Writing for Kenya Read online

  Fig. 2. Map of Henry Muoria’s Kenya, 1945

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  Ng’enda

  Githunguri

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  THIKA

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  White

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  Limuru

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  Settler

  Rironi

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  Kiambaa

  Ruiru

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  Kiambu

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  Ngecha

  iver Ruiru

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  Kirangari

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  of coffee and

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  Kikuyu

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  sisal

  Kabete

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  Thogoto

  Dagoretti

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  Fig. 3. Map of Southern Kikuyuland, 1945

  SECTION I

  LIFE

  CHAPTER ONE

  HENRY MUORIA, PUBLIC MORALIST1

  John Lonsdale

  Kiri ngore gitihotaga:

  ‘An unspoken word convinces no one.’

  Unremembered era, forgotten man

  Th

  is chapter introduces Henry Muoria as a public moralist among his

  Kikuyu people and political journalist for a future Kenyan nation—each

  of them a problematic, multiple, identity—in the context of his time,

  place, intellectual tradition, and polemical arena. His time was the

  later 1940s, over sixty years ago, aft er the Second World War. Th

  is

  global confl ict had bankrupted Kenya’s imperial ruler, Britain; had

  shown that the British could be defeated by a non-white people, the

  Japanese; had caused the empire to lose its oriental barracks in India,

  the jewel in the crown; had brought to the fore two anti-imperial pow-

  ers, the United States and Soviet Union; had linked Britain’s post-war

  recovery to colonial development; and awoken tens of thousands of

  Kenya’s young men to their own organised, military, potential when

  sweating and dying alongside white soldiers as mortal as they, to help

  the British drive the Italians from Ethiopia and then the Japanese from

  Burma (Myanmar).

  For all these reasons the late 1940s was a time of hope for many

  Africans. It saw the birth of Kenya’s open, constitutional, black

  1 I owe much to conversation with the late Henry Muoria Mwaniki and his wife Ruth Nuna, as with Greet Kershaw and Derek Peterson, whose Mau Mau from Below (Oxford, Nairobi & Athens OH: Currey, EAEP & Ohio University Press, 1997) and Creative writing: Translation, bookkeeping, & the work of imagination in colonial Kenya (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 2004) respectively, take discussion of Kikuyu social and intellectual history on to a new plane. Richard Waller has been my most valuable critic.

  Muoria’s 1987 typescript, ‘How it feels to be born a Gikuyu’ gives biographical detail as also his I, the Gikuyu and the White Fury (Nairobi: EAEP, 1994). For comparison see, Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Th

  ought and Intellectual Life in Britain

  1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).

  4

  chapter one

  nationalism, proof of a sense that the future could, with the necessary

  determination, be mastered. Muoria was there at the beginning, one of

  the midwives of Kenya’s modern political thought. His principal—but

  not his only—audience was his own Kikuyu people, about twenty per

  cent of the colony’s fi ve million African population. He was convinced

  that to show themselves worthy of modern political responsibility they

  must, as mature adults armed with a self-discipline that was equal to

  their ambition, live up to their ancestral traditions of honourable self-

  mastery while learning modern skills. He called this his brain battle, to

  combat British arrogance, but it brought him very material rewards.2

  His audience was large; they liked what they read; they were prepared

  to pay. His wide readership enabled Muoria, then in his thirties, to

  marry a second and even a third wife. He built the fi rst stone house

  in his neighbourhood; he acquired from his local Indian publisher the

  fi rst African-owned printing press; he bought a Citroën traction avant

  car, the fi rst to belong to an African in Kenya—that classic black, low-

  slung, saloon with big chrome headlamps beloved, in fi lms at least, by

  gangsters and Gestapo.

  If the brain battle of hope was profi table it also carried heavy political

  risks since, for many other Africans, these were years not of hope but

  of fear. Landless peasants in the African ‘reserve’ areas, redundant black

  farmworkers in the ‘white highlands’, and the urban under-employed,

  all suff ered a dismal present and could see little prospect of a respect-

  able, married, productive life for themselves in the years to come. Th

  e

  future was not theirs to master; rather, social extinction appeared to

  be their fate. Partly because white farmers were mechanising at the

  expense of their Kikuyu labour, partly because some Kikuyu were also

  doing well at the expense of their clients, the despairing Kikuyu poor

  were more numerous than in any other ethnic group. Many felt that

  nationalist petition and peaceful protest were not urgent enough to

  meet their needs, especially for access to the land that would make it

  2 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 the Making of Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 278–313. See Muoria’s editorial, the angriest he ever wrote, in response to a speech by Sir Philip Mitchell who had poured scorn on African backwardness, ‘Th

  e Present Battle is the Brain Battle: Mumenyereri’s

  Reply to the Governor on Behalf of all AKikuyu’, Mumenyeri, 25 Nov. 1947: Kenya National Archives, MAA.8/106 (excerpted below in footnote 124 to the pamphlet ‘What Should we Do, Our People?’).

