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Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

John Lonsdale
John Lonsdale
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge
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This article explores the imaginative meanings of Mau Mau which white and black protagonists invented out of their fearful ambitions for the future of Kenya. Within the general assumptions of white superiority and the need to destroy Mau Mau savagery, four mutually incompatible European myths can be picked out. Conservatives argued that Mau Mau revealed the latent terror-laden primitivism in all Africans, the Kikuyu especially. This reversion had been stimulated by the dangerous freedoms offered by too liberal a colonialism in the post-war world. The answer must be an unapologetic reimposition of white power. Liberals blamed Mau Mau on the bewildering psychological effects of rapid social change and the collapse of orderly tribal values. Africans must be brought more decisively through the period of transition from tribal conformity to competitive society, to play a full part in a multi-racial future dominated by western culture; this would entail radical economic reforms. Christian fundamentalists saw Mau Mau as collective sin, to be overcome by individual confession and conversion. More has been read into their rehabilitating mission in the detention camps than is warranted, since they had no theology of power. The whites with decisive power were the British military. They saw the emergency as a political war which needed political solutions, for which repression, social improvement and spiritual revival were no substitute. They, and the ‘hard-core’ Mau Mau detainees at Hola camp who thought like them, cleared the way for the peace. This was won not by any of the white constructions of the rising but by Kenyatta's Kikuyu political thought, which inspired yet criminalised Mau Mau.

Type
Colonial Minds
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , November 1990 , pp. 393 - 421
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

References

2 I was unable to give a satisfactory answer when John Dunn put this question at a Cambridge University African Studies Centre seminar; this essay is a second attempt. But I end with the same question, put to me in 1988 by Justus Ndung'u Thiong'o. Much of the impact of ‘Mau Mau’ on the mind lay in its name; many different origins have been proposed for it. The most plausible comes from Thomas Colchester, lately of the Kenya administration: in Swahili ka is a diminutive prefix, ma an amplifying one, enhanced by repetition. Mau would thus connote something larger than Kau (the colloquial form of the Kenya African Union). The beauty of this explanation is that it needs no originator, merely a common play on words.

3 Kanogo, , Squatters, 129–37Google Scholar; Furedi, Frank, The Mau Mau War in Perspective (London, 1989), chapters 3 and 4.Google Scholar

4 Willoughby (‘Tommy’) Thompson, Kandara division (Fort Hall) handing over report, 1 March 1955: Rhodes House, Oxford, [RH] Mss. Afr. s. 839 (1); Kenyatta, Jomo, Facing Mount Kenya (London, 1938), 304.Google Scholar

5 For a brief outline of the war, see Clayton, Anthony, Counter-insurgency in Kenya 1952–60 (Nairobi, 1976).Google Scholar My research student Mr Randall W. Heather, whose Ph.D. thesis on the intelligence war is nearing completion, has been generous with material and ideas.

6 Bennett, George and Rosberg, Carl, The Kenyatta Election: Kenya 1960–1961 (London, 1961), 22.Google Scholar

7 SirBlundell, Michael, So Rough a Wind (London, 1964), 283Google Scholar; similar symbolism was used by white demonstrators in Pretoria on 10 February 1990, the day before the release of Nelson Mandela.

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9 From his upcountry retirement, former governor Mitchell warned settlers that ‘loyalists’ would expect fundamental change after the war: SirMitchell, Philip, African Afterthoughts (London, 1954), 268.Google Scholar

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12 Buijtenhuijs, Rob, Essays on Mau Mau (Leiden, 1982), 35–6Google Scholar, discusses Mau Mau recruitment rates.

13 Figures seen by courtesy of Greet Kershaw; full discussion must await her own publication, but some of her evidence suggests that many joined Mau Mau during Kenyatta's trial in late 1952 and early 1953. They both wished to support Kenyatta and were reassured that Mau Mau could not have been as dreadful as they imagined if he had, after all, been in charge of it.

