It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  The details of Mau Mau’s ‘terrorist’ atrocities were so gruesome–an elderly settler disembowelled in his bath, a tousle-haired six-year-old hacked to death amidst his teddies by the family servants–they obscured the reality of casualty numbers. The overwhelming majority would be black, not white. Historian David Anderson estimates that while sixty white civilians and the same number of British soldiers and policemen died during the insurgency, the number of Kikuyu dead probably reached 20,000.22 For the Kikuyu community, a post-feudal society itself riven with inequalities and ripe for internal revolution, was tragically split. On the one side stood wealthy landowners who had prospered by collaborating with the British, mission-educated Christians who rejected Mau Mau’s call for a return to traditional Kikuyu roots, and the Home Guard (subsequently renamed the Kikuyu Guard), a militia loyal to the colonial government. On the other stood Mau Mau’s natural recruits: desperate young men, many of them landless squatters. Their oaths to Kirinyaga were marked by a cross of soil and animal blood smeared across their foreheads, and when fatally wounded in battle their last act, it was said, was to seize a handful of that same soil. This rich earth was what had nurtured them, the reason for laying down their lives, the element to which they returned in death.

  As the campaign to suppress what was as much a civil war as an anti-colonial uprising gained momentum, with the Royal Air Force bombing and starving into submission two dreadlocked rebel armies mustered in the dank forests of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares, scarcely a Kikuyu family remained untouched. The Mau Mau did find recruits in other ethnic communities, with neighbouring Meru and Embu lending a particularly fervent hand. But Mau Mau was always predominantly a Kikuyu phenomenon, and that meant every ‘Kuke’–the nickname alone sounded like a curse on settler lips–was suspect. In 1954, realising that Mau Mau cells in the capital were keeping the movement in the countryside supplied with weapons and information, the British rounded up some 15,000 Kikuyu in Nairobi. Those deemed suspicious were sent to bleak detention camps to be broken, ‘cleansed’ and rehabilitated, a process dubbed ‘the Pipeline’. The rest were deported to newly-built villages in Central Province, complete with spiked moats and watchtowers, guarded by twitchy Home Guards. Families were often torn apart, with one son opting for life in the forest while his brother or father donned Home Guard uniform. So was the Kikuyu community as a whole, for it was noticeable that Kiambu, whose proximity to Nairobi meant its residents had been the first to be exposed to Western civilisation, produced precious few Mau Mau generals, while Muranga and Nyeri–more remote, less influenced by the white man–produced the hardliners. The bitterness created by such divisions would rankle through the generations. The more grotesque the form violence takes, the deeper go its scars, and plenty of grotesque acts were performed during these dark days, on both sides. In the British detention camps, suspects were castrated, raped and beaten to death, while the Mau Mau decapitated, strangled and disembowelled suspected enemies and informers.

  By 1960 the British authorities had won the battle, but lost the argument. A problem officials had confidently expected to last less than three months had dragged on for eight years. In that period, press coverage back home had changed beyond recognition, thanks in part to the efforts of Labour MP Barbara Castle and Daily Mirror journalist James Cameron. There was little sympathy for Kenya’s settler administration in post-war Britain, where reports of Happy Valley debauchery had gone down particularly badly. Crushing African rebellions was an expensive business, and British taxpayers jibbed at shouldering the cost on behalf of what was seen as a community of dissolute reactionaries. Exsanguinated by the Second World War, Britain was divesting itself of a demanding empire. Why should Kenya be an exception? Accepting the inevitable, the British government invited the colony’s emerging black leaders to a series of conferences in London’s Lancaster House in 1960, and the shape of future self-government was gradually agreed. Three years later, after his KANU party claimed an effortless election victory, Kenyatta became the first prime minister of independent Kenya. At a ceremony in a Nairobi stadium, the British flag was lowered in tactful darkness and a new Kenyan one–black for the people, red for the blood that had been shed, green for the land–was raised to cries of ‘Uhuru!’ (Freedom). Prince Philip turned to Kenyatta, seeing a lifetime’s ambition fulfilled, and joshed: ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’

