Kenya Administration 1892–1963 (London: Radcliff e, 1993), chapters 4, 11–12, 15. For army discipline, Timothy H. Parsons, Th
e African Rank-and-File: Social Implications
of Colonial Military Service in the King’s African Rifl es, 1902–1964 (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1999), 188–9.
59. What John Hatch, formerly the British Labour Party’s adviser on African aff airs, most remembered about his dealings with Kenyatta before 1946 was Kenyatta’s advice to some Somali merchant seamen that the remedy for their troubles lay in their own hands. In conversation with John Lonsdale at Cambridge, 1980.
60. Th
e Gikuyu text, mihiriga ya andu, means ‘clans of people’ but, plainly, here means ‘race’.
61. The main occupation of Nairobi’s Somalis would have been the livestock
trade.
62. Pumwani Memorial Hall was built in 1923 (as memorial to the great sacrifi ces of the 1914–1918 Carrier Corps), in the new municipally-controlled ‘Native Location’
that was intended to replace the informal ‘native villages’ by which Nairobi was surrounded: Luise White, Th
e Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990), chapters 3 and 6. Frederiksen, ‘Making Popular Culture’, 5.
63. ‘From Meru to Ngong’ was a contentious way to describe the territorial extent of Kikuyuland. It was to claim the Embu and Meru peoples as ‘Kikuyu’. While the British entertained an almost equal suspicion of the so-called ‘K.E.M. tribes’ during the Mau Mau Emergency, Embu and Meru leaders have frequently, then and now,
resisted any such inclusion into ‘Greater Kikuyuland’. In 1952 some European com-mentators blamed Mau Mau on youthful boredom, thanks to missionary disapproval of ‘tribal dances’.
64. Th
e ‘family’ referred to here is rũrĩra, an ‘umbilical cord’, or the button on the bottom of a gourd, or the ‘relationship’ binding blood kin (Benson, 400). Th
e proverb
is in Barra, 1,000 Kikuyu Proverbs, number 814.
kenyatta is our reconciler
387
65. Th
e proverb is in Barra, 1,000 Kikuyu Proverbs, number 747.
66. Such neighbourly sentiment was perhaps reinforced by the fact that Kenyan and other battalions of the King’s African Rifl es had helped the British to expel the Italians from Ethiopia and restore Haile Selassie to his throne in 1941. Gakaara wa Wanjau had served in this campaign.
67. Nding’ũri here is a ‘big, sturdy lad left over and not circumcised with the rest of his age-group’, or ‘one with outstandingly great reputation or strength . . . above his age group of class’ (Benson, 293).
68. Kenyatta distinguishes—as Kikuyu had done at least since the 1920s— gikuyuini, rural Kikuyuland, from gicombaini, the ‘place of the foreigners’ or the ‘place of the heedless’, in other words, Nairobi. Contrast his views on circumcision in this and the next section with his earlier thoughts, above, in ‘Kenyatta’s Main Speech’.
69. Colonial Kenya had a long history of anti-Indian sentiment expressed by both white settlers and Africans. As small traders, informal bankers, skilled artisans, clerks, lawyers, station-masters—all the middle rungs of society—they were all too easily seen as a threat both to European supremacy and to African mobility when they might, more objectively, be seen as the essential lubricant of economic growth. See, Robert G.
Gregory, India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations within the British Empire 1890–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1951); idem, South Asians in East Africa: An Economic and Social History 1890–1980 (Boulder: Westview, 1993); Agehananda Bharati, Th e
Asians in East Africa: Jayhind and Uhuru (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1972).
70. For an explication of the proverb, see footnote 22 above.
71. Kenyatta’s chauff eur-driven car was a second-hand 1930s Hudson Terraplane.
72. Athomi, ‘readers’, can generally be taken to mean ‘Christians’. Kenyatta is here echoing the Gospel parable of the sower. See St Mark 4: 3–20.
73. Kenyatta has apparently thought again about the connections he had earlier not drawn between African poverty and white and Asian wealth. See above, ‘Kenyatta’s Main Speech’.
