Writing for Kenya

by Wangari Muoria-Sal

4. Kenyatta may here be rephrasing I Corinthians 15: 36 [‘Th

  ou fool, that which

  thou sowest is not quickened, except it die’] to critical effect. He developed the metaphor further in the speeches that follow. It made a great impression on educated Kikuyu: see the preface to James Ngugi [wa Th

  iong’o], A Grain of Wheat (London:

  Heinemann, 1967).

  5. In quoting this English proverb Kenyatta uses the word Ngai for God.

  6. An expression of a core value in a society where, historically, children were oft en at risk of being orphaned, like Kenyatta himself.

  7. Kenyatta’s word here is Mwene Nyaga, not Ngai.

  8. Tea parties became the mark of young, Christian, sociability in the 1920s, to supplant the beer parties that had formerly been confi ned to male elders. By the early 1950s ‘tea party’ had acquired a new meaning, as a ceremony of initiation into Mau Mau. See, John Lonsdale, ‘ “Listen while I read”: Patriotic Christianity among the Young Gikuyu’, in Toyin Falola (ed.), Christianity and Social Change in Africa (Durham NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), 563–93; 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 Making the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 302–10 for translation of Mumenyereri, 20 September 1952.

  9. Muoria here summarises I Corinthians 9: 20–22.

  10. Th

  e Gikuyu uiguano (derived from the verb igua, ‘to hear, heed, listen, obey’) is

  ‘mutual understanding, agreement; harmony, unity, amity’ (Benson, 183).

  11. Muoria’s unpublished English text has ‘UNIFIER’ here. Th

  e Gikuyu term mui-

  guithania means ‘one who causes people to hear, understand; one who makes mutual understanding, concord, harmony; reconciler, unifi er’ (Benson, 183). To us, ‘reconciler’

  conveys the idea of a persuasive speaker creating agreement while ‘unifi er’ suggests a more forceful leader.

  12. Muoria apparently thought that many of his readers feared that in England Kenyatta had succumbed to the self-doubt that Kenyatta went on to condemn in educated Africans who no longer respected their parents’ traditions. See below, ‘Kenyatta Speaks to the Kenya African Union’.

  13. Gichuhiro is in southern Kiambu district, not far from Nairobi. Th

  ogoto, thought

  to be a Gikuyu corruption of ‘Scots’, is the Church of Scotland mission station where Kenyatta was educated and baptised. For Catholic mission work and church history in Kikuyuland see Lawrence M. Njoroge, A Century of Catholic Endeavour: Holy Ghost and Consolata Missions in Kenya (Nairobi: Paulines, 1999); and for Kikuyu Catholic thought, Edmondo Cavicchi, Problems of Change in Kikuyu Tribal Society (Bologna: EMI, 1977).

  14. For the Church of Scotland’s wish to return much of its mission land to its former Kikuyu owners as early as 1926, long before Kenyatta’s visit, see Njoroge, A Century of Catholic Endeavour, 136–54. For the earlier missionary acquisition of African land, see, M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1968), chapter 16. For the politics of the Scottish mission’s land and its return to particular clans: John Lonsdale, ‘Th

  e Prayers of Waiyaki: Political Uses

  of the Kikuyu Past’, in David M. Anderson and Douglas H. Johnson (eds.), Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History (London: James Currey, 1995), 247–8, 257–61.

  kenyatta is our reconciler

  383

  15. ‘Th

  e very beginning’ here means the outset of British rule. Mubea, or priest, is a Gikuyu corruption of ‘mon pere’, for French Catholic fathers of the Holy Ghost Fathers or Spiritans were among the earliest missionaries in central Kenya. While the axiom is generally taken to mean that missionaries were as bad as settlers in taking African land, Kenyatta also has in mind their divisive eff ect on African loyalties, a theme he elaborated later: see below, ‘How the Old Judas still Lives’ and ‘Jomo with the Elders who Sent Him to England’.

  16. For Kenyatta’s service to the Ethiopian cause see, Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, 196–98.

  17. Th

  is appears to be a reference to the Swahili Kenyatta had used in Mombasa.

  18. In London, for an English audience, Muoria glossed this saying as ‘Knowledge is Power’.

  19. Kenyatta exaggerated, but only a little. Besides the United Kingdom he visited Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the Soviet Union, Sweden, and Switzerland.

