Years later, when we became part of the Kenyan elite, we preferred to speak in English to one another, our children, and those in our social class. While the monitor approach helped us learn English, it also instilled in us a sense that our local languages were inferior and insignificant. The reality is that mother tongues are extremely important as vehicles of communication and carriers of culture, knowledge, wisdom, and history. When they are maligned, and educated people are encouraged to look down on them, people are robbed of a vital part of their heritage. I am very glad I did not lose my desire or ability to speak Kikuyu, because this helped ensure that a gap did not open between my parents and me, as it has for some of our children for whom education became synonymous with Westernization.
As we became fluent in English, we were also shifting in other ways—moving from a life of traditional dancing, singing, and storytelling to one of books, study, prayers, and the occasional game of netball. When I wasn't in the classroom or playing, many of my friends and I were involved with a Christian society known as the Legion of Mary that instilled in us a sense of service and the importance of volunteerism for the common good. We visited the sick and eased the work of nuns and other staff in the hospital. We washed and ironed the church linen and were involved in prayer meetings. We worked in the school gardens and helped other students with homework. The idea was to serve God by serving fellow human beings.
During my time at St. Cecilia's, and after many lessons on Christianity, especially on the Reformation, I decided to become a Catholic. We were taught that the Catholic Church was the original church and held God's truth. I do not remember discussing this decision with my family. I just made it. On my next birthday, I was born again. To show my admiration for the Holy Family, Mary and Joseph, I took a new Christian name: Mary Josephine (in Anglophone regions no one would name themselves after Jesus). My friends called me Mary Jo through high school and college.
Many years later St. Cecilia's was transformed into a pastoral training center, but otherwise the Mathari Mission remains relatively unchanged. The hospital is still a major health center for the area and the buildings look much the same. The Chania River is still there, although when I used to cross it, it was very wide and roaring. These days, like so many rivers, the Chania is very narrow and much quieter. Deforestation in the Aberdare range is taking a toll on rivers and their tributaries downstream.
Toward the end of my first year at St. Cecilia's, in 1952, the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule broke out and lasted throughout much of the 1950s. Organized by members of the Kikuyu, Meru, and Embu communities, the Mau Mau struggle was fueled most immediately by the sense of betrayal felt by soldiers returning to Kenya from the Second World War. Not only did they not receive any recognition or compensation for their service, but, to add insult to injury, their British colleagues were being showered with honors and even allocated land, some of it taken from the Kenyan war veterans, who were forcibly displaced.
The roots of the Mau Mau movement, however, are found in an older betrayal. In 1890, Captain (later Lord) Frederick Lugard arranged a meeting with Waiyaki wa Hinga, a Kikuyu leader, to establish station posts for the Imperial British East Africa Company on Kikuyu land and enable goods to be brought to and from Uganda. At their meeting, Lugard and Waiyaki swore an oath to allow the station posts on the condition that the British would not take Kikuyu land or other property. The agreement, however, did not last long, because Lugard's porters started looting the nearby settlements and raping women. The Kikuyus fought back in a series of battles that culminated in a standoff in 1892, when Waiyaki was captured, taken away, and eventually buried alive by the colonial administration.
The Kikuyus were stunned by Waiyaki's humiliation and death. In Kikuyu culture, everybody had a right to shelter and space: People who had land were expected to share with people who did not, who became like squatters, and were allowed to stay while they tried to purchase their own land. It was profoundly shocking that the British, when temporarily given such land under oath, would renege on their word and seize the land. Even though the oath was oral and not written, to the Kikuyus this was seen as a solemn pledge. But as the Kikuyus would learn, the newcomers had no time for verbal promises between themselves and the native population. Eventually the strangers simply acquired and distributed land to themselves and others, who began arriving in Kenya in numbers. The appropriation and redistribution of land became a feature of the British presence in Kenya.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, all the peoples of Kenya resisted colonization, and many were killed in the process. Eventually, they were all defeated, suppressed, and largely silenced. In the decades after the First World War, tension increased among settlers, the colonial government, and the native population, especially Kikuyus who occupied some of the highlands that the settlers had appropriated. Immediately after the First World War, the British established an identification system, called kipande, that required every male African in Kenya to carry a pass. The government introduced indirect forced labor and increased taxes. Local men began to organize to fight for better conditions, but after the British used violence to stop a peaceful protest in 1922, African associations and periodicals were either banned in Kenya, or their activities were curtailed.