  What happened next underlined how thoroughly the colonial authorities had misunderstood Kenyatta. Shaking their heads at the chaos that must surely come with black rule, many settlers pocketed British government compensation, sold their farms and returned to the motherland. The exodus threatened to destabilise the economy. One of the first actions of the man the Daily Telegraph had labelled ‘a small-scale African Hitler’ was to gather four hundred nervous settlers in a town hall in Nakuru to hear a message of reconciliation. ‘There is no society of angels, black, brown or white,’ he told them. ‘If I have done a mistake to you, it is for you to forgive me. If you have done a mistake to me, it is for me to forgive you.’ In return they roared a grateful ‘Harambee!’–‘Let’s work together’–Kenyatta’s battle cry.

  Claiming that ‘We all fought for Uhuru,’ Kenyatta blithely rewrote history, recasting the anti-colonial struggle as something that stretched far beyond the Kikuyu, a blurry, noble joint effort that somehow embraced black and Asian, collaborators and forest fighters, Kikuyu and non-Kikuyu. His message to demobilising Mau Mau expecting radical reform was so severe it amounted to a repudiation. ‘We shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya…Mau Mau was a disease which has been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.’ The revolution would not take place; Kenyatta stood for continuity, not change. Executing the same nifty manoeuvre Stalin had carried out with Lenin and Mobutu would perform with Lumumba, he claimed the mantle of the great national iconoclasts even as he neutralised their legacy. The ragged Mau Mau fighters who emerged from the bush only to find both their lands and wives appropriated in their absence were swiftly marginalised. Kenyatta invited them to independence celebrations, and fawned over them in public, but the kitchen cabinet he pulled together in 1962–63 contained not a single member of the movement. Since the Kikuyu who could afford to buy the farms of departing settlers were almost always loyalists, the rich elite that emerged was solidly Home Guard.

  The impact of Kenyatta’s ‘Forgive and Forget’ slogan–historians refer to a policy of ‘orderly amnesia’, of ‘therapeutic forgetting’23–linger to this day. ‘We don’t care where we’re coming from, we care where we’re going to,’ a Kikuyu will tell you in justification, but the relationship with the past is more complicated and tortured than that. In the public consciousness, a hypocritical history has taken convenient root. Just as it is sometimes impossible to find a Briton who voted for Margaret Thatcher, and every Frenchman’s father appears to have been in the Resistance, every Kikuyu seems to have had a father who fought valiantly for Mau Mau. When the NARC government, which rescinded a colonial-era ban on Mau Mau that remained on the statute books, unveiled a statue to Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi in central Nairobi in 2007, no mention was made at the ceremony of the existence of a pro-settler loyalist movement. Significantly, recent books on Mau Mau and the colonial era in Kenya have all been written by white Westerners.24 ‘When it comes to Mau Mau, a terrible pall of silence hangs over Kenyan intellectual life,’ says John Lonsdale, a Cambridge professor who has dedicated his career to shattering that taboo. ‘Kenyans may write their autobiographies, or record the pre-colonial histories of their ethnic communities. But they don’t write about Mau Mau.’

  Elderly Kikuyu living on what used to be the Kikuyu Reserve but is now just Central Province, a striking number of whom still suffer physical side-effects from being beaten with rifle butts by British soldiers or held too long in handcuffs–a stiff hip, a faltering walk, annoyingly nerveless fingers–retain a mental map of the landscape shaped by Mau Mau. These eighty-and ninety-year-olds can show visitors the loc
ation of the caves where fighters hid and were smuggled food, the spots where the Kikuyu were herded into artificial villages, the junctions where the disembowelled bodies of vanquished Mau Mau–their intestines wrapped around their torsos like bandoliers–were displayed. But none of these features on any map or in any tourist guidebook, and this silent topography will gradually disappear from community consciousness as the elders die.

