Writing for Kenya

by Wangari Muoria-Sal

  his horror of a tradition-denying, ultra-modernist, Communism that

  he had briefl y glimpsed, feared and, as his Soviet mentors reported,

  rejected in Moscow. Th

  e other was the functional anthropology learned

  from Malinowski at the London School of Economics. Th

  is taught

  that all aspects of a society were necessary to each other and to the

  harmony of the whole. Kenyatta had there found a theory to back his

  gut instinct that, unless one was very careful, modernity would destroy

  Kikuyu social order.71 Mukiri and Gathigira seemed prepared to give

  far too much away, by backing one version of Kikuyu time alone, that

  of cyclical renewal.

  Kenyatta’s ethnography, Facing Mount Kenya, by contrast, perhaps

  indeed in deliberate opposition to his fellow print-historians, tried to

  combine both concepts of time, not only the generational time he had

  71 See further, John Lonsdale, ‘Jomo Kenyatta, God, and the Modern World’, chapter 3 in Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst, & Heike Schmidt (eds.), African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate (Portsmouth NH & Oxford: Heinemann & Currey, 2002), 31–66; Berman & Lonsdale, ‘Custom, Modernity, and the Search for Kihooto’.

  44

  chapter one

  himself once fostered in Muigwithania but also the dynastic time with which many of that newspaper’s correspondents had sought reconciliation. But, in the more closely argued pages of his book, this was a

  compromise that led Kenyatta to imagine a culture that had none of the

  independent capacity to change from within that Mukiri and Gathigira

  had claimed for Kikuyu. In Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta’s ituika, in contrast to theirs, was a conservative festival. However resistant it might

  have been to despotism in the Kikuyu past, Kenyatta argued that it best

  defended freedom by protecting the authority of propertied elders, who

  laid down iron laws of good behaviour and social harmony. In his book

  he portrayed his fellow readers, athomi, no longer as pioneers of change, but bewildered, amoral, pitiable beings unable to know which way to

  turn, for want of any clear guiding principle. Modern education, which

  he had championed ten years earlier when editing Muigwithania, now

  seemed a threat. It led to individualism, or to new forms of collectivity

  like trades unionism—something Mukiri had welcomed—to the detri-

  ment of the solidarities familiar to Kikuyu, such as kinship and circum-

  cision-based age sets. Kenyatta’s rule-bound version of Kikuyu history

  therefore appeared to deny the possibility of either dynastic progress

  or generational renewal in a modernising but still Kikuyu future. His

  last, defi ant, chapter called for Africans to be allowed the freedom to

  choose how best to pluck the benefi ts of modernity from out of the

  grip of its oppressions. Th

  e logic of the rest of Facing Mount Kenya

  was, however, very diff erent. It was that ‘the spirit of manhood’, the

  key to self-mastery and rational choice, was best preserved by cultural

  conservatism and tribal isolation.72

  What then should our people do?

  Muoria’s approach to social change could scarcely have been more

  diff erent from that of his hero Kenyatta. To Muoria change brought

  opportunity; Kenyatta seems to have become increasingly worried by its

  threats. Muoria’s thought led forward with a marvellous conviction and

  logic. Rather than summarise the argument of his fi rst pamphlet, What

  should we do, Our People? reproduced below, this section will discuss 72 For Kenyatta’s attempts to argue his way out of this predicament see, Bruce Berman

  & John Lonsdale, ‘Th

  e Labors of Muigwithania: Jomo Kenyatta as Author’, Research

  in African Literatures 29 (1998), 16–42.

  henry muoria, public moralist

  45

  his pamphlet literature and journalism of the late 1940s as a whole.

  Th

  ey were of a piece, consistently addressed to the questions of what

  Africans could do for themselves, to what purpose and, increasingly,

  how they could have the confi dence to act in the face of growing Brit-

  ish resistance to self-reliant political action, outside the establishment

  realms of African local government and multi-racial advisory com-

  mittees. Altogether, Muoria analysed the issues of colonial subjection,

  cultural integrity, and modernity with little of the tragic sense of a

  destructive contradiction between Kikuyu self-respect and an imperi-

  ally-sponsored modernity that Kenyatta feared and Gakaara attacked.

  In three areas of thought he struck out on his own—to convert the

  challenges of Christianity, western claims to superiority, and of African

  social inequality, into his people’s assets.

  Perhaps the most noticeable diff erence between Muoria and Kenyatta

  is the former’s continuing belief that Christianity was a benefi t to

  Kikuyu, not a source of confusion and confl ict. Kenyatta was no atheist,

  and knew his Bible well, but was increasingly hostile to the denomi-

  national divisions between the mission churches as a source of confu-

  sion to Kikuyu politics—as is well shown in the third pamphlet below.

  Muoria, to the contrary, still saw Christianity as a moral and polemical

  resource. With his teenage signature on the kirore petition for the protection of non-circumcisers, it is not surprising that as he matured he

  became explicitly concerned to reconcile Kikuyu and Christian belief.