  henry muoria, public moralist

  5

  possible to achieve a married, self-mastered, progenitive adulthood, an

  ambition that in Gikuyu was summarised as ithaka na wiathi.3 British

  rule through compliant black offi

  cials seemed all too fi rmly entrenched,

  indeed more intrusive than ever before in the post-war search for a

  technically-determined ‘development’, unheeding of the mass misery on

  which the prosperity of minorities rested, whether white farmer, Indian

  trader, or African chief. It is a despair one saw again sixty years later,

  in the new year of 2008, for not wholly dissimilar reasons.

  Crisis and tragedy s
oon fell on the land. In October 1952 the British

  colonial government declared a state of emergency, to forestall rebel-

  lion from a secret, almost entirely Kikuyu, movement that its enemies

  called ‘Mau Mau’. Th

  is name is best translated as ‘the greedy eaters [of

  elders’ authority]’ since the militants claimed, outrageously, the politi-

  cal privilege and moral duty that was conventionally exercised only by

  established elders—of whom Muoria was one—to struggle for, defend,

  and allocate ithaka na wiathi, land and adult self-mastery. Armed

  with emergency powers, the state was now legally entitled to wage

  internal war on its native subjects, of whom Kikuyu were at greatest

  risk of victimisation. Suspicion fell on Muoria, because of the suppos-

  edly evil power of his persuasive pen. Th

  is seditious reputation now

  meant a life of exile for him and, for his families, a trans-continental

  divide between Kenya and London. It was a terrible reversal of fortune.

  Guilt by association forced his wives and children to face hardship

  and danger. Marriage to a writer for the nation was no guarantee of

  domestic comfort aft er all. Muoria’s wives learned for themselves the

  old truth that women everywhere have paid heavily for nationalism’s

  confl icts, whether between fellow patriots or against the alien power.4

  Th

  e remembered heroes of nationhood on the other hand, all over the

  world, are almost always men.5

  All nationalisms have conveniently forgetful memories. Th

  ey must.

  Nor is gender their only blind spot. Th

  e French political philosopher

  3 An argument expanded in John Lonsdale, ‘Authority, Gender, and Violence: Th e

  War within Mau Mau’s Fight for Land and Freedom’, in E. S. Atieno Odhiambo & John Lonsdale (eds.), Mau Mau and Nationhood (Oxford, Nairobi & Athens OH: Currey, EAEP & Ohio University Press, 2003), 46–75.

  4 Caroline Elkins, ‘Detention, rehabilitation, and the destruction of Kikuyu society’, in Atieno Odhiambo & Lonsdale, Mau Mau and Nationhood, 191–226.

  5 But see, Susan Geiger, TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955–1965 (Portsmouth NH, Oxford, Nairobi & Dar es Salaam: Heinemann, James Currey, EAEP & Mkuki na Nyota, 1997).

  6

  chapter one

  Ernest Renan, in his famous lecture What is a nation? delivered at the University of Paris in 1882, argued that while a shared history was

  essential to national sentiment it would also have to be a carefully edited

  past. Useful history required nations to forget much and misremember

  more. Th

  e intimate violence that, typically, had fi rst imposed political

  unity on the future nation or bought its freedom from unjust rule,

  whether by means of ethnic, dynastic, or religious war, even massacre,

  had to be written out of the public narrative. A violently creative past,

  common to most nations, must not be allowed to poison the diff erent

  arguments of the present day.6

  Th

  is selective memory was vital, since Renan thought that constant

  argument, ‘a daily plebiscite’, was the spiritual essence of nation-

  hood. Civic debate, he proposed, was the precondition for a patriot

  citizenry to agree to share each other’s burdens. But all such debate

  draws on precedent, on memory, and this, he knew, could be painful.

  His nineteenth-century ideal, in which debatable memory fostered

  mutual obligation, was imaginable only to people who, with habitual

  forgetfulness, thought they shared a long history under a single state

  which they had made their own. African states, by contrast, have been

  unitary polities for barely more than a century, for much of that time

  as colonies whose alien rulers fought off any sense of political unity

  among their native subjects until the last minute, when conceding

  them power. Opposition between state and community, between cen-

  tral power and local patriotism, remains at the core of Africa’s living

  memory, not least in Kenya.7

  African nations will, it seems, have to learn to be as forgetful of their

  oft en divisive origin as European nations, or get that foundational myth

  equally wrong, if they are ever to be at peace with themselves. Yet offi

  -

  cially sanctioned recollection, currently taught on political platforms and

  in school textbooks, tends to serve the partisan interest of whichever

  minority currently occupies the state in the nation’s name. Th

  at is doubt-

  less how all national epics originated—in precolonial African kingdoms

  as much as in Europe or Asia—that is, in order to forge legitimacy, a

  right to govern, for their fi rst rulers. Such stories may well have been

  6 Ernest Renan, ‘Quest-ce qu’une nation?’ in Hélène Psichari (ed.), Oeuvres completes de Ernest Renan, vol. I (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947), 887–907.