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18 Barnett, and Njama, , Man Mau front Within, 138–9, 142, 155, 193–5Google Scholar; ‘Interrogation of Waruhiu s/o Itote, alias “General China”’ (Kenya Police Special Branch, Nairobi, 26 January 1954), para. 219: privately held.

19 This point is briefly developed at the end of the essay, with reference to the komerera.

20 To use the language of Beecher, Bishop L. J., ‘Christian counter-revolution to Mau Mau’, in Joelson, F. S. (ed.), Rhodesia and East Africa (London, 1958), 82.Google Scholar

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26 As in Nellie Grant to Elspeth Huxley, 20 Oct. 1952, in Huxley, Elspeth (ed.), Nellie: Letters from Africa (London, 1980), 179.Google Scholar

27 Compare Ranger, Terence, ‘Bandits and guerrillas: the case of Zimbabwe’, in Crummey, Donald (ed.), Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa (London, 1986), 373–96Google Scholar; Kriger, Norma, ‘The Zimbabwean war of liberation: struggles within the struggle’, J. Southern Afr. Studies, XIV (1988), 304–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 All this is to be found not only in white narratives and Mau Mau memoirs but also in a scholarly Kikuyu account: Githige, R. M., ‘The religious factor in Mau Mau with particular reference to Mau Mau oaths’ (M.A. thesis, University of Nairobi, 1978).Google Scholar The attitude of most Europeans to the oaths can conveniently be found in Corfield report, 163–70.

29 As suggested by Kariuki, Josiah M., ‘Mau Mau’ Detainee (London, 1963), 33.Google Scholar

30 Blundell, , Wind, 168Google Scholar; one must be thankful that the British popular press did not then include The Sun.

31 Report to the Secretary of State for the Colonies by the Parliamentary Delegation to Kenya January 1954 (Colonial Office: Cmd. 9081, 1954)Google Scholar, I. Nellie Grant provided her usual back-handed sanity, remarking that in the first world war some Australian troops billeted in Wiltshire were said to have given some polo ponies venereal disease ‘and no one worried much.’ Huxley, , Nellie, 299Google Scholar (letter of 28 February 1954).

32 Clayton, , Counter-insurgency, 7, n. 12.Google Scholar

33 R. D. F. Ryland (Officer-in-charge, Nairobi extra-provincial district) to R. G. Turnbull (Minister for African Affairs), 23 December 1954: Kenya National Archives, Nairobi [KNA], MAA. 9/930.

34 KNA, Rift Valley Province annual report (1953), 2, 16, reporting the systematic screening of the remaining Kikuyu farmworkers after large-scale repatriation to the reserve in early 1953: while 95 per cent were shown to have been oathed, no less than 80 per cent were allowed to remain at work. Much evidence could be cited which casts doubt on the factual details of the ‘advanced’ oaths other than in the minds of some interrogators. But there is no reason to doubt the public masturbation (mentioned also by Frank Kitson, below). See, Leakey, L. S. B., The Southern Kikuyu before 1903 (London, 1977). vol. 1, 24Google Scholar; vol. 2. 691–2; and Lambert, H. E., Kikuyu Social and Political Institutions (London, 1956), 53–4Google Scholar, for the ceremonial group rape-cum-masturbation performed by circumcision initiates in the past, to symbolise the ending of adolescent restrictions. Leakey's material was collected in 1937, Lambert's in the 1930s and '40s.

35 Leakey, L. S. B., Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (London, 1952), 98ff.Google Scholar; but the social horror of women's oathing in the minds of Leakey's informants may be part of the Kikuyu male imagination of Mau Mau. Larger numbers of women took the oath (on Kershaw's data) and played a more active role than can be explained by their men's reluctant induction of them; see also Presley, Cora, ‘Kikuyu women and their nationalism’ (Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, 1986).Google Scholar

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37 Blundell, , Wind, 171.Google Scholar

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40 Leys, Norman, Kenya (London, 1924), 303.Google Scholar

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42 The metaphor is John Gunther's: Inside Africa, 9.