  In Nyeri, a cement obelisk on the main shopping street supposedly pays tribute to Mau Mau’s fallen, but the plaque explaining this is missing. As pedestrians bustle past, it sits blank, ignored, anonymous. Perhaps the most creepily poignant site lies at the gravel entrance to the town’s golf club. Some fifteen years ago, the story goes, workmen were sent to fill a dip that kept forming under the chairman’s parking space after each heavy rain. They began digging, but dropped their tools in alarm when smoke began mysteriously wafting from the open ditch. The neat greens are located, as it happens, on the site of a former British prison, and today’s parking lot lies where the bodies of hanged Mau Mau were thrown. Rationalists may reject the tale as an urban legend, but the story certainly contains a metaphorical truth. In local minds the Mau Mau era, like the unrecorded bodies of its dead, continues to fester underground like so much toxic waste, ready to rise up and overwhelm today’s Kenyans with its noxious fumes.

  Of course there were grumbles amongst the Kikuyu at Kenyatta’s snubbing of Mau Mau. But the awkward fact that it was the collaborators, rather than the heroes of the revolution, who inherited the earth in independent Kenya was pushed to one side as the realisation set in that there was serious money to be made. Hundreds of new schools, roads and hospitals were being built, thousands of jobs once available only to whites and Asians were opening up in the state sector, and prices for tea and coffee–which the Kikuyu were now free to grow–were high. This was when the Kikuyu determination to embrace the white man’s ways really paid off.

  Kenyatta had revealed the expansionist plans he nursed for his community during the Lancaster House Conferences, to the dismay of other delegates. ‘He said that the Gikuyu must be allowed to take up land in the Rift Valley…Immediately there was a long-drawn-out “Aaah” from the Kalenjin and Maasai representatives, and Willie Murgor from the Eldoret area produced a whistle and blew a long note of alarm on it,’ recalled Michael Blundell in his memoirs.25 Borrowing money from Kikuyu banks and Kikuyu businessmen, tapping into the expertise of Kikuyu lawyers, the president’s fellow tribespeople rushed to buy the land of departing whites under a million-acre resettlement scheme subsidised by London. Descending from the escarpment, they flooded in their hundreds of thousands into the previously off-limits Rift Valley, seizing lands the Kalenjin and other communities regarded as having been temporarily appropriated by the white man, but rightfully theirs. Given a selling scheme based on the principle of willing buyer, willing seller, there was little the poorer tribes could do.

  The Kikuyu knew in their hearts that they were doing unfairly well out of the Kenyatta presidency. But those fortune favours can always convince themselves their luck is somehow deserved. It was their community that had suffered at the hands of the British, the Kikuyu told themselves, their community that had risen up against the oppressor, their community–better-educated thanks to its early exposure to the missionaries–which taught less politically-aware Kenyans what it meant to be free. More sophisticated, cannier than their fellow Kenyans, they had led the way in these, as so many other areas, and had surely won in the process the right to both lead the country and eat their fill. By 1971, the conviction that this pleasant state of affairs should be rendered permanent had so hardened in Central Province that a party within a party was formed–the Gikuyu, Embu, Meru Association (GEMA), whose aim was to change a constitution which provided for vice president Daniel arap Moi, from a small coalition of Rift Valley pastoralists known as the Kalenjin, to take over in the event of the president’s death. If ever there was an expression of ethnic hubris, GEMA was it.

  That golden era ended in 1978, when Kenyatta took ill on a podium in Mombasa, collapsed in the men’s toilets and later died. Despite GEMA’s best efforts, the presidency went to Moi, who could now take his revenge after years of being patronised by Kenyatta’s Kikuyu cronies. His power would be built on Kenya’s smaller tribes’ fear of a repetition of Kikuyu rule. Moi’s publicly declared philosophy might be ‘Nyayo’–to walk in the ‘Footsteps’ of the revered Kenyatta–but for the Kikuyu, nothing would be the same again. It was now the Kalenjins’ turn to ‘eat’ at the trough of the state. The Kikuyu still flourished, but they now did so in spite of government patronage, rather than because of it. In Nairobi, the matatu routes, the taxi trade, the hotel business, real estate–areas where the domineering KANU government enjoyed no control–were all in Kikuyu hands. GEMA went into voluntary liquidation in 1980, its dreams shattered.

