14
Post-war Settlement and Kikuyu Politics
Waves of settlement in Kenya always followed wars. The Boer war heralded the first, the Kaiser's war the second and, with the end of Hitler's war, came the third.1 But there was a difference this time. The interest was more widespread, both as regards the countries from which the settlement came and also in the diversity of their aims. Expansion began almost at once. Nairobi hotels were full. A resident returning some three years after the war would have noticed a significant change. People of diverse nationalities appeared in astonishing numbers, not for the most part as prospective settlers but, rather, as tourists who had come to examine openings for investment. It revealed the pattern of the future. It meant that, hand in hand with new settlement on the farms, there would also be capital available for commercial and industrial enterprises to broaden the basis of the economy. Indeed, the 15 years from the end of the war to 1960 were to be marked by unprecedented economic expansion and, at the same time, intense political conflict. They were years of great importance in the development of Kenya into a nation – that is to say, an entity capable of national feeling, however diverse in origin its communities might be.2
Political and economic forces were interacting on each other constantly throughout this period. The Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) had been banned at the beginning of the war but, in 1944, the Kenya African Union (KAU) arose out of its ashes. Jomo Kenyatta, the former president of KCA,3 had been absent from Kenya when KAU was formed but, returning in 1946, was elected its president. He had been away in Europe much of the time since 1931, mostly in England but including a short visit to Russia. He had spent some time studying anthropology at London University and, in 1945, was elected president of the Pan-African Federation with Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast (afterwards Ghana) as vice-president. It is clear, therefore, that he had not been entirely preoccupied with the affairs of the Kikuyu tribe. He was at once pan-African and a staunch Kikuyu.4 KAU showed something of the same characteristics, being in many ways pan-Kenyan, but always predominantly Kikuyu. Several of the old KCA leaders were included in the central council of KAU and on its branch committees but, to mark its new character as a union for all Kenya Africans, care was taken to include a number of non-Kikuyu, especially Luo, in prominent posts.5
The avowed aims of the association were the end of all racial privilege, whether in government or on the land. Although it professed to be against European privilege but not against Europeans as such, there was a strong and increasing element among the Kikuyu that was definitely unfriendly, and the tone of speeches at KAU meetings was hostile and provocative. The principal issue, as always, was land. The extent of land in effective occupation by the Kikuyu, which had been lost to the European Highlands, was assessed by the Kenya Land Commission at approximately 126 square miles, nearly half of which fell within a radius of 25 miles from Nairobi. They had been awarded, in return, some 33 square miles in the Mwea area, in addition to which, for purposes of economic need and future expansion, an area of 383 square miles had been placed at their disposal in the northern part of the Yatta Plateau adjoining Mwea. Even taking into account the relative merits of the land this seemed a fair settlement of old grievances within the range of what was practicable.6 Nairobi had, however, proved a magnet which had drawn towards it a large influx of Kikuyu both into the city itself and the neighbouring Kikuyu district of Kiambu, where previously the population had been sparse. Its attraction was as a market both for their produce and their labour.
It was also near Nairobi that the first alienations for European farms were made, naturally enough in view of the emptiness of the countryside at the time, and the effect of these factors was to provide the Kikuyu with a grievance which was to be one of the major causes of Mau Mau. They felt that they were being squeezed from their own land, but if there had been no Nairobi to attract them there would have been no severe congestion, and Nairobi was after all a Masai name.7
The development of African district councils, which had given Africans a large degree of responsibility in the sphere of local government, was not enough to satisfy their aspirations. Ever since the time of the Parliamentary Joint Select Committee of 1931 they had pressed for direct representation in Legislative Council. Government had tardily conceded this to the extent of one nominated African member in 1944. This could scarcely have been expected to content them for long, and by 1947 Kikuyu dissatisfaction was already being expressed through the instigation of leaders of KAU, by the refusal of women to undertake communal terracing.8 Agitation was mounting, always with the Kikuyu in the lead, but with considerable support from the Luo and elements of the Akamba and, for reasons of their own, the Somali Youth League. Mass meetings and political ‘tea parties’ several hundreds strong were now a feature in all Kikuyu districts, at which demagogues were raising their audiences to a dangerous pitch of enthusiasm. It was only a question of time before an open clash with government would be sure to result in fighting and bloodshed, unless strong and appropriate counter-measures were taken with speed.