43 For the debate in Kenya see, Gregory, Robert G., Sidney Webb and East Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962)Google Scholar; Kipkorir, B. E., ‘The Alliance High School and the origins of the Kenya African elite’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1969)Google Scholar; King, Kenneth J., Pan-Africanism and Education (Oxford, 1961)Google Scholar; Berman, Bruce, The Dialectics of Domination (London, 1990)Google Scholar; and in South Africa for the same period, Dubow, Saul, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa 1919–36 (Basingstoke, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 Throup, Origins; Berman, Dialectics. For the pre-war origins of conflict between segmentary and centralised politics see my ‘The depression and the second world war in the transformation of Kenya’, in Killingray, David and Rathbone, Richard (eds.), Africa and the Second World War (Basingstoke, 1986), 97–142.Google Scholar

45 An idea which he seems to have first adumbrated in 1938 when governor of Uganda: Macpherson, Margaret, They Built for the Future (Cambridge, 1964), 26.Google Scholar

46 Governor Mitchell to Secretary of State Creech Jones, confidential despatch 16, 30 May 1947; KNA, African Affairs file ii (reference noted in 1965 but not checked since the revision of the archives classification).

47 Clayton, Anthony and Savage, Donald C., Government and Labour in Kenya 1895–1963 (London, 1974), 265–346Google Scholar; Stichter, Sharon B., ‘Workers, trade unions and the Mau Mau rebellion’, Canadian J. Afr. Studies, IX (1975), 259–75Google Scholar; Cooper, Frederick, On the African Waterfront (New Haven and London, 1987), 78–203.Google Scholar

48 The earliest reference I have seen to squatters seeing the ‘White Highlands’ as their own (other than that small portion which was once Kikuyu) comes from Kenyatta in June 1932: Kenya Land Commission Evidence, vol. 1 (Nairobi, 1933), 430.Google Scholar Something more than an old retainer's loyalty brought former headman Njombo back to Nellie Grant's farm to die in 1947; eighteen years later his heirs were among those who bought her out in a syndicate called Mataguri (‘we have been here a long time’) Farm: Huxley, , Nellie, 165, 270.Google Scholar

49 Kanogo, Squatters; Furedi, Mau Mau War; Throup, Origins, chapter 5.

50 Kikuyu politicians must have distrusted Kenyatta as much as whites; before his departure for England they had sworn him against going with white women. Conversely, it seems that Kenyatta was more terrified by Moscow than inspired; see, Cohen, Robin, editor's ‘Introduction’ to Nzula, A. T. et al. , Forced Labour in Colonial Africa ([Moscow 1933] London, 1979), 15.Google Scholar I owe this reference to David Throup.

51 Throup, , Origins, 152–64Google Scholar, shows that the administration little understood Kenyatta's position in this heavily politicised ‘terrace war’.

52 Murray-Brown, Jeremy, Kenyatta (London, 1972), 45Google Scholar, reports how the young Kenyatta was nursed through phthisis by Scots missionaries in 1910; by 1951 phthisis had become ‘some spine disease’, an operation for which saved his life: see W. O. Tait, memorandum, May 1951, in press cutting file on Kenyatta with The Standard, Nairobi.

53 M. G. Capon, ‘Kikuyu 1948, a working answer’, September 1948: KNA, DC/MUR. 3/4/21.

54 Throup, , Origins, 129–30.Google Scholar

55 As in footnote 46 above.

56 Carothers, Psychology, 16, is cautious on this point; Beecher ‘Christian counter-revolution’, 82, much less so, comparing him with Marx and Engels in the British Museum. This accusation lingered long after it was understood that there was nothing exotic about the oaths, which merely reworked Kikuyu symbols of dangerous power: the strongest white attack on Kenyatta on this point was also the last; see, Corfield report, 169–70.

