2.3. The struggle for Constitutional Independence
2.3.1. The Mau Mau liberation movement
The Mau Mau liberation movement was a guerrilla war of emancipation that was waged mainly by the people of Central and Eastern Kenya, from the early 1940s to the early 1960s, in protest against the injustices of colonial rule. These injustices can be explained in various ways. First, the five million Africans who lived in the British colony of Kenya had failed to gain any meaningful form of political representation; and the suppression and banning in 1940 of emerging political movements such as the Kikuyu Central Association {Hereafter, KCA). As David Anderson has noted, political dissent found expression for over three decades prior to the Mau Mau uprising; for Africans voiced their "plangent political concerns despite the obstruction of an unsympathetic colonial state" (2005: 9).42
Some of the issues that dominated African politics included the low level of African wages, which were kept to a minimum by the European settlers who were eager to remain competitive agricultural producers. Africans were also agitating against the forced carrying of the Kipande - that is, an identity card and passbook that were introduced after WW1, without which no African could leave his or her home to seek employment.
Frequently, European settlers would punish "errant" African workers by tearing up the Kipande, thereby making it impossible for them to get further employment (Anderson 2005:9). In addition, the European settlers punished their labourers with the kiboko, that is, a whip made of rhinoceros hide. They would flog their African workers from time to time and justify their cruel actions with trivial excuses. As Anderson notes, "by the early 1920s, the deaths of several African servants from beatings at the hands of their European masters earned Kenya's white settlers an unenviable reputation for brutality" (2005:78; cf. Kanogo 1987; Clough 1998; Kershaw 1997;Likimanil985; Throup 1987; Wachanga 1975,1978;
Wanjau 1988; Odhiambo and Lonsdale 2003).
These injustices led Africans to retreat to the forests and form bands of guerrilla fighters.
As the war went on, police brutality was experienced in the screening of suspects, the colonial government employing torture as a means of establishing who was an adherent of the Mau Mau. As Caroline Elkins (2005:87-8) has noted:
Torture, or fear of it, compelled oath takers to give details about their ceremonies, including names or revealing the locations of the caches of arms or food supplies
42 See also, Kanogo 1987; Clough 1998; Kershaw 1997; Likimanil985; Throup 1987; Wachanga 1975, 1978; Wanjau 1988; Odhiambo and Lonsdale 2003.
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for Mau Mau fighting the forest war. Some of this intelligence was accurate and some (was) pure fiction, fabricated on the spot by Mau Mau suspects trying to save themselves. The colonial government nevertheless used the information to convict some thirty thousand Kikuyu men and women of Mau Mau crimes and sentence them to prison, many for life.
Mzee MbuurT wa KTnyua, of Ndia Division, KTrinyaga District of Central Kenya, concurs with Elkins assessment when he explains the nature of this screening:
Undu umwe wa maundu maria nemagwo nikuriganirwo ona akorwo mmanjikiraga ruo ngoro-ini yakwa ni screening Ma yekirwo riria Kenya yageragia kwiyatha.
Ngeretha acio marutaga wira na endia a bururi matiaiganagira, mendaga o tumahe uhoro tutafi naguo. MagTtuhura, magituhurira kuu station-irii icio da thigari, kuu ithamirio-ini ona kuu Tchagi-inl Screeningyahanaga ta icua-ini.
(Among the things that I am unable to forget, however much they invoke painful memories, is the screening exercise that was administered to us - during the Kenyan quests for self-rule. Those British, who worked with the sellers of the land (African traitors), were never satisfied with us (we) who were being screened; they just wanted more information from us but we didn't have more to give. But they just beat us and beat us in the police station, in their detention camps, and (embarrassingly) in the villages (before our wives and children). Screening was hell).43
Jesse Mugambi was born and brought up during these critical moments in Kenya's political history, when the colonial brutality was at its peak. As Nelson Mandela, freedom fighter and first State President of the new democratic state of South Africa (1994), has demonstrated the massacre of the Kenyan people by the colonial authorities caused worldwide indignation. Speaking at an African National Congress {Hereafter, ANC) Conference, September 21, 1953, Mandela clearly describes the Kenya of Mugambi's childhood days:
The massacre of the Kenyan people by Britain has aroused worldwide indignation and protest. Children are being burnt alive; women are raped, tortured, whipped and boiling water poured on their breasts to force confessions from them that Jomo Kenyatta had administered the Mau Mau oath to them. Men are being castrated and shot dead. In the Kikuyu country there are some villages in which the population has been completely wiped out.