  Th

  e problem must have troubled many of his generation—a second

  generation of Christians for whom the new faith was no longer a sub-

  version of Kikuyu domestic hierarchy but, increasingly, a support for

  all constituted authority, whether Kikuyu or colonial. Muoria found this

  reconciliation in ways not dreamt of by the contributors to Muigwitha-

  nia, nor by Kenyatta, still less by the conservative evangelical majority among the missionaries who then taught in Kenya.

  Muoria found his answers in a combination of Kikuyu moral thought

  and biblical criticism. First, moral thought and theology. He started with

  the proposition that God wanted good things for his creatures but could

  not act on his own. He had to work through human hands. To use one’s

  talents therefore honoured God, idleness insulted him. True, Kenyatta

  had said as much. Th

  us far Muoria was scarcely original. In colonising

  and clearing the Okiek forests and civilising them with agriculture, past

  Kikuyu generations had learned just such a labour theory of value. But

  Muoria pursued the theology further by giving his own twist to the mis-

  sionary teaching that Christian prayer had the power to overcome the

  46

  chapter one

  Kikuyu fear of spirits and sorcery. To pray without action, he argued,

  was just as bad as the fear of occult powers; it was itself to believe in

  a holy magic. Faith was best shown in works, not miracles; God loved

  a hard worker. While it is true that the motto of Muigwithania had

  been ‘Work and Pray’, that newspaper had never spelt out that couplet

  quite as rigorously as Muoria did now. Nor, in his view, was faith in an

  aft erlife a substitute for earthly prosperity. Kikuyu, he argued, should

  n
ot be deceived that poverty was saintly; Christ had condemned not

  material wealth but the spiritual sin of greed. One could, in short, be

  both a good Kikuyu and a faithful Christian.

  Muoria was almost entirely alone, again, in considering that biblical

  criticism might also come to the aid of colonised native subjects.73 Th

  is

  thought, too, must have been his own inspiration. Th

  e theologically

  conservative missionaries of his day would not have countenanced

  it; Mukiri and Gathigira would scarcely have dared; and for Kenyatta

  as for other ‘readers’ the Bible was an endlessly eclectic resource of

  sacred backing for Kikuyu proverbial wisdom. Th

  is common accep-

  tance of Biblical utility was scarcely surprising when one remembers

  how much Kikuyu intellectual labour had gone into biblical transla-

  tion in the fi rst place. But it occurred to Muoria that the Bible could

  do more for Africans than merely reinforce their own ideas. Serious

  scriptural study might show that God had never intended Africans to

  be an inferior people. As he pointed out, science, far from disproving

  God had enabled man to understand better what God intended. Clever

  Europeans, he went on, had proved that not everything in the Bible

  was true. Clever Africans ought to carry their work further. Th

  ey might

  then discover that what the Bible was believed to say about them was

  also false, ‘Namely that the black men were cursed by their father who

  ordained that they should be forever the slaves of the white people.’74

  Muoria’s wonderful imagination was able to stretch what was now

  familiar biblical knowledge to entirely new ends.

  He went on to suggest another way of overcoming a sense of inferior-

  ity among his fellow Africans. Th

  ey should not be dismayed by white

  learning. Here he was, perhaps (one cannot know for certain), argu-

  ing against his more radical contemporary Gakaara wa Wanjau, who

  feared that colonialism had engendered a slave mentality. He was also

  73 Not quite alone. See also Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, 48–51, 73.

  74 Muoria, Our Mother is the Soil, our Father is Knowledge (1948).

  henry muoria, public moralist

  47

  reacting to British scorn for African political ambition, expressed most

  colourfully by Kenya’s governor, the once progressive but increasingly

  conservative Sir Philip Mitchell.75 In response to both lines of attack

  Muoria asked his readers to remember two encouraging facts. First,

  while it had to be admitted that Africans could not write before the

  missionaries came, the wisdom of their preliterate intellectuals, coin-

  ers of proverbs, was second to none. Orality was in no way inferior to

  literacy. Secondly, literacy had in any case started in Africa, with the

  Egyptians, not in Europe. Here was a home-grown Afrocentrism indeed,

  even if learned by means of a correspondence course obtained from

  London! Even Kenya’s rulers, the British, had derived all their learning

  from Africa, through the medium of Greece. Moreover, Europe’s very

  mastery of the art of argument was African in origin, since Socratic

  method was clearly the same as the Kikuyu ideal of conciliar reasoning.