57 Baring, top secret telegram to Lyttelton, 10 Oct. 1952: PRO, CO 822/443, and reproduced in Douglas-Home, Charles, Evelyn Baring, the Last Proconsul (London, 1978), 227–8.Google Scholar That a beer boycott and Mau Mau should be thought to be of equal existential weight is an extraordinary indication of the assumption of African malleability. See also, Kingsley Martin's reports in New Statesman, 22 November 1952, ‘The case against Jomo Kenyatta’; and 6 December 1952, ‘The African point of view’.

58 I am grateful to Malcolm Ruel for urging me to clarify my thoughts at this juncture.

59 (James) Ngugi (wa Thiong'o), London, 1965.

60 Two illustrated accounts of Mau Mau are Roberts, Granville, The Mau Mau in Kenya (London, 1954)Google Scholar, and anon, Mau Mau, a Pictorial Record (Nairobi, nd., ?1954).Google Scholar

61 Ibid. Foreword.

62 For histories of white settler achievement, see Lipscomb, J. F., White Africans (London, 1955)Google Scholar and We Built a Country (London, 1956)Google Scholar; Hill, M. F., Cream Country (Nairobi, 1965)Google Scholar; there were farm memoirs too. For works which contrasted this with African stagnation or worse, see Wilson, C. J., Before the Dawn in Kenya (Nairobi, October and December 1952, January 1953)Google Scholar and Kenya's Warning (Nairobi, 1954)Google Scholar; Stoneham, C. T., Out of Barbarism (London, 1955).Google Scholar The only work sympathetic to African civilization was Leakey's Mau Mau and the Kikuyu.

63 Lipscomb, , White Africans, 82Google Scholar; Wilson, , Kenya's Warning, 13.Google Scholar

64 Kingsley Martin, ‘The settler case’, New Statesman, 29 November, 1952.

65 Among the useful phrases for settler wives to learn in Swahili or Kikuyu, in the Kenya Settler's Cookbook (Nairobi, 1959)Google Scholar, was the injunction ‘it is better not be sulky’.

66 Kanogo, , Squatters, 45, 65, 72.Google Scholar

67 Uasin Gishu district council resolution, April 1947, quoted in Furedi, Mau Mau War, 35–6.

68 Pictured on the blood-red dustcover of Wilson, Kenya's Warning.

69 Greene, Graham, Ways of Escape (London, 1980), 188Google Scholar; I owe this reference to David Throup.

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71 Ruark, Robert, Something of Value, (London, 1955), 368.Google Scholar For Kimanl's earlier appreciation of settler hospitality to Kikuyu squatters on Maasai land, see ibid. 272–4. It was one of the ironies of Mau Mau, as Richard Waller has reminded me, that the squatters shared the settler view that they had cultivated civilisation on Maasailand's transhumant pastures: see Mugo Gatheru's reflections on his squatter childhood, Child of Two Worlds (London, 1964), 7–8.Google Scholar

72 Most succinctly put by Wilson, , Kenya's Warning, 59.Google Scholar

73 Stoneham, , Barbarism, 105.Google Scholar

74 ‘The voice of the settler’, anonymous correspondent to New Statesman, 4 October 1952, 378.

75 In April 1952 the director of intelligence and security submitted a memorandum on Mau Mau (KNA, GO. 3/2/72) which, while comparing the movement to Nkrumah's Convention People's Party in the Gold Coast (whence the director had recently been posted), traced it back to a supposed ‘Supreme Council of Elders’, all ‘experts in witchcraft’ who in days past had specialised in cursing wealthy upstarts. This information was said to have been supplied by ‘a well known authority’, but nothing remotely like it can be found in the obvious sources, Routledges, Prehistoric people; Hobley, C. W., Bantu Beliefs and Magic (London, 1922)Google Scholar; and Cagnolo, C., The Akikuyu (Turin, 1933).Google Scholar Neither Lambert's nor Leakey's works were then available (see footnote 34 above), nor do they support the idea of a wizard's council. It is possible that it was derived from one of the earliest Kiambu settlers, W. O. Tait, an amateur historian who claimed to have been a member of the council (Stoneham, Barbarism, 112–13), and who twenty years earlier had spoken of ‘a secret society among the Kikuyu which nobody ever gets to know much about’: Kenya Land Commission Evidence, vol. 1, 590.

