My life as a Mau Mau Child

Autobiography

By Edward Kieni Kimani

C O N T E N T S

Forwards

Preface

Acknowledgements

DEDICATION

My mother

This book is dedicated to my late mother Fraciah Kabuiya Kimani without whom, my life would never have been what it is today. She is the one with all the difficulties of the emergency she insisted I must go to school. With all the hardships she faced during those trying times she continued with hope where there was none. She had no formal education but had a lot of wisdom and a great passion for education for her children.

The book is intended to give history as fight for independence started until those dark days of emergency and what transpired later when Kenya became independent, a lot of history about Mau Mau uprising has been written by some of the people who were far away from the real happening with a lot of distortion and it is my wish that I may be able to pass on to the reader what went on in central part of the country.

The book with all the research done in the National Archives and part of which I personally experienced shows step by step of what was happening in Kikuyu land at the time and most of all it answers many of the questions which many young people in our country often ask about the Mau Mau uprising and the purpose of the fighting.

May God bless you as you read the book.

CHAPTER 1

Let us start off the time when the Europeans appeared in what they described as tin houses of the now Nairobi.  The trading company British East African Company entered Central Kenya just after 1888, followed by British Government in 1895. The Kikuyu since their arrival in the southern foothills of Mt. Kenya had gradually multiplied and extended the area under their control. The fertility of the forest soil had encouraged them to become settled agriculturalists. Their functionally diffuse social and political institutions were readily adaptable to an era of prosperous expansion. A belt of dense forest, the formidable military reputation of the Masai and Kamba control of the trade routes from the coast shielded them from the depredations of the growing coastal traffic and the corrupting guns of the Arab ivory and slave caravans, although John Boyes, an early visitor to Kikuyu, noted that Wang’ombe the foremost leader of the northern Kikuyu, had several firearms in his possession when he first met him in 1898.

Before the British intrusion outstanding local leaders, such as Wang’ombe wa Ihura in Nyeri, Karuri wa Gakure  in Muranga (later Fort Hall) Waiyaki wa Hinga and Kinyanjui wa Gathirimu in Kiambu would on occasion lead combined forces from several ridges against Masai and Kamba. To benefit on this skirmishes the British played off one tribe against the other and the colonial power thus extended its rule over the Kikuyu piecemeal.

In 1890 Captain Lugard of IBEAC established a fortified depot at Dagoretti in Southern Kikuyu, but before the buildings were complete he was moved to Uganda by his bosses. He left behind a civilian George Wilson, with a weakened garrison. For reasons that even then were not wholly clear, the Kikuyu turned against Wilson and begun a virtual siege of his post. Wilson abandoned the site and fought his way through the bush to Machakos and camped there. The following year Captain Eric Smith established a new post at Fort Smith, a few miles away. Thus began a process that was to alter fundamentally Kikuyu history. Although there had been a brief period of good neighborliness, than Dagoretti the agents of the Company, then extended to the financial breaking point by involvement in Uganda had for sometime been under pressure to make the new depot self-sufficient. This had disastrous effects on the cooperation relationship developed by Lugard with the southern Kikuyu in the early days of contact. Within a few months the local Kikuyu leader Waiyaki, who might have consolidated an alliance mutually advantageous to the British he refused and they secretly decided he should be deported to the coast. One morning Waiyaki visited Fort Smith and it is alleged he tried to assassinate a Company official, one Mr. Purkiss in his room. Waiyaki was arrested and to be transferred to the coast, it is alleged he died by his own hand at Kibwezi on the way to exile. He became the first Kikuyu martyr, and this incident became a turning point in Kikuyu nationalist mythology. Following Waiyaki’s death Purkiss was besieged for six days.

After the Protectorate was established and the IBEAC had handed over its responsibilities to the Foreign Office, in June 1895, further punitive expeditions, made up of regular troops of the King’s African Rifles and Masai morans were sent out with the administrators as they penetrated the areas which became the districts of Kiambu, Fort Hall ( Mbiri, which later became a military station), Nyeri, Embu and Meru. Francis Hall one of these administrators wrote in his diary has vividly described part of this pacification of Kikuyu country. In one expedition in 1894 four men from his column (which included 100 Swahilis with Sniper rifles, 120 Masai morans and 65 friendly Kikuyu) had died of cold on the approach march to the disaffected area. Despite this setback, Hall decided to carry out the original plan to punish the area. "we soon set to work, lit up a kraal and got the men warm again, we made a mess of all Kikuyu villages and as, the column was working along about two miles off, the natives had a long time to run, they would not stand, so I had no chance of trying my war rockets.                 

