What happened to that Kenyatta during the ten years of prison life in lonely, dusty places? In the prisons, reading only the Bible and the Koran, with the district commissioner constantly calling him to private audiences away from the other four, did the demons, in the ghostly forms of Ross, Hooper, Barlow, and Arthur—all the early missionaries who used to write to him in the 1930s urging him to return to church fellowship and give up “extreme” politics—did these now visit him and, raising him from the valley of dry bones, showed him the escape route from the ceaseless, fruitless labors of African Sisyphus? Did they then take him to the mountaintop and show him all the personal glory accruing to him who would kneel before the God of imperialism and offer prayers of devotion?—to be sprinkled of course, with occasional nationalist slogans borrowed from past memories.
Evidence of such visitations now comes from the work of a die-hard settler. Michael Blundell was the leader of the settlers and a leading architect of ways and means of suppressing Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) and African nationalism. In his settler memoirs, So Rough a Wind, he describes a secret visit to Kenyatta in detention:
We had a long talk together, especially on the land problems of the poorer Kikuyu, with which he had always been so concerned. When I was leaving to get into my car, he asked me why the Europeans disliked him so much. I thought it best to tell him the truth; that they associated him with the evil side of Mau Mau and considered that he had planned and initiated the movement, with all its horrors and murders; and felt that he hated them and would not treat them fairly if he ever achieved power. He asked me what he should do as this was a wrong analysis of his feelings, although he was determined that Africans were the leaders and first-class citizens in their own country. I replied that I could not help him, that I firmly believed the new African world needed the best of the Europeans and that only he could correct, by his speeches and actions, the impressions which many Europeans sincerely held about him. He took no offence at this straightforward talk, but nodded his head, grunting away the while, which is a habit of his when considering anything.
Did Kenyatta enter into some secret agreement with the British while he was in detention? Or did he merely act on the advice of the likes of Michael Blundell?
At any rate, the Kenyatta who came out of detention and imprisonment in 1961 was talking an entirely different language from the one he used to speak when he was “the burning spear” of nationalistic politics. The new Kenyatta now went to Nakuru, the heartland of white colonial settlerdom, on August 12, 1963, soon after the KANU victory, and he actually asked the erstwhile imperialist murderers and sadists to forgive him for whatever wrongs he had done them, just as Blundell had asked him to do:
If I have done wrong to you it is for you to forgive me. If you have done wrong to me, it is for me to forgive you. . . . We want you to stay and farm this country.
But to the Kenyan workers and peasants and the stalwarts of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau), he was talking a language of threats almost as if they were now his main enemies. Indeed his assurances to the settlers and imperialist foreigners about their special protected role in an independent Kenya was a slap in the face to the many Kenyans who had fought precisely to get imperialists off the back of Kenya’s economy:
The government of an independent Kenya will not be a gangster government. Those who have been panicky about their property—whether land or buildings or houses—can now rest assured that the future African government will not deprive them of their property or rights of ownership.
As Bishop Abel Muzorewa was later to do in Zimbabwe, this new Kenyatta, now preaching “forgive and forget and follow me,” sent the army inherited from colonial times to hunt down the remaining guerrillas, describing them as “these evil men, vagrants.”
This action was of course quite consistent with the anti-Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) denunciatory line he had taken in 1952 and at Kapenguria: “The government, instead of joining with us to fight Mau Mau, they arrested all the leading members of KAU (Kenya African Union).” What was surprising was the ready swiftness with which he went about eliminating the fighters. It is interesting that throughout his life as prime minister and president of an independent Kenya, he never allowed the remains of Kĩmathi to be removed from Kamĩtĩ Prison to a symbolic shrine of honor. It is interesting too that Kenyatta never allowed a single former militant associate of KAU and KLFA of predetention days near the seats of power.