76 Stoneham, , Barbarism, 122.Google Scholar

77 This composite picture is drawn from ibid.; and Wilson, Before the Dawn and Kenya's Warning.

78 Baring to Lyttelton, 9 October 1952: PRO, CO 822/443.

79 Lyttelton, radio broadcast from Nairobi, 4 November 1952 (transcript in KNA, CD. 5/73); and repeated in his statement to parliament: House of Commons Debates, 5th series, vol. 507 (7 November 1952), col. 459.

80 W. Gorell Barnes to Baring, 10 September 1952; note of a meeting with Baring, 23 September 1952: PRO, CO 822/544. The KAU was already split; official belief in its unity, in thrall to Mau Mau, caused it to be banned early in 1953.

81 I have adopted Kingsley Martin's reading of the situation: New Statesman, 8 November 1952.

82 For instance, official press handout no. 70 of 19 April 1953, purporting to show a Mau Mau central committee circular, omitted all its reference to ‘peace’ and ‘freedom’; Baring to Lyttelton, 19 April 1953: PRO, CO 822/440. Wilson, Kenya's Warning, 63, made much play with what was made public, including threats to drink the blood of enemies and to castrate and decapitate anybody who helped the government.

83 Rogers, minute to Gorell Barnes, 24 October 1952; Rogers, minute to Sir Charles Jeffries, 16 February 1953; Lyttelton to Baring, 5 March 1953: PRO, CO.822/440.

84 Jeffries, minute to Lloyd, 17 February 1953 (original emphasis): CO.822/440.

85 T. G. Askwith, typescript memoirs, chapter on ‘Mau Mau’ p. 8, seen by courtesy of the author.

86 Colony and Protectorate of Kenya [CPK], Community Development Organization Annual Report 1953 (Nairobi, 1954), 2–3Google Scholar; CPK, Annual Report of the Department of Community Development and Rehabilitation 1954 (Nairobi, 1955), 21–33.Google Scholar

87 Dr J. C. Carothers, in conversation, 26 July 1989.

88 Carothers, J. C., The African Mind in Health and Disease (World Health Organization, Geneva, 1953), 54–5, 130–3.Google Scholar

89 CPK: Carothers, J. C., The Psychology of Mau Mau (Nairobi, 1954), 6–18.Google Scholar

90 Carothers, J. C., ‘The nature-nurture controversy’, Psychiatry: J. for the Study of Interpersonal Processes, XVIII (1953), 303Google Scholar; this was in response to critics of his WHO monograph, but the same method was openly employed in his pamphlet on Mau Mau. See, Psychology, 20–1: ‘assessments of other people must continually be based on re-assessments of oneself.’ The first half of the pamphlet described the Kikuyu in admittedly ‘derogatory’ terms; the second half turned the tables on the whites; for Kikuyu were, of Kenya's African peoples, ‘the most like ourselves’.

91 Carothers, Psychology, 22–4; a message to which I have been alerted by the work of Luise White.

92 The best summary statement of the district commissioner's view is in Perham, Margery, ‘Struggle against Mau Mau II: seeking the causes and the remedies’, The Times (London), 23 April 1953Google Scholar; while reprinted in her Colonial Sequence 1949 to 1969 (London, 1970), 112–15Google Scholar, it has been given the disastrously wrong date of 1955.

93 CPK, Report of the Committee on African Wages (Nairobi, 1954).Google Scholar

94 CPK, A Plan to Intensify the Development of African Agriculture in Kenya (Nairobi, 1954).Google Scholar

95 For Mitchell's statement, see Church Missionary Society [CMS], Mau Mau, What is it? (London, 1952), 8Google Scholar; and Church of Scotland Foreign Missions Committee [CSM], Mau Mau and the Church (Edinburgh, 1953), 4Google Scholar, where ‘organic’ is rendered, in a splendidly illustrative slip, as ‘organised’.