  Muoria proved this connection with quotations from Plato’s Republic.76

  Western education was simply coming home to Africa. Nonetheless,

  even if no Kikuyu need be ashamed of their intellectual history, the wiser

  and better educated among them—perhaps another echo of Plato—were

  better able to see through the stone hedge of ignorance that hid the

  future. Ignorance was the fruit of idleness, wisdom of work. Let the

  ignorant then follow educated advice.77 Muoria was not, it seems, in

  favour of popular democracy. Kenyatta also had his doubts. Since all

  Kikuyu were circumcised, he complained in 1947, each felt that this

  proof of physical courage made them all moral equals, not bound to

  obey any leader.78 Social inequality was the fi nal challenge that Muoria

  faced in his role as public moralist. His arguments in its favour were

  75 For Mitchell’s robust defence of Britain’s task, ‘to civilise a great mass of human beings who are at present in a very primitive moral, cultural and social state’, and his impatience with the ambitions of ‘the partially educated’ to manufacture ‘premature synthetic nationalisms’ that would allow ‘local demagogues . . . to achieve the liberty to exploit and oppress the mass of the people’, as opposed to ‘the British way [of] the gradual evolution of responsible government in communities of a political maturity and moral and social stability capable of exercising political responsibility’ see despatch, and annexe, from Mitchell to Arthur Creech Jones, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 30 May 1947, BNA: CO 847/35/6, no. 88, reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), Th e Labour

  Government and the End of Empire 1945–1951 (London: HMSO, British Documents on the End of Empire Series A, Volume 2, 1992) document 45, pp. 129–41.

  76 Henry Muoria, Life is War by Action, to Win or Lose (Nairobi, 1949); idem, Some Ancient Greek Giants of Knowledge (Nairobi, 1948).

  77 See below, Muoria, ‘What Should we Do?’ Section 39, ‘Concluding Matters’.

  78 See below, Kenyatta ni Muigwithania witu (Nairobi, 1947), translated as ‘Kenyatta is our Reconciler’, section headed ‘How the Kikuyu Could be Respected’.

  48

  chapter one

  brilliant in making a case for African rural capitalism, freedom of

  association, and modern industrial relations.

  Muoria ended his fi rst pamphlet, What Should We Do, Our People?

  with a chapter on ‘wealth and its purposes’. Kenyatta could never have

  contemplated such an enquiry: his romanticised Kikuyu past was one of

  a merrie equality, without social distinction, with only rare and evasive

  references to the generous, well-bred, patronage and upright, friendly,

  clientage by which Kikuyu moralised their unadmitted social diff er-

  entiation. Nor did inequality enter the pages of Mukiri and Gathigira.

  For Muoria inequality was central to his message of self-discipline. It

  separated the deserving from the undeserving. Drawing on the Kikuyu

  obsession with clearing away the psychic and physical dangers of the

  wild, he concluded that wealth was like a broom with which, if one

  were wise, one swept away bad things, poverty especially, so that good

  things, light and peace, could be ensured. Ignorant wealth was no

  good; in foolish men’s houses one was kept in the dark, assailed by

  the stench of goat’s urine. Muoria was not afraid to off end his readers

  by this picture of precolonial squalor. He saw no point in mourning a

  primitive past.79 Kenyatta was proud of Kikuyu history and never risked

  criticising his elders in this way.

  Muoria’s thoughts on wealth and its purposes refl ected his own expe-

  rience. For fourteen years at the beck and call of his railway employ-

  ers, by the mid 1940s he had become an independent entrepreneur in

  print, a print-capitalist indeed. To his mind the broom of capitalism

  was a tool of civic as much as private virtue. If England was a nation of

  shopkeepers, he asked, three years aft er his fi rst pamphlet, why should

  not Kikuyu be so too?80 He also developed an entirely modern
argu-

  ment for an implicitly qualifi ed form of democracy, where Kenyatta

  had praised the full democracy of circumcision—before despairing of

  the anarchic potential of such a universal Kikuyu badge of courage.

  Business enterprise, Muoria suggested in What Should we Do, was just

  as patriotic as farm production. Some of the previous generation of

  Christians had dared to say that, but had stopped at the same point,

  where commercial wealth fended off the material and social poverty that

  came from working for whites. But, in a later editorial in Mumenyereri, Muoria returned to this argument and pursued its logic into hitherto

  79 Muoria, ‘What Should we Do?’ Section 38.

  80 Muoria, Our Victory does not Depend on Force of Arms (1948).

  henry muoria, public moralist

  49

  uncharted territory. Trade would preserve a future for African children,

  he pointed out, while white commerce would only encourage more

  white immigration. Th

  at was a critical comment on Kenya’s racial

  inequalities. But Muoria was equally critical of Africans. He asked why

  it was that most of their businesses failed. His answer was forthright:

  African traders were ignorant, thieves, and jealous of their partners.81

  Th

  ey had to change. And this is where his logic took a dramatic new

  twist; for he called on the colonial state to make this African transi-

  tion possible. His argument was the classic case for bourgeois liberal

  democracy, but it was also his own.

  Enterprise, he observed, caused dispute; discussion had the potential

  to bring understanding; and the cooperation that might then be agreed

  was a precondition for progress. It followed that Kikuyu must be allowed

  freedom of assembly and speech! Yet, under present legislation, colonial

  chiefs had the power to prohibit meetings. Th

  is was pure oppression,

  since without discussion Africans could not work for more schools

  or trade. Nor could they engage in politics, the only means to escape

  from colonial slavery. Conscious of the resentments of others, Muoria

  protested that Kikuyu were not proud. It was just that they had more

  schools and companies than other Kenyan peoples and more need,

  therefore, of democracy.82 It should be neither surprising nor a cause