This happened at Kahura in the Fort Hall district in August 1947. The village green was packed with thousands of Kikuyu men and women in festive mood and colourful in their Sunday best. They listened eagerly to the impassioned orators who had driven up from Nairobi and time and again they burst forth with the shouts and murmurings of a mob. Chief Ignatio Murai, facing the situation with determination, marched boldly into the ring with his two tribal police, arrested two of the ringleaders and took them to his camp. This sobered the mob for a while, but, recovering later, they advanced to rescue the prisoners and were closing in to attack when the police opened fire. One rioter fell dead, another was wounded, and the rest fled.9 It was an ominous moment, but after this incident KAU exercised more restraint and the government let its meetings continue within the limits of legitimate agitation, rather than drive it underground. That, however, did not prevent an underground wing from being formed. It came to be known as Mau Mau.10
In the following year, 1948, the number of African members of the Legislative Council was increased to four. This brought the total of African and Asian members combined to parity with European elected members at 11 each. At the same time the official membership on the government side was reduced to 16 so that there was now an unofficial majority for the first time.11
Exactly when or by whom the name Mau Mau was first given is not known but it began to be heard about at this time. Underground movements were not new in Kikuyu. This one may have stemmed from as far back as the independent church movement which followed the breakaway from the Church of Scotland mission in 1929. The Karing'a (Orthodox), the ‘Pentecostals’ and other sects had orientated themselves towards what was, in effect, a Kikuyu tribal religion with the deity conceived as inhabiting Mount Kenya, a doctrine in which Mau Mau was steeped. Superstition, with frequent recourse to witchdoctors, was indeed a strong element in Mau Mau throughout. Although they may not have had the same origin, Mau Mau was regarded as an underground adjunct of KAU, and it seemed to the government that the same organizing brains were at the back of both. While KAU sought to gain its ends essentially by legitimate agitation, Mau Mau was planning revolt, to be put in hand if KAU's more moderate efforts should fail.
Along with the independent church movement there was an associated organisation of independent schools. These, in process of time, split into two groups, the Kikuyu Karing'a Education Association, intensely tribalistic and reactionary, which, when the time came, readily supported Mau Mau; and the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association (KISA), which was more genuinely educational in intent. There is no reason to doubt but that the Teachers' Training College founded in 1939 at Githunguri in Kiambu district by Peter Mbiyu Koinange, eldest son of Senior Chief Koinange, was established quite honestly for its avowed purpose of training teachers for the KISA schools so that they might be able to keep pace with the government and mission schools and qualify for grants in aid.12 But in the tense situation now prevailing, all this was changed, and Githunguri became almost the main planning centre of the movement.13 At every KAU meeting and at every opportunity, collections were taken, ostensibly for the college buildings but actually to support the campaign.
Much the same thing occurred with the trade unions, whose chairman and officers seemed nearly always to be Kikuyu or Luo. Several of them became very heavily impregnated with Mau Mau and were the main support to its funds. Trading companies, too, which had sprung up in large numbers among the Kikuyu during the war, were readily persuaded to join Mau Mau and boycott non-members.14 Even social clubs which had started harmlessly enough were systematically infiltrated and turned to account.
The strong arm of the Mau Mau was provided by the ‘Forty Group’. These were young men of the age grades circumcised in or after 1940. It is not true, as is sometimes stated, that many of them had served with the East African forces overseas and had returned disaffected with the war. They may have served in the forces in Kenya at the very end of the war, in some cases, but few had seen service overseas.