96 The colony's director of education conducted a survey of the first detainees to investigate the sources of their schooling and discovered that they showed no significant difference from other Kikuyu; there was thus no solid evidence for the general suspicion of the independent schools, another private doubt which did not sway the conventional wisdom: CPK, Education Department Annual Report 1953 (Nairobi, 1955), 39–40.Google Scholar

97 CMS, Mau Mau, 5. An indication of the aroused imaginations of the time is given on the same page, where the difficulty of obtaining evidence against Mau Mau is compared with the fruitless enquiry into the murder and sexual mutilation of a woman missionary in 1930. Yet there was never any suggestion that Mau Mau murders involved circumcision–or, indeed, rape.

98 For two Kikuyu accounts, see Wanyoike, E. N., An African Pastor (Nairobi, 1974), 151–68Google Scholar; Kariuki, Obadiah, A Bishop facing Mount Kenya (Nairobi, 1985), 46–59, 78–9Google Scholar; Kariuki gives a glimpse of his relations with Kenyatta, his brother-in-law, Ibid. 79–81.

99 CSM, Mau Mau and the Church, 5. For Kikuyu comparisons between Revival and Mau Mau see, Wanyoike, African Pastor, 175, 180–85, 195f. By contrast, Githige, ‘Religious factor’, arguing from oral reminiscence, is doubtful of Christianity's influence on Mau Mau, whether as inspiration or antagonist.

100 Which may not be sufficiently clear from the brief treatment in Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth, 340.

101 CPK, Annual Report of the Department of Community Development 1954, 26.

102 The one notable exception to Christian pacifism was shown by the independent Africa Christian Church in Murang'a, whose headquarters at Kinyona was so bellicose that Mau Mau fighters christened it ‘Berlin’: ‘A book of forest history’ recovered by Willougby Thompson in December 1953: RH.Mss.Afr.s.1534. See also, Sandgren, David P., Christianity and the Kikuyu: Religious Divisions and Social Conflict (New York, 1989), 158.Google Scholar

103 Bewes, T. F. C., Kikuyu Conflict: Mau Mau and the Christian Witness (London, 1953), 41–2. 68.Google Scholar

104 As in all other aspects of this essay, there is a deeper history to be told; this analysis is derived principally from S. A. Morrison, ‘What does rehabilitation mean?’, 5 June 1954, seen by courtesy of Greet Kershaw who was employed by the CCK in the 1950s. For an indication of a wider approach see, John Lonsdale, with Booth-Clibborn, Stanley and Hake, Andrew, ‘The emerging pattern of church and state co-operation in Kenya’, in Fashole-Luke, Edward et al. (ed.), Christianity in Independent Africa (London, 1978), 267–84.Google Scholar (My two co-authors were also CCK employees in the 1950s).

105 Carothers, , Psychology, 19–20, 28–9.Google Scholar

106 T. G. Askwith, in conversation, 27 July 1989; Terence Gavaghan, in conversation over the years.

107 General Sir George Erskine, despatch, ‘The Kenya emergency June 1953–May 1955’, 2 May 1955: PRO, WO 236/18 (seen by courtesy of Mr Heather).

108 Kitson, Frank, Gangs and Counter-gangs (London, 1960), 131.Google Scholar

109 Ibid. 158; for his later thoughts, see his Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (London, 1971).Google Scholar

110 Lyttelton, secret and personal telegram to prime minister Churchill, 18 May 1953: PRO, CO 822/440; Lyttelton, Oliver, The memoirs of Lord Chandos (London, 1962), 41, 59.Google Scholar

111 Blundell, Wind, chapter 4 and p. 184.

112 Cameron, James, ‘Bombers? Kenya needs ideas’, News Chronicle (London), 15 Nov. 1953.Google Scholar

113 Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars (Harmondsworth, 1980), chapter 11.Google Scholar

114 The quoted phrases come from Erskine's despatch of 2 May 1955, para. 17: PRO, WO 236/18; and Kitson, Gangs, 46.

115 Erskine's despatch, 2 May 1955, paras. 15, 17, 40, 74.

116 For settler outrage see, Blundell, Wind, 189–92, but discussion of the surrender offers must await Mr Heather's findings.