This deliberate and conscious effort to remove Kenya Land and Freedom Army and other nationalistic elements from the central stage of Kenyan politics always reached ridiculous heights during the commemorative month of October, in which Kenyatta was usually spoken of as the sole fighter, the man who singlehandedly won Kenya’s independence. It was as if such others as Kaggia, Oneko, and the millions of dead and detained had been wiped off the face of known and written history.
For administration and for political advice, the new Kenyatta relied more and more on those who used to be actively anti-KLFA, or on colonial chiefs and sons of colonial chiefs. The sole remaining symbol of KLFA militancy to occupy a place of national importance after independence was J.M. Kariũki. He too was murdered in 1975.
In Kenyatta’s officially collected speeches, Harambee, all his old anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-exploitation, and anti-oppression statements and articles were deliberately excluded. Indeed, the new Kenyatta, like Harry Thuku before him, could now only cite personal accumulation as the sole criterion of one’s moral and political worth. The ethics of serve-self-first are clearly articulated in his now famous attack on Bildad Kaggia, at Kandara, on April 11, 1965, only a year and five months after independence:
We were together with Paul Ngei in jail. If you go to Ngei’s home, he has planted a lot of coffee and other crops. What have you done for yourself? If you go to [Fred] Kubai’s home, he has a big house and has a nice shamba [plantation]. Kaggia, what have you done for yourself? We were together with Kũng’ũ Karũmba in jail, now he is running his own buses. What have you done for yourself?
Here independence was interpreted as a golden opportunity for personal gain. Anyone who didn’t grab was lazy. In fact there has now grown up a clan of Kenyans who, following the colonial tradition of European settlers, pride themselves on their hard work and efficiency. But this “hard work and efficiency” consists of pocketing a small commission fee for every 10 million shillings they let go out of the country on the shoulders of foreign investments. Seen in terms of grabbing wealth, then the European settlers had been a most efficient and hard-working lot, for they had gone about it day and night, from 1895 to 1963. It is interesting that in his Kandara attack on radical nationalism, the point of departure or reference is not KCA or KAU or Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) but prison. It was as if Kaggia had broken some collective resolution agreed to in detention!
Because of his revolutionary KCA-influenced past, his pan-African associations with Kwame Nkrumah, C.L.R. James, Paul Robeson, George Padmore, and W.E.B. Du Bois, his KAU nationalistic phase, the cult of revolutionary anti-imperialist personality built around him while he was in prison, and his consummate, almost instinctive sense of political opportunism, the new Kenyatta went on fooling his peasant admirers, who always thought that he still concealed, behind his gold-dyed beard and hypnotic eyes, a master plan for Kenya’s final deliverance from external and internal exploitation. “Our Kenyatta knows what he’s doing” was the general ambiguous attitude even when they felt uneasy about the influx of imperialist Europeans in an independent Kenya. Of course, they were right. Kenyatta was too much of a political opportunist not to know what he was doing. But for most Kenyans, the truth that this was not the Kenyatta of progressive Kenyan nationalism came to light with the callous, brutal murder of J.M. Kariũki and the subsequent official cover-up. This Kenyatta had finally said yes to the colonial culture of fear at Lodwar, Lokitaung, and Maralal.
In the novel A Grain of Wheat, I tried, through
Mũgo, who carried the burden of mistaken revolutionary heroism, to hint at the possibilities of the new Kenyatta. But that was in 1967, and nothing was clear then about the extent to which Kenyatta had negated his past, nor the sheer magnitude of the suffering it would cause to our society today.
2
The negation of a previous progressive position by the type of political prisoner exemplified by Thuku and Kenyatta cannot entirely be attributed to their lonely wrestles during imprisonment with the demons of surrender. In the case of both Thuku and Kenyatta, the roots of their political about-face lay in their petit bourgeois3 class positions (the result of missionary education), which they never quite transcended by fully and consciously immersing themselves in the fortunes of the peasantry and working class. Kenyatta was always torn between the power and might of imperialism and the power and might of the masses. He was therefore strong or weak depending on which individuals or groups were closest to him, pro-imperialist, or anti-imperialist.
