Writing for Kenya...the original Gikuyu was lost. In this case we have therefore gone back to the original Gikuyu, translated for us by Joseph Muriithi Kariuki, whom Derek Peterson

Writing for Kenya

W. Muoria-Sal, B.F. Frederiksen, J Lonsdale, and D.R. Peterson - 9789047427506Downloaded from Brill.com05/26/2021 04:08:22AM

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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


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Henry Muoria, London 1954.


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Writing for Kenya

Th e Life and Works of Henry Muoria

By

Wangari Muoria-Sal, Bodil Folke Frederiksen, John Lonsdale and Derek Peterson

LEIDEN • BOSTON2009


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Cover illustration: From the frontispiece of Henry Muoria’s fi rst pamphlet ‘Tungika atia iiya witu?’ or ‘What should we do, our people?’ (1945). For the text, see pp. 136-37.

Th 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 1567-6951ISBN 978 90 04 17404 7

Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Th e Netherlands.Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff 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 Th e Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.Fees are subject to change.

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CONTENTS

List of Figures and Photographs ..................................................... viiPreface .................................................................................................. ix

SECTION I

LIFE

Chapter 1 Henry Muoria, Public Moralist ................................. 3 John Lonsdale

Chapter 2 Th e Muorias in Kenya: ‘A very long chain’. An Essay in Family Biography .................................................... 59

Bodil Folke Frederiksen

Chapter 3 Th 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 Th e Home Coming of Our Great Hero Jomo Kenyatta ........................................................................................... 253

Chapter 6 Kenyatta Is Our Reconciler ........................................ 317

Bibliography ........................................................................................ 393

Index .................................................................................................... 403


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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 fi rst wife Elizabeth Th 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 Th ogori with their two fi 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. Th ree generations of Nairobi women: Ruth Nuna, her mother Grace Njoki and her daughter Christine Gathoni ........................................................................................ 102 8. Henry Muoria received by his two fi rst wives, Elizabeth and Judith, children and grandchildren in Nairobi, 1975 .... 103 9. Henry Muoria greets his mother-in-law, Grace Njoki, Nairobi, 1975 ............................................................................... 10410. Henry Muoria, his third wife Ruth Nuna and their seven London-born children ............................................................... 12611. Henry Muoria visiting Nairobi December 1989 at his home in Nyathuna, Lower Kabete ........................................... 12712. Henry Muoria in Kenya, 1975 ................................................. 128


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PREFACE

Th is volume is intended to give twenty-fi rst century readers around the world access to the life and works of a signifi cant African nationalist and publicist, Henry Muoria, who wrote in the middle of the last cen-tury principally for the Kikuyu people, then around one million strong in the equatorial highlands of the British colony of Kenya. Th 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 (‘Th 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 eff ective combating of the Mau Mau insurrection, Muoria left for Great Britain. It became his fate to remain in exile until his death in 1997. He married three gift 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: Confl 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. Th 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. Th ey turned out to be the grandsons of Henry Muoria and Ruth Nuna Muoria. Th is coincidence contributed to


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x preface

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), ‘Th 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 aft er they were fi rst published in Gikuyu. We commissioned a re-translation of the fi 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 aft er his death. Th e fi 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). Th 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 to an audience ignorant of Kenya’s history. His emendations were so extensive that much of the urgent immediacy of the original Gikuyu was lost. In this case we have therefore gone back to the original Gikuyu, translated for us by Joseph Muriithi Kariuki, whom Derek Peterson used as research assistant in the work that bore fruit in Peterson’s Creative Writing: translation, bookkeeping, and the work of imagination in colonial Kenya (2004). Muoria’s English texts of the other two pamphlets were close translations of his Gikuyu originals, but we have kept the explanatory additions he made in his English ver-sions, to illustrate his professional journalistic instinct that everything must be immediately intelligible to his readership.

We introduce these pamphlets with a chapter on the political and intellectual setting of Muoria’s thought and activities by Lonsdale; a biographical chapter on the Muoria family in Kenya by Frederiksen; and a chapter on the life of the London Muorias by Muoria-Sal. We


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preface xi

bring the texts of the pamphlets in their original Gikuyu and in Eng-lish translations with linguistic annotation by Peterson and historical, contextual commentary by Lonsdale.

