Our Silenced Heroes

The months of February and March mark the anniversaries of several significant massacres and assassinations that have haunted post-independence Kenya. The killings, all of which were perpetrated by the government, touched both the elite and regular folk, whose tombstones are the depressing landmarks littering Kenya’s descent into dictatorship.

February 10 marked 31 years since the beginning of the ordeal suffered by thousands at the Wagalla Airstrip in what is today Wajir County. In what has been described as Kenya’s worst human rights atrocity, about 5,000 Kenyan citizens were then taken to an airstrip and prevented from accessing water and food for five days before being executed by Kenyan soldiers.

Exactly 6 years later, on the morning of February 13, 1990, a herdsboy named Shikuku stumbled upon a burning corpse at the foot of Got Alila Hill in Kisumu County. It would be another four days before police confirmed the body to be that of missing Foreign Affairs Minister, Robert Ouko. His murder and the subsequent cover up implicated officials at the highest levels of the Daniel arap Moi administration, though, to date, as with the Wagalla Massacre, no one has been held to account for the crime. The aptly named fall guy was former Nakuru District Commissioner, Jonah Anguka, who was tried (twice) and acquitted.

By the time of Dr Ouko’s murder, assassination had become an occupational hazard for prominent Kenyans who dared to oppose the people in power. A quarter century before, on February 25, 1965, independence hero and journalist Pio Gama Pinto had become the first Kenyan politician to be assassinated following the formal end of colonialism. The outspoken socialist was shot at close range while waiting in his driveway at his home on Nairobi’s Lower Kabete Road.

One Kisilu Mutua was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder even though the judge admitted that the court might have concluded the trial without having the real culprits before him. Kisilu, whose death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, would spend 35 years in prison before being pardoned in 2001 by President Moi following a campaign by his family, lawyer and pressure groups. He maintains his innocence to this day and claims to have been framed after being forced to sign a confession. The Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission found, as with Dr Ouko, “that there is sufficient circumstantial evidence, including the failure by the government to uncover the truth of who was responsible, to conclude that the government was involved in the killing of Pio Gama Pinto.”

A decade after Pinto’s murder, on March 3 1975, a mutilated body, with fingers chopped off, eyes gouged out and face partially burned by acid, was found by a herdsman, Musaita ole Tunda, in a thicket at the foot of the Ngong Hills. It turned out to be that of Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, popularly known as JM, who at the time was the MP for Nyandarua and and Assistant Minister for Tourism and Wildlife in Jomo Kenyatta’s government. JM had last been seen alive the day before at Nairobi’s Hilton Hotel, accompanied by Kenyatta's bodyguard, and it would be another ten days before the government would admit that the body was his.

In the days prior to his murder, the first bombings in independent Kenya had been set off, the first two going off in February inside the Starlight night club and in a travel bureau near the Hilton hotel. The day before JM disappeared, a bus exploded at the OTC terminal in downtown Nairobi, killing 30 people. JM had reportedly booked a bus ticket to travel to Mombasa on that day. The bombers were never found and many speculate that it was the work of government agents. If this is indeed the case, then it is telling that the first use of terror tactics in the country was by the government itself, and also provides historical grist for suspicions that some of the more recent bombings in the capital and at the coast have also been the work of the government.

Like Pinto before him, JM was a vociferous critic of the stark inequality that has characterized Kenya’s development (he famously warned the country was turning into a nation of ten millionaires and ten million beggars), and antagonized powerful people within Kenyatta’s inner circle who feared his rising popularity. In 1969, he had been the only Kikuyu politician to set foot on Rusinga Island for the funeral of yet another popular young leader murdered at the hands of the government, Tom Mboya. Despite a Parliamentary Select Committee investigation implicating senior police and government officers and politicians, no one was ever punished for JM’s murder.

It is perhaps not surprising that, at least within official circles, these anniversaries passed pretty much unobserved, given the fact that both the government and Kenya’s murderous political elite would like to keep their involvement in them quiet. Those in powerful positions today owe much of their wealth not just to the termination of these men and but also to the brutal suppression of their ideas as well as the rights of the citizenry in general.