He was very strong in the 1930s when he was close to the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) and other radical nationalists, and later when he was in England with radical pan-Africanists like C.L.R. James, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Kwame Nkrumah, leading to his participation in the 1945 Fifth Pan-African Congress. But toward the end of the 1930s, he had lost touch with Kenyan-based anti-imperialist nationalist organizations, and two people—Professor Bronisław Malinowski and Mbiyũ Koinange—had come into his life reinforcing the reactionary tendencies of his own class. Professor Malinowski led him down the easy paths of cultural nationalism through a study of anthropology, which culminated in the publication of Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, with its obvious attempts to hold back the political bitterness that progressive Africans necessarily felt then. Nevertheless, Kenyatta’s previous KCA-influenced radical anti-imperialism was strong enough to leave a mark on the general political tone of Facing Mount Kenya. The seminal study and the resolutions of the Fifth Pan-African Congress were still ringing in his ears when finally he returned to Kenya in 1946.
Mbiyũ Koinange has never really condemned imperialism. His politics have never gone beyond the call for an end to the color bar in acquiring land, in the holding of public office, and in social life. He remained the educated son of an enlightened chief, but with a strong admiration for mystical feudalism. In 1933, Mbiyũ was defending British colonialism in Kenya:
It is an undeniable fact that the natives of Africa have benefited by British administration, for, regardless of its failures in some respects, the British Government has shown a desire for fair play in its dealings with the Natives.
This was at a time when even his own father was demanding the return of the stolen lands, and Kenyatta was calling for the violent overthrow of British imperialism not only in Kenya but also in the whole of Africa. The decisive intervention of the university-educated Mbiyũ in the life of the virtually self-educated Kenyatta at certain strategic moments in 1938, 1946, and 1963, has been disastrous for Kenya’s nationalism and modern history.
In the only book that he has published, The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves (1955), Mbiyũ was at pains to prove the blessings of multi-racialism if only the color bar would end in Kenya. This may not have been surprising in the 1950s. What is surprising is that in 1979, he allowed a reprint of the book. On page 75 of the reprint appears the following: “The Kenyan people, without settler domination, would be of infinitely more value and service to the British Commonwealth of Nations than all the mess settlers have created both in Kenya and in the eyes of the world. The people of Kenya, free from settler domination, would make a powerful contribution to the British people.”4
For Thuku, similar interventions came in the form of selected friendly priests and “objective” colonial district administrators who called on him to give advice on the basis of a carefully packaged “human” equality.
Nevertheless, prison detention, removing Thuku and Kenyatta from the mainstream of the people’s struggles, was the essential first step in their total repudiation of former militancy, making them say yes to that which only yesterday was most repugnant to their seemingly progressive selves.
3
The other type of political prisoner, typified by Waiyaki wa Hinga, Ngunju wa Gakere, Me Katilili, and Arap Manyei,5 never repudiated their former militant political stands. Led down the ladder of despair by the demons of surrender, they turned their eyes away from the valley of white bones and looked up to their people’s history and culture of struggle and determination and gained the strength to say no to the colonial culture of fear and its ethic of submissive silence. They were sure that a million hands united in struggle would finally break the rock of oppression. They as individuals could go, but the struggle would continue, and they would forever be part of it. Detention and imprisonment couldn’t break their spirits; it could at most break their bodies. So they remained firm, defiant, and strong. In the zenith of colonial culture, this kind of political prisoner was labeled a hard-core Mau Mau.
Now to the original list of Waiyaki, Me Katilili, Arap Manyei, and Kenya Land and Freedom Army hard-core anti-imperialists, we may add two more political prisoners, Makhan Singh and J.M. Kariũki. The list grows with time.
