31 - The Masses React

Summary

THE MUMBOITES, FOLLOWERS OF A SERPENT GOD WHOSE MEDIUM had promised the removal of Europeans, were duly smitten by an indignant colonial authority and were themselves removed, with their leaders exiled to the offshore Kenya island of Lamu and their ranks dispersed. But their ideas were not so easily banished. They stayed in the consciousness of the 1920s and –30s. After the gruelling enlightenment on world realities provided by the first world war, other Africans began to give these ideas a more practical turn. There came a second ideological shift from the ideologies of the past. Having achieved, with Christianity, an African interpretation of European things-spiritual, men began to form an African interpretation of European things-temporal. They moved their dissidence from the sphere of religion to more secular ground. There emerged among ordinary people, by no means necessarily attached to any élite, what may be called proto-nationalism.

One of its early manifestations, this time in East Africa, was the Young Kikuyu Association founded in 1921 by Harry Thuku, then a telephone operator in the Nairobi treasury department. Like Mumbo's prophet, Thuku had no use for European moral teachings. 'Because the European missionaries did not come here to preach the word of God but of the devil only/ he said in a speech of 1921,1 do not want them here.’ Yet what he founded was not a dissident church but a dissident political organisation; and his advice to his audience was not to await the millennium but to organise against the Europeans.

There followed a pattern of events that was to become familiar in many colonies. ‘A crowd collected in front of the Police Lines [i.e. barracks] where [Thuku] was detained, and a shot fired by a nervous and over-tired policeman started a volley’—in the colonial records one is constantly finding these ‘nervous and over-tired policemen’—‘ending in the death of twenty-one Africans. Thuku was deported and the Young Kikuyu Association banned.’ Years of increasingly political agitation, sometimes open, often clandestine, followed upon this. They were difficult preparatory years. After the second world war, with another large helping of enlightenment about the world, the ideas of Kenya nationalism could at last grow to maturity in a fully political movement of mass dimensions.