It's Our Turn to Eat (13 page)

Unlike the Maasai, whose rejection of modernity doomed them to marginalisation, many Kikuyu eagerly embraced the new ways, deciding that the route to success lay in adopting Christianity and Western customs. The
athomi
, ‘people who read', replaced banana leaves on their roofs with corrugated iron, goatskins with shirts and trousers. Under the influence of the missionaries who had fanned across Kikuyuland they gradually abandoned polygamy and female circumcision, and insisted on learning English, language of the master race, rather than the Kiswahili the British thought appropriate. Writer Binyavanga Wainana pokes fun at these ‘progressives', whose loyalty to the white man could be measured by the amount of Vaseline they used. ‘You can see it in old photos: a generation of clean-cut, Vaseline Kenyans who had regular features, seemed to have no ethnicity, and carefully combed down their hair.'

Yet still they found the playing field pitched against them. In Kikuyu culture, the quality most admired is to be ‘
muthuri wirugamitie
'–an upstanding man, a man who earns his living from the sweat of his brow. Land ownership, traditionally, was what allowed a Kikuyu male to become captain of his destiny. Now Kikuyu males found themselves demeaned. Unable to marry because they owned no property, thwarted in their desire to found family dynasties, they had assimilated faster than any other Kenyan community, yet what had this flexibility brought them?

Decades of grievances reached a head in the late 1940s, when a banned organisation, the Kikuyu Central Association, began secretly administering traditional oaths of loyalty to young Kikuyu, effectively signing up secret fighters for a coordinated campaign of civil disobedience.

As oathing quietly spread through the Kikuyu community, veteran activist Jomo Kenyatta returned from long exile in London to take the leadership of the Kenya African Union, an organisation pushing, through parliamentary channels, for black rule. When the British
government refused in 1951 to bow to demands for the number of elected Africans on the colony's Legislative Council to be raised above five for a population of five million–as compared to fourteen for 30,000 white settlers–the possibility of compromise between settlers and Africans receded. One year later, alarmed by the growing number of attacks on white farms and the murders of suspected Kikuyu informers, Kenya's governor declared a state of emergency, deployed troops and arrested a hundred black leaders, including Kenyatta. It was a move which betrayed the degree of panic in the colonial administration. Despite time spent in Moscow, Kenyatta was no radical. He had so little sympathy for the revolutionary credo of the Land and Freedom Armies, the movement which would swiftly be dubbed ‘Mau Mau', that its hardliners would discuss his assassination. The British decision to sentence this supposed ringleader to seven years' hard labour simply turned him into a national hero.

British press coverage of the Mau Mau rebellion would play on all the traditional Western stereotypes of the dark continent. This war in ‘Terrorland', the British public was told, pitted plucky settlers' wives on lonely homesteads against a disturbingly irrational enemy in whose breast the Mau Mau's macabre nocturnal oathing ceremonies, involving animal sacrifice and, perhaps, bestiality, had awakened the most primeval impulses. The Kikuyu, it was said, had been plunged too suddenly into the modern world–‘Only fifty years down from the trees,' muttered the settlers
²¹
–and the jarring shock of the encounter between primitive culture and Western life had triggered some sort of psychological meltdown.

The details of Mau Mau's ‘terrorist' atrocities were so gruesome–an elderly settler disembowelled in his bath, a tousle-haired six-year-old hacked to death amidst his teddies by the family servants–they obscured the reality of casualty numbers. The overwhelming majority would be black, not white. Historian David Anderson estimates that while sixty white civilians and the same number of British soldiers and policemen died during the insurgency, the number of Kikuyu dead probably reached 20,000.
²²
For the Kikuyu community, a post-feudal society itself riven with inequalities and ripe for internal
revolution, was tragically split. On the one side stood wealthy landowners who had prospered by collaborating with the British, mission-educated Christians who rejected Mau Mau's call for a return to traditional Kikuyu roots, and the Home Guard (subsequently renamed the Kikuyu Guard), a militia loyal to the colonial government. On the other stood Mau Mau's natural recruits: desperate young men, many of them landless squatters. Their oaths to Kirinyaga were marked by a cross of soil and animal blood smeared across their foreheads, and when fatally wounded in battle their last act, it was said, was to seize a handful of that same soil. This rich earth was what had nurtured them, the reason for laying down their lives, the element to which they returned in death.