Many of the organizers of the Mau Mau, also known as the Land and Freedom Army, were ex-soldiers who had fought for the British in Somalia, Ceylon, and Burma during the Second World War. Serving on the front lines to win a war for a colonial government raised their awareness about conditions in Kenya, while the insurgency skills they learned fighting on the side of the British in Burmese jungles gave them the expertise to resist a military assault. When these ex-servicemen returned to Kenya in the mid-1940s, they and others began organizing a coordinated resistance. In 1944, the Kenya African Union (KAU) was formed to campaign for independence. In 1946, Jomo Kenyatta, already a leader of the independence movement, returned from England to Kenya, and a year later he was elected to head the KAU.
In the early 1950s, frustrated by the slow pace of change, a guerrilla war for independence was launched: the Mau Mau. While there are many theories about the origin of the term “Mau Mau,” the one I find most interesting is this: In Kikuyu, when beginning a list, you say, “maũndũ ni mau”—“The main issues are …”—and then hold up three fingers to introduce them. For the Mau Mau, the three issues were land, freedom, and self-governance.
My family felt some sense of relief that at St. Cecilia's I would be protected from the violence of the insurgency and the efforts to suppress it. For the most part, I was insulated from the conflict, although I could not be completely so. There were very few Kikuyu families whose lives the Mau Mau rebellion did not affect. I had been sufficiently indoctrinated to believe that the Mau Maus were the terror group and that everyone else was trying to restore order. The British propaganda kept us naïve about the political and economic roots of the conflict and was designed to make us believe that the Mau Maus wanted to return us to a primitive, backward, and even satanic past.
One night we heard gunshots very close to our dormitories. The sisters came in, woke us up, and told us that there were marauders in the mission and that we should start saying the rosary. The extent of the misinformation and brainwashing was such that we prayed that the Mau Maus would be arrested. I did not understand that the Mau Mau were our freedom fighters!
Through much of the 1950s, it was not uncommon to encounter British soldiers, Mau Mau fighters, or Home Guards in and around Nyeri. The Home Guards were mainly drawn from Kikuyus who collaborated with the British government. In addition to the fifty thousand or so soldiers the British deployed in Kenya during the Mau Mau insurgency, they also armed the Home Guards and gave them considerable freedom to move around the countryside. They often accompanied British soldiers—nicknamed johnnies—and sometimes uniformed men from other communities who did not identify with the aspirations of the Mau Mau movement, which they despised and sought to crush. They
did not believe that the British Empire could be challenged.
As the Mau Mau period went on, more and more people were mobilized and people were forced to choose to support the Mau Maus or the British. All able-bodied men and boys, unless they were very young, were required to be part of the Home Guards and were expected to be at their posts by six o'clock at night. Gathering the young men at the posts was also a way to prevent their being abducted by the Mau Maus. Both of my older brothers participated in the night watch to protect Ihithe from Mau Mau attack and worked closely with the local Home Guards during the holidays. The violence came very close. Across the ridge from Ihithe, at Gatumbĩĩro, the Mau Mau burned a Home Guards’ depot to the ground, killing more than twenty of them. It was one of the worst local massacres by the Mau Mau and left many widows in the community. Such traumas have never been addressed. Indeed, there has almost been a desire to deny these atrocities took place. There is still need for healing, reconciliation, and forgiveness.