Following in the footsteps of the colonial administration, the Kenyan elite have sought to build their empires on a foundation of forgetting. The colonial powers had already discovered that erasing a people’s memory of its history was the easiest way to enslave them. As the French political thinker and historian, Alexis de Tocqueville said, “When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness”.

Thus, until recently, Kenya’s official history largely glossed over the misdeeds of government. Even today, the alternative ideas of what independence and development meant other than the substitution of black oppression and thievery for white oppression and thievery, are hard to come by. Alternative visions of Kenya seem to have been interred along with bones of the victims who imagined them. Today, people like Pinto, JM, Tom Mboya and Ouko are, if at all, remembered as a series of dates, and as stains upon an otherwise glowing governmental reputation. Their critiques of, and challenge to, the governance arrangements of their day, which arrangements inevitably gave birth to the asymmetrical and stunted Kenya of today, are either largely forgotten or reduced to a few pithy statements, the import of which seems forever lost.

For example, while many will vaguely remember Pinto as a youthful hero cut down in his prime, few can say exactly why. Few would recognize the Dorian Gray like image of the Kenyatta regime painted by Pinto’s brother, Rosario, in a tribute uncovered by former Daily Nation Chief Reporter, Cyprian Fernandes. “Pio was murdered to silence him and put an end to his dream to implement socialism, the ideals for which the people of Kenya had formed government. Now that Independence had been gained, and the armed forces’ loyalty had been bought, those in power considered it a convenient time to assassinate Pinto as a warning to other dedicated nationalists.”

What were these ideals? What were Pinto’s and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s alternatives to Tom Mboya’s Sessional Paper No. 10, which put the country on an unequivocally capitalist economic footing and which the TJRC described as “a facilitator of economic marginalisation rather than a mitigator of inequality”? What were JM’s ideas about how to ensure a more equitable model of development in which delivered for more than a few Kenyan families? How about Dr Ouko’s? How did the people of Wajir historically resolve the inter-clan disputes that formed the pretext for government massacres?

We should be wary of eulogies that replace memory with hagiography. Where our heroes are more notable for the circumstances of their deaths than for the ideas and visions that that animated them and their compatriots. 

On February 18, we marked the 58^th anniversary of the execution of the first “Field Marshal” of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, or MauMau as we know it, Dedan Kimathi, complete with the obligatory bemoaning of the fact that we have been unable to locate his grave and give his remains the national interment they deserve. Yet all we seem to remember is that he died. 

What he actually fought for, the society he envisaged beyond the wooly notions of independence and land, is deemed less important. His establishment of a Parliament in the forest and his election as Prime Minister, his 1953 Charter, the letters he wrote from his Nyandarua headquarters, such as one in 1955 in which he declared that “only the revolutionary justice of the struggles of the poor can end poverty for Kenyans” are mostly unknown to Kenyans. Similarly, most are unaware of that the Mau Mau activities continued after 1959 and that they produced a Policy Document which was presented at the 1961 KANU conference and which warned of “a calculated plan on the part of the economic elite to partially dissolve racial barriers in order to consolidate its position along class lines and to use Africans as front men and spokesmen for its interests ... 'Africanisation' is the term used for the process…” Few though can deny that the warning came true.

This is a form of erasure, a denial of the past, which also leads to a culture where we celebrate the dead while ignoring the living. Who are the heroes of today? Why is it that the dead Mau Mau fighters merit more remembrance than those still living today? A blogger describes one former Mau Mau “General” as "hard put to understand why those who successfully evaded bullet, bomb and grenade are less praiseworthy than the one who got caught."

Erasure also takes the form of a racial bias, a blindness to the contribution of those who do not entirely fit into the racialized narrative of oppression. So the efforts of members of the so-called “Indian” or “European” communities have simply been ignored. And that extends to their vilification and exclusion from much of Kenyan national life throughout most the last half-century. Similarly, the contrived “official” histories of groups such as ethnic Somalis whom the government sought to paint as “alien” or “bandits” to justify its continuing marginalisation and oppression of these populations. These narratives are constantly renewed and re-invented to delegitimize both communities and individuals perceived as hostile to the existing order. In a very real sense, history is constantly rewritten to justify new oppressions.

