Writing for Kenya
Page 6
locations entered a decade of energetic literary and musical output,
chronicled by Drum magazine, one of the liveliest periodicals in the
world, before the forced apartheid removals to suburban townships
closed that energy down during what has been called South Africa’s
‘silent sixties’. Kenya therefore was not exceptional in this new age of
cultural creativity. Nonetheless, the achievements of Henry Muoria
and his few local contemporaries were remarkable. Nairobi’s African
population was smaller than that of Accra, Lagos, or Johannesburg.
More middle-ranking jobs that could have supported a literary culture
were held by south Asians than by Africans. Kenya’s formal African
schooling was two or three generations behind that of parts of western
and southern Africa. English, in particular, was accessible to far fewer
Africans in Kenya than their Nigerian or South African counterparts. To
publish in the vernacular, not only in Gikuyu but also in KiKamba and
Dholuo, was more profi table than doing so even in Swahili. Nairobi’s
readerships were smaller, more divided, poorer than elsewhere. Muoria
contrived to prosper—perhaps, in part, because he soon dropped the
English-language section from Mumenyereri.
Muoria benefi ted, then, from social and educational change, however
late they came to East Africa when compared with west and southern
Africa. Th
e political and moral arguments he expressed in his newspaper
and pamphlets were similar to those declared, for instance, in Nigeria
but by a much larger group of journalists, Nnamdi Azikiwe among
them, who supported nationalist politics and social reform. But the
size of the Nigerian audience was increased still further by the ability
of many to read in English as much as in Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa. Th
e
didactic pamphlets and penny dreadfuls that emerged from the market
town of Onitsha, a famous example of Africa’s new popular literature,
were entirely in English. In South Africa, newspapers like Th
e Bantu
World, Ilanga Lase Natal and Inkundla ya Bantu, published either in English or with English-language sections, were edited by political
reformers closely related to social and political institutions older and
more deeply rooted in black society than the Kenya African Union
could begin to pretend. Like Muoria, they promoted political progress
and moral enlightenment, they were responsive to their readers. But
their conversations with their public were largely in English. Muoria’s
Gikuyu was just as ‘national’ in historical resonance as English, but
henry muoria, public moralist
27
his public was only one among Kenya’s many moral communities, not
the increasingly common audience entered into by the African middle
classes of western and even southern Africa at this time—however much
their politicised ethnicity later divided them.47
Muoria began to create and address his public at a critical moment
in the life of colonial Kenya, as his contemporaries did in other colonies
Also as in other parts of the postwar world it was a time of dislocation,
of social change engineered from above and, increasingly, of frightened,
angry, tumult below. Th
e economic stimulus of war-imperialism had
brought thousands of young East Africans to town for the fi rst time,
making them strangers to their parents and bringing them new friends,
new rivals. Military service had introduced many more thousands to
a wider world overseas, to Egypt and the holy land of Palestine to the
north—what for some was the centre of their biblically-educated global
imagination—and, to the east, to India and Burma, where people even
poorer and more divided than themselves were soon to gain indepen-
dence.48 Yet, aft er the war many Africans found that life back home took
a turn for the worse, dashing all hopes that the British might reward
them for their sacrifi ces in fi ghting the Empire’s freedom-struggle
against fascism.49
Th
e African poor were equally hard hit in town and country. Th
e
price-infl ation caused by worldwide shortages of food and consumer
47 For these last two paragraphs see, from a large literature, Emmanuel Obiechina, An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973); Tim Couzens, Th
e New African. A Study of the Life and
Works of H. I. E. Dhlomo (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985); Stephanie Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: ‘How to Play the Game of Life’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Karin Barber (ed.), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), especially her ‘Introduction: Hidden Innovators in Africa’ and the following chapters: Bhekizizwe Peterson, ‘ Th
e Bantu World and the World of the Book: Reading, Writing,
and “Enlightenment” ’, and Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘Reading Debating/Debating Reading: Th e
Case of the Lovedale Literary Society, or Why Mandela quotes Shakespeare’. Th anks,
too, to guidance from Bodil Folke Frederiksen.
48 For excitement and doubt in visiting the holy land see, Kaggia, Roots of freedom, 28–30, 37–9. For Burma, Gerald Hanley, Monsoon Victory (London: Collins, 1946); Waruhiu Itote (General China), ‘Mau Mau’ General (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967); John Nunneley, Tales from the King’s African Rifl es (London: Cassell, 1998).
49 A propaganda pamphlet to encourage African recruitment and published in
English, Swahili, Luganda and Chinyanja, was in English called A Spear for Freedom (Nairobi: East Africa Command, ?1943). Th
e army masked the political implications of
this title for its Swahili-reading audience by changing it to the simple military couplet, Mkuki na Bunduki, ‘Spear and Gun’.