It seems that until about 1950, Kenyatta had hopes that armed conflict might be avoided and that an agreed solution might be reached, resting on the basis of parity of representation in the Legislative Council and the end of restrictions against Africans and Asians buying land in the Highlands. Partly at his insistence a multi-racial Kenya Citizens Association was formed, but it soon foundered on the two rocks of the Highlands and a common electoral roll, for on neither of these points were the Europeans prepared to give way.15 It was clearly seen that a common electoral roll would soon swamp Europeans and Asians under a flood of African voters for, however high the qualifications for the vote were set, agitation would not cease until Africans had achieved a clear majority and black domination at an early date. The alternative was community franchise with each community electing its own members to the Legislative Council on a basis approximating to racial parity. The Europeans would have preferred this solution and might have supported it as between themselves and the Africans, but it foundered on the Asian question. Even if such an agreement had been reached, it would have been highly fragile and would have tended to make racial distinctions even more pronounced instead of gradually closing the gap.16
As to the White Highlands, there were probably few Europeans who would not have admitted that the entail of land to the exclusive ownership of any one race, whether white or black, could not be continued indefinitely and that in time the exclusiveness of privilege would have to be modified and eventually fade out. But, seeing how enormously the economy of the country was dependent on the White Highlands and the skilled farming needed to maintain their fertility, and considering also the rights of the settlers to the fruits of their labours and the security promised them, the settler community envisaged the process in terms of generations. However, even on the most gradual basis there was little disposition among the settlers to relax the exclusiveness of their privilege. At most one could say that there was rather less resentment than there had been at a suggestion that, in certain circumstances and with the consent of their neighbours in the district, a settler might be allowed to sell his land or part of it to an applicant of another race if it appeared that he had the capital and resources to farm the land properly. But settler opinion as a whole was, in practice, still uncompromising and I know of no such concession being granted.17
The standpoint of the two sides was thus much too far apart to have given any real prospect of agreement at that time. No more was heard of the ‘Kenya Citizens’ and, after this setback, KAU became more extreme. There was no longer any attempt at compromise or any concealment about their aims. They wanted self-government for Africans and the end of colonial rule, recovery of the Highlands, no ‘colour bar’ and higher wages. KAU remained more or less in the open, stepping up agitation to the utmost limit short of open sedition, and sometimes passing it, but Mau Mau, operating underground, was secretly collecting arms and administering oaths, with no holds barred.
Their programme captivated the minds of many thousands of Kikuyu and kindred tribes of the Embu district. It did not have the expected measure of success among other tribes, however, as they suspected that the self-government intended was domination by the Kikuyu and did not relish it.18 Nor did they see much good coming to them if the settlers left the Highlands because they would not be passed back to the Masai or other original owners, but the land-hungry Kikuyu would get the greatest share. Indeed, no other solution would have been practicable in such an event, for about a quarter of a million Kikuyu squatters, counting women and children, were already there. The rest of the programme too attracted little notice where other tribes were concerned, although the prospect of higher wages had appeal for many and was a factor in gaining considerable support from the Luo tribe. It was not easy, however, to see where these wages would come from if suddenly the settlers left. As for the lifting of the ‘colour bar’ and the desire to enter European hotels, or send African children to white schools, it seemed predominantly a Kikuyu craving. Nevertheless, there were enough sympathisers and malcontents among the other tribes – particularly the Abaluhya, Luo, Meru, Suk and the Somalis of the Northern province – to be causing government some concern, but the general disposition was to wait upon events.
It is probable that the reference to the colour bar was intended to have a wider implication than the mere abolition of specifications. The intention was to play upon the latent resentment at Africans being in effect third-rate citizens in their own country. However amicable the relations between the races had been, the leading role which circumstances had given to the white man, and the air of superiority which it engendered, must have been galling to the blacks. The plain fact was that there was far too great a disparity between Europeans and Africans, both as regards attainments and standards of living, to make for contentment or permanent security. Insofar as there was a middle class, it was filled overwhelmingly by Asian technicians, shopkeepers, and clerks sandwiched between a white aristocracy above and African peasant farmers or labourers below. It was a difficulty that time and common sense could best solve, and there was very little sign of discontent over the country at large corresponding to the ferment among the Kikuyu, but it was, nevertheless, an unstable situation which Mau Mau exploited.