As the campaign to suppress what was as much a civil war as an anti-colonial uprising gained momentum, with the Royal Air Force bombing and starving into submission two dreadlocked rebel armies mustered in the dank forests of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares, scarcely a Kikuyu family remained untouched. The Mau Mau did find recruits in other ethnic communities, with neighbouring Meru and Embu lending a particularly fervent hand. But Mau Mau was always predominantly a Kikuyu phenomenon, and that meant every ‘Kuke'–the nickname alone sounded like a curse on settler lips–was suspect. In 1954, realising that Mau Mau cells in the capital were keeping the movement in the countryside supplied with weapons and information, the British rounded up some 15,000 Kikuyu in Nairobi. Those deemed suspicious were sent to bleak detention camps to be broken, ‘cleansed' and rehabilitated, a process dubbed ‘the Pipeline'. The rest were deported to newly-built villages in Central Province, complete with spiked moats and watchtowers, guarded by twitchy Home Guards. Families were often torn apart, with one son opting for life in the forest while his brother or father donned Home Guard uniform. So was the Kikuyu community as a whole, for it was noticeable that Kiambu, whose proximity to Nairobi meant its residents had been the first to be exposed to Western civilisation, produced precious few Mau Mau generals, while Muranga and Nyeri–more remote, less influenced by the white man–
produced the hardliners. The bitterness created by such divisions would rankle through the generations. The more grotesque the form violence takes, the deeper go its scars, and plenty of grotesque acts were performed during these dark days, on both sides. In the British detention camps, suspects were castrated, raped and beaten to death, while the Mau Mau decapitated, strangled and disembowelled suspected enemies and informers.

By 1960 the British authorities had won the battle, but lost the argument. A problem officials had confidently expected to last less than three months had dragged on for eight years. In that period, press coverage back home had changed beyond recognition, thanks in part to the efforts of Labour MP Barbara Castle and
Daily Mirror
journalist James Cameron. There was little sympathy for Kenya's settler administration in post-war Britain, where reports of Happy Valley debauchery had gone down particularly badly. Crushing African rebellions was an expensive business, and British taxpayers jibbed at shouldering the cost on behalf of what was seen as a community of dissolute reactionaries. Exsanguinated by the Second World War, Britain was divesting itself of a demanding empire. Why should Kenya be an exception? Accepting the inevitable, the British government invited the colony's emerging black leaders to a series of conferences in London's Lancaster House in 1960, and the shape of future self-government was gradually agreed. Three years later, after his KANU party claimed an effortless election victory, Kenyatta became the first prime minister of independent Kenya. At a ceremony in a Nairobi stadium, the British flag was lowered in tactful darkness and a new Kenyan one–black for the people, red for the blood that had been shed, green for the land–was raised to cries of ‘
Uhuru!
' (Freedom). Prince Philip turned to Kenyatta, seeing a lifetime's ambition fulfilled, and joshed: ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?'

What happened next underlined how thoroughly the colonial authorities had misunderstood Kenyatta. Shaking their heads at the chaos that must surely come with black rule, many settlers pocketed British government compensation, sold their farms and returned to
the motherland. The exodus threatened to destabilise the economy. One of the first actions of the man the
Daily Telegraph
had labelled ‘a small-scale African Hitler' was to gather four hundred nervous settlers in a town hall in Nakuru to hear a message of reconciliation. ‘There is no society of angels, black, brown or white,' he told them. ‘If I have done a mistake to you, it is for you to forgive me. If you have done a mistake to me, it is for me to forgive you.' In return they roared a grateful ‘
Harambee!
'–‘Let's work together'–Kenyatta's battle cry.

