Papers presented at the conference commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Declaration of a State of Emergency in Kenya in 1952
Abstract by Max Pinckers
Muted Histories of Mau Mau: The loyalism debate, the alternative narrative to the heroic Mau Mau story, internal debates and emergent divisions in the Mau Mau. We are looking for contributions that highlight the differences that could indicate the multiple ideologies in the movement. How were these divisions resolved?
The existence of fragmented histories of the Maumau is partly and yet to a significant degree an archival problem just as it is an inevitable outcome of sense making around a layered and complex question such as the war for independence. Multiple and sometimes competing narratives which can and should be expected when chronicalizing a historical war sometimes wear down the acceptable and available frames of helping tell the stories to contemporary audiences.
Within these frames inaccuracies, accidental and intentional gaps help highlight and at times obscure critical dates, incidents, personalities, and events which if properly told will create villains out of heroes and conversely might provide otherwise unknown hero(ine)s from within the struggles. What therefore exists is a remotely relatable, disjointed accounts of how the war played out, its funding, motivations, failures and successes as well as its legacies.
Credible visual retelling and accurately captioned frames provide one of the critical lenses through which we can begin to address these gaps out which hopefully emerges a much better understanding of the Maumau and its numerous concerns and contestations. Wars are never neat, and yet within their rugged realities punctuated by mortality, limitations, triumphs and even mistakes, wholesome accounts can and must be told in order for a people to make sense of why they fought, who they fought, who paid the price and who still continues to pay that price long after the last shot was fired.
The Elephant and Max Pinckers have hosted one such account building upon Max’s meticulous work in documenting this reports as well as other contributors such as Rose Miyonga, Chao Maina and Wangui Kimari. It is in light of this that we can vocalize and visualize through photo essays and captions some of the interesting and rarely heard of bits within the Maumau Histories.
Abstract by Niels Boender
Heroes and Hooligans: Reframing Mau Mau’s legacies through a reconciliatory lens
The Emergency era in Kenya’s colonial history has attracted a huge amount of scholarly debate, from its very outbreak to the present. Debate has centred on the role of loyalists, the motivations of the fighters, and the brutality of the colonial state. One area that has however remained particularly polarised, and not yet been subject to sufficient historical synthesis, is the question of the place of Mau Mau in the post-colonial Kenyan state. This paper seeks to speak to this question, especially concentrating to the post-war lives of Mau Mau survivors, and how both the late and post-colonial states engaged with them. It combines several themes: the lives of veterans, the role of Kenyatta, and most especially the manifestations of Mau Mau in independent Kenya.
In essence, the paper seeks to upset simplistic notions of ‘forgetting’ to reframe Mau Mau’s legacy through the lens of reconciliation. Reconciliation captures the way in which various iterations of Kenyan government attempted to find a place for the radical anti-colonial movement in the country’s politics and national identity. It also foregrounds that Mau Mau, besides being an anti-colonial rebellion, was also a brutal civil war, with all the requisite post-war societal processes. It will begin by looking at the Emergency itself, and how British colonial officers structured their counterinsurgency operations around notions of preparing Kenya for a future generation of colonial rule. In the Emergency Villages and detention camps, men and women were forcibly ‘rehabilitated’. The paper will develop a concept of ‘coercive reconciliation’ to understand this complex, dual, and varied process. It will also draw special attention to the way in which Mau Mau ex-detainees and veteran forest fighters interacted with the colonial state.
Crucially, this process continued into a post-colonial state. Certain radical scholars like Maina wa Kinyatti have emphasised that the Kenyatta state repressed and formally ‘forgot’ the Mau Mau’s struggle for independence. While it is obvious that their story was not elevated to a central place that many people believed they deserved, the reality was far more complex than simple repression. Kenyatta conceived of Mau Mau as a ‘disease’, a malady of the colonial body politic exorcised by Uhuru. The threat of Mau Mau’s radical redistributionist ideology was certainly present, but this was not dealt with by pure repression. For example, 400 generals and field marshals were granted plots on settlement schemes, and multiple ex-Mau Mau made it into the country’s first post-independence parliament. Top Government ministers and leaders of the Provincial Administration regularly corresponded about the continuing rivalries which emanated from the Emergency, while attempts continued to bring together the different factions. Notions of moral ethnicity and nation-building were moreover central to this process.
