Writing for Kenya
Page 13
several fronts among the African population. First and foremost, racial
segregation of the three main population groups, Africans, Indians and
Whites, had deepened at all levels and included active implementa-
tion of the colour bar in restaurants and other public places. African
political representation was doled out from above, by nomination only.
Segregation was carried out from below by means of fi nely meshed by-
laws on location and regulation of businesses and housing, and on the
movement of people. Passbooks had existed and been resisted for a long
15 On Mumenyereri and Muoria as a newspaper editor see Bodil Folke Frederiksen,
‘ “Th
e present battle is the brain battle”: Writing and publishing a Kikuyu newspaper, Mumenyereri, in the Pre-Mau Mau period in Kenya’, in Karin Barber (ed.), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 278–313.
the muorias in kenya
71
time, but now rules were being enforced with great zeal for Africans in
the city. Th
ey had to carry passbooks with them at all times, showing
that they had legitimate business. Paternalism and ‘welfare’ from above
crushed African self-organisation and entrepreneurship.
Furthermore, Kikuyu in the city and some owning land on its out-
skirts feared that the ‘city’ might be more land hungry than the town
and swallow up land around Dagoretti Market, which was occupied
by African enterprises. African townspeople and political organisa-
tions protested against the participation of their two nominated town
councillors in the celebrations, which were widely boycotted. Strikes
and boycotts were aimed particularly at municipal welfare institutions
such as canteens and beer halls. In 1947 income from the city’s munici-
pal beer halls was halved because of popular boycott, and in 1950 the
municipal canteen had to close down.
Muoria did not live in the city, but left his home in Kiambu every
day to go to work. On the day of the Jubilee, Muoria himself did not
take part in the celebrations or the protests, but ‘drove to the town in
his old squeaking Ford Four car’, and observed the Jubilee pageant
and the speeches from a distance in his capacity as a journalist.16 In his
writings he links this day to the beginning of clandestine oathing that
later came to be associated with the Mau Mau movement.
He ran his newspaper business from changing locations in Nairobi.
When Ruth, looking back, characterized her husband, she stressed
how in his case ‘work’ and the ‘city’ were two sides of the same coin:
‘He was from upcountry, but his work was in the city. He only went
upcountry to stay. . . . Most of the time he was in the city, only when he
goes home, it is home time. Th
en in the morning he wakes up to get
ready to go to town.’17 At one time he employed four to fi ve people,
among them an assistant editor, John Gatu, who later became Modera-
tor of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa. Muoria also used family
labour. Ruth wrote stories for the paper, allegorical tales with a moral,
and reported from political meetings, when her husband could not go.
Both she and Judith helped with production, packing and distribution
of Mumenyereri. When the printing machine broke down in mid-1950,
Muoria rented a duplicator and continued producing the paper—two
thousand copies twice a week from changing urban locations. At this
16 Th
e British and my Kikuyu Tribe, 282.
17 Interview, London, July 2000.
72
chapter two
time political tensions made the production of nationalist newspapers
a risky business, as Muoria’s fi rst wife had foreseen.
For the fi rst time the paper made a profi t, a development that whetted
Muoria’s appetite for new technologies and for being independent of
printers who took fi ft y percent of his income, as he told in an interview,
forty years later: ‘ Mumenyereri was selling at twenty cents a week. Of that amount ten cents went to the printer, four cents to the vendor and
I collected six cents from each copy.’18 When he had earned enough
money he bought a second-hand printing press from an Indian printer
and established his workshop and offi
ce in a rented space in Nairobi’s
central business district.
Muoria situated himself in a network of innovative African entre-
preneurs. He collaborated with Asians, who were experienced and well
established in the area of printing and newspaper production. He was
not willing to go along with the established colonial structures and
procedures and was strongly critical of his some fellow editors who
let the government assist them fi nancially and with training activities.
His intransigence may have had something to do with his departure
for Britain. It certainly prevented his return.
Mumenyereri was one of a handful of vernacular papers. Others
were brought out by leading nationalists and opposition journalists like
Achieng’ Oneko, W. W. W. Awori, Paul Ngei and Victor Wokabi.19 Th
e
authorities watched Mumenyereri and the other African newspapers
closely and Muoria produced his paper under constant threat of being
prosecuted for sedition. Th
e paper’s report on a strike at the Uplands
Bacon Factory in 1947, where two strikers were shot dead by African
police offi
cers, did in fact lead to court proceedings. Th
e reporter who
wrote the story was sent to prison for six months, Muoria and the
printer, Mr. V. G. Patel, were fi ned. At this time the legislation which
made it possible for the authorities to confi scate the printing equipment
of publications deemed to be subversive had not been introduced—it
came into eff ect only in 1950. Aft er having paid his fi ne, Muoria was
set free to continue the production and sale of his paper.