Claiming that ‘We all fought for Uhuru,' Kenyatta blithely rewrote history, recasting the anti-colonial struggle as something that stretched far beyond the Kikuyu, a blurry, noble joint effort that somehow embraced black and Asian, collaborators and forest fighters, Kikuyu and non-Kikuyu. His message to demobilising Mau Mau expecting radical reform was so severe it amounted to a repudiation. ‘We shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya…Mau Mau was a disease which has been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.' The revolution would not take place; Kenyatta stood for continuity, not change. Executing the same nifty manoeuvre Stalin had carried out with Lenin and Mobutu would perform with Lumumba, he claimed the mantle of the great national iconoclasts even as he neutralised their legacy. The ragged Mau Mau fighters who emerged from the bush only to find both their lands and wives appropriated in their absence were swiftly marginalised. Kenyatta invited them to independence celebrations, and fawned over them in public, but the kitchen cabinet he pulled together in 1962–63 contained not a single member of the movement. Since the Kikuyu who could afford to buy the farms of departing settlers were almost always loyalists, the rich elite that emerged was solidly Home Guard.

The impact of Kenyatta's ‘Forgive and Forget' slogan–historians refer to a policy of ‘orderly amnesia', of ‘therapeutic forgetting'
²³
–linger to this day. ‘We don't care where we're coming from, we care where we're going to,' a Kikuyu will tell you in justification, but the relationship with the past is more complicated and tortured than that. In the public consciousness, a hypocritical history has taken convenient root. Just as it is sometimes impossible to find a Briton
who voted for Margaret Thatcher, and every Frenchman's father appears to have been in the Resistance, every Kikuyu seems to have had a father who fought valiantly for Mau Mau. When the NARC government, which rescinded a colonial-era ban on Mau Mau that remained on the statute books, unveiled a statue to Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi in central Nairobi in 2007, no mention was made at the ceremony of the existence of a pro-settler loyalist movement. Significantly, recent books on Mau Mau and the colonial era in Kenya have all been written by white Westerners.
²⁴
‘When it comes to Mau Mau, a terrible pall of silence hangs over Kenyan intellectual life,' says John Lonsdale, a Cambridge professor who has dedicated his career to shattering that taboo. ‘Kenyans may write their autobiographies, or record the pre-colonial histories of their ethnic communities. But they don't write about Mau Mau.'

Elderly Kikuyu living on what used to be the Kikuyu Reserve but is now just Central Province, a striking number of whom still suffer physical side-effects from being beaten with rifle butts by British soldiers or held too long in handcuffs–a stiff hip, a faltering walk, annoyingly nerveless fingers–retain a mental map of the landscape shaped by Mau Mau. These eighty-and ninety-year-olds can show visitors the location of the caves where fighters hid and were smuggled food, the spots where the Kikuyu were herded into artificial villages, the junctions where the disembowelled bodies of vanquished Mau Mau–their intestines wrapped around their torsos like bandoliers–were displayed. But none of these features on any map or in any tourist guidebook, and this silent topography will gradually disappear from community consciousness as the elders die.

In Nyeri, a cement obelisk on the main shopping street supposedly pays tribute to Mau Mau's fallen, but the plaque explaining this is missing. As pedestrians bustle past, it sits blank, ignored, anonymous. Perhaps the most creepily poignant site lies at the gravel entrance to the town's golf club. Some fifteen years ago, the story goes, workmen were sent to fill a dip that kept forming under the chairman's parking space after each heavy rain. They began digging, but dropped their tools in alarm when smoke began mysteriously wafting from the
open ditch. The neat greens are located, as it happens, on the site of a former British prison, and today's parking lot lies where the bodies of hanged Mau Mau were thrown. Rationalists may reject the tale as an urban legend, but the story certainly contains a metaphorical truth. In local minds the Mau Mau era, like the unrecorded bodies of its dead, continues to fester underground like so much toxic waste, ready to rise up and overwhelm today's Kenyans with its noxious fumes.

 

Of course there were grumbles amongst the Kikuyu at Kenyatta's snubbing of Mau Mau. But the awkward fact that it was the collaborators, rather than the heroes of the revolution, who inherited the earth in independent Kenya was pushed to one side as the realisation set in that there was serious money to be made. Hundreds of new schools, roads and hospitals were being built, thousands of jobs once available only to whites and Asians were opening up in the state sector, and prices for tea and coffee–which the Kikuyu were now free to grow–were high. This was when the Kikuyu determination to embrace the white man's ways really paid off.