117 ‘Interrogation of “General China”’, para. 14.

118 ‘Flash Report No. 1—Interrogation of Kaleba’, Special Branch headquarters, 28 Oct. 1954, para. 37: KNA, DC/NYK.3/12/24 (by courtesy of Mr Heather). This statement accurately summarises two themes of guerrilla doctrine. They called their movement ‘ithaka na wiathi’, which is better rendered as ‘land and moral responsibility’ or ‘freedom through land’, the highest civic virtue of Kikuyu elderhood, rather than the more common ‘land and freedom’ which invites the retrospective connotation of ‘land and national independence’. The ‘power of self-determination’ by which wiathi is rather well translated in this police report was essentially moral and individual. Secondly they called themselves itungati, a reserve of seasoned warriors who neither commanded nor attacked on raids but acted as bodyguard to the leaders and then beat off counter-attacks as a successful raiding party withdrew. For these former military tactics see, Kenyatta, Jomo, Facing Mount Kenya (London, 1938), 206Google Scholar; Lambert, , Kikuyu Institutions, 70f.Google Scholar; Leakey, , Southern Kikuyu, vol. 3, 1051–3.Google Scholar

119 Foreword to Kariuki, ‘Mau Mau’ Detainee, XV.

120 Wanjau's, Gakaara wa prison diary, published as Mwandiki wa Mau Mau ithaamirio-ini (Nairobi, 1983)Google Scholar and Mau Mau Author in Detention (Nairobi 1988)Google Scholar, is driven by such reasoning. Wanjau's father, a Presbyterian minister, was killed at the outset of the war; he himself was a noted political songwriter and pamphleteer.

121 As argued by Darwin, John, Britain and Decolonisation: the Retreat from Empire in the Post-war World (London, 1988), 244–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

122 As African leaders complained to Kingsley Martin: ‘The case against Jomo Kenyatta’, New Statesman, 22 November 1952.

123 As Governor Mitchell almost said in retirement: Afterthoughts, 268.

124 Barra, G., 1000 Kikuyu Proverbs (Nairobi, 1974, first edition 1939)Google Scholar; Njururi, Ngumbu, Gikuyu Proverbs (Nairobi, 1983).Google Scholar What follows is a too brief sketch of Kikuyu political thought which I intend to develop elsewhere.

125 See, Mwangl's, Meja novel, Kill me Quick (Nairobi, 1973).Google Scholar

126 ‘Classification report no. 3468: John Michael Mungai’, (17 May 1956), 9–10: RH, Mss.Afr.s. 1534; the only direct indication I have found of Makhan Singh's thought on pre-colonial Kenya is in his History of Kenya's Trade Union Movement, to 1952 (Nairobi, 1969), 1–2Google Scholar, from which the quotation comes.

127 Kingsley Martin studied extracts of the vernacular press and found there only liberal nationalism, not Marxism: ‘Kenya report’, New Statesman, 15 November 1952. The most likely source for any Mau Mau class ideology would be Kaggia, Roots of Freedom 1921–63 (Nairobi, 1975)Google Scholar, but the nearest he comes to that is syndicalism; no memoir of Mau Mau initiation suggests that the political education given to recruits referred to class struggle; conversely, a ‘typical notice’ of a Mau Mau initiation contained, as its sole programmatic statement, a threat to ‘all those who try to stop us selling our goods where and when we want’: Corfield report, 164. Kinyatti, Maina wa (ed.), Thunder from the Mountains, Mau Mau Patriotic Songs (London, 1980)Google Scholar, gives a retrospective, socialist, twist to insurgent thought.