Young girls in particular were at risk of rape from Home Guards, johnnies, and policemen. Genuine Mau Maus did not harass or physically violate women. Instead, they abducted them to serve as cooks, porters, or spies. The Home Guards had a reputation for extreme cruelty and all manner of terror and intimidation. Initially, Mau Mau soldiers were respectful of women and did not abuse them sexually. Later on, however, when the war deteriorated into internal strife between the Home Guards and Mau Maus, and the barriers became blurred, the Mau Maus started using tactics that could punish even the innocent.
During the holidays, the protection available in boarding schools disappeared, so it was common for girls to sleep together in one house rather than being spread throughout the village. This way, if the Mau Maus, Home Guards, or soldiers came, the girls could be more easily hidden or evacuated altogether.
One night, when I was staying at my cousin Wangari's house in Ihithe with two other girls and a small baby, Wangari's mother heard the noise of a raid. We were quickly taken to hide in a nearby wood-lot of black wattle trees. The woodlot was thick and dark and full, and that night I remember the moon was very bright. We put the baby on the ground between us to continue sleeping and then the three of us kneeled and began to recite the rosary. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” we prayed, hoping she would protect us. Then, suddenly, in front of our eyes, perhaps twenty feet away, a leopard passed in the moonlight. We prayed harder: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now …” “Especially now,” I thought to myself. But the leopard did not so much as look in our direction. It just walked on and disappeared into the thicket. We looked at each other with much relief.
My family, like many other families at the time, was split between those who sympathized with the Mau Maus and those who supported the status quo. Even though I never heard much discussion in my family, I was old enough to know that division existed. My father had a special regard for Mr. Neylan and his family, and I know that Mr. Neylan trusted him. This presented my father with a dilemma, because those members of the family who supported the Mau Maus perceived him as a collaborator who should have been killed. For a time, my father stopped sleeping at his homestead and took temporary shelter at night in Mr. Neylan's compound. Mr. Neylan was allowed to carry a gun for self-defense.
The division within families also worked itself out in Nyeri, where my mother was attacked by men she assumed were Mau Maus. It happened at night, so she could not tell for sure. “They held the knife to my neck,” she told us. “I thought they were going to kill me!” Although she only received a cut, which was not life-threatening, the fear and intimidation she felt lingered for most of her life. After independence, my mother discovered that her main assailant was a disgruntled member of our extended family who used the emergency situation to avenge grievances against my father but made it appear like Mau Mau terror. My mother never got over the fact that someone within the family would want to harm her. Such was the trauma that many families experienced during these times.
In October 1952, during the end of my first year at St. Cecilia's, Kenya's British governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, arrested Jomo Kenyatta and declared a state of emergency. By that time, the Mau Mau rebellion had succeeded in creating an atmosphere of panic and terror among the white settlers. The British took harsh measures, eventually interring nearly a million Africans in detention camps, effectively concentration camps, and “emergency villages” where women, children, and the elderly, in particular, were confined and where hunger and disease were common. Entry and exit were tightly controlled.
In April 1953, Kenyatta was sentenced to seven years’ hard labor over his alleged role in the Mau Mau struggle. A year later, in one of the largest crackdowns of the rebellion, ten thousand Mau Mau fighters and suspected sympathizers were arrested and sent to detention camps where methods of interrogation were often iron-fisted and accompanied by torture. New historical research suggests at one point around 1954 three out of every four Kikuyu men were in detention. Land was taken from the detainees and given to the collaborators, while detainees were pushed into forced labor. Visitors arriving at Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi today might not know that Mau Mau detainees laid the concrete foundation of the runways. Their suffering and their contribution have been deliberately forgotten.
My mother, like hundreds of thousands of others, was forced to live in an emergency village—in her case, in the center of Ihithe. Such relocation was costly in many ways, including monetarily. My mother had to abandon an almost-completed house on our land and build a new one within the confines of the emergency village. She stayed there for nearly seven years and was able to return to the site of a new home she'd built only in 1960.