  20. Th

  e Gikuyu text says Kenyatta’s thoughts were mahoreire, ‘cool’ or ‘mature’, like a fi re that has died down. But in London Muoria evidently felt that an English audience, without such understanding, would expect rather more of Kenyatta’s state of mind.

  21. Th

  e word here, mũtwe, is ‘intellect’ or ‘intelligence’.

  22. Th

  e ‘heavy object’ referred to is ndĩrĩ, a wooden mortar used for pounding grain.

  An ndĩrĩ was a long log in which several holes had been cut, so that women could work together (Benson, 295–96). Th

  e phrase was evidently popularized as part of the mugoiyo

  dance, performed normally by old people (Barlow, fi le Gen. 1785/6: ‘Mugoiyo Dance, Kiambu’, 1905). Kenyatta possibly came upon the proverb in reading G. Barra, 1,000

  Kikuyu Proverbs (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1994 [1939]), number 235.

  23. Th

  e word here is kieya, from the verb -ea, to ‘clean up’ or ‘scrape up rubbish, litter or a mess’ (Beechers, 19). A kieya was a space cut clear of grass, shrubs, and other rubbish on which a home could be built.

  24. Presumably the British rulers and settlers, and Indian traders.

  25. By which Kenyatta means ‘knowledge’.

  26. In colonial times a predominantly Indian residential area of Nairobi.

  27. Muoria spells Dagoretti phonetically in the Gikuyu text: Ndaguriti.

  28. Other Kikuyu at the time, including Gakaara wa Wanjau (see Lonsdale’s chapter, above, section headed ‘Public moralist’) would have blamed African poverty on the economic discrimination and labour exploitation that had helped to make Indians and Europeans wealthy—although until the 1940s many settlers lost rather than made money. Kenyatta later revised his views on this issue: see below, ‘To Advance Means Doing Th

  ree Th

  ings’.

  29. Jiggers were sand-fl eas, apparently unknown in Kenya before colonial rule, which laid eggs inside people’s toes, creating great damage unless quickly extracted.

  Stone houses with wooden fl oors were more easily swept clean of jiggers than mud huts with earthen fl oors—something Muoria doubtless had in mind when concluding his fi rst pamphlet, above.

  30. See Barra, 1,000 Kikuyu Proverbs, number 433.

  31. Kenyatta here pays tribute to two senior colonial chiefs, whom more radical politicians might have considered to be ‘collaborators’.

  32. Kenyatta spoke as elder and anthropologist. For a fuller account see, Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 140–41. For his later doubts about the political value of circumcision see below, ‘How the Kikuyu Could Be Respected’ and ‘How to Conduct

  our Trade’.

  33. Th

  e only ‘Young’ Indian association at this time appears to have been the Young Sikh Society, determined to combat the intra-Asian communalism that was spurred on by the approach of independence and partition in the sub-continent itself. For Asian and African political contacts in post-war Kenya see: Dana April Seidenberg, Uhuru

  384

  chapter six

  and the Kenya Indians: Th

  e Role of a Minority Community in Kenya Politics (New Delhi:

  Vikas Publishing House, 1983), chapter 4; Robert G. Gregory, Quest for Eq
uality: Asian Politics in East Africa 1900–1967 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993), 72–80.

  34. It is diffi

  cult to be precise about the ‘custom’, as Kenyatta called it, of racial seg-

  regation in Kenya, since explicit segregation was illegal, except in relation to farmland, aft er 1939. Th

  ere were many ways round that, however: restricted covenants on the

  transfer of property; censorship of fi lms; inability of banks to lend to Africans without documentary title to land as collateral; informal but eff ective white community sanctions against mixing. For fi lm, see Bodil Folke Frederiksen, ‘Making Popular Culture from Above: Leisure in Nairobi 1940–1960’ (Roskilde University: Institute of Development Studies, unpublished, 1998), 19.

  35. Kenyatta was perhaps optimistic in saying that no Europeans still held such beliefs—as Muoria went on to refl ect in London. See below for his comment on Hola detention camp.

  36. Now known as Inuit.

  37. Th

  e word Kenyatta uses here for ‘race’ is muhiriga, which in 1938 meant a

  ‘division of a tribe or race’ (Beechers, 125). Th

  e word here is plainly meant to mean

  ‘race’.