128 Rosberg, and Nottingham, , Myth, 234–76Google Scholar; Kaggia, , Roots, 78–115, 193–5Google Scholar; Tamarkin, M., ‘Mau Mau in Nakuru’, J. Afr. Hist., XVII (1976), 119–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spencer, John, KAU, the Kenya African Union (London, 1985), 202–49.Google Scholar

129 Editor (Kenyatta, ), ‘Conditions in other countries’, Muiguithania, i, 3 (July 1928)Google Scholar, translation by A. R. Barlow of the CSM. KNA, DC/MKS.10B/13.1.

130 Profile of Kenyatta, Jomo in The Observer (London), 2 November 1952Google Scholar, doubtless by Colin Legum. The Corfield report, 301–8: Appendix F, (Assistant Superintendent Henderson's report on KAU mass meeting at Nyeri on 26 July 1952, with 25,000 estimated present) shows the difficulty Kenyatta could have in controlling a crowd.

131 KNA: Edward Windley, Central Province annual report (1952). This was certainly true of at least one future forest leader: see, Barnett, and Njama, , Mau Mau from Within, 73–80.Google Scholar

132 Corfield report, 305.

133 I assume that Kenyatta spoke Kikuyu at this point, as remembered by Henderson a few months later at his trial (Slater, Trial, 93), and as recalled for me by one who was there as a schoolboy, Professor Godfrey Muriuki (in a letter of 7 February 1990); elsewhere, Kenyatta's Swahili was translated into Kikuyu by the KCA leader Jesse Kariuki.

134 For these and other translations I depend on Benson, T. G. (ed.), Kikuyu-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1964)Google Scholar, and on help from friends, especially John Karanja, Tabitha Kanogo, Mungai Mbayah, Henry Muoria Mwaniki, Godfrey Muriuki (both of whom advised Benson), and George K. Waruhiu. Both ngero and umaramari have Maasai forms, on which Richard Waller has advised.

135 Wamweya, Joram, Freedom Fighter (Nairobi, 1971), 52.Google Scholar

136 Mutonyi, Eliud, ‘Mau Mau chairman’, undated typescript, copy in author's possession.Google Scholar

137 This Kikuyu political logic is strong ground for thinking that Kenyatta was sincere in his denunciations of Mau Mau; if he did equivocate, he had good reason to do so in the threats made on his life by the Nairobi militants: evidence of Fred Kubai for Granada Television's ‘End of Empire’, screened 1 July 1985. While Wilson (Kenya's Warning, 54) made much of the mass Nyeri meeting of 26 July 1952, quoting long extracts from the East African Standard's record of the other speakers, he passed over Kenyatta in half a sentence, as if his pieties were indeed difficult to square with his demonic reputation.

138 Barnett, and Njama, , Mau Mau from Within, 180.Google Scholar

139 Ibid. 213, 221, 293–5, 376, 390, 397, 479, 498; Waruhiu Itote (General China), Mau Mau General (Nairobi, 1967), 139–41.Google Scholar

140 Barnett, and Njama, , Mau Mau from Within, 471–8Google Scholar; Itote, , Mau Mau General, 78, 127–38.Google Scholar White, ‘Separating the men from the boys’, has much more on all this.

141 The full title of Gakaara wa Wanjau's 1952 pamphlet was ‘The spirit of manhood and perseverance for Africans’, as translated in an appendix in Mau Mau Author, 227–43.

142 Kenyatta, Jomo, Suffering without Bitterness (Nairobi, 1968), 124, 146, 147, 154, 159, 161, 163–8, 183, 189, 204.Google Scholar My view of Kenyatta's attitude to Mau Mau at this time is thus entirely different to that proposed by Buijtenhuijs, Mau Mau Twenty Years After, 49–61, and is supported by the picture facing page 57 in this book, showing ex-Mau Mau in 1971 with the slogan ‘Mau Mau is still alive: we don't want revolution in Kenya’.