One might here think of the contributions of people like Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee to the struggle for equal rights and memory in Kenya, including his founding of what we today call the Standard newspaper and his association with the African nationalists of his day, Manilal Desai who published Harry Thuku’s articles and pamplets, and in later years, the likes of Makhan Singh, Ambu Patel and Shirraz Durani, most of which are ignored in official recitations of our history. The fact of Somali resistance to colonial rule, that they were the targets of the most, and the most punitive, colonial military expeditions, is similarly swept under the national carpet, the implications for today’s policies ignored.
 

Our forgetting finds one of its more egregious manifestations in the fate of the TJRC report which appears to have suffered the same fate as the numerous reports of Commissions of Inquiry that line government shelves. Instead of sparking a re-examination of the past that would then illuminate the path to a better future, the report has essentially been buried in Parliament.

The 40,000 or so statements collected by the TJRC, the largest number of statements of any truth commission in history, represent a living history of the troubled times that Kenyans have endured (and continue to endure). It is not a history that you will read in any of the textbooks that purport to teach our children about the travails of independent Kenya. And it is neither a perfect, or even complete, history by any means. It is, though, a valuable start in demolishing the walls of myth, lies and official silences that have surrounded traumatic events, and shedding light on some of the darkest chapters of our common history.

One would have expected our journalists and historians to dig into this treasure trove and to begin to reconstruct the history we have for a long time been encouraged to forget. However, two years later there seems little interest, at least publicly, in pursuing the potential lines of inquiry and discovery opened up by the report. It is ironic that a document meant to begin the process of lifting the veil on a forgotten past is itself in the process of being forgotten.

Many of the hopes and dreams our citizens had at independence have since been betrayed by regimes that sought to appropriate rather than dismantle the colonial edifice. Along with it, they retained the methods that had worked subdue the natives and render them compliant in their own exploitation. Central to this is the erasure of history, or at least of alternative histories to the superficial tale spun by officialdom.

The famed Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiongo, in his introduction to Shiraz Durrani’s book Never Be Silent, which documents efforts by both colonial and post-independence governments to suppress popular Kenyan histories in favour of official narratives, wrote: “The dominating try to control the sources, agents and contents of information. They want the dominated to view the world through the filters of the dominating… But the dominated do not just absorb the information as packaged. They will read between and behind the lines. But more important they will also try to collect and package information which will counter that of their enemies”

We must understand that far from being fixed, the past is constantly contested and that reclaiming our history as well as our memory of it was, and continues to be, essential in asserting the dignity, humanity, and freedom of our people. 

A Monument To Exclusion

Kenyans love their monuments. A look around Nairobi's central business district will reveal a good number of them, commemorating everything from the first world war, to the fight for independence, to the KANU dictatorship and even the public transport system.

However, there is one curious and inconspicuous piece of unintentional public art that more than any other speaks to the state of Kenya today. Along Mama Ngina Street, one of the city's only two distinct walkways, stands a City Clock whose base the Nairobi County Government has seen fit to decorate with barbed wire. The message is clear. "No idling about. Keep on walking."

Thus even on one of the few streets that have supposedly been set aside for pedestrians, for the people and not the cars, we are encouraged to keep shuffling along. Not to hang about. We are constantly reminded that the city is not ours and that our presence in it is merely tolerated.

It's location, on the street named after the billionaire wife of the first President Kenyatta, a few metres away from the statue and street honouring Dedan Kimathi, whose revolution was stolen by the political elite her husband and son represent, is a wonderful metaphor for the Kenyan public space, which while pretending inclusion, is actually better characterised by the lack of it. 