He continued writing I had no fun for a long time and although we brought in 1,100 goats and loads of grain, we did not manage to do much execution as the brutes wouldn’t stand.  These years saw a series of more or less serious clashes occur in Hall’s area, with casualties reaching 90 dead in one encounter and with heavy confiscation of goats and cattle. Though the Kikuyu at no time suffered more than local defeats, some of this was shattering. Hall’s account of a later pacification episode in southern Fort Hall District in January and February 1899 will illustrate this. His column this time had 150 rifles and 500 friendly natives. They approached the selected area through the bamboo forest. He writes,

"As usual the natives had deserted their village and bolted with all their

Livestock. However we scoured the forest and collected a good deal and

then proceeded to march quietly through the country, sending columns

out to burn the villages and collect more goats and cattle. We rarely saw

any of the people; when we did, they were at very long ranges, so we did

not have much fun, but we destroyed a tremendous number of villages and,

after fourteen days, emerged on the plains to the eastward, having gone

straight from one end to the other of the disaffected districts. We captured

altogether some 10,000 goats and a few cattle, and this on top of the previous

expedition, must have been a pretty severe blow to them"

The number of villages destroyed, in reality individual homesteads, was in the hundreds. Five years later further north, Col. R. Meinertzhagen notes that in ten days in February and March 1904 his column, one of three in the Iriaini (Nyeri-Embu border) expedition killed 796 Kikuyu and captured 782 cattle and 2,150 sheep and goats. There was another expedition to quell a revolt of the Embu in 1906. However despite these locally crippling episodes, the tribe as a whole avoided the overall, crushing disasters inflicted in other parts. The absence of any decisive early confrontation between the Kikuyu and the British also meant that, in contrast with some major tribes in South Africa and Rhodesia, there was no symbolic moment of surrender to the new authority. While acquiescing to British rule, a station was established at Mbiri (later Fort Hall) in 1901 and another at Nyeri in 1902, the resilient Kikuyu seldom behaved with timidity, apathy or obsequiousness that might have been displayed by a more decisively conquered people.

On the missionary wing of the conquerors they moved from Mombasa and the Rev. Thomas Watson reached Kikuyu country from Kibwezi in 1898 and established a mission that was taken over in 1900 by the Church of Scotland (CSM). In 1899, the Roman Catholic Mgr. Allgeyer of the Holy Ghost Fathers arrived, and in October 1900 the Rev. A.W. McGregor of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) arrived. In 1902 the Rev. and Mrs. Harry Leaky arrived to take over from McGregor, who moved up to Fort Hall. The African Inland Mission (AIM) an American-British interdenominational organization set up its headquarters at Kijabe in 1901 on the southern Kikuyu Escarpment just below Lari and in 1902 the Rev. C.F. Johnston opened another station in at Machakos. Italian and French Roman Catholic Societies in a joint missionary endeavor  opened a mission near Nairobi in 1901, following this with further stations at Kiambu and Tuthu in 1902, Limuru and Nyeri in 1903, Mang’u in 1906 and Meru in 1911.

The establishment of missions not only disturbed the social balance between young and old, but also created tensions that were not always easily contained and that the Administration was often shrewdly to manipulate in its own interest. In the years just before the First World War, the limited form of elementary education introduced by the missionaries had already reached  small group of young men, encouraging in them a common wish to progress and enter fully into the new social order. Among them was Jomo Kenyatta, born Kamau wa Ngengi, who was baptized August 1914 at the Church of Scotland Mission, Kikuyu, where he also received his first five years of education. For the moment this group accepted European power almost without question, perhaps not yet comprehending the full consequence of its permanence.

Going back to 1903 there was a new Commissioner (later title changed to Governor), Sir Charles Eliot who decided to create a new white man’s country between 1903 and 1906 most of the areas of Kikuyu land that were to become the focus of major dispute in the future were alienated parts of Nairobi, Kiambu, Limuru areas some 11,000 families were alienated. The alienation was openly undertaken as it was Eliot’s public policy. After his resignation in 1904, he wrote that no one can doubt that the rich and exceptionally fertile district of Kikuyu is destined to be one the chief centres of European cultivation, and the process of settlement must be implemented. Earlier in December 1903 John Ainsworth, the Chief Native Commissioner asked Eliot for permission to bunch up" the Kikuyu into Reserves at intervals, however, it was several years before the Reserve boundaries were first tentatively delimited.

By the time the war began in 1914 the framework of the exclusive white highlands system had already been confirmed.

Mordern politics start around this time in 1911 Pumwani was started as the first stage in the resettlement and control of Nairobi’s African population, and was not actually declared open until 10 years later in 1921, when it became native location and the site was then thought large enough to accommodate all the Africans who might migrate to Nairobi in the foreseeable future. Its growth was inordinately slow, ten years later (1931) Pumwani contained only 317 houses and a population of 3996 Africans.

By contrast, Pangani grew rapidly, first used by porters in 1890 even before the railhead reached Nairobi; it soon absorbed a nearby hamlet known as Unguja. Numerically the Kikuyu and the Kamba soon dominated Pangani’s expansion. While few Kikuyu owned houses there, even by 1913 many must have been renting lodging rooms.

Pangani had a Swahili ambiance and remained strong hold of the Muslim faith until its final demolition in 1938. By the end of the First World War, if not before, Pangani had become  a convenient asylum for African, and especially Kikuyu, Muslims. Its inhabitants thrived on providing lodgings for the Africans employed by shooting safaris and by the small Indian industries gradually becoming established across the Nairobi River, and by supplying other urban amenities such as home-brewed beer, brothels and hotel.

Nairobi was the locus of Kenya African politics, so Pangani was the focal point within the city. After the war the Pangani hotels (tea-shops) became the nerve-center of African political discussion and the meeting place for town and country. Every Sunday afternoon, cooks and servants employed in the expanding European and Indian residential areas on the other side of the river went across to the mass meetings (kamukunji) on the sports ground there. A contemporary newspaper report said: "Out Pangani Village way the natives