The first open defiance on a wide scale began with the so-called women's riots in the Fort Hall and Nyeri districts towards the end of 1951. They were not particularly significant in themselves and resulted in nothing worse than the burning of a number of cattle crushes in protest against the veterinary department's anti-rinderpest campaign, but they were exploited by agitators for seditious purposes. There was no indication in the reports for the year that the situation was getting beyond the capacity of the civil administration to deal with it, except a statement from Fort Hall district that KAU meetings were becoming increasingly hostile.19 In the expectation, however, that things would get worse and that private property would need protection, steps were taken to increase the Kenya Police Reserve (KPR) and parallel precautions were also taken to increase the tribal police in the African lands. Most of the men of the European community joined the KPR, or, if young enough to do so, the Kenya Regiment. From about April 1948, when the general increase of lawlessness necessitated special precautions, members of the KPR, although not yet officially called up, voluntarily carried out frequent patrols.
Whether the KAU leaders had yet come down firmly on the side of open revolt is doubtful, but the movement had now gained a momentum which they were unable to restrain. From the beginning of the year there were numerous outbreaks of fire on pasture land, burning of huts and poisoning of cattle on settlers' farms in the Nyeri and Nanyuki districts, and in February there were serious fires on farms in the Timau area. The African press was full of provocative articles and Mau Mau hymns were secretly printed. Scarcely veiled sedition was being preached at ‘tea parties’ several hundred strong in the Kiambu district. The spear and shield emblem was painted on the sides of Kikuyu buses, and Mau Mau devotees grew beards, presumably in emulation of Jomo Kenyatta for, beyond question, he was now universally accepted as the dominant figure in the movement. That does not mean, however, that he had control of its operations or approved its every feature.
The Mau Mau oath, which initially had been comparatively mild and used with caution, was now being administered wholesale at a fee of 60 shillings which went to the campaign funds with 2 shillings and 50 cents to the oath administrator. It enjoined complete loyalty to the movement and absolute obedience, even if a man were ordered to do murder. It was administered secretly in huts at night with magical ceremonies involving rituals which, as time went by, became increasingly more revolting. As the Mau Mau campaign proceeded, several different types were employed – probably seven – becoming progressively more bestial and nauseating at each successive stage according to the position held and the ruthlessness of the deeds which the oath-taker bound himself to do, if so ordered. They were not traditional Kikuyu oaths such as might have been administered by a properly constituted elder of the tribe under the sanctions of Kikuyu custom. It seems that, although old men were generally preferred, any Mau Mau of the rank of section commander or above could administer the oath. As to the form, the essential feature of the obscenities practised was that they should be against the order of nature. It had nothing to do with Kikuyu custom: it was as much a flouting of tribal tradition as it was a defiance of government.20
Oathing in schools was widespread, not only in KISA and Karing'a schools, but also in the bush schools started in forest reserves and settlers’ farms where teachers were mostly Kikuyu and where influence could be extended to other tribes. Both the children and their parents had to take the oath. If they refused, the children were banished from the school and frequently the parents' huts would be burnt down. Over the Kikuyu country at large the taking of the oath was not confined to willing adherents. Gangs of young thugs from the Forty Group and their like would round them up and they would be compelled to take it by force.
These activities meant, inevitably, that much more information now reached the government, and there is reason to think that the Mau Mau may have overreached and embarrassed the more sober-minded of the KAU leaders who would have preferred, if oathing was to be used at all, that it should be confined to comparatively narrow cells in key places, ready for rapid expansion if and when open revolt should be unleashed. But their hand had been forced and they must now have realised that the revolt was imminent. If they wished to stop it, their only recourse was to an unequivocal condemnation of Mau Mau, or else they must let it have its head. No such denunciation was made.21
Counter-measures by government included restrictions against holding meetings or making collections without a permit. A curfew was imposed in the Fort Hall district. There was also introduced a ‘cleansing’ oath, intended to remove the curse from anyone who had taken the Mau Mau oath and reported it, or had taken it by force, but the attempt to match magic by magic was of doubtful expediency and had little general effect, although it was reported to have brought relief in a few cases. Meanwhile the deteriorating situation had begun to take a further sinister turn: with the murder of informers against Mau Mau. The first recorded case of the kind was on the 15th May 1952, when the bodies of two Africans, one of whom had given evidence, were found in the Kileleshwa River with bullet wounds and panga slashes.22
On the 26th July a large KAU meeting was held at Nyeri. Forty lorries full of supporters of both sexes arrived from Nairobi. Flags in the colours of the movement were openly displayed, and the key-note of the speeches was ‘recovery of our stolen land’. It was a red-letter day for Mau Mau recruitment and can be said to have marked the point of no return.23 During these months while this dangerous situation was building up, the governor of Kenya, Sir Philip Mitchell, was absent from the colony on terminal leave pending retirement. For a reason that may have seemed sufficient to the Colonial Office – that two governors cannot be on the payroll at once – his successor, Sir Evelyn Baring, had to wait until that period of leave had expired. When he eventually arrived on the 29th September, he acted with speed. A quick tour of the affected areas convinced him that he would have to report that a state of emergency existed and must be declared forthwith.
