Writing for Kenya Read online

  Writing for Kenya

  African Sources

  for

  African History

  Editorial Board

  Dmitri van den Bersselaar (University of Liverpool)

  Michel Doortmont (University of Groningen)

  Jan Jansen (University of Leiden)

  Advisory Board

  RALPH A. AUSTEN UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, USA

  WIM VAN BINSBERGEN AFRICA STUDIES CENTRE LEIDEN, NETHERLANDS

  KARIN BARBER AFRICA STUDIES CENTRE BIRMINGHAM, UK

  ANDREAS ECKERT UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG, GERMANY

  JOHN H. HANSON UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA, USA

  DAVID HENIGE UNIVERSITY OF MADISON, USA

  EISEI KURIMOTO OSAKA UNIVERSITY, JAPAN

  J. MATTHIEU SCHOFFELEERS UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN, NETHERLANDS

  VOLUME 10

  Writing for Kenya

  Th

  e Life and Works of Henry Muoria

  By

  Wangari Muoria-Sal, Bodil Folke Frederiksen,

  John Lonsdale and Derek Peterson

  LEIDEN • BOSTON

  2009

  Cover illustration: From the frontispiece of Henry Muoria’s fi rst pamphlet ‘Tungika atia iiya witu?’ or ‘What should we do, our people?’ (1945). For the text, see pp. 136-37.

  Th

  is book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data

  Writing for Kenya : the life and works of Henry Muoria / by Wangari Muoria-Sal . . .

  [et al.].

  p. cm. — (African sources for African history ; v. 10)

  Biographical material in English; texts of Muoria’s political pamphlets in Kikuyu with English translation.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-90-04-17404-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Muoria, Henry. 2. Muoria,

  Henry—Family. 3. Journalists—Kenya—Biography. 4. Kenyans—England—

  London—Biography. 5. Kenyatta, Jomo. 6. Kikuyu (African people) 7. Kenya—

  Politics and government—To 1963. I. Muoria-Sal, Wangari. II. Muoria, Henry.

  III. Title. IV. Series.

  PN5499.K42M868 2009

  070.92—dc22

  [B]

  2009010954

  ISSN 1567-6951

  ISBN 978 90 04 17404 7

  Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Th

  e Netherlands.

  Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,

  IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by

  Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to

  Th

  e Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910,

  Danvers, MA 01923, USA.

  Fees are subject to change.

  printed in the netherlands

  CONTENTS

  List of Figures and Photographs .....................................................

  vii

  Preface ..................................................................................................

  ix

  SECTION I

  LIFE

  Chapter 1 Henry Muoria, Public Moralist .................................

  3

  John Lonsdale

  Chapter 2 Th

  e Muorias in Kenya: ‘A very long chain’.

  An Essay in Family Biography ....................................................

  59

  Bodil Folke Frederiksen

  Chapter 3 Th

  e Muoria Family in London—A Memory ........... 105

  Wangari Muoria-Sal (with Bodil Folke Frederiksen)

  SECTION II

  WORKS

  Editorial note on Henry Muoria’s three political pamphlets ...... 131

  Chapter 4 What Should We Do, Our People? ........................... 137

  Chapter 5 Th

  e Home Coming of Our Great Hero Jomo

  Kenyatta ........................................................................................... 253

  Chapter 6 Kenyatta Is Our Reconciler ........................................ 317

  Bibliography ........................................................................................

  393

  Index .................................................................................................... 403

  LIST OF FIGURES AND PHOTOGRAPHS

  Figures

  1. Muoria Family Tree ................................................................... xiii 2. Map of Henry Muoria’s Kenya, 1945 ......................................

  xiv

  3. Map of Southern Kikuyuland, 1945 ........................................

  xv

  Photographs

  1. Henry Muoria (second right) and friends, early 1930s .......

  57

  2. Henry Muoria in his East African Railways uniform, and

  friend ............................................................................................

  58

  3. Wedding photo of Henry Muoria and his fi rst wife

  Elizabeth Th

  ogori, best man Mr Charles Karau and his

  wife Mrs Karau as maid of honour, 1932 ...............................

  98

  4. Ruth Nuna joins Henry Muoria in London, 1954 ................

  99

  5. Henry Muoria and Elizabeth Th

  ogori with their two

  fi rst-born children (John Mwaniki and Peter Kigia) ............ 100

  6. Henry Muoria, his children and his motorbike (John

  Mwaniki, Peter Kigia and Wambui who passed away) ........ 101

  7. Th

  ree generations of Nairobi women: Ruth Nuna, her

  mother Grace Njoki and her daughter Christine

  Gathoni ........................................................................................ 102

  8. Henry Muoria received by his two fi rst wives, Elizabeth

  and Judith, children and grandchildren in Nairobi, 1975 .... 103

  9. Henry Muoria greets his mother-in-law, Grace Njoki,

  Nairobi, 1975 ...............................................................................