74. Th
e Gikuyu text chimes with the proverb ‘a group of people are capable of lift ing up a heavy object’, quoted above. What Kenyatta here meant by ‘power’ is crucial for one’s understanding of his politics. If he meant the moral power of unity and will, then one may conclude that his political views were socially conservative. If he meant political power, then he was, at this moment, as politically radical as Gakaara wa Wanjau (for whom see above, Lonsdale’s chapter, section headed ‘Public moralist’). Here we face the key enigma of Kenyatta’s political thought—for which see John Lonsdale, ‘Jomo Kenyatta, God, and Modernity’, in Han-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst and Heike Schmidt (eds.), African Modernities (Portsmouth NH, Heinemanns, 2002), 31–66.
75. Th
is was his second reminder of how much was owed to (KCA) elders. See
above, ‘Kenyatta at Rironi’.
76. Kenyatta seems to think there were then no landless Kikuyu—unlike the working classes of Europe. In this he was wrong. Most scholars attribute Mau Mau’s militancy to landlessness, or land poverty, among a large minority of Kikuyu. But Kenyatta acted on his belief that property was necessary to mature self-realisation and the social construction of civic virtue, to the extent of disapproving of workers’ strike action in Kenya.
See, especially, David W. Th
roup, Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau 1945–53
(London: James Currey, 1987); Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: Th
e Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 238, 354. Mau Mau’s self-appellation of ithaka na wiathi, ‘landed property and self-mastery’ suggests both a political philosophy shared with Kenyatta—that land conferred the right to political responsibility—and that Mau Mau’s members did not enjoy that entitlement.
77. Kenyatta practised what he preached. See the photograph of him, with many others (and his Hudson Terraplane car), quarrying stone for Githunguri school, in Anthony Howarth, Kenyatta: A Photographic Biography (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967), 72–3.
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78. Arthur Gatung’u (wa Gathuma) was in the 1930s one of the earliest ordained priests of the African Orthodox Church and aft er the Second World War became prominent in the Kikuyu Karing’a Educational Association. Educated at the Scottish mission and Alliance High School, he was in large part responsible for the schism between Karing’a and the Independent Schools Association. Kikuyu opinion was
divided on whether, in the 1950s, he supported Mau Mau or opposed it as a committed Christian. Welbourn, East African Rebels, 149–53.
79. Compare Muoria’s earlier gloss on ‘Ngemi’ above, ‘Kenyatta’s Words to the Kikuyu Sports Club’.
80. For Kang’ethe see above, endnote 22 in ‘Th
e Homecoming of our Hero’.
81. While the Gikuyu text is not entirely clear, Muoria seems to report Kang’ethe as saying that missionaries foresaw a future when education would outrun missionary control—thus perhaps suggesting that the independent schools had missionary blessing.
82. Kenyatta says the association aims to kunora ciana, to ‘sharpen children’ like a knife. For ũgĩ as ‘sharpness’, see Peterson, Creative Writing, 81.
83. In London, for his English audience, Muoria rendered ‘goodness’ as ‘charity’.
84. Th
e Gikuyu kĩrĩra or ‘secret knowledge’ was what elders passed on to youths at their initiation. In London, Muoria clearly felt the term was open to misunderstand-ing—and elders would certainly have seen their ‘secret knowledge’ as ‘good advice’.
85. Th
e Gikuyu text here is kĩrĩra ka
na githomo, ‘oral knowledge or written knowledge’.
86. Th
e Gikuyu phrase is kĩrĩra ni kũruta magongona, the ‘knowledge of making sacrifi ces’. Magongona were the rituals that elders practiced when propitiating angry ancestors.
87. Kenyatta is developing his ‘seed’ metaphor (see above, his Introduction to this pamphlet) and will go on to develop it further, below. Here he also modifi es the parable of the sower ( St Mark 4: 3–20) by focusing on the quality of the seed rather than on the nature of the ground in which it is sown.
88. Th
e word here is gĩtina, the ‘base’ or ‘foundation’, like the main stem of a plant, or the foot of a tree (Benson, 449).
89. For Kenyatta’s earlier use of the proverb see above, ‘Kenyatta’s Main Speech’.
His thoughts here echo the last two defi ant pages of his Facing Mount Kenya.