  Once Moi gave in to pressure to end single-party rule in 1991, it was natural that the discontented Kikuyu community, at the fore-front of every curve, should launch the first opposition parties. Kikuyus today cite this as evidence that not only were they responsible for Kenya’s first liberation–from colonial rule–they should also be thanked for its second, from the one-party system. In every election that followed, Nairobi and Central Province would repeatedly, fruitlessly, vote against KANU, a constant reminder to Moi that this important section of the community rejected what he stood for. When the first serious ethnic violence in Kenyan history broke out in the early 1990s, with 1,500 ‘foreigners’ who had settled the Rift Valley during the Kenyatta years killed by local Maasai and Kalenjin and hundreds of thousands brutally cleansed–with the support of the police and government officials–the Kikuyu interpreted it as a warning that ethnic extermination was not entirely out of the question. ‘Lie low like envelopes or be cut down to size,’ declared Moi’s chauvinistic Maasai minister for local government, William Ntimama. Whatever protestations Moi made that he was Father to One Nation, the Kikuyu would see this bloodletting, an early signal of what the future held that no one wanted to heed, as punishment for a successful community’s defiance.

  It was sometimes hard to tell exactly where government incompetence ended and deliberate sabotage began. But the collapse of the coffee industry, troubles in the tea factories, the decline of Kenya Cooperative Creameries–all involving sectors at the heart of the rural Kikuyu economy–would be viewed by the Kikuyu as part of a malevolent plot to pauperise the tribe Moi feared. And they pointed to the state of the roads, schools and hospitals in Central Province as further proof of the president’s vindictive determination to make them pay for past ‘eating’. While Eldoret, Moi’s home town, got what every analyst agreed was a superfluous airport and bullet factory, the Kikuyu got potholes and schools more like farmyard barns than educational facilities. That might not have been so bad if the country as a whole was prospering, the thinking went, but just look at Moi’s pathetic economic record and compare it with the growth rates of the Kenyatta era. This was what you got when a bunch of illiterate herdsmen were allowed to run the country.

  Such, then, was the community from which John Githongo hailed. He was a member of the House of Mumbi, a house whose story was in many ways synonymous with that of Kenya itself, a community that managed to combine a bitter sense of grievance with a superiority complex nurtured during the long years of Kenyatta indulgence.

  Most African countries have their version of the Kikuyu: hardworking, economically aggressive ethnic groups whose success in business, skill at interacting with the globalised economy and bumptious faith in their own prowess so intimidate the rest that the fear shapes a nation’s destiny, reducing politics to a none-too-subtle expression of resentment by the less successful. In the Democratic Republic of Congo it is the Luba, in Nigeria the Ibos, in Rwanda the Tutsi, in Cameroon the Bamileke, in Ethiopia it was once the Eritreans. The ‘Jews of Africa’, these groups often dub themselves, and the things once said in Europe about the Jews are muttered about them:
‘All they care about is money, money, money,’ ‘Give one a job and the whole clan takes over,’ ‘They keep themselves to themselves, just can’t be trusted.’ And when things turn nasty, and politicians whip up ethnic hatred to please the crowds, it is these groups that pay the price.

  One of the characteristics the British left behind in Kenya was a very Anglo-Saxon enjoyment of jokes. Kikuyu jokes are legion, as often as not cracked by ‘Kyuks’ themselves, who have reclaimed their derisive nickname with the same confidence with which they once reclaimed their land.

  Two newborn babies are lying in the maternity ward, and careless nurses get them mixed up. How to establish which is which before the very Luo Mrs Otieno and the very Kikuyu Mrs Kamau come to pick them up? ‘Easy,’ says Matron. ‘Just jingle some coins in front of each and see what happens.’ One baby falls asleep. The other wakes and holds out a pudgy hand. ‘See?’ says Matron. ‘That one’s Otieno, that one Kamau, end of story’…How can you tell if a Kikuyu is dead or only faking? Drop your wallet next to his bed, and if he doesn’t immediately reach for it, he’s definitely for the morgue…Then there’s the one about the Kikuyu conductor of a crashed matatu who complains that his passengers keep dying before paying for their seats; and the one about the Kikuyu suitor whose idea of a romantic first date is to give the girl a hoe, take her to his shamba and put her to work.