On the night of the 25th/26th September over 150 sheep and cattle on farms in the Nanyuki area were maimed so badly by Mau Mau gangs that they had to be destroyed. This horrible act was the work of youths who had only taken the Mau Mau oath the previous night. But then worse things happened. From the 1st August to the 20th October there were, according to a police report, 34 known murders of Africans by Mau Mau. Four headmen were among the victims, and many chiefs received threatening letters. The culminating crime occurred on the 7th October when Senior Chief Waruhiu of the Githunguri division of Kiambu district was murdered as he was being driven home after attending the hearing of an African court appeal case. His way was blocked both in front and behind by two cars drawn crossways over the road while the murderer got out of the car in front and shot him in cold blood. It was a tragic event, for he was able, honourable and an eminently just man.24
On the night of the 20th/21st October the governor proclaimed the state of emergency. Many arrests of suspected Mau Mau leaders were made on that and following days. Immediately after the proclamation the Lancashire Fusiliers were flown in from the [Suez] Canal Zone. The 6th KAR arrived from Tanganyika and the 7th from Uganda to reinforce the 4th, 5th, and 26th who were already in the operational area, with the 3rd and 23rd also in Kenya and available. The Kenya Regiment was embodied with its reserves and called up.25 The Kenya Police was also expanded by calling up the reserve and, within a short time almost every able-bodied settler who could possibly be spared had joined it, as too had many businessmen. The more elderly joined the Home Guard which was now formed and comprised both European and Asian sections. There was, as yet, no African Home Guard, but certain chiefs had, of their own initiative, formed private guards for the protection of their own people, and the same thing was done by several of the mission stations. European farmers living in affected areas had also, for the most part, assigned a share in their defence plan to their more dependable employees.
Emergency regulations were brought into force at once. African newspapers of seditious tendency were suppressed. Special regulations, supplemented as need arose, were applied to the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru tribes. Curfews were imposed, travelling restricted, meetings and collections virtually prohibited, labour very strictly regulated, and labourers required to carry an employment record card and to be photographed. Photographs too had to be carried by other Kikuyu on their identity cards. Jomo Kenyatta and five other political leaders were committed for trial on a charge of sedition and, after a controversial trial at Kapenguria, which was very protracted, they were convicted as having been leaders of the Mau Mau movement.26 Many other people were also detained but it was not found possible to deal with all detainees by trial because witnesses were afraid to come forward and it was not thought right to expose them to Mau Mau vengeance. A tribunal was therefore appointed with a retired colonial judge as chairman to hear detainees' appeals.27
1 A brilliant insight, not fully shared by other accounts of white settlement in Kenya, by authors whose generation has not been so dominated by war as Fazan's.
2 The British Council was among the ‘nation-building’ institutions of the time, trying, unsuccessfully, to find common cultural ground for Africans, Europeans and South Asians. See Richard Frost's aptly titled Race against Time: Human Relations and Politics in Kenya before Independence (London: Rex Collings, 1978).