28
chapter one
goods impoverished black townspeople, always among the lowest paid
and oft en unemployed. Nor were the colonial regime or commercial
employers quick to permit to African workers the full rights of trades
union representation that might have won them some redress.50 In the
rural regions of central Kenya, too, where most Kikuyu people lived,
many poorer households faced a shocking decline in status as the
rich and powerful few, both black and white, exploited the wartime
export boom to tighten their hold on property. Farm tenants found
their previously agreed land rights were repudiated as much by their
seniors in the Kikuyu ‘reserve’ as by employers on the ‘white highlands’.
Th
e shock was all the greater in the latter area, on the settlers’ farms.
African labour tenants here, the so-called ‘squatters’, had hitherto
managed to cultivate and graze larger acreages of their own on the
vast white estates, while their poor relations back in the reserves had
since the 1930s been fi ghting a losing battle against the demands of
their senior kin, patrons, or offi
cial chiefs. And yet, as the war ended,
many of these comparatively wealthy squatters found their entitlements
to white-owned arable land and pasture were severely, and suddenly,
cut back. It
was almost impossible for them to recover their rights to
ancestral land they may have deserted a generation or more ago back in
the reserves; and government settlement schemes for ex-squatters were
hedged about with onerous rules of land husbandry that denied self-
mastery to household heads.51 To crown the causes of discontent, many
ex-soldiers failed to fi nd civilian jobs at the levels of pay and skills they had enjoyed in the army; and their savings were soon exhausted. Th
ere
was growing generational friction, as the young found that shortage of
land and jobs—each controlled by their parents’ generation—made it
ever more diffi
cult to marry and embark on their own adult lives of
honourable achievement.52
50 Makhan Singh, History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement to 1952 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969); Anthony Clayton & Donald C. Savage, Government and Labour in Kenya 1895–1963 (London: Cass, 1974); Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: Th
e Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), Parts II to IV; Dave Hyde, ‘Th
e Nairobi General
Strike, 1950: From Protest to Insurgency’, in Burton, Urban Experience, 235–53.
51 Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau and Frank Furedi, Th e
Mau Mau war in Perspective (London, Nairobi, and Athens OH: Currey, EAEP, Ohio University Press, 1987 and 1989 respectively); Th
roup, Economic & Social Origins.
52 Lonsdale, ‘KAU’s Cultures’, 113–15.
henry muoria, public moralist
29
Henry Muoria began his writing career, then, in the face of a divided
African society, full of hope, frustration and, for the poorest, fear of
social extinction. He himself was living testimony to the power of
will and self-discipline, peasant virtues at the heart of Kikuyu culture.
Recalling a political set-back, he refl ected, in an agrarian metaphor of
resolute perseverance: Utanamerithia ndatigaga kuhanda: ‘He whose
crops have failed does not stop planting.’53 But he was older than the
returning soldiers; he was married, with children; he had inherited
land; he was able to avoid the daily indignities of a slum existence. It
is not surprising that, as a self-made man entitled to call himself an
elder, he held, in common with Kenyatta and other leaders at the time,
a critical view of the failings of his own people in the face of post-war
disillusion. Th
e fault appeared to lie more in themselves than in the
colonial rule set over them. Africans were not doing enough to raise
their civic aspirations, certainly not as much as he himself had, to prove
themselves worthy of economic and political trust. Th
ey did not even
trust each other. Th
e right to freedom, he believed, must be earned
not only by the arduous exercise of self-mastery but also by proof of a
cooperative civic sense. Muoria’s, like Kenyatta’s, was a stern, conserva-
tive, nationalism of self-improvement.
In all other respects Muoria’s thought was very much his own.
Twenty years younger than Kenyatta, he lacked the latter’s intricate,
perhaps rather inhibiting, sense of Kikuyu history. Kenyatta’s imagined
Kikuyu past was bound by rules. Muoria’s vision of the future was full of
opportunity. His philosophical horizons were broader than Kenyatta’s,
despite the fact that the older man had returned from sixteen years
of intellectual exploration in Britain. But Muoria was also less well-
educated than another great Kikuyu pamphleteer at the time, Gakaara
wa Wanjau, who had briefl y studied at the AHS before being sacked
for taking part in a student food-strike. Gakaara had also experienced
army service in Ethiopia and, aft er the war, the growing desperation
of squatter life in the highlands. Moreover, Gakaara’s home district of
Nyeri, in northern Kikuyuland, was not as prosperous, nor as well-
educated, as Muoria’s Kiambu. For all these reasons Gakaara was more
penetrating than Muoria in his criticisms of British rule. He asked how
far it was realistic to expect colonialism to allow its subjects to pursue
53 Muoria, ‘How it Feels’, 84; compare Greet Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below (Oxford, Nairobi, Athens OH: Currey, EAEP, Ohio University Press, 1997), 15–18.