It will end by mentioning how reconciliatory logics still persist, for example in the shaving of Field Marshal Muthoni’s dreadlocks by former First Lady Mama Ngina, Altogether, the paper will hope to open up a new area not just in the historiography of Mau Mau, but in the whole Kenyan history.
Bio: Niels is a third-year PhD Student at the University of Warwick, working with the Imperial War Museum on a Collaborative Doctoral Project. His project concerns the legacies of the Mau Mau Uprising in colonial Kenya, investigating the interactions between colonial counterinsurgency and post-colonial politics. The study hopes to investigate, using previously hidden archives and oral histories with Kenyan survivors, the dynamics of reconciliation and vengeance in the wake of the anti-colonial uprising.
Abstract by Paul Njoroge Muiru
“God’s Book” and the Declaration of Emergency in 1952.
‘Write the vision clearly, that he that runs can read’. Habakkuk 2: 2-3.
Imperial annexation of Kenya coincided with the missionary invasion of what was then known as British East Africa. Indeed, one of the major legacies of Sir William Mackinnon’s Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEACO) was the Church of Scotland Missionary enterprise, which sits silently, ignored, and under-researched by Historians of Kenya’s decolonization. The CSM would, in a bid to re-imagine Kikuyu’s future, undertake to ‘raise the Kikuyu man, and to raise him high’. This project would be realized by translating the Scriptures. Between 1901 and 1951, the CSM and other Protestant missions in Central Kenya sporadically released translated portions of the Bible. Subsequently, revised editions of those translated portions appeared under different titles. The re-phrasing of names for books is worth thinking through. The Bible became an important ‘fellow traveler’ as Kikuyu walked through the brief, yet consequential, colonial moment. A society that was known for its disputative nature, the Kikuyu appropriated the Bible in their struggle within and against colonial rule.
In the Bible and other forms of Christian literacy, the Kikuyu innovated new pathways to realizing self-mastery. Wiathi was originally and most truly the desire of a Kikuyu to feel and prove a grown-up status. As a process, wiathi set off soon after circumcision, irua. Traditionally, the transition from circumcision to a grown-up status was, to a large extent, assured unlike during the age of Empire and Missions. Ibuku ria Ngai, as the Kikuyu called the Bible, was circulated around the Central Kenya region. It brought on board the Embu, Chuka, and the Meru. In the preconquest period, Mount Kenya people made the region habitable by carving out a civilization out of the huge forests that covered the area. There, the blood that spilled to the ground during circumcision, and their sweat [labor] and martial tradition had made boys men and girls’ women. Importantly, the trinity of circumcision [and its pain], labor and warrior tradition had made Kikuyu both own and possess the land. Colonial and missionary intervention fed into these traditional debates and practices, creating raptures and anxieties whose shadows loomed large in the post-1945 period. Inadvertently, the Central Kenya people found in the Kikuyu Bible, narratives that spoke to their past, present, and their future.
In this paper, I seek to speak about the centrality of the Kikuyu vernacular Bible in making Mau Mau imaginable, and the Emergency possible. I note that the murder of a Christian chief directly led to the declaration of the Emergency on October 20, 1952. In the previous year, the Kikuyu had received the translated Old Testament. Inspired by the story of Exodus, many men carried their Bibles to Bushi, to wage a guerrilla war. Broadly, my paper is informed by an emerging scholarship on Christianity and the African Imagination and the observation that historians who ignore religious history do so at their peril (Spencer, 1975).