The positive contribution of Kenyan workers of Asian origin to the struggle for independence has been deliberately played down by European colonialists and their Kenyan intellectual sympathizers and chauvinists of all shades. From 1893 to the present, Indian workers, Indian labor leaders, and progressive Indian newspaper editors have contributed a lot to Kenya’s anti-imperialist struggle.6
The name of Makhan Singh, a remarkable Kenyan of Asian origins, is synonymous with the growth of a modern workers’ movement and progressive trade unionism. We see him in successive stages as the able and dedicated general secretary of the Indian Trade Union, the Labour Trade Union of Kenya, and the East African Trade Union Congress. Like Thuku in the 1920s, he correctly saw the economic emancipation of workers in political terms. Strikes were legitimate weapons of political struggle.
Indeed, the right to strike was a worker’s basic human right: it was only the enslaved, because it has been taken away from them, who had no right to bargain for what they should be given for the use of their labor power. If a worker is unable to strike, then he is in the position of the enslaved.
One of the resolutions proposed by Makhan Singh and adopted by the Trade Union Congress at Kaloleni Hall in Nairobi on April 23, 1950, was a demand for the complete independence and sovereignty of the East African territories, as the only way in which workers could get a fair economic deal. On May 1, 1950, Makhan Singh wrote:
The call of May Day 1950, in the middle of the twentieth century, is that the workers and the peoples of East Africa should further strengthen their unity, should become more resolute and thus speed up the movement for freedom of all the workers and peoples of East Africa.
He was arrested on May 15, 1950, and was prosecuted by Anthony George Somerhough in the court of Ransley Samuel Thacker, the same colonialist duo who were later to sit in judgment over Jomo Kenyatta and the rest of the Kapenguria Six.
In the colonial court, Makhan Singh carried himself with calm dignity, answering all the racist provocation of the prosecution with a progressive political line that further maddened Thacker and Somerhough. When, for instance, Singh told the kangaroo court that the British government had no right to rule Kenya, that the country should have a workers’ government with a parliament freely elected by the people and answerable only to the country’s workers and peasants through their organizations, the settler magistrate was so outraged that he took over the role of prosecution:
THACKER: Where would you get your judges, for instance?
SINGH: From the people of this country.
THACKER: There is no single African qualified in law?
SINGH: The new government will give opportunities for training people to become judges, lawyers, magistrates, etc.
THACKER: In the present s
tage of the African, you would be content to appoint him a judge or magistrate?
SINGH: Of course. If before the advent of the British they were able to judge about matters, even now they can do it.
Makhan Singh was imprisoned in Lokitaung, Maralal, and Dol Dol for eleven and a half years, from June 5, 1950, to October 22, 1961. During that time, he was constantly visited by the demons in the physical form of prison officers, district commissioners, and other colonial agents, who tried to pressure him into agreeing to leave Kenya and be rewarded for it, or to recant and start working against the Kenya workers’ movement and progressive nationalism, with rewards of course, but he refused.
After his release, he resumed his activities in the workers’ movement. His book, Kenya’s Trade Union Movement to 1951, is, up to now, the only progressive treatment of the emergence of modern Kenya.
It is clear that even Makhan Singh, of Asian origin, derived his strength to say no from his roots in the progressive aspects of Kenyan people’s culture. In an article he wrote for the Daily Chronicle of February 12, 1949, he urged Kenyans of Asian origin to forge common links with native Kenyans. “The main task before us,” he wrote, “is to forge a strong unity among ourselves and with Africans for the common cause of democratic advance in this country.” He advocated the establishment of common schools for all Kenyans. “Learn the language of the people—Swahili. Teach the best of your culture, learn the best from African culture. This way lies our salvation and this is the way out!”
J.M. Kariũki has written an account of his own wrestling bouts with demons in at least fourteen concentration camps all over Kenya. His autobiography, Mau Mau Detainee, is an important contribution to the Kenyan literature of struggle, and I have written about it in my book Writers in Politics (Heinemann Educational Books, London). In Manyani, the European camp commandant sadistically tortured Kariũki to make him sign a statement of submissive acquiescence and betrayal. But Kariũki said no. “I was given the strength to endure all these things,” he later wrote, “because I knew that I was right. . . . This is the sort of strength that no amount of beatings can weaken.”