Writing for Kenya
Page 2
Fig. 2. Map of Henry Muoria’s Kenya, 1945
R
to NAKURU
to MURANG’A
i
& ELDORET
& NYERI
f
t
Ng’enda
Githunguri
V
THIKA
a
l
White
l
Limuru
e
y
Settler
Rironi
E
Kiambaa
Ruiru
s
Kiambu
R
Ngecha
iver Ruiru
c
a
r
Plantations
Kirangari
p
m
of coffee and
e
Kikuyu
n
sisal
Kabete
t
0
5
10
Thogoto
Dagoretti
miles
NAIROBI
km
CITY
0
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10
CENTRE
Railway
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Main Road
g
Langata
o
Mission Station
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NGONG
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H
ill s
to MOMBASA
Fig. 3. Map of Southern Kikuyuland, 1945
SECTION I
LIFE
CHAPTER ONE
HENRY MUORIA, PUBLIC MORALIST1
John Lonsdale
Kiri ngore gitihotaga:
‘An unspoken word convinces no one.’
Unremembered era, forgotten man
Th
is chapter introduces Henry Muoria as a public moralist among his
Kikuyu people and political journalist for a future Kenyan nation—each
of them a problematic, multiple, identity—in the context of his time,
place, intellectual tradition, and polemical arena. His time was the
later 1940s, over sixty years ago, aft er the Second World War. Th
is
global confl ict had bankrupted Kenya’s imperial ruler, Britain; had
shown that the British could be defeated by a non-white people, the
Japanese; had caused the empire to lose its oriental barracks in India,
the jewel in the crown; had brought to the fore two anti-imperial pow-
ers, the United States and Soviet Union; had linked Britain’s post-war
recovery to colonial development; and awoken tens of thousands of
Kenya’s young men to their own organised, military, potential when
sweating and dying alongside white soldiers as mortal as they, to help
the British drive the Italians from Ethiopia and then the Japanese from
Burma (Myanmar).
For all these reasons the late 1940s was a time of hope for many
Africans. It saw the birth of Kenya’s open, constitutional, black
1 I owe much to conversation with the late Henry Muoria Mwaniki and his wife Ruth Nuna, as with Greet Kershaw and Derek Peterson, whose Mau Mau from Below (Oxford, Nairobi & Athens OH: Currey, EAEP & Ohio University Press, 1997) and Creative writing: Translation, bookkeeping, & the work of imagination in colonial Kenya (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 2004) respectively, take discussion of Kikuyu social and intellectual history on to a new plane. Richard Waller has been my most valuable critic.
Muoria’s 1987 typescript, ‘How it feels to be born a Gikuyu’ gives biographical detail as also his I, the Gikuyu and the White Fury (Nairobi: EAEP, 1994). For comparison see, Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Th
ought and Intellectual Life in Britain
1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
4
chapter one
nationalism, proof of a sense that the future could, with the necessary
determination, be mastered. Muoria was there at the beginning, one of
the midwives of Kenya’s modern political thought. His principal—but
not his only—audience was his own Kikuyu people, about twenty per
cent of the colony’s fi ve million African population. He was convinced
that to show themselves worthy of modern political responsibility they
must, as mature adults armed with a self-discipline that was equal to
their ambition, live up to their ancestral traditions of honourable self-
mastery while learning modern skills. He called this his brain battle, to
combat British arrogance, but it brought him very material rewards.2
His audience was large; they liked what they read; they were prepared
to pay. His wide readership enabled Muoria, then in his thirties, to
marry a second and even a third wife. He built the fi rst stone house
in his neighbourhood; he acquired from his local Indian publisher the
fi rst African-owned printing press; he bought a Citroën traction avant
car, the fi rst to belong to an African in Kenya—that classic black, low-
slung, saloon with big chrome headlamps beloved, in fi lms at least, by
gangsters and Gestapo.
If the brain battle of hope was profi table it also carried heavy political
risks since, for many other Africans, these were years not of hope but
of fear. Landless peasants in the African ‘reserve’ areas, redundant black
farmworkers in the ‘white highlands’, and the urban under-employed,
all suff ered a dismal present and could see little prospect of a respect-
able, married, productive life for themselves in the years to come. Th
e
future was not theirs to master; rather, social extinction appeared to
be their fate. Partly because white farmers were mechanising at the
expense of their Kikuyu labour, partly because some Kikuyu were also
doing well at the expense of their clients, the despairing Kikuyu poor
were more numerous than in any other ethnic group. Many felt that
nationalist petition and peaceful protest were not urgent enough to
meet their needs, especially for access to the land that would make it
2 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 and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 278–313. See Muoria’s editorial, the angriest he ever wrote, in response to a speech by Sir Philip Mitchell who had poured scorn on African backwardness, ‘Th
e Present Battle is the Brain Battle: Mumenyereri’s
Reply to the Governor on Behalf of all AKikuyu’, Mumenyeri, 25 Nov. 1947: Kenya National Archives, MAA.8/106 (excerpted below in footnote 124 to the pamphlet ‘What Should we Do, Our People?’).