90. Kenyatta is perhaps recollecting here the criticism he had made of the confu-sions created by missionary education in Facing Mount Kenya, 120, 124–5, 250–51, 269–73, 316.
91. Th
e word here is angwana, a Swahili term connoting the sophisticated gentility of upper-class, urban, Muslims, living behind the doors that Muoria had so admired when being shown round Mombasa by Paul Kelly. See above, ‘Home Coming’, section
‘Seeing Wonderful Old Doors’.
92. Th
e word here is gathuku, ‘parrot’, from the Swahili kasuku. President Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s second president and Kenyatta’s successor, was later to be notorious for advising Kenya’s politicians to echo his words like parrots rather than espouse different policies of their own. For such teaching see Daniel T. arap Moi, Kenya African Nationalism: Nyayo Philosophy and Principles (London: Macmillan, 1986).
93. Kenyatta here seems to share Muoria’s belief that one should think before speaking. See above, ‘What Should we Do?’, footnote 28.
94. Nyamĩndigi is a red-breasted thrush, a clear whistler, frequently mentioned in folk-tales. It is also a nickname given to a garrulous person (Benson, 341).
95. Th
e mukongoe was a mythical tree whose roots were said to go down to the unknown. To be swallowed by the roots of the mukongoe was to disappear completely.
In another version of this folk-tale God changed his mind aft er sending the chameleon to mankind with the promise of eternal life, and sent the bird to forecast death. See, Leonard J. Beecher, ‘Th
e Stories of the Kikuyu’, Africa 11 (1938), 80–87. Th
e question
kenyatta is our reconciler
389
whether or not Kenyatta had cursed Mau Mau ‘down to the roots of the mukongoe tree’ on 24th August 1952 at a public meeting at Kiambu’s kirigiti (cricket) ground played a prominent part in his trial in 1952–53. While the judge thought it was coded advice that Mau Mau should ‘go underground’, there seems no reason to doubt that Kenyatta did indeed curse the movement. See, John Lonsdale, ‘Kenyatta’s Trials: Breaking and Making an African Nationalist’, in Peter Coss (ed.), Th
e Moral World of
the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 230–31.
96. Th
e Gikuyu here is gutindirira, to ‘take long over’.
97. Philip Kioko was treasurer of the Akamba Traders Association and was later appointed an offi
cial chief; Chief Karaboto (Kalavoto to the Kamba) was one of the
most senior chiefs of the area; Chief Jonathan Kala of Kangundo was another senior man, with a Zulu wife; he may have started his offi
cial career as a police interpreter,
then became an administrative clerk, then chief in 1936. He used the loyal military service of the Kamba in both World Wars to exert pressure on the British. Chief James Mwanthi of Kalama location, back from Britain’s victory celebrations in London, also exploited the Kamba military reputation to good political eff ect, especially in securing educational funding from government. Information kindly given by Myles G. Osborne; see also his ‘Changing Kamba, Making Kenya, c. 1880–1964’ (Harvard University PhD., 2008).
98. Th
e word rendered as education here is u’marua, an invented word meaning
‘the state of letters’. Marua are paper correspondence.
99. The word here is tanimboi, a Gikuyu-ized rendition of the English ‘turn boy’.
100. Kenyatta here refers to the Kamba ‘destocking crisis’ of 1938 when the British, partly as an environmental protection measure, partly to increase the turnover of a canning factory installed to export white-settlers’ beef products, tried forcibly to cull
‘surplus’ Kamba cattle at a knock-down price. Kamba protests were relayed to Kenyatta in London. Th
e British soon relented, mainly because the Kamba were seen as good
soldiers, not to be provoked with a new world-war looming: See, Robert L. Tignor, Th
e Colonial Transformation of Kenya: Th
e Kamba, Kikuyu, and Maasai from 1900
to 1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), chapters 14 and 15; Osborne,
‘Changing Kamba, Making Kenya.’
101. For Kenyatta’s development of this analogy, and discussion, see below.
102. Gucukana is to ‘despoil each other’. Th
e British knew Kenyatta could be
misreported by those with ‘some axe to grind’ but rarely gave him the benefi t of that doubt: See Colonial Offi
ce, Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau
(London: HMSO, Cmnd 1030, 1960), 52. Cited as Corfi eld Report hereaft er, aft er its author, Frank Corfi eld, a retired colonial offi
cial.