  104

  10. Henry Muoria, his third wife Ruth Nuna and their seven

  London-born children ............................................................... 126

  11. Henry Muoria visiting Nairobi December 1989 at his

  home in Nyathuna, Lower Kabete ........................................... 127

  12. Henry Muoria in Kenya, 1975 ................................................. 128

  PREFACE

  Th

  is volume is intended to give twenty-fi rst century readers around the

  world access to the life and works of a signifi cant African nationalist

  and publicist, Henry Muoria, who wrote in the middle of the last cen-

  tury principally for the Kikuyu people, then around one million strong

  in the equatorial highlands of the British colony of Kenya. Th

  is son of

  peasants in Kenya
’s rich and fertile Central Province who became a

  respected spokesperson of his people, Muoria is not well represented

  in the political and cultural history of Kenya, despite his pioneering

  writings and his extraordinary career. In his Gikuyu-language news-

  paper Mumenyereri wa Maundu Mega ma Ugikuyu (‘Th

  e Guardian of

  the good things of Kikuyu’) and in his political and moral pamphlets,

  written between 1945 and 1952, he was an outspoken and clear-sighted

  critic of colonialism and a proponent of Kenyan and African self-reli-

  ance. He was a self-taught ‘organic intellectual’ with a remarkably global

  outlook. His writing enterprises were followed and discussed eagerly by

  his widespread African audiences and watched closely by the colonial

  authorities. A few weeks before the October 1952 Emergency in Kenya,

  declared in order to create conditions for the eff ective combating of

  the Mau Mau insurrection, Muoria left for Great Britain. It became his

  fate to remain in exile until his death in 1997. He married three gift ed

  women and had large families both in Kenya and in Great Britain.

  During his work at the University of Cambridge on ‘the moral

  economy of Mau Mau’, that became part of the two-volume Unhappy

  Valley: Confl ict in Kenya and Africa (1992 , co-authored with Bruce Berman), John Lonsdale met Henry Muoria, who had recently retired

  as an underground-train guard with London Transport. Th

  ey had long,

  valuable conversations about the inner workings of Kenyan nationalism,

  and Kikuyu enterprise and ideas of enlightenment, fuelled by curries

  cooked in Holloway, North London, by Ruth Nuna, Henry Muoria’s

  third wife. Meanwhile, in Kenya, Bodil Folke Frederiksen, from Roskilde

  University, Denmark, was doing research on youth culture and urban

  livelihoods in a poor neighbourhood in Nairobi. She met two bright and

  intelligent local young men, George Muoria and Julius Mwaniki, who

  became her research assistants. Th

  ey turned out to be the grandsons of

  Henry Muoria and Ruth Nuna Muoria. Th

  is coincidence contributed to

  x preface

  John Lonsdale’s determination to devote a publication to Muoria’s life

  and works and to do so in collaboration with his daughter, Wangari

  Muoria-Sal, the family archivist, the Gikuyu scholar and historian Derek

  Peterson, and Bodil Folke Frederiksen.

  Our key enterprise has been to publish a selection of Henry Muoria’s

  central writings in a context that makes them intelligible and readable

  for a present-day audience. We do so in the belief that Muoria still has

  something of importance to say to Africans, to Kenyans more particu-

  larly, and to students of African contemporary history more generally.

  We have chosen three pamphlets, ‘What should we do, our people?’

  (1945), ‘Th

  e Home Coming of Our Great Hero, Jomo Kenyatta’ (1946),

  and ‘Kenyatta is Our Reconciler’ (1947). For the latter two pamphlets

  we have worked from the English texts translated by Henry Muoria

  himself about thirty years aft er they were fi rst published in Gikuyu.

  We commissioned a re-translation of the fi rst pamphlet, ‘What Should

  We Do, Our People?’

  Muoria was clearly anxious to bring his 1940s Gikuyu-language

  pamphlet’s literature before a wider, English-reading audience, and it

  is a source of satisfaction that we are now able to bring his wishes to

  fruition, if only aft er his death. Th

  e fi rst pamphlet, ‘What Should we

  Do, Our People?’ has already been reproduced (with other pamphlets

  not reprinted here), in English, in Henry Muoria’s autobiography, I,

  the Gikuyu and the White Fury (Nairobi, 1994). Th

  is book, produced

  for a local readership, has scarcely been noticed outside Kenya. More-

  over, Muoria re-worked the pamphlet’s English-language text in order

  to make it intelligible to an audience ignorant of Kenya’s history. His

  emendations were so extensive that much of the urgent immediacy of

  the original Gikuyu was lost. In this case we have therefore gone back

  to the original Gikuyu, translated for us by Joseph Muriithi Kariuki,

  whom Derek Peterson used as research assistant in the work that bore

  fruit in Peterson’s Creative Writing: translation, bookkeeping, and the

  work of imagination in colonial Kenya (2004). Muoria’s English texts of the other two pamphlets were close translations of his Gikuyu originals,

  but we have kept the explanatory additions he made in his English ver-

  sions, to illustrate his professional journalistic instinct that everything

  must be immediately intelligible to his readership.