Take for example the ongoing debate on the wage bill. It was kicked off a few weeks ago, with a conference of bigwigs bemoaning the burden that their salaries has imposed on "Wanjiku" -the ordinary Kenyan. At this meeting, Wanjiku herself was afforded a hearing, a token appearance that was as brief as it was forgotten. In being included, she was actually being excluded. This was a debate whose terms would be defined, not by those who carry the burdens, but by those who benefit from the current state of affairs.

As it turns out, it is all  a smokescreen, a very clever piece of political judo which seeks to turn the tables on Wanjiku herself: taking advantage of the outcry against the obscene wages and allowances paid to a few public officials to manufacture a crisis and set the stage for rolling back the political order inaugurated in 2010 which mandated the decentralisation and devolution of power. It is a reminder the political elite's historic antipathy to sharing power. In the run up to Independence, as noted by Professor Daniel Branch in the introduction to his book Kenya, Between Hope and Despair, 1963-2012, the KANU delegation to Lancaster House agreed to accept a constitution it did not want on the understanding that once it had the government, it would change what it considered "a temporary document only."

Four years ago, the elite was once again forced to accept a constitution it didn't want. Now it is set to exploit the discussion on it's own wages to undo that document and reinforce the peculiarly Kenyan approach to democracy where the people are encouraged to turn out in large numbers once every five years to rubber stamp pre-determined electoral choices, and then are expected to essentially keep their opinions to themselves in the intervening periods. The illusion, if not exactly the reality, of participation.

Similar tactics were at play last week. On Thursday, President Uhuru Kenyatta delivered his annual address to a joint session of Parliament. The 46 minute speech mentioned the poor thrice: once while recognising that the expansion of VAT "may have been perceived" as hurting them, which he described "as a painful jab," and, twice when announcing "a social safety net programme ... to transfer [untold billions in] cash to the most vulnerable." Far from a jab, this was a sucker punch from a President who justifies the requisition of the resources of the poor and their concentration in the hands of the rich in the name of "funding development" while at the same time pledging fidelity to "the value of inclusion" defined as offering the poor vague promises of handouts.

(A day later, the President met with what were described representatives of the Kenyan Somali community to urge them to fight "terrorism" even as the police terrorized city districts with a significant population of ethnic Somalis, arresting hundreds, including Kenyan Somalis. Despite the harassment, isolation, demonizing and scapegoating of ethnic Somalis and Somali refugees that has been a characteristic of the Kenyatta administration's response to terror attacks, the President continued to pretend inclusion declaring "Muslims are in the center of my government.")

"Will the elite which has inherited power from the colonialists use that power to bring about the necessary social and economic changes or will they succumb to the lure of wealth, comfort and status and thereby become part of the Old Establishment," asked Mwai Kibaki in 1964. In fact, as the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission confirmed, and every Kenyan knew, the "Old Establishment" was never overthrown. The colonial state endured and the elites, who have always "encouraged Kenyans to think and act politically in a manner informed first and foremost by [tribe]," opted to hype ethnicity to crush demands for redistribution of resources from the centre while paying lip service to the ideal of unity.

Like that City Clock on Mama Ngina street, the wage bill debate is a monument to the deceptive methods that have been utilised by a few to retain power and privilege at the expense of the many. If the rest of us do not come together to call time on such mischief, it will not be long before we wake up to find that the clock has been turned back to a darker era.

The Spoils of War: Why Do We Celebrate Kenyatta, not Kimathi, Day?

This week, Kenya will mark the anniversaries of two arrests. One will be marked by a public holiday and celebrated with fanfare, while the other will be almost completely ignored. The lives of the two suspects, the circumstances surrounding their arrests, and the differing reactions we have to them today, are symbolic of the contradictions at the centre of Kenya’s path to independence and beyond.

In the early hours of 21st October, 1952, Jomo Kenyatta was arrested peacefully at his Gatundu home, charged with managing the so-called Mau Mau uprising and on 8 April 1953 sentenced to 7 years hard labour. In an uncanny historical coincidence, 4 years to the day after Kenyatta’s arrest, on 21st October, 1956, the leader of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army and self-proclaimed President of Kenya, Dedan Kimathi, was shot and captured in the forests near Nyeri. Clad in a leopard skin and carrying a .38 revolver, Kimathi was charged with carrying a lethal weapon –a capital offence under the emergency regulations then governing Kenya. He was sentenced to death and hanged at Kamiti prison on 18th February 1957.