Mandela went on to say:
We are prisoners in our own country because we dared to raise our voices against those horrible atrocities and because we expressed our solidarity with the cause of the Kenyan people. You can see that there is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountain tops of our desires (1994:42).
43 Interview 25/07/2005.
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In evaluating the Mau Mau Liberation movement as a formative factor in the life of Jesse Mugambi, we realise that his birth (1947) came at a remarkable moment in Kenya's struggle for political independence. This environment had its obvious effects on his entire life. The Kenyan troop's having returned from World War 2 (1939-1945) {Hereafter, WW2) had been enlightened politically and upon their homecoming began to express their desire for national liberation. In turn, people were keen to learn from the experiences of these returnees. Indeed, and as was noted at the beginning of this section, these returning Troops ended up becoming freedom fighters (the Mau Mau) in Kenya. They had discovered many secrets of the coloniser and had experienced the rivalries between the various colonising powers. They had also noted the cunning of (some of) the colonising powers. As one ex-member of the Mau Mau who waged guerrilla warfare against the British, Mzee Kibagi Ngotho, could bitterly recall:
As an African, I cannot find the cause to trust the white man. Through the years, he robbed me, lied to me, tortured me, imprisoned me, killed me, dehumanised me...The white man who occupies my land and tells me to go jump in the sea or swallow a razor blade if I am bitter...The White man who took me to Burma in 1939 to fight for 'democracy'...The white man who ensured that his friends consumed the fruits of our independence...The white man who told me to turn the other cheek until I had no more cheeks (Gathogo 2001:3).
Such bitterness is striking and shows how the Africans who participated in WW2 felt betrayed for being made to fight amongst rival European armies in the name of
"democracy." Mugambi was born following the conclusion of this war, a fact that defines his earlier environment one that introduced him to "liberation" and "democracy" among other concepts.
In relating these events and their influence, Mugambi can state:
These events greatly shaped my childhood. I started school in the middle of the Emergency (1954), and spent eight years of my childhood in two concentration camps (Kigari and Kirigi in Embu). I have known oppression since my childhood!
They confirm that what I went through was also experienced by a whole generation of Kenyans. Unfortunately, there has not been anything similar to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; so much of the experience of this generation remains unexpressed within the public domain. 44
Conversely, Mugambi's experiences with the missionary enterprise in which suppression of African culture in the church were also not positive. He observes:
During that period, 1952 until 1962, the missionary agencies fully supported the colonial regime. In school and at the church they (as citizens of the empire) taught E-mail interview 12/10/2004.
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us to be docile subjects of Her Majesty the Queen. Yet they expected us to respect them. Rather than winning respect, they instilled fear in us. While accepting the Gospel, we rejected its ideological misappropriation by the missionary establishments. Thus long before I began to study theology I knew and understood the difference between oppression and liberation.4
Throughout the war of liberation, the young Mugambi was able to reason out the views that were being expressed by the agitators for freedom and dignity. He would listen quietly as they discussed the injustices that were being perpetrated by the local colonial administration. He could read logic in their agitation, especially where they decried the overt racism, denial of full human dignity through torture, and the grabbing of large tracts of land by then colonial authorities. Such changes were occurring in young Mugambi, although his zealous Christian father was not joining in the political agitation; he was busy preaching. Zablon Nthamburi, his contemporary, explains the environment that prevailed during the colonial era:
I remember growing up as a small child in one of the small towns in Kenya. There was a "white only" restaurant in town with the inscription "Africans and dogs are not welcome." From the very beginning you were made to understand that you are not fully human. You were classified with the dogs, and that is the treatment you got (1991:5).
For Mugambi and his contemporaries, colonialism became a stigma that African people could not forget.