But many administrative procedures and social sanctions were segregatory in eff ect.

  60. Paul Kelly, an Oxford graduate then in his thirties, had joined the Kenyan administration in 1936. Driven from his post in northern Kenya by the Italians in 1940, he was a notably liberal offi

  cer, active in agrarian reform in the 1950s, who ended his

  career as a provincial commissioner. He regularly revisited Kenya in retirement. See, Charles Chenevix Trench, Men who Ruled Kenya: Th

  e Kenya Administration 1892–1963