Writing for Kenya

Writing for Kenya Henry Muoria, London 1954. African Sources for African History Editorial Board Dmitri van den Bersselaar (University of Liverpool) Michel Doortmont (University of Groningen) Jan Jansen (University of Leiden) Advisory Board RALPH A. AUSTEN UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, USA WIM VAN BINSBERGEN AFRICA STUDIES CENTRE LEIDEN, NETHERLANDS KARIN BARBER AFRICA STUDIES CENTRE BIRMINGHAM, UK ANDREAS ECKERT UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG, GERMANY JOHN H. HANSON UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA, USA DAVID HENIGE UNIVERSITY OF MADISON, USA EISEI KURIMOTO OSAKA UNIVERSITY, JAPAN J. MATTHIEU SCHOFFELEERS UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN, NETHERLANDS VOLUME 10 Writing for Kenya e Life and Works of Henry Muoria By Wangari Muoria-Sal, Bodil Folke Frederiksen, John Lonsdale and Derek Peterson LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009 Cover illustration: From the frontispiece of Henry Muoria’s rst pamphlet ‘Tungika atia iiya witu?’ or ‘What should we do, our people?’ (1945). For the text, see pp. 136-37. is book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data Writing for Kenya : the life and works of Henry Muoria / by Wangari Muoria-Sal . [et al.]. p. cm. — (African sources for African history ; v. 10) Biographical material in English; texts of Muoria’s political pamphlets in Kikuyu with English translation. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17404-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Muoria, Henry. 2. Muoria, Henry—Family. 3. Journalists—Kenya—Biography. 4. Kenyans—England— London—Biography. 5. Kenyatta, Jomo. 6. Kikuyu (African people) 7. Kenya— Politics and government—To 1963. I. Muoria-Sal, Wangari. II. Muoria, Henry. III. Title. IV. Series. PN5499.K42M868 2009 070.92—dc22 [B] 2009010954 ISSN 1567-6951 ISBN 978 90 04 17404 7 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, e Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijho Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to e Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. CONTENTS List of Figures and Photographs ..................................................... vii Preface .................................................................................................. ix SECTION I LIFE Chapter 1 Henry Muoria, Public Moralist ................................. 3 John Lonsdale Chapter 2 e Muorias in Kenya: ‘A very long chain’. An Essay in Family Biography .................................................... 59 Bodil Folke Frederiksen Chapter 3 e Muoria Family in London—A Memory ........... 105 Wangari Muoria-Sal (with Bodil Folke Frederiksen) SECTION II WORKS Editorial note on Henry Muoria’s three political pamphlets ...... 131 Chapter 4 What Should We Do, Our People? ........................... 137 Chapter 5 e Home Coming of Our Great Hero Jomo Kenyatta ........................................................................................... 253 Chapter 6 Kenyatta Is Our Reconciler ........................................ 317 Bibliography ........................................................................................ 393 Index .................................................................................................... 403 LIST OF FIGURES AND PHOTOGRAPHS Figures 1. Muoria Family Tree ................................................................... xiii 2. Map of Henry Muoria’s Kenya, 1945 ...................................... xiv 3. Map of Southern Kikuyuland, 1945 ........................................ xv Photographs 1. Henry Muoria (second right) and friends, early 1930s ....... 57 2. Henry Muoria in his East African Railways uniform, and friend ............................................................................................ 58 3. Wedding photo of Henry Muoria and his rst wife Elizabeth ogori, best man Mr Charles Karau and his wife Mrs Karau as maid of honour, 1932 ............................... 98 4. Ruth Nuna joins Henry Muoria in London, 1954 ................ 99 5. Henry Muoria and Elizabeth ogori with their two rst-born children (John Mwaniki and Peter Kigia) ............ 100 6. Henry Muoria, his children and his motorbike (John Mwaniki, Peter Kigia and Wambui who passed away) ........ 101 7. ree generations of Nairobi women: Ruth Nuna, her mother Grace Njoki and her daughter Christine Gathoni ........................................................................................ 102 8. Henry Muoria received by his two rst wives, Elizabeth and Judith, children and grandchildren in Nairobi, 1975 .... 