18 Th
e Standard 16 June 1989.
19 On Awori’s Habari za Dunia, Radio Posta and the KAU newspaper Sauti ya Mwafrika see Fay Gadsden, ‘Th
e African Press in Kenya 1945–1952’, Journal of African
History 21 (1980), 515–535, 515–6; David Goldsworthy, Tom Mboya: Th e man Kenya
wanted to forget (Nairobi & London: Heinemann,1982), 20, 40. On Wokabi see KNA A.G. 5/24, ‘Seditious Publications: Muthamaki’.
the muorias in kenya
73
Muoria sought to shake African trust in the colonial masters. In
1950 Mumenyereri published a letter warning Africans against believing what they were being told in government pamphlets and publications:
‘Whenever you see a European give you anything free, remember that
there is something he is trying to get out of you.’ An editorial stressed
the need for African newspapers: ‘Th
ere is no reason why the African
Press should publish articles just to suit Europeans while the Europeans
do not publish theirs to suit the Africans.’ Muoria ended by quoting
one of his favourite proverbs: ‘Chase a man with the truth and he will
go away for good. But if you chase a man with a s
tick, he will turn
back to you with a stick.’20
When Muoria left for Europe to widen his journalistic experience
and look out for new technology his second wife Judith took over as
an editor. ‘She was already an experienced journalist and machine
operator’, as he told in an interview thirty-fi ve years later.21 She was in
close contact with her husband, who sent her articles from London.
Th
e front page of the September 20 issue carried a photo of Muoria
and an account of his air fl ight to London which lasted four days and
nights: He reported that fl ying was like sitting in a swing! Number
456 was the last issue of the newspaper to appear before the colonial
government clamped down on the African press.
Th
e authorities did not leave Africans who had been involved in
newspaper production alone, and in early 1953 Judith was detained.
She recalled the event many years later during an interview: ‘I was
tipped by a policeman that my husband and I were to be arrested’. She
asked him to delay the arrest so that she could transport the printing
press to her rural home. ‘Th
e man was kind, and he gave me a day
or two, where I hired a lorry and we transported the heavy machines
to my home.’ Aft er that she went to the police headquarters carrying
her son Kinyanjui and gave herself up.22 While in detention she kept
fi ghting for her rights and ideals and petitioned the authorities with
long lists of grievances: that she was not allowed to collect her older
children and stepchildren before being taken away; that conditions in
the camp were unsuitable for young children; that she was not told
why she was detained and that she had a right to petition; and that she
20 KNA A.G. 5/23, ‘Seditious Publications: Mumenyereri’. Mumenyereri 14 July 1950.
21 Sunday Nation 15 February 1987.
22 Daily Nation 18 February 1987.
74
chapter two
was not allowed to continue the publication of Mumenyereri in spite
of having been given an ‘application to proceed with the paper’. Her
fi le includes an English translation of a Gikuyu article that she had
published in a magazine. She exhorts women to ‘come to the aid of
Gikuyu and Mumbi’ and to continue their fi ght: ‘We must show that
we are intelligent and can do anything, in politics we should stand in
the middle and cultivate the land that is ours. It is our job to grow food
and to know the lands we possess. Th
is we can only do by helping the
men in their task of trying to get the land back.’23
Judith spent seven months in detention camp in Kajiado. Judith and
Henry’s two oldest children, Rosabell and Charles, were left in the care
of her mother. In London Muoria mobilized liberal politicians in his
fi ght to have her set free, and eventually she was released with their
assistance. She returned to live at Muoria’s property in Nyathuna and
worked hard to look aft er and educate her children. Aft er Muoria left
for the U.K. there was no further income from publishing activities, and
Muoria’s car was sold to fi nance children’s school fees. Th
eir daughter
Rosabell recalls: ‘We were brought up with lots of fi nancial diffi
culties.
Mum had to work as a teacher during the day and as a hotel keeper
in the evenings in order to make ends meet. To supplement this we
did peasant farming.’24 According to her daughter, Judith was ‘a strong
campaigner for independence in her own right and she didn’t wor-
ship the white man at all’. In October 1996 an article in the Kenyan
newspaper Daily Nation praised Judith and other ‘unsung heroines of the freedom war’, and Rosabell followed up in a letter to the editor,
writing that her mother ‘felt a lot of satisfaction when the white man
capitulated and Kenya became independent.’25
Ruth Nuna and her forebears in Pumwani—marriage to Muoria
Family stories about Henry Muoria’s courage and persistence in his
public and private life are balanced, as we have seen, by stories of the
actions of the family’s courageous and resourceful women. Muoria
was typical in the sense that, like other organic intellectuals in Kenya,
23 KNA JZ 7/5. Judith w/o Henry Muoria. Th
anks to Derek Peterson for notes from
this fi le. Th
e magazine in question was Gikuyu na Mumbi, No. 2 November 1952.