103. Th
e Gikuyu text refers to the ‘tribal informers’ as ‘some people whose hearts
were pounding, asking when Kenyatta would fi nish so that they can take that news of his to the clan of the whites’.
104. Kihoto also came to mean ‘justice’.
105. To be a dependent client would make one defer to one’s patron’s wishes; and the most common reason for a man to live at another man’s home would be that one was too poor to marry his daughter other than by performing domestic service. Such a man was known as mwendia ruhiu, ‘a seller of the knife’. Kenyatta may be reassuring his audience that he is not subservient to his father-in-law Koinange.
106. Kenyatta uses Mwene-Nyaga here for ‘Almighty God’.
107. One cannot know if Kenyatta remembered, if indeed he knew, that ‘Judas’ had fi rst entered the Kikuyu political vocabulary in 1921–22, when it was an accusation levied against chiefs (including Koinange and Muhoho, both to become Kenyatta’s fathers-in-law). See John Lonsdale, ‘Moral Economy of Mau Mau’ in Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Confl ict in Kenya and Africa (London: James Currey, 1992), 370.
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108. Kenyatta is quoting the Prayer of St. Chrisostom, from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, and itself derived from a promise reported of Jesus Christ in St Matthew 18: 19–20.
109. Whites got to know of this argument and completely misinterpreted it as an attack on Christianity, when Kenyatta’s chief concern was that religious division and competition was an obstacle to Kikuyu unity. Th
e Kikuyu independent schools
and churches, which Kenyatta supported, never repudiated Christianity. See, Corfi eld Report, 80.
110. Th
e Gikuyu text titles this section ‘What Kenyatta told the crowd at the sports meeting of the three-letters at Mukui school’s football pitch’.
111. We have been unable to fi nd evidence to corroborate this strange statement.
It is possible that Muoria, adding this refl ection in the 1980s, was thinking as much of his own inability to return to Kenya in the 1960s as of Kenyatta’s predicament in the 1940s. For what Kenyatta said to others about his contacts with the British government before his return see Spencer, KAU, 163, 191–2. Also, C
orfi eld Report, 50.
112. Dedan Mugo Kimani, who became president of all Mariika or age-groups in 1947, the chief fund-raisers for Githunguri school, was convicted of administering an illegal oath, on evidence apparently brought by outraged elders. Carl G. Rosberg and John Nottingham, Th
e Myth of ‘Mau Mau’: Nationalism in Kenya (Stanford CA:
Hoover Institution, 1966), 332; Greet Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), 210, 233, 243. For George Ndegwa see the previous pamphlet, ‘Home Coming’, endnote 21.
113. This proverb is cited twice above, and explicated in footnote 22 of this pamphlet.
114. For accounts of Kenyatta in London see, Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth, 102–04, 138–41; Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, chapters 10–18. It is not clear what Kenyatta meant when referring to women’s tax obligations since the Hut Tax, oft en seen as a tax on wives, had not been withdrawn, although it became easier for widows to claim exemption. Harry Th
uku had been nicknamed ‘the chief of the women’ in the 1920s
for denouncing forced woman and child labour on white coff ee estates, and claimed that even Kenyatta had so named him: Th
uku, with King, Autobiography, 47; echoed
in Cora Ann Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya (Boulder CO: Westview, 1992), 125.
115. When rewriting in London, in 1985, Muoria revised this sentence to make it clear that Kenyatta had Kikuyu independent schools in mind.
116. Th
e 1929 ‘confl ict’ was the so-called ‘female circumcision crisis’. For which
see the summary in Lonsdale’s chapter above, section on ‘Th
e making of a self-taught
man’.
117. Kenyatta did not know what he was talking about; in the late 1930s (and doubtless since) Kikuyu women were choosing their bean varieties with an eye to their market profi tability, as a means to pay taxes. See Claire Robertson, Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men, and Trade in the Nairobi Area 1880–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 51–2, 77–8, for tax and beans. It is however the case that, as producer prices rose during the war, the fl at-rate hut tax would have been a decreasing burden for rural Kikuyu households with enough land for market production.
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