103 9. Henry Muoria greets his mother-in-law, Grace Njoki, Nairobi, 1975 ............................................................................... 104 10. Henry Muoria, his third wife Ruth Nuna and their seven London-born children ............................................................... 126 11. Henry Muoria visiting Nairobi December 1989 at his home in Nyathuna, Lower Kabete ........................................... 127 12. Henry Muoria in Kenya, 1975 ................................................. 128 PREFACE is volume is intended to give twenty- rst century readers around the world access to the life and works of a signi cant African nationalist and publicist, Henry Muoria, who wrote in the middle of the last century principally for the Kikuyu people, then around one million strong in the equatorial highlands of the British colony of Kenya. is son of peasants in Kenya’s rich and fertile Central Province who became a respected spokesperson of his people, Muoria is not well represented in the political and cultural history of Kenya, despite his pioneering writings and his extraordinary career. In his Gikuyu-language news- paper Mumenyereri wa Maundu Mega ma Ugikuyu (‘ e Guardian of the good things of Kikuyu’) and in his political and moral pamphlets, written between 1945 and 1952, he was an outspoken and clear-sighted critic of colonialism and a proponent of Kenyan and African self-reli- ance. He was a self-taught ‘organic intellectual’ with a remarkably global outlook. His writing enterprises were followed and discussed eagerly by his widespread African audiences and watched closely by the colonial authorities. A few weeks before the October 1952 Emergency in Kenya, declared in order to create conditions for the e ective combating of the Mau Mau insurrection, Muoria le for Great Britain. It became his fate to remain in exile until his death in 1997. He married three gi ed women and had large families both in Kenya and in Great Britain. During his work at the University of Cambridge on ‘the moral economy of Mau Mau’, that became part of the two-volume Unhappy Valley: Con ict in Kenya and Africa (1992, co-authored with Bruce Berman), John Lonsdale met Henry Muoria, who had recently retired as an underground-train guard with London Transport. ey had long, valuable conversations about the inner workings of Kenyan nationalism, and Kikuyu enterprise and ideas of enlightenment, fuelled by curries cooked in Holloway, North London, by Ruth Nuna, Henry Muoria’s third wife. Meanwhile, in Kenya, Bodil Folke Frederiksen, from Roskilde University, Denmark, was doing research on youth culture and urban livelihoods in a poor neighbourhood in Nairobi. She met two bright and intelligent local young men, George Muoria and Julius Mwaniki, who became her research assistants. ey turned out to be the grandsons of Henry Muoria and Ruth Nuna Muoria. is coincidence contributed to x John Lonsdale’s determination to devote a publication to Muoria’s life and works and to do so in collaboration with his daughter, Wangari Muoria-Sal, the family archivist, the Gikuyu scholar and historian Derek Peterson, and Bodil Folke Frederiksen. Our key enterprise has been to publish a selection of Henry Muoria’s central writings in a context that makes them intelligible and readable for a present-day audience. We do so in the belief that Muoria still has something of importance to say to Africans, to Kenyans more particu- larly, and to students of African contemporary history more generally. We have chosen three pamphlets, ‘What should we do, our people?’ (1945), ‘ e Home Coming of Our Great Hero, Jomo Kenyatta’ (1946), and ‘Kenyatta is Our Reconciler’ (1947). For the latter two pamphlets we have worked from the English texts translated by Henry Muoria himself about thirty years a er they were rst published in Gikuyu. We commissioned a re-translation of the rst pamphlet, ‘What Should We Do, Our People?’ Muoria was clearly anxious to bring his 1940s Gikuyu-language pamphlet’s literature before a wider, English-reading audience, and it is a source of satisfaction that we are now able to bring his wishes to fruition, if only a er his death. e rst pamphlet, ‘What Should we Do, Our People?’ has already been reproduced (with other pamphlets not reprinted here), in English, in Henry Muoria’s autobiography, I, the Gikuyu and the White Fury (Nairobi, 1994). is book, produced for a local readership, has scarcely been noticed outside Kenya. More- over, Muoria re-worked the pamphlet’s English-language text in order to make it intelligible

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