henry muoria, public moralist
5
possible to achieve a married, self-mastered, progenitive adulthood, an
ambition that in Gikuyu was summarised as ithaka na wiathi.3 British
rule through compliant black offi
cials seemed all too fi rmly entrenched,
indeed more intrusive than ever before in the post-war search for a
technically-determined ‘development’, unheeding of the mass misery on
which the prosperity of minorities rested, whether white farmer, Indian
trader, or African chief. It is a despair one saw again sixty years later,
in the new year of 2008, for not wholly dissimilar reasons.
Crisis and tragedy s
oon fell on the land. In October 1952 the British
colonial government declared a state of emergency, to forestall rebel-
lion from a secret, almost entirely Kikuyu, movement that its enemies
called ‘Mau Mau’. Th
is name is best translated as ‘the greedy eaters [of
elders’ authority]’ since the militants claimed, outrageously, the politi-
cal privilege and moral duty that was conventionally exercised only by
established elders—of whom Muoria was one—to struggle for, defend,
and allocate ithaka na wiathi, land and adult self-mastery. Armed
with emergency powers, the state was now legally entitled to wage
internal war on its native subjects, of whom Kikuyu were at greatest
risk of victimisation. Suspicion fell on Muoria, because of the suppos-
edly evil power of his persuasive pen. Th
is seditious reputation now
meant a life of exile for him and, for his families, a trans-continental
divide between Kenya and London. It was a terrible reversal of fortune.
Guilt by association forced his wives and children to face hardship
and danger. Marriage to a writer for the nation was no guarantee of
domestic comfort aft er all. Muoria’s wives learned for themselves the
old truth that women everywhere have paid heavily for nationalism’s
confl icts, whether between fellow patriots or against the alien power.4
Th
e remembered heroes of nationhood on the other hand, all over the
world, are almost always men.5
All nationalisms have conveniently forgetful memories. Th
ey must.
Nor is gender their only blind spot. Th
e French political philosopher
3 An argument expanded in John Lonsdale, ‘Authority, Gender, and Violence: Th e
War within Mau Mau’s Fight for Land and Freedom’, in E. S. Atieno Odhiambo & John Lonsdale (eds.), Mau Mau and Nationhood (Oxford, Nairobi & Athens OH: Currey, EAEP & Ohio University Press, 2003), 46–75.
4 Caroline Elkins, ‘Detention, rehabilitation, and the destruction of Kikuyu society’, in Atieno Odhiambo & Lonsdale, Mau Mau and Nationhood, 191–226.
5 But see, Susan Geiger, TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955–1965 (Portsmouth NH, Oxford, Nairobi & Dar es Salaam: Heinemann, James Currey, EAEP & Mkuki na Nyota, 1997).
6
chapter one
Ernest Renan, in his famous lecture What is a nation? delivered at the University of Paris in 1882, argued that while a shared history was
essential to national sentiment it would also have to be a carefully edited
past. Useful history required nations to forget much and misremember
more. Th
e intimate violence that, typically, had fi rst imposed political
unity on the future nation or bought its freedom from unjust rule,
whether by means of ethnic, dynastic, or religious war, even massacre,
had to be written out of the public narrative. A violently creative past,
common to most nations, must not be allowed to poison the diff erent
arguments of the present day.6
Th
is selective memory was vital, since Renan thought that constant
argument, ‘a daily plebiscite’, was the spiritual essence of nation-
hood. Civic debate, he proposed, was the precondition for a patriot
citizenry to agree to share each other’s burdens. But all such debate
draws on precedent, on memory, and this, he knew, could be painful.