Born almost a quarter of a century apart, the two men were destined to change the future of the Kenya colony. They each received their early education at Church of Scotland missionary schools. To pay the school fees, Kenyatta worked as a houseboy and cook for a white settler while Kimathi collected seedlings for the forestry department. Both were religiously inclined. Kenyatta converted to Christianity in 1914 assuming the name John Peter, which he then changed to Johnstone Kamau. Kimathi was reported to carry a Bible regularly. However while the former completed his education and went on to secure opportunities which saw him rise to general secretary Kikuyu Central Association in 1928 and (after a 15 year sojourn in the UK) the eventual leadership of the Kenya African Union, the latter dropped out for a lack of fees, was kicked out of the Army for misconduct, joined the militant wing of the then defunct KCA in 1951 and was elected as a local branch secretary of KAU in Ol' Kalou and Thomson's Falls area in 1952.

An interesting encounter between the two men is related by Munene Macharia, Professor of History and International Relations at the United States International University. “One day at Kaloleni, Nairobi, (so say those who were there) Kenyatta turned to Jesse Kariuki, one of his top KCA comrades and asked in Gikuyu language: ‘Jesse, andu niaiganu?’ (Are there enough people?). Before Kariuki could respond, a brash young man named Dedan Kimathi shouted ‘Ii niaiganu,’ (Yes, they are enough). On hearing Kimathi, Kenyatta reportedly took out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes and asked ‘Nimukwenda wiyathi?’ (Do you want independence?). And the public responded ‘Ii nitukwenda’ (Yes, we want it). Kenyatta then remarked, ‘Muti uyu wa wiyathi nduitagiririo mai; uitagiririo thakame. Ningunyita Kiongo-i, nimukumiriria mateke?’ (the tree of freedom is not nurtured by water but by blood. I will hold the bull by the horn, will you withstand the kicks?) ‘Ii’ (Yes), the people responded.”

That same year marked the beginning of the uprising. At about the same time Kenyatta was prevailed upon by the colonial government to curse the “secret society called Mau Mau” saying they should “go to the roots of the mikongoe tree”, Kimathi was briefly detained for his oathing activities, escaped with the help of local police and fled to the forest. In 1953, as Kenyatta declared in open court “ndiui Mau Mau” (I do not know Mau Mau, I have no connection with it) and that violence would never bring harmony, Kimathi formed the Kenya Defence Council to co-ordinate all forest fighters. That same year, as related by Gatimu Maina in his paper, Paths of the Mau Mau Revolution: Victory and Glory Usurped, he launched the only known communication between his movement and the outside world, the KLFA Charter, which attempted to explain its political position and programme of the movement. The Charter was sent to the British government. Copies were circulated to the Indian, Egyptian, French, American, and Russian governments. Pan-Africanists such as Kwame Nkurumah of Ghana, George Padmore and W.E. B. Dubois were also sent copies. To whip public support in Britain, a copy was sent to Fenner Brockway, who was a sympathizer of the Mau Mau cause. The thrust of the Charter was self-government for Kenya with an African judiciary based on African laws, African control of the economy and the withdrawal of British armed forces from Kenya. The launching of the KLFA Charter, coupled with the sustained armed struggle and the eventual creation of the Kenya Parliament with Kimathi as its President in the forests on February 5, 1954 constituted, in Gatimu’s opinion, a unilateral declaration of independence for Kenya by the KLFA.