3 As earlier noted, he had been General Secretary, not President, of the KCA.
4 West African and Caribbean pan-Africanists in London complained that Kenyatta was more ‘staunch Kikuyu’ than pan-African: see Ras Makonnen, with Kenneth King, Pan-Africanism from within (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 162. His visit to Moscow had made Kenyatta a convinced anti-communist, as the British secret services were slow to realise; see Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, ‘Custom, Modernity, and the Search for Kihooto: Kenyatta, Malinowski, and the Making of Facing Mount Kenya’, in Helen Tilley, with Robert J. Gordon (eds), Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 178–80, and Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British intelligence, the Cold War, and the Twilight of Empire (London: Harper, 2013), pp. 258–62. Kenyatta had not been president of the pan-African federation, but helped to organise its 1945 Manchester conference. His anthropological studies at the London School of Economics, under Bronislaw Malinowski, had resulted in his book, Facing Mount Kenya (1938). See also Jeremy Murray-Brown, Kenyatta (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), Part II. The following account of Kikuyu grievances is more sympathetic than anything Fazan may have read in official reports 20 years earlier.
5 Spencer, KAU, would not dissent from this view.
6 Fazan, its secretary, would naturally defend the Kenya Land Commission's findings and in purely quantitative terms he was right – but that is to forget all questions of sentiment, the coerced loss of property and disruption of intimate social relations with their complex history and continuing obligations, government regulation of settlement schemes, the poorer soils in the resettlement areas, and so on.
7 Indeed, meaning ‘Coldstream’. Fazan's criticism of Kikuyu failure to take due account of their colonial advantages interestingly balances his criticism of the white settler failure to share these advantages more widely – an illustration of how the administrative official's position as ‘man in the middle’ led to a sometimes exasperated desire for more sober rationality on either side of the racial divide.
8 Kikuyu objections to terracing were only loosely connected to wider political dissent. It was hard work, done mainly by the wives of absentee migrant workers, often for the benefit of wealthier Kikuyu; it interfered with normal farming activities and not infrequently had to be repeated when it failed in its purpose of protecting cultivated hillsides against soil erosion. See Throup, Economic and Social Origins, Chapter 7.
9 See Throup, Economic and Social Origins, pp. 153–60.
10 There is no agreed analysis of the origins and growth of Mau Mau – whose most likely meaning is ‘the greedy eaters (of the authority of their elders)’. Fazan's account is therefore as plausible as any, much more so than the conspiracy theory told in the Kenya government's official history, the ‘Corfield Report’, Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of the Mau Mau Movement in Kenya (London: HMSO, Cmd 1030, 1960). As discussed above, in the Foreword, Fazan had modified Corfield in his own 1961 History of the Loyalists. His mature judgment here on Kenyatta's role – as an inspiration to the militants but not their leader – now flatly contradicts Corfield but is a view with which most later historians would agree. It is no longer possible to tell whether Fazan had read any later study before writing his memoir, but his account bears some similarity to that of Rosberg and Nottingham's The Myth of ‘Mau Mau’, published in 1966. The historiography on the origins and nature of Mau Mau is large and grows yearly. A select bibliography follows: Rosberg and Nottingham, argue – against the majority British view of the time that Mau Mau was a mental sickness – that it was the militant wing of a rational nationalism, over which Kenyatta lost control – a view that Spencer's KAU supports with ample oral evidence. Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, and Furedi, Mau Mau War in Perspective, sees it as the revolt of discarded Highland squatters; Throup, Economic and Social Origins, also brings in outcast Nairobi and the discontented Kikuyu ‘reserve’. Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993) provides a good synthesis; John Lonsdale, ‘The moral economy of Mau Mau’, Chapters 11 and 12 in Berman and Lonsdale (eds), Unhappy Valley, pp. 265–504, emphasises the angry despair of client dependants, whose inability to achieve adult self-mastery (wiathi) in marriage and property ownership turned them against their patrons both white and black. Greet Kershaw's Mau Mau from Below (Oxford: James Currey, 1997) has the most detailed knowledge of the land history of northern Kiambu and the most convincing discussion of why elders may have surrendered authority to their young, whose ambitions they could no longer assist.
11 Settler politicians had long demanded an unofficial majority – composed of white settlers. They had now achieved their demand but in a most unwelcome, multi-racial, form: If they were to defeat the government benches in future they could do so only in alliance with South Asian and African members of legislative council.