Th is has been a happy collaboration around an unusual project, and we have been supported in our venture by a number of people and institutions. Our most valuable and stimulating supporters have been members of the Muoria family in Great Britain and Kenya, fi rst and foremost Henry Muoria’s widow Ruth Nuna Muoria, his son Peter Mwaniki and his daughter Wangari Muoria-Sal; in Kenya particularly Christine and George Muoria, Julius Mwaniki, Hellen and John Gich-ache, the late Charles Mwaniki, Alex Muoria and Rosabell Mbure. We thank them all for their generosity and insights, now over many years. Th e translation of ‘What Should We Do, Our People?’ was carried out by Joseph Kariuki. We have been supported by the Centre for the Advanced Study in the Humanities in Copenhagen, in particular by Birgitte and Jesper Possing; by the managers of the Smuts Memorial Fund of the University of Cambridge; and by Selwyn (Peterson) and Trinity (Lonsdale) Colleges of that University. For valuable advice, information, and encouragement we also thank our many colleagues, more especially Karin Barber, Bruce Berman, Catherine Burns, Myles Osborne, Tabitha Kanogo, Warris Vianni, Richard Waller, Th e Right Revd Gideon Githiga and the Revd Dr John Kimani Karanja.

Our spouses, Preben, Moya, Salim, and Becky, have, as is customary and following the example of Henry Muoria’s wives, borne the greater burdens.

Bodil Folke Frederiksen, John Lonsdale, Wangari Muoria-Sal, Derek Peterson.


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Fig. 1. Muoria Family Tree

Mbari, Samuel – 1922

John Mwaniki – 1933–1989Wambui – died as a childPeter Kigia – 1936–1964Mbari – died as a childJames Gitau – 1942–1992

Charles Mwaniki – 1946–2008Rosabel WambuiWalter Kinyanjui – 1952–1998

1945194919501951

1952–1953)1955195619571959196019621964

Grace NjokiHelen WambuiChristine GathoniImmaculate Waringa(MwanikiJean WangariJuliet NyakenjiPeter MwanikiJosphat KareraMargaret WanjiroDavid MbariSimon Mbugua

MWANIKI WA MUORIA married Wambui wa Mbariand had three children

Muoria, Henry – 1914

Kimengi wa Karuiki

First son to Gathoni – MWANIKI WA MUORIA

Married 1932 Thogori, Elizabeth wa Kinuthia

Married to Nyambura,Hannah wa Njoroge

Married 1947 – Nyamuruwa Judith wa Kinyanjui

Married 1948 – Nuna, Ruth wa Karera (stepfather)

KaruikiMwaniki

NjokiMungai

WambuiNgina

GathoniMwanikiNjoroge

NjeriKariuki

Mbogo – deceased

Gathoni, Lillian – 1905

In Nyathuna, located in Lower Kabete the home land is known as(Mbari Ya Muoria) which means the clan of MUORIA

One of Muoria’s wives was known as Gathoni

From the family above Muoria was grandfather to 43 grandchildrenAnd over 45 great grandchildren


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Fig. 2. Map of Henry Muoria’s Kenya, 1945

3

2

1

0 5080 160 km

100 m

3

2

1

kmm

SUDAN

UGANDA

TANGANYIKA

Indian Ocean

EldoretTimboroa Mt. Kenya

Meru

Hola

Mombasa

Nyeri

Thika

MachakosNairobi

Magadi

Mt. KilimanjaroRailway‘White Highlands’MountainKiambu districtFort Hall (Murang’a) districtNyeri district

VictoriaNyanza

ETHIOPIA

NLake Rudolf(Turkana)

ex-(ITALIAN)

SOMALILAND

R. Tana


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RailwayMain RoadMission Station

0 5

50 10

10miles

km

Githunguri

Kiambaa

Kabete

Kirangari

Ngecha

Limuru

Rironi

DagorettiThogoto

Kikuyu

Kiambu

Plantations of coffee and

sisal

White

Settler

Langata

to MOMBASA

NGONG

Ruiru

NAIROBICITY

to MURANG’A& NYERI

to NAKURU& ELDORET

CENTRE

THIKA

Ng’enda

River Ruiru

Rift

Valley

Escarpment

NgongHill

s

Fig. 3. Map of Southern Kikuyuland, 1945


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Documents

Writing for Kenya...the original Gikuyu was lost. In this case we have therefore gone back to the original Gikuyu, translated for us by Joseph Muriithi Kariuki, whom Derek Peterson