His nineteenth-century ideal, in which debatable memory fostered
mutual obligation, was imaginable only to people who, with habitual
forgetfulness, thought they shared a long history under a single state
which they had made their own. African states, by contrast, have been
unitary polities for barely more than a century, for much of that time
as colonies whose alien rulers fought off any sense of political unity
among their native subjects until the last minute, when conceding
them power. Opposition between state and community, between cen-
tral power and local patriotism, remains at the core of Africa’s living
memory, not least in Kenya.7
African nations will, it seems, have to learn to be as forgetful of their
oft en divisive origin as European nations, or get that foundational myth
equally wrong, if they are ever to be at peace with themselves. Yet offi
-
cially sanctioned recollection, currently taught on political platforms and
in school textbooks, tends to serve the partisan interest of whichever
minority currently occupies the state in the nation’s name. Th
at is doubt-
less how all national epics originated—in precolonial African kingdoms
as much as in Europe or Asia—that is, in order to forge legitimacy, a
right to govern, for their fi rst rulers. Such stories may well have been
6 Ernest Renan, ‘Quest-ce qu’une nation?’ in Hélène Psichari (ed.), Oeuvres completes de Ernest Renan, vol. I (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947), 887–907.
7 As well illustrated in Gregory H. Maddox & James L. Giblin (eds.), In Search of a Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence in Tanzania (Oxford, Dar es Salaam & Athens OH: Currey, Kapsel & Ohio University Press, 2005).
henry muoria, public moralist
7
revised many times, to justify successive usurpers, treasonable rebels
who then got themselves hailed as lawfully prosperous kings. Later on,
counter-stories of popular sovereignty may also have been graft ed on
to them. In order to give grounds for its resistance to royal despotism,
for instance, the seventeenth-century English parliament elaborated
the myth that a ‘Norman yoke’ had long ago suppressed their native,
Anglo-Saxon, liberties. Similarly, socialist romance has been dreamed
about the Parisian French communes of 1792 and 1871—and partially
blotted out ever since too, for fear of their insurrectionary repetition.
Th
e more recent memory of the 1960s American civil rights movement
is also contested to this day, part inspiration and part threat.
Few modern African countries are the direct heirs to long-argued
precolonial polities with their own contradictory layers of public myth.
Many European colonies in Africa incorporated three, four, or many
more such historically conscious peoples by that sweeping act of politi-
cal simplifi cation called the ‘Scramble for Africa’. Most African states,
therefore, as post-colonies, are still at an early stage of their own for-
mation. Th
eir rulers have to manufacture legitimacy anew, just like the
kings of old. Th
eir publicly sanctioned story-telling serves to build power
rather than speak up for people. Resistant, popular, forms of forgetful
or mendacious history fl ourish more or less surreptitiously in Africa, as
elsewhere. Th
ese ‘hidden transcripts’, however, these mental ‘weapons
of the weak’ have yet to be etched into political cultures as the irrefut-
able folklore of vulgar, democratic, entitlement, however irritating that
may be to the ruling classes. Offi
cial history, meanwhile, prohibits any
daily plebiscite, since popular opinion, supposedly ignorant, divisive,
and with a peasant distrust of the state—any state—must, or so it is
said, be inherently s
ubversive of public order. Such offi
cial suspicion of
popular memory is as strong in Kenya as anywhere else in Africa.8
Public debate has nonetheless remained remarkably lively in postcolo-
nial Kenya. But it has largely forgotten Muoria. It is not that he is now
8 Richard Werbner (ed.), Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London: Zed Books, 1998); E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, ‘Democracy and the Ideology of Order in Kenya’, in Michael G. Schatzberg (ed.), Th
e Political Economy
of Kenya (New York: Praeger, 1987), 177–201; idem, ‘Matunda ya Uhuru, Fruits of Independence: Seven Th
eses on Nationalism in Kenya’, in Atieno Odhiambo and
Lonsdale, Mau Mau & Nationhood, 37–45. More generally, James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); idem, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
8
chapter one
inconvenient9 but that his whole era of African politics, the late 1940s,
is generally thought to be a story of failure, not worthy of remembrance.
More importantly, it was followed by the Mau Mau decade of political
violence, something which Kenyans, obsessively, continue to argue how
to commemorate, if at all, and how to forget. Th
is crisis of memory has,
more or less explicitly, informed every political crisis of post-colonial
Kenya, not least the last, the disputed election of December 2007.
In the later 1940s, however, in that distant pre-Mau Mau era, Muoria’s
was the fi rst voice to break the wartime silence of African politics. His
pamphlet, What should we do, our people, reproduced here, came out
in January 1945, in the last months of the war. But the white settler
minority, less than one per cent of the population, still dominated the
public sphere and indeed swayed the governance of colonial Kenya, with
more confi dence than at any time in the colony’s previous history. In
offi
cial correspondence ‘public opinion’ meant white opinion. Neither
Africans, the overwhelming majority, nor South Asians, three times as
numerous as whites and nearly two per cent of the total, were accepted
as members of the public. Africans could not in any formal sense
counter the local Europeans’ infl uence over British policy.10 Among
whites Muoria was read only by the Kenya Police Special Branch—and
historians must be grateful for that, since it has preserved his newspaper