I was detained only once, when I was sixteen or seventeen. It was during the school holidays, and I was on my way from my high school at Limuru to Nakuru to visit my extended family. Unlike most men, including my father, I was allowed to travel. Traveling for my mother would have been too dangerous, so during the whole Mau Mau period, my mother and father never saw each other. Instead, they communicated through us children, who were able to travel to and from school. When I reached Nakuru town, I was arrested. I do not know the cause, but I suspect that even though I had the required passbook, it indicated I was from Nyeri and, therefore, should not have been anywhere near Nakuru. Even though I was young, being a Kikuyu meant that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was enough for me to be thrown into a detention camp, where Kikuyus belonged.
I was terrified. The conditions were horrible—designed to break people's spirits and self-confidence and instill sufficient fear that they would abandon their struggle. Sanitation was poor, food was minimal, and the camp was very crowded. Women and children, along with a few men, were everywhere—sitting, sleeping, talking, and cooking. I did not recognize anyone and slept where I could find a space. Because I arrived in my uniform, people in the camp immediately recognized me as a schoolgirl and asked what I was doing in the camp. I was questioned and after two long days the police took me to my father's homestead. I suspect that both my father and Mr. Neylan had been contacted and that Mr. Neylan had confirmed that I was a daughter of one of his workers, coming to visit during the school holidays.
I will never forget the misery in the camp. Nevertheless, it had its own strange calmness. In spite of the crowding, there was no disorder. I didn't even hear children crying, and made sure that I did not cry. I was also struck by the tenderness with which both men and women spoke to me. When they asked what I was doing there, I could see the concern on their faces and hear it in their voices. They knew I was an innocent schoolgirl, but by then no Kikuyu could be trusted.
New research indicates that in spite of the hysteria in the British press and the government, of the approximately four thousand people who died as a result of Mau Mau activities, a total of thirty-two were white settlers. In comparison, recent scholarship estimates that more than one hundred thousand Africans, mostly Kikuyus, may have died in concentration camps and emerge
ncy villages—on top of the humiliation, loss of property, and trauma that families suffered. It is clear that terrorism was not confined to one side. Interestingly, it is only very recently that the law in Kenya has been changed so that the Mau Maus are no longer described as imaramuri (“terrorists”) but as freedom fighters.
Even though the Mau Mau rebellion undoubtedly hastened Kenya's independence in 1963, and the events of the Mau Mau period are now fifty years in the past, the struggle has left trauma among Kikuyus that remains unaddressed to this day. The social cost to families and children of the violence of the 1950s may be incalculable. Fathers, sons, and brothers were jailed. Rape was a weapon used to suppress the rebellion. The trauma of the colonized is rarely examined, and steps are rarely taken to understand and redress it. Instead, the psychological damage passes from one generation to the next, until its victims recognize their dilemma and work to liberate themselves from the trauma.
In one aspect, I was very lucky. I started at St. Cecilia's nearly a year before the Mau Mau insurgency began. If I had been born a few years later, there is a good chance that the insecurity of the countryside around Nyeri would have dissuaded my family from continuing my education beyond the village school in Ihithe. If this had been the case, my life would have been very different. I most likely would have stayed in Ihithe, married, had children, and continued to work the land. You would see me there now, cultivating the earth and carrying firewood on my back up the hills to my home, where I would light a fire and cook the evening meal. I would not tell stories, because they have been replaced by books, the radio, and television.
I did very well in my examinations at the end of Standard 8. In fact, I was the first in my class, and when I left St. Cecilia's in 1956I received a place at Loreto Girls’ High School in Limuru, just outside the capital, Nairobi. It, too, was Catholic, run by Irish sisters of the Loreto order. Loreto Girls’ High School (known as Loreto-Limuru) was at that time the only Catholic high school for African girls in the country, and it drew students from all over Kenya. For the first time, I was studying with girls from many communities and regions. Of course, the rule was to communicate in English all the time.
Unbowed: A Memoir (Vintage) Page 8