The British took the threat posed by the KLFA very seriously. On the same night Kenyatta was arrested, a State of Emergency had been declared and British military reinforcements began to arrive in the colony. A regiment of British soldiers was flown in from the Suez Canal Zone. The Kenya Regiment (composed of European settlers) was called up. Units of the King's African Rifles arrived from neighbouring Tanganyika and Uganda. In total, according to Basil Davidson, Britain and the Kenya colonial authorities mobilized 50,000 troops for the war armed with bomber airplanes, tanks, personnel carriers and other sophisticated weapons. These were ranged against Kimathi’s estimated 10,000-25,000 guerillas armed with rifles, shotguns, homemade guns, and grenades and crude traditional weapons of all kinds.

In the forest Kimathi had to contend with emerging splits, especially between the illiterate and the educated. He had himself usurped the overall leadership of the movement from the unlettered General Stanley Mathenge who, unlike Kimathi, had military experience. As their rivalry became generalized, the educated fighters favoured Kimathi’s Parliament while the rest preferred Mathenge’s Kenya Riigi. Matters came to a head in 1955 when, according to former fighter Field Marshal Muthoni-Kirima, the colonial government “suggested a truce, that the insurgents and the colonialists start exchanging letters before they could meet physically and negotiate a ceasefire.” Kimathi took a dim view of this proposal, fearing it to be a trick, and forbade any contact with the British. However, Mathenge went ahead to meet with them, incurring the wrath of Kimathi and narrowly escaping the death sentence at his trial before the Parliament. This however did not appear to dissuade him as a week later he was reported to have had more meetings with the British. An enraged Kimathi ordered that Mathenge be brought to him alive, but the latter went into hiding and was reported to have fled to Ethiopia. (This was a precursor of what was to happen to the KLFA fighters when they emerged from the forest and stepped into an independent Kenya governed by the better educated sons of collaborators.)

By 1955, though, the brutal British tactics were beginning to tell. The forests of Mount Kenya, where the KLFA had their base camps, were designated a "prohibited area" and were heavily bombed. People living on the fringes of the forest were evicted from the land, their animals confiscated and crops and huts burned to clear the way for the "free fire zone" where any black man could be shot on sight. In fact, rewards were offered to army and police units that produced the largest number of 'Mau Mau' corpses, the hands of which were chopped off to make fingerprinting easier. The entire 1.5 million rural Kikuyu population were forcibly resettled into barbed-wire fenced villages, overseen by watch-towers. Continuing urban insurgency was smashed by the aptly named Operation Anvil in April 1954, which effectively arrested all Kikuyu in Nairobi. The back of the insurgency was broken and one by one the forest commanders fell. Eventually, after a 10 month man-hunt, Kimathi himself was captured, tried and hanged.

Meanwhile, Kenyatta, convicted after a five-month trial on the perjured testimony of Rawson Macharia, was sentenced on April 8, 1953 to seven year’s imprisonment with hard labor and indefinite restriction thereafter. His subsequent appeal was refused by the British Privy Council in 1954. On April 14, 1959, Kenyatta completed his sentence at Lokitaung but remained in restriction at Lodwar. Later, he was moved to Maralal, where he remained until August 1961. On August 14, 1961, he was allowed to return to his Gatundu home. On August 21, 1961, nine years after his arrest, he was freed from all restrictions.

Though he was not directly connected to the insurgency, his political rise after imprisonment was undoubtedly a direct result of the Mau-Mau activities. In 1961 Kenya was on track towards self-government and he was hailed as the country’s independence leader. He assumed the leadership of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), a political party formed while he was in prison and in 1963 led it to an electoral victory. He became prime minister of an independent Kenya on 12th December 1963 and a year later, when Kenya became a republic, Kenyatta was declared its first president, more than 10 years after Kimathi had claimed the title for himself.

Over the course of half a century, Kenya’s independence war has entered into the realm of legend, with little to distinguish between fact and fiction. Many who then opposed or shunned the insurgency nowadays proclaim themselves to be at its forefront, while the real fighters languish in long-forgotten and overgrown graves or are still awaiting the recognition and rewards they insist are due them. Just as Kimathi usurped the uneducated Mathenge’s authority in the forest, so the collaborators and their offspring inherited his uprising.