  38. In his English text Muoria quotes the careless as saying Shauri ya Mungu in Swahili since an English audience might have been expected to know that expression.

  In the Gikuyu text the phrase is given in Gikuyu, as ni uhoro wa Ngai, ‘it is God’s business’.

  39. For similar sentiments expressed in his interview with the Indian-owned Colonial Times in October 1946 see, Seidenberg, Uhuru and the Kenya Indians, 81. Kenyatta’s view of Kenya’s political history was broadly correct, if harsh. Indian politicians and lawyers had made common cause with Africans against white settler supremacy in the early 1920s, and continued to do so thereaft er, if to a lesser extent, although the Kikuyu Central Association continued to benefi t from Indian advice until it was banned in 1940.

  40. Th

  is idiosyncratic interpretation of British counter-insurgency against Mau Mau is not without some truth, since many whites did indeed blame the insurgency on Kenyatta’s malign infl uence over the suggestible Kikuyu, for which see John Lonsdale,

  ‘Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Re-making Kenya’, Journal of African History 31 (1990), 393–421. Eleven Mau Mau detainees were beaten to death at Hola detention camp in March 1959, not to test the thickness of their skulls but to force them to labour on an irrigation scheme. Th

  e government pathologist testifi ed the cause of

  death to be either acute pulmonary oedema (9 cases) or haemorrhage (2), attributable to violence against their bodies. Two had also suff ered fractures to their jaw or skull, and six others had minor head injuries: Colonial Offi

  ce, Record of Proceedings and Evidence

  in the Inquiry into the deaths of eleven Mau Mau detainees at Hola Camp in Kenya (London: HMSO, Cmnd.795, 1959), 8–26. Hola was a disaster for Britain, helping to signal ‘the moral end of the British empire in Africa’. For its eff ects on British policy see, Robert Shepherd, Iain Macleod, a biography (London: Pimlico, 1994), 155–61; and (for the quote), Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: Th

  e Road to Decolonisation

  1918–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 263.

  41. Kikuyu independent schools and churches (independent of white mission-

  aries) took their origin from private reading of the Gikuyu Gospels in the 1920s.

  Th

  ey expanded in response to the ‘female circumcision crisis’ of 1929–30, for which see Lonsdale’s chapter, footnote 57 above. Th

  ey split into two streams, the Kikuyu

  Independent Schools Association and African Independent Pentecostal Church on one hand, and the Kikuyu Karing’a (‘pure Kikuyu’) Educational Association and African Orthodox Church on the other, the latter being the more radical politically. Both wings were banned during the Mau Mau emergency. See, F. B. Welbourn, East African Rebels (London: SCM Press, 1961); John Anderson, Th

  e Struggle for the School: Th

  e interac-

  kenyatta is our reconciler

  385

  tion of Missionary, Colonial Government and Nationalist enterprise in the development of formal education in Kenya (London: Longman, 1970), chapter 8; Derek Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 2004), chapters 6 to 8; James A. Wilson, ‘Th e

  Untold Story: Kikuyu Christians, Memories, and the Kikuyu Independent Schools Movement 1922–1962’ (Princeton University PhD., 2002).

  42. In London Muoria added the clarifi cation that these were the independent schools.

  43. Th

  is is a doubtful claim. Moreover, Kikuyu autobiographies oft en refer to students moving from missionary to independent schools and vice versa. For Kenyatta’s more modest claim see below, ‘Jomo with the Elders who Sent Him to Europe’.

  44. Tuthuri, minor elders, could not aff ord to become full elders; tubuti (Swahili, kabuti) were oft en ex-army greatcoats.

  45. In Kenyatta’s youth parents were far from convinced that schooling was good for children.

  46. Th

  e proverb is in Barra, 1,000 Kikuyu Proverbs, number 137.

  47. Njahi, nutritious beans, were especially fed to pregnant women.

  48. While the KAU was the fi rst offi

  cially sanctioned Kenyan African political

  organisation aft er the Second World War, several ethnically-based political associations, among them the Kikuyu Central Association, had been offi

  cially recognised between

  the wars (and some, including the KCA, banned as a wartime measure in 1940).

