Five - Politics of Protest: Mau Mau

Summary

The squatters were perhaps the most suppressed, dispossessed and insecure social group in Kenya, especially in the post-war years.

People [Kikuyu squatters] in the Rift Valley fully supported the Mau Mau Movement. They hated the Europeans. They had lived next to them for a long time and had seen their mistakes.

The Kikuyu [squatters] in the Rift Valley were fighting for land in that area. The other nduriri [non-Kikuyu especially from Western Kenya] did not know how to fight for land. People like the Maasai did not know how to fight for land. They had given in [to the colonial administration] and had been moved to several places to make room for Europeans. So the Kikuyu had to fight and later claim any area.

Post-war political mobilisation

During the years following the declaration of the Second World War, the political activities of the KCA (then proscribed and its leaders detained) were reduced to a few intermittent local meetings. These were to prevent the party from dying altogether and to raise funds for the detained leaders and for Kenyatta, who was still abroad.

The release of the detainees in 1943 and 1944 gave the reconstituted party a new lease of life. In Kiambu, KCA leaders were generally recruited from two sources, from the General Council of the KCA, which was originally established in the mid-1930s, and from the mbari committee. This was initially made up of clan (mbari) leaders who had represented the Kikuyu Land Board Association when it gave evidence on Kiambu Kikuyu land claims to the Kenya Land Commission of 1932-33. To ensure the former detainees’ loyalty to the party's political struggle in Kiambu, it was decided that they should be required to take an oath. But, unlike the earlier KGA oath, which used the Bible and the soil as its symbols, in place of the Bible this one used goat meat. This oath, sometimes referred to as the mbari oath, was a radical departure from past practices and symbolised the changing political style towards militancy. Although the oath was initially designed expressly for the detainees, by 1945 all the KCA leaders in Kiambu had taken it.