The name attached to the movement itself betrays this. While initially it had no name (the Kikuyu had called it Muingi ("The Movement"), Muigwithania ("The Understanding"), Muma wa Uiguano ("The Oath of Unity") or simply "The KCA", after the Kikuyu Central Association that created the impetus for the insurgency), according to Bildad Kaggia, the movement had been using the Kiswahili word muhimu (important) as a password for the movement and its activities. After muhimu declared an open war on the British colonial government, the combat forces referred to themselves as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. The British though called it Mau Mau, a bastardised name given to them by the settlers. In the 1953 Charter, Kimathi introduced his movement stating: “We reject being called [Mau Mau or] terrorists for demanding our people’s rights. [It is derogatory]. We are the Kenya Land [and] Freedom Army.” Josiah Mwangi (JM) Kariuki, who was interned in prison camps from 1953 to 1960, and later murdered by Kenyatta's agents, talked of the KLFA saying: "The world knows it by a title of abuse and ridicule with which it was described by one of its bitterest opponents." To this day, however, the appendage Mau Mau remains.

Neither has the derogatory nature of the term changed. The Merriam-Webster Online dictionary defines the verb to “mau-mau” as “to intimidate (as an official) by hostile confrontation or threats”. In 2002, right-wing US columnist Ann Coulter, outraged that Halle Berry won an Oscar, complained that the Black artist had "successfully mau-maued her way to a Best Actress Award." In 1993, Former US Vice President Daniel Quayle's chief of staff, William Kristol, said Carol Mosely Braun "mau-maued" the U.S. Senate when, as the only African American woman member in the Senate's history, she stopped a charter renewal for the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The statistics of the KLFA uprising are also a source of perennial controversy. According to the British government, some 32 white civilians, 63 white military and 527 'loyalists' were killed. In contrast, 11,503 Africans died. Other sources have the Kikuyu death toll at anywhere from 20,000-30,000 with 10,527 fighters killed in action. One thing is not in dispute though. The British losses were remarkably light, with less than 100 dead. What accounts for this discrepancy? Was the conflict, as some (including the British) have termed it, less about aspirations to nationhood and more of a civil war within the Kikuyu community?

In a paper entitled Emergency in Kenya: Kikuyu and the Mau Mau Insurrection, Major Roger D. Hughes of the US Marine Corps says about the conflict: “The Mau Mau movement is usually viewed strictly as being politically motivated toward national independence. The less popular view is endorsed herein, that two separate, multi-faceted movements existed, one motivated by nationalism, and the other by a blind, irrational quest for revenge. In the process of each attempting to exploit the other for self-serving purposes, they became uncontrollably intertwined, which resulted in near disaster for the Kikuyu tribe. Totally lacking in quality intelligence regarding the origins of Mau Mau at the outbreak of hostilities in 1952, colonial forces struck out blindly to suppress the violence and treated the movements as one. Thus, the Military resolution is traced through 1956, when the preponderance of hostilities were finally suppressed in what seemed at that time more like an intra-tribal civil war than a war of independence.”

As related by Marshall S. Clough in his book Mau Mau memoirs: History, Pemory, and Politics, “the Gikuyu were the angriest and the most internally divided of the major ethnic groups in Kenya. Colonial rule had affected them deeply, and for two generations they had suffered from its impositions and responded to the opportunities it had offered more than any other Africans. The British authorities and their policies tended to push the Gikuyu together, but for most the closer ties to lineage, locality and district remained more important than loyalty to the ethnic group as a whole. Ever since the founding of the Kikuyu Association (KA) in 1919, their politicians had protested such grievances as land alienation in Kiambu and Nyeri, the treatment of squatters in the Rift Valley, the carrying of passes, and the non-representation of Africans in the Legislative Council. In protest politics, however, disunity had been as typical a common front, as witnessed by the division between the KA and the East African Association (EAA) in 1921 and between the KA and the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) in the late 1920s. Religious disputes, emerging originally from the cliterodectomy conflict of 1929-1931, divided them further among animists, followers of mission Christianity, Christian independents, and followers of prophetic sects (the arathi). Divisions between educated and uneducated, landed and landless, rich and poor had widened in the interwar period. Moreover, Gikuyu members of the colonial authority structure, especially chiefs, had often clashed with politicians and these conflicts would grow more intense in the postwar period as the second colonial generation entered politics.”