  49. While no newspaper reported Kenyatta as fully as Muoria’s Mumenyereri, white-owned newspapers, especially the Swahili-language Baraza, did not ignore him. Th e

  Alliance High School (founded by the inter-denominational ‘alliance’ of Protestant missionary societies) was the premier African school in Kenya, by the late 1940s being of full secondary (or ‘high’) school status. Kenyatta’s half-brother James Muigai was the fi rst boy to register at the school’s opening in 1926. Kenyatta also sent his nineteen-year old daughter, Margaret Rose Wambui, to AHS, in 1947—before there was an Alliance Girls’ School. See, Jeremy Murray-Brown, Kenyatta (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), 110–11; Margaret Kenyatta, interview with John Lonsdale at Electoral Commission of Kenya, 5 July 2001. Th

  e Jeanes School, modelled on a community-schooling programme

  for African Americans in the southern United States, had opened in 1925, with Carnegie Foundation aid, to train African schoolteachers in the skills of rural development. In the 1940s the army took over the school for teacher-training and the Kenya government then used it to train junior African offi

  cials. For the school’s early history see,

  Kenneth J. King, Pan-Africanism and Education: A Study of Race, Philanthropy, and Education in the Southern States of America and East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 150–76; for its later years, Joanna Lewis, Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya 1925–52 (Oxford: James Currey, 1952), 227–32, 330–32.

  50. In London, Muoria made it clear that he referred to the lack of political activity in Murang’a (Fort Hall)—in contrast to the 1920s, when Murang’a had given birth to the KCA.

  51. Th

  e Gikuyu text refers to the Muhonokia witu ithui ciana cia Mumbi, ‘our saviour, we children of Mumbi’.

  52. Th

  e KAU had been founded, with wary British approval, in October 1944, as a

  constituency association for the sole, nominated, African member of Legislative Council, Eliud Mathu. Its fi rst president was the veteran Kikuyu politician, Harry Th uku, soon

  to be succeeded by the younger, more energetic, James Gichuru, educated at the same Scottish mission school as Kenyatta, for fi ve years a teache
r at the Alliance High School, then head of a Scottish mission school and secretary to the Kenya African Teachers Union. Handing over the presidency of KAU to Kenyatta in 1947, he played a similar role in the early 1960s, being the fi rst president of the Kenya African Union before Kenyatta was released from detention in 1961, and was Kenyatta’s fi rst minister for fi nance at independence in 1963. For KAU’s origins see, John Spencer, KAU: Th e Kenya

  African Union (London: KPI, 1985), chapter 4.

  386

  chapter six

  53. Gathigira probably came from the northern district of Nyeri where his is a common name.

  54. Th

  e Gikuyu text calls them ngombo iria nene. Ngombo were ‘slaves’ or ‘people in a servile condition’, lacking volition and agency.

  55. Francis Khamisi, then in his mid-30s, a Catholic from the Coast, was general secretary of the KAU but for most of his working life was a journalist, and for a time municipal councillor in Nairobi and then Mombasa.

  56. Th

  ika, about 20 miles north-east of Nairobi, became a manufacturing centre,

  processing settler-grown fruit and vegetables. Th

  e Nairobi-Th

  ika road, skirting the

  southern edge of the Kikuyu ‘reserve’ was then, as now, one of the busiest and most dangerous roads in Kenya.

  57. Eliud Mathu, born in 1910, witchdoctor’s son, Alliance High School and Oxford graduate, was nominated as the fi rst African member of Legislative Council in October 1944. Aft er an uncomfortable period as ‘man in the middle’ during the Mau Mau Emergency, he became President Kenyatta’s private secretary at independence. See, Jack R. Roelker, Mathu of Kenya: A Political Study (Stanford CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1976). Harry Th

  uku, Kenyatta’s contemporary, had learned his politics when

  working for a settler newspaper and then the Treasury, before leading African protests, as a pioneer nationalist, in 1921. By now he was more conservative and became a leading ‘loyalist’ during the Emergency. See, Harry Th

  uku, with Kenneth King, An

  Autobiography (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1970).

  58. When revising his text in London Muoria left out Hassan’s admission that Somalis had to be shown how to be African. So-called ‘alien Somalis’— not from northern Kenya but from British or Italian Somaliland—who came to Kenya mainly for the livestock trade, had earlier claimed to be ‘Asians’, not ‘natives’, and thus not subject to hut or poll tax. Somali soldiers also avoided fl ogging, deemed to be an intolerable insult to Muslims. For British views see Charles Chenevix Trench, Men who Ruled Kenya: Th e