  7 As well illustrated in Gregory H. Maddox & James L. Giblin (eds.), In Search of a Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence in Tanzania (Oxford, Dar es Salaam & Athens OH: Currey, Kapsel & Ohio University Press, 2005).

  henry muoria, public moralist

  7

  revised many times, to justify successive usurpers, treasonable rebels

  who then got themselves hailed as lawfully prosperous kings. Later on,

  counter-stories of popular sovereignty may also have been graft ed on

  to them. In order to give grounds for its resistance to royal despotism,

  for instance, the seventeenth-century English parliament elaborated

  the myth that a ‘Norman yoke’ had long ago suppressed their native,

  Anglo-Saxon, liberties. Similarly, socialist romance has been dreamed

  about the Parisian French communes of 1792 and 1871—and partially

  blotted out ever since too, for fear of their insurrectionary repetition.

  Th

  e more recent memory of the 1960s American civil rights movement

  is also contested to this day, part inspiration and part threat.

  Few modern African countries are the direct heirs to long-argued

  precolonial polities with their own contradictory layers of public myth.

  Many European colonies in Africa incorporated three, four, or many

  more such historically conscious peoples by that sweeping act of politi-

  cal simplifi cation called the ‘Scramble for Africa’. Most African states,

  therefore, as post-colonies, are still at an early stage of their own for-

  mation. Th

  eir rulers have to manufacture legitimacy anew, just like the

  kings of old. Th

  eir publicly sanctioned story-telling serves to build power

  rather than speak up for people. Resistant, popular, forms of forgetful

  or mendacious history fl ourish more or less surreptitiously in Africa, as

  elsewhere. Th

  ese ‘hidden transcripts’, however, these mental ‘weapons

  of the weak’ have yet to be etched into political cultures as the irrefut-

  able folklore of vulgar, democratic, entitlement, however irritating that

  may be to the ruling classes. Offi

  cial history, meanwhile, prohibits any

  daily plebiscite, since popular opinion, supposedly ignorant, divisive,

  and with a peasant distrust of the state—any state—must, or so it is

  said, be inherently s
ubversive of public order. Such offi

  cial suspicion of

  popular memory is as strong in Kenya as anywhere else in Africa.8

  Public debate has nonetheless remained remarkably lively in postcolo-

  nial Kenya. But it has largely forgotten Muoria. It is not that he is now

  8 Richard Werbner (ed.), Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London: Zed Books, 1998); E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, ‘Democracy and the Ideology of Order in Kenya’, in Michael G. Schatzberg (ed.), Th

  e Political Economy

  of Kenya (New York: Praeger, 1987), 177–201; idem, ‘Matunda ya Uhuru, Fruits of Independence: Seven Th

  eses on Nationalism in Kenya’, in Atieno Odhiambo and

  Lonsdale, Mau Mau & Nationhood, 37–45. More generally, James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); idem, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

  8

  chapter one

  inconvenient9 but that his whole era of African politics, the late 1940s,

  is generally thought to be a story of failure, not worthy of remembrance.

  More importantly, it was followed by the Mau Mau decade of political

  violence, something which Kenyans, obsessively, continue to argue how

  to commemorate, if at all, and how to forget. Th

  is crisis of memory has,

  more or less explicitly, informed every political crisis of post-colonial

  Kenya, not least the last, the disputed election of December 2007.

  In the later 1940s, however, in that distant pre-Mau Mau era, Muoria’s

  was the fi rst voice to break the wartime silence of African politics. His

  pamphlet, What should we do, our people, reproduced here, came out

  in January 1945, in the last months of the war. But the white settler

  minority, less than one per cent of the population, still dominated the

  public sphere and indeed swayed the governance of colonial Kenya, with

  more confi dence than at any time in the colony’s previous history. In

  offi

  cial correspondence ‘public opinion’ meant white opinion. Neither

  Africans, the overwhelming majority, nor South Asians, three times as

  numerous as whites and nearly two per cent of the total, were accepted

  as members of the public. Africans could not in any formal sense

  counter the local Europeans’ infl uence over British policy.10 Among

  whites Muoria was read only by the Kenya Police Special Branch—and

  historians must be grateful for that, since it has preserved his newspaper