12 While Fazan rightly acknowledges the initial educational ambitions of Githunguri College, one must also remember his respect for its founder, Senior Chief Koinange.
13 This is now more open to doubt. Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below, pp. 220, 223–37, 329–30, writes of several Mau Maus, including a ‘Githunguri’ or ‘Kenyatta’ Mau Mau that demanded disciplined but non-violent solidarity; and ‘Nairobi’ and ‘Rift Valley’ Mau Maus, more committed to violence, which exploited Kenyatta's reputation, but were not subject to his control. The late Greet Kershaw is the only historian of Mau Mau, either Kenyan or expatriate, to have conducted research in Kikuyuland during the Emergency, initially as a Quaker aid-worker.
14 Fazan was correct. The chairman of Mau Mau's central committee, Muhimu, was Eliud Mutonyi, lorry owner and charcoal dealer. Fred Kubai and Bildad Kaggia, leaders of Nairobi's militants, were both, among other things, active trade union officials. See Kaggia, Roots of Freedom; Dave Hyde, ‘The Nairobi General Strike [1950]: from protest to insurgency’, in Andrew Burton (ed.), The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa c. 1750–2000 (Nairobi: The British Institute in Eastern Africa, 2002), pp. 235–53.
15 Interestingly, and as part of his continuing meditation on how Kenya's land allocation might, with wiser counsels, have been changed over time, Fazan here attributes the worsening political atmosphere as much to white intransigence as to African militancy, a view that few whites at the time would have accepted but which historians would emphasise.
16 An excellent summary of post-war Kenya's political conundrum.
17 Not only were settlers unyielding on any relaxation of their racially-protected right of Highland ownership in the foreseeable future, but many new post-war farmers were settled on state-assisted or tenancy terms that assumed a continuing colonial status.
18 British propaganda played on these fears.
19 Settlers bitterly criticised the colonial government for its apparent complacency in face of rising African militancy. Junior officials tended to blame ‘paper’ and an aloof central government secretariat and/or the governor, Sir Philip Mitchell who, weary after a distinguished career, could not bear to accept that his crowning achievement, Kenya's governorship, might end in disaster. Official admission of this failing is found in the first term of reference for the retired civil servant Frank Corfield, who in 1957 was charged with explaining not only the growth of Mau Mau but also ‘the circumstances which permitted the movement to develop so rapidly without the full knowledge of the Government’: Historical Survey, p. 1. For a first-hand account of the administration's reactions at the time see Chenevix Trench, Men who Ruled Kenya, pp. 220–31.
20 This seems to be generally agreed, including by Kikuyu informants. The most forceful statement of this view and, for white opinion the most authoritative, was in L. S. B. Leakey, Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (London: Methuen, 1952), pp. 98–101.
21 This is a questionable statement, thanks to doubt over Kenyatta's meaning when in August 1952, at a meeting on the Kiambu cricket ground – kirigiti – called to denounce Mau Mau, he cursed it ‘to the roots of the mikongoe tree’, a mythical tree of the underworld. At his trial the judge suggested he was advising Mau Mau to go underground, but Kubai and Kaggia, leaders of the urban militants, later claimed to have threatened to kill Kenyatta should he continue to condemn Mau Mau.
22 At this point in the memoir it appears that Fazan was summarising his official History of the Loyalists, compiled in 1960–1.
23 The verbatim police report of this mass meeting, which Kenyatta found difficult to control, appears as Appendix F in Corfield's Historical Survey, pp. 301–8.
24 Many Kikuyu held a different view of Waruhiu. See Throup, Economic and Social Origins, pp. 159–61; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, pp. 11–12, 34–5, 55–7.
25 Parker's Last Colonial Regiment is more thoughtful and more detailed than Guy Campbell's The Charging Buffalo: A History of the Kenya Regiment 1937–1963 (London: Leo Cooper, 1986).
26 See John Lonsdale, ‘The trials of Jomo Kenyatta: Breaking and making an African nationalist’, Chapter 11 in Peter Coss (ed.), The Moral World of the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 196–239.
27 And of which Fazan was a member.