  We introduce these pamphlets with a chapter on the political and

  intellectual setting of Muoria’s thought and activities by Lonsdale; a

  biographical chapter on the Muoria family in Kenya by Frederiksen;

  and a chapter on the life of the London Muorias by Muoria-Sal. We

  preface xi

  bring the texts of the pamphlets in their original Gikuyu and in Eng-

  lish translations with linguistic annotation by Peterson and historical,

  contextual commentary by Lonsdale.

  Th

  is has been a happy collaboration around an unusual project,

  and we have been supported in our venture by a number of people

  and institutions. Our most valuable and stimulating supporters have

  been members of the Muoria family in Great Britain and Kenya, fi rst

  and foremost Henry Muoria’s widow Ruth Nuna Muoria, his son Peter

  Mwaniki and his daughter Wangari Muoria-Sal; in Kenya particularly

  Christine and George Muoria, Julius Mwaniki, Hellen and John Gich-

  ache, the late Charles Mwaniki, Alex Muoria and Rosabell Mbure. We

  thank them all for their generosity and insights, now over many years.

  Th

  e translation of ‘What Should We Do, Our People?’ was carried

  out by Joseph Kariuki. We have been supported by the Centre for the

  Advanced Study in the Humanities in Copenhagen, in particular by

  Birgitte and Jesper Possing; by the managers of the Smuts Memorial

  Fund of the University of Cambridge; and by Selwyn (Peterson) and

  Trinity (Lonsdale) Colleges of that University. For valuable advice,

  information, and encouragement we also thank our many colleagues,

  more especially Karin Barber, Bruce Berman, Catherine Burns, Myles

  Osborne, Tabitha Kanogo, Warris Vianni, Richard Waller, Th

  e Right

  Revd Gideon Githiga and the Revd Dr John Kimani Karanja.

  Our spouses, Preben, Moya, Salim, and Becky, have, as is customary

  and following the example of Henry Muoria’s wives, borne the greater

  burdens.

  Bodil Folke Frederiksen, John Lonsdale, Wangari Muoria-Sal, Derek

  Peterson.

  In Nyathuna, located in Lower Kabete the home land is known as

  (Mbari Ya Muoria) which means the clan of MUORIA

  One of Muoria’s wives was known as Gathoni

  First son to Gathoni – MWANIKI WA MUORIA

  MWANIKI WA MUORIA married Wambui wa Mbari

  and had three children

  Karuiki

  John Mwaniki – 1933–1989

  Mwaniki

  Gatho
ni, Lillian – 1905

  Kimengi wa Karuiki

  Wambui – died as a child

  Njoki

  Peter Kigia – 1936–1964

  Mungai

  Mbari – died as a child

  James Gitau – 1942–1992

  Married 1932 Thogori, Elizabeth wa Kinuthia

  Charles Mwaniki – 1946–2008

  Rosabel Wambui

  Muoria, Henry – 1914

  Married 1947 – Nyamuruwa Judith wa Kinyanjui

  Walter Kinyanjui – 1952–1998

  Married 1948 – Nuna, Ruth wa Karera (stepfather)

  Grace Njoki

  1945

  Helen Wambui

  1949

  Christine Gathoni

  1950

  Immaculate Waringa 1951

  Married to Nyambura,

  Wambui

  Mbari, Samuel – 1922

  (Mwaniki

  1952–1953)

  Hannah wa Njoroge

  Ngina

  Jean Wangari

  1955

  Gathoni

  Juliet Nyakenji

  1956

  Mwaniki

  Peter Mwaniki

  1957

  Njoroge

  Josphat Karera

  1959

  Njeri

  Margaret Wanjiro

  1960

  Kariuki

  David Mbari

  1962

  Mbogo – deceased

  Simon Mbugua

  1964

  From the family above Muoria was grandfather to 43 grandchildren

  And over 45 great grandchildren

  Fig. 1. Muoria Family Tree

  SUDAN

  ETHIOPIA

  80 km

  160 km

  0

  50 m

  100 m

  Lake Rudolf

  N

  (Turkana)

  UGANDA

  ex-

  (ITALIAN)

  SOMALILAND

  Eldoret

  Timboroa

  Mt. Kenya

  Meru

  R.

  Victoria

  Ta

  Nyeri

  n

  Nyanza

  a

  3

  2

  1

  Thika

  Nairobi

  Magadi

  Machakos

  Hola

  Indian Ocean

  Railway

  Mt. Kilimanjaro

  ‘White Highlands’

  Mountain

  TANGANYIKA

  1

  Kiambu district

  Mombasa

  2

  Fort Hall (Murang’a) district

  3

  Nyeri district