30
chapter one
the self-improvement that Muoria demanded of them. Gakaara went
further in asking, long before it began to dawn on Muoria, how far the
experience of subjection might disable Africans from dreaming such
dreams in the fi rst place. Gakaara blamed unequal colonial structures
rather than feeble African wills. Africans were not so much lazy as
deceived by whites, colonised in mind.54
Such comparison with Kenyatta and Gakaara helps us to see what
was special about Muoria’s thought. Kenyatta was more conserva-
tive, Gakaara more radical. Muoria was less inhibited than Kenyatta
and more optimistic than Gakaara, although he did sometimes, and
increasingly, echo Gakaara’s accusation that colonial rule had enslaved
the African mind. Above all, Muoria asked his public new questions
and off ered new solutions. To appreciate the originality of his thought,
however, one fi rst has to know more of the intellectual and cultural
history that had helped to mould him and his immediate predecessors.
Of that history nothing was more important than Muoria wa Mwaniki’s
own adventurous youth.
Th
e making of a self-taught man
Muoria, son of Mwaniki and his wife Wambui, was born in 1914 near
Kabete, southern Kikuyu, a few green, thickly populated but airy miles
uphill from Nairobi. Kenya’s capital was then an alternately muddy
or dusty, ramshackle, Indian railway town of corrugated iron, badly
drained, haunted by plague. Kabete was a thatch-roofed Anglican mis-
sion station, headed by Canon Harry Leakey, Giteru, the bearded one,
most of whose days were spent on his veranda translating the Bible into
Kikuyu, with the aid of his fi rst Kikuyu converts.55 Muoria’s parents
had nothing to do with the mission, possibly because they were too
rich. His father Mwaniki’s household was counted among the ene or
owners of his subclan or mbari, more secure therefore, and probably
54 For Gakaara wa Wanjau see, Gakaara wa Wanjau, Mau Mau Writer in Detention (Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1988); Lonsdale, ‘Moral Economy’, 431–2; Cristiana Pugliese, Author, Publisher and Kikuyu Nationalist: Th
e Life and Writings of Gakaara
Wanjau (Nairobi & Bayreuth: IFRA & Bayreuth University, 1995); Derek Peterson,
‘Th
e Intellectual Lives of Mau Mau Detainees’, Journal of African History 49 (2008), 73–91.
55 John Kimani Karanja, Founding an African Faith: Kikuyu Anglican Christianity 1900–1945 (Nairobi: Uzima Press, 1999), chapter 5.
henry muoria, public moralist
31
larger, than its allies and dependants, the ahoi. ‘ Fundi’, or ‘craft sman’, Mwaniki also had an unusually responsible job—for an African—with
Nairobi’s electrical power company. By the standards of the time the
young Muoria did not know household poverty. In all
other respects
his youth was a struggle.
Muoria’s life cannot be understood apart from his encounter with
Christianity. As elsewhere in Africa Kikuyu Christianity emerged, in
large part, as adolescent rebellion.56 Muoria’s youth was both disobedi-
ent and dutiful. He pursued a life unimaginable to his forebears and
disapproved of by his parents, but not without a sense of family obliga-
tion. Muoria’s experience, subversive of family expectation yet obedi-
ent to Kikuyu conventions of respectability, was paralleled by many
of his enterprising contemporaries who also went on to make their
mark on Kenya’s public life. A sturdy self-reliance coloured everything
Muoria later wrote. His life story is given in his autobiography, I, the
Gikuyu, and the white fury (1994) and elsewhere in this volume. All
that is needed here is some indication of how a desire for self-mastery
and the new education were reconciled with the stern Kikuyu moral
economy of household duty, a challenge that he later generalised in
his pamphleteering.
Young Muoria spent his boyhood as he should, herding his father’s
sheep and goats, but with a dreamy inattention that brought down the
wrath of neighbours. To learn to read was his own idea, on seeing the
magical power of print in the schoolbooks of a friend. Th
at Kikuyu
should call their Christians ‘readers’, athomi, was no accident. But duty to his parents meant that it was not until a younger brother was old
56 Th
e archetypal childhood of disobedient Christian literacy was of course Kenyatta’s: See, George Delf, Jomo Kenyatta: Towards Truth about ‘Th
e Light of Kenya’ (London:
Gollancz, 1961), 28; Jeremy Murray-Brown, Kenyatta (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), 33–53. Compare: R. Mugo Gatheru, Child of Two Worlds, a Kikuyu’s Story (London: Routledge, 1964), 34–71; Oginga Odinga, Not yet Uhuru (London: Heinemann, 1967), 31–42; Harry Th
uku, with Kenneth King, An Autobiography (Nairobi: Oxford University
Press, 1970), 6–10; E. N. Wanyoike, An African Pastor (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1974), chapters 2–4; Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, chapter 1; Charles Muhoro Kareri, Th
e Life of Charles Muhoro Kareri, ed. by Derek Peterson (Madison: African Studies Progam, University of Wisconsin, 2003), chapter 3. A Christian education pursued in obedience to parents was rare before the 1930s; see, Parmenas Githendu Mockerie, An African Speaks for his People (London: Hogarth, 1934), 54–5; Muga Gicaru, Land of Sunshine: Scenes of Life in Kenya before Mau Mau (London: Lawrence