Gikuyu and Mumbi are the mythical founders of the Kikuyu nation.
24 Rosabell Wambui Mbure personal letter, 15 December 1999.
25 Daily Nation 2 November 1996.
the muorias in kenya
75
he came out of rural mission modernity, profoundly associated with
masculine ideals. Th
e backgrounds of his three wives were equally sig-
nifi cant: Elizabeth was one of the very early Christian converts, Judith
a pioneer on the strength of her education and political awareness, and
Muoria’s third wife Ruth was representative in that she was the product
of a distinct modernity unfolding in towns, associated with women’s
lives, work and values. Th
e intertwining of rural and urban sets of values
have aff ected generations of Kenyans deeply. Some of the tensions and
patterns of mobility characteristic of the Muoria extended family have
followed from these diff erent roots and trajectories.
Ruth Nuna Japhet Kinyori was born in Nairobi in 1927 as the only
child of a Pumwani woman, Grace Njoki, and a Kenyan Asian, Jan
Muhammed, who was a trader. When Ruth tells her life history, the
account begins with the dramatic events that determined the fate of
Grace’s mother Pricilla Nuna Gikiro, whom she considers the founder
of her lineage. Ruth’s grandmother was one of a generation of pioneer
women migrants who settled in the newly established colonial capital,
Nairobi, which at this time consisted of a small colonial administrative
area, a railway junction and a few scattered townships for Africans.
Pricilla fl ed from her husband in rural Kikuyuland with her children
and fi rst settled in Masikini, one of the fi ve original African villages on the outskirts of the colonial town. When, around 1921, Masikini was
destroyed as part of the colonial zigzag policies on housing of Africans,
Pricilla moved to Pumwani, paid rent to the Municipal Council for the
land and built her own house. Pumwani was established in the early
1920s in segregated Nairobi as the fi rst area in which Africans were
allowed to build and own their own houses. It was the heart of African
Nairobi and started out as a well-ordered location with space and ame-
nities for a number of households on the principles of English garden
cities. However, because of increasing population pressure and the
unwillingness of the colonial regime to seriously plan and provide for
Africans as legitimate inhabitants of cities, overcrowding and depriva-
tion came to mark the neighbourhood. Th
e colonial authorities came to
regard it as dangerous because of poverty, disease and crime, more than
because of nationalist politics,
which they did not pay much attention
to in their urban manifestations until the end of the 1930s.26
26 For the history of Pumwani see Andrew Hake, African Metropolis. Nairobi’s Self-Help City (Sussex: Sussex University Press 1977); Kenneth McVicar, Twilight of an East African Slum. Pumwani and the evolution of an African slum (PhD. Dissertation.
76
chapter two
Pricilla married again in the city. Of her thirteen children only four
survived into adulthood—a testimony to the dismal social and economic
conditions of the urban African population. One of them was Grace.
She was elected by her mother to inherit the house and carry on the
family business of letting rooms and selling beer. Grace who chose
not to marry Ruth’s father, as she would have to convert to Islam,
did so with her daughter as a companion and helper. Grace put Ruth
through school, the fi rst one run by the Anglican Mission, the second
better one by the Salvation Army in nearby Kariokor. Encouraged by
her mother, Ruth wanted to learn more and was unhappy with the
prevailing social realities that meant that ‘even if you study so much
you cannot get a job because you are a woman. You have to get mar-
ried, your work is to go and cook and look aft er children.’27 Ruth was
taught spinning and weaving by colonial wives and social workers, and
she remembers that they appropriated the income from the sale of the
products. She did get a job, however. Because of her excellent Swahili
she appeared regularly in a radio programme on hygiene and child
rearing, where her task was to impersonate the fi gure of Mama Mzee
who would advise listeners presumably keen to learn about the latest
wisdom on baby care from Britain. Vernacular broadcast programmes
was one of several propaganda initiatives, emerging from the colonial
Information Offi
ce.28
Ruth’s early fi rst marriage was to a Goan. He was married already
and the union with Ruth was celebrated in the customary way with
the payment of dowry and blessing by parents. Already at the age of
nineteen she separated from him, ‘he was not my tribe’, as she says in
retelling her life story. Th
ey had a daughter together and she stayed
with her mother. Not long aft er her divorce, she met Henry Muoria on
the way to her radio job in central Nairobi. At this time, around 1947,