Patricia Wairimu Njirwa, (Waruhiu’s granddaughter) “Senior Chief Waruhiu: The Great British Cover-up”
Abstract
The Declaration of State of Emergency in 1952 by the British is associated with the brutal murder of Senior Chief Waruhiu. Yet other than historians and commentators according him epithets and descriptions that are biased and at times unfounded, little is known about this dedicated and loyal servant of the British empire. In this paper I intend to provide an insight into the man, his early life and influences and subsequent service as a loyal public servant of the British colonial government in Kenya. I will show that the common love for the gospel and a hunger for learning made his family to be among early converts who turned to be teachers of not only the Bible but of Mathematics, Kiswahili, Geography to mention a few. Waruhiu was a product of this enthusiasm for learning with a character of excellence in service that eventually led him to become a senior colonial chief. The paper will show how the British colonial government cost a loyal leader his name and reputation for the past 70 years by hiding the true identity of his killers. It will also demonstrate that Chief Waruhiu was brutally murdered by a skilled assassin whose skill the Mau Mau did not possess at that time and that the circumstances of his killing and marksmanship of the killer point to foreign culpability. I will finally pose a question: as the British increasingly accept responsibility for the atrocities committed on Kenyans, including the Mau Mau, is it not time that they should also acknowledge the betrayal of such people like Chief Waruhiu?
Reenacting Mau Mau History Through Physical Reconstruction of Emergency Experiences at Karatina University
By Prof. John Mwaruvie
Abstract.
Karatina University is situated at the edge of Mount Kenya forest which served as “Mau Mau barracks”.To relive the Mau Mau experience the University has established a Centre for Mau Mau and other Liberation Movements with the core mandate to collect Mau Mau artifacts, conduct oral interviews targeting surviving Mau Mau veterans and rehabilitate or reconstructMau Mau relics. The effort has yielded a data base that has documentaries of major Mau Mau veteran’s reenacting their experiences during the struggle and after independence. This paper discusses what has been achieved in reviving interest in the history of Mau mau Movement and decolonization of Kenya. It examines the positive results of collaborative effort between the Centre and National Museum of Kenya in mapping and Gazzetting Mau Mau caves in Karatina University neighbourhood, rehabilitation Mau Mau Trench outside the University gate, recreated a Mau Mau Village and a watch tower facing the trench, restoration of sacred Mugumo Tree that served as Mau Mau post office adjacent to the Mau Mau trench. The centre has a mini museaum/ laboratory with photographs, artifacts associated with Mau Mau and material culture used as teaching aids for history students. The paper equally discusses the challenges encountered in this effort and opportunities ahead. It is hoped that the paper will provoke discussion on how institutions can collaborate to develop public history for posterity and also generate income for the institution.
Abstract by Zarina Patel
Mau Mau Reflections – A story of two minorities in the struggle.
The Mau Mau War for Land and Freedom was fought largely in the forests of the Aberdare mountains but the Mau Mau Movement itself was a much larger entity comprised of justice-seeking Kenyans from every corner of the country. It had its origins much prior to the Declaration of the Emergency on 20th October 1952 and extended to well beyond independence to the official unbanning of the Mau Mau War of Independence by the Kibaki-led Govt in 2003. This act brought closure to that liberation phase of our campaign against British colonialism.
The gallant freedom fighters led by Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi were building on the struggles of Waiyaki wa Hinga, Me Katilili, Koitalel and Moraa; on the Indian Associations and the East African Indian National Congress; on Harry Thuku and the YKA, EAA, KCA and KAU; on the Colonial Times and Daily Chronicle; on the 1946 Anake Group of ex-servicemen; on the trade unionists led by Makhan Singh, Fred Kubai and so many others; to name but a few. The guerilla fighters were supported directly and indirectly by the taxi-drivers who ferried the food, medicines, weapons, funds, uniforms and information; the clandestine media operatives; and the comrades who spread the word internationally and sourced for funds and weapons.
Flag Independence was won in 1963 and colonialism morphed into neo-colonialism - the white images changed to black but the colonial structures of governance; the judiciary; the security organs and the economic policies remained intact. As did the ever-watchful eyes of our former colonial masters and their allies. Apart from the select few, the people of Kenya had won neither land nor freedom. So, the struggle continued.
Kenya’s independence constitution included a multi-party system but soon after uhuru under Jomo Kenyatta, this transformed into a de jure single-party state and in June 1982, the National Assembly under President Moi made it official – Kenya was now a dictatorship with centralization of power, personalized by the president.
This paper is an account of a group of persons, an underground cell of which I was part of, and which was engaged in the struggle to overturn the Moi-KANU dictatorship and its declared policy of single party rule. The cell included persons from two Kenyan minorities who have been largely overlooked in the narration of the ventures which led to the Second Liberation i.e. the return of multi-partysm in 1991. These unlikely and little-known groups were ‘Women’ and ‘South Asians’. South Asians are less than one per cent of the Kenyan population; women though not a statistical minority, are considered a ‘minority’ because they have as a group less power and fewer privileges than men.
CFP: Recasting Mau Mau Discourse, University of Nairobi
Muted Histories of Mau Mau
Abstract:
Reinterpreting everyday control in Kenya’s Mau Mau emergency (1952-1956)
The Mau Mau emergency, one of Britain’s bloodiest post-war conflicts, has an almost unmatched place in documenting the inglorious end of Empire in Africa. Unsurprisingly therefore, the historiography of the emergency that has followed has tended to tier interpersonal violence narratives over other means, due to the brutality and scale of bloodshed seen, leaving the wider repertoires of coercion in the conflict reduced largely to footnote and marginalia. The paper will act as a distillation of my thesis in research in reorienting the Mau Mau conflict to a localised level and making these everyday quotidian controls its focus. Bringing together the conclusions I have drawn, the paper offers a novel rereading of the Mau Mau conflict, and raises questions about how my findings might challenge some established preconceptions of notions of control in British imperialism.
Not one singular policy, the paper will demonstrate how restrictions were utilised in conjunction to establish a ‘network of punishment’ that reinforced one another and affected almost every aspect of Kikuyu everyday life, supported through the conspiration of administrative officers and local loyalist elites acting for mutual benefits in what is termed, ‘constituencies of control’.
The production of the thesis made use of the controversial Hanslope disclosure, insofar tapped for its violent content, to analyse the conceptualisation, development and application of district-level coercive policy showing it to be a firmly bottom-up process, born in negotiation between the ‘constituencies of control’ and conceived as applicable, appropriate and supposedly familiar to the Kikuyu people to aid in their justification. The paper will chart how conventions such as, ‘Blood Money’ were utilised and reimagined to fit the needs of the Kenyan administration and persecute the Kikuyu population en masse in thoroughly unfamiliar ways. Finally, the paper will conclude in discussion of what such work can tell us about the migrated archive and wider debates on imperial history going on in today’s so-called culture wars.
Abstract by Shamsul : The Insurrection of the Subjugated Knowledge”: on Writing Mau Mau History
The main theme of the present paper is to ponder an alternative way to write the history of Mau Mau. The paper argues that existing discourse of Mau Mau historical and others marginalized and silenced the voices of Mau Mau as they are framed within the nationalist discourse of decolonization. In other words, it neglects the history makers. This specific task will accomplish by eclectic reading of writings of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984). From Gramsci we borrow his conceptlization of sublaternity. To him the subaltern category stands for inferior rank, that is, those social groups who are subjected to the hegemony of the ruling classes, hence, failed to exert their own hegemony, rendered them marginalized and voiceless. If we attempt to situate, subalternity in the colonial context, we the dominant social classes, includes, at the top, the various colonial administrators, and officials, dominant indigenous groups. In the Kenyan context, the subaltern groups constitute, colonized communities, various ethnic groups or so-called “tribal,” peasants, women, nascent working classes, and other social categories, that are, dominated by the colonial hegemonic power. Writing of Mau Mau history, this paper will argue constitute a “crisis of history.” This crisis derives from the overwhelming dominance of hegemonic historiography and consequently silencing the voice of the subalternity in writing Mau Mau history. To put it differently, the crisis lies in both hegemonic historiography of the event and the subversive politics of the subaltern. Furthermore, giving voice to the Mau Mau subaltern and debunking dominant historiography is essentially a political project. This politics of the Mau Mau subaltern can be described by what Foucault calls “insurrection of the subjugated knowledge.” By subjugated knowledge, Foucault refers to “a whole set of knowledge that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledge, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity”. Sources for the writings of Mau Mau history from this perspective could be located in myriad sources, that includes Mau Mau combatants autobiographies, reading archives “differently”, letters, songs and testitimonials, others sources that are historically and deliberately remain ignored and unused. In that way, Mau Mau’s legacy in post-colonial Kenya would be understood.