And what of tactics? Both sides utilised the tactics of terror and neither spared innocents. Just compare these two reports, one by Peter Swan, a British policeman who guarded Kimathi after his capture:

The Mau Mau 'Freedom Fighters' were no more than thugs whose terrorist activities were directed mainly at their own tribesman than at the 'whites'. Having come across Meru women, gutted with an unborn child torn from them; children whose heads had been cracked open; an old couple that where burnt alive after being ham-strung to make sure that they couldn't get away, it was difficult for me and the twenty African policeman to have any sympathy for those Mau Mau that we encountered. We took no prisoners. To hear them classed as heroes' of the day goes against the grain.

Another account from an Australian living in Kenya during the ‘Emergency’:

We was joined by two of [a settler named] Bill’s mates in another Land Rover and just about dawn we seen two Africans crossing the road ahead. Bill fired a shot across their bow and they put their hands up. I tried to tell Bill that those lads, hardly more than boys they was, didn’t look like Mickeys (Mau Mau) to me but he says, “They’re Kukes and that’s enough for me”. Well he roughs them up some but they say they don’t know where the gang of Mickeys went to, so he gets some rope and ties one to the rear bumper of his Land Rover by his ankles. He drives off a little ways, not too fast you know, and the poor black bastard is trying to keep from ploughing the road with his nose. The other cobbers are laughing and saying, “put it in high gear Bill” and such as that, but Bill gets out and says, “Last chance, Nugu (baboon), where’s that gang?” The African boy keeps saying he’s not Mau Mau, but Bill takes off like a bat out of hell. When he comes back, the nigger wasn’t much more than pulp. He didn’t have any face left at all. So Bill and his mates tie the other one to the bumper and ask him the same question. He’s begging them to let him go but old Bill takes off again and after a while he comes back with another dead Mickey. They just left the two of them there in the road.

Even tales of Kimathi himself tend to differ with a 1956 TIME Magazine article titled "The Terrorist" saying of him:

There was no fiercer character in all the jungle than Dedan Kimathi, a scarred, stocky ex-clerk who had fought and jockeyed his way to the leadership of all the guerrillas. Not content with his popular title, "General Russia," Dedan capped his arrogance by calling himself Field Marshal Sir Dedan Kimathi and appointing a parliament of his own to preside over...A refugee captured by Kenya police as he left Kimathi's camp recently has provided a vivid picture of the once great chieftain in his twilight hour. Broken in health and mind, 35-year-old Dedan Kimathi now spends his days making wild speeches to the jungle trees and his nights raving endlessly. He lies on a litter of branches, blubbering and blabbering about reform in the Liberation army, while his friends search the woods for monkeys to eat. Whenever a police patrol comes near, the 20 loyal henchmen (and teen-age henchwomen) who still surround him hustle Kimathi into a nearby cave and gag him to keep him quiet.

Peter Swan, quoted above, paints an entirely different picture of the man:

Our first hours together were almost silent. My command of Kikuyu language was reduced to the long drawn out greetings 'Moogerrrh' which should have elicited the reply 'Moogerrhni'. His command of Kiswahili and mine were similar, in that we were both well versed in what was loosely termed Kaffir Swahili. He was, I discovered, soon after joining him in the hospital, well versed in English and we later spent time swapping tales of our bush activities in that language. His wound was in the thigh and he had to be stretchered everywhere. Up to then he had received rudimentary first aid and he was still dressed in the leopard skins that had been his trade mark during his Mau Mau operations...Dedan Kimathi and I sat and read the books that I brought in to pass the time. Our conversations were occasional and without animosity or conflict on either side. He knew the penalty for his activity was death, and he expected that sentence. He believed that the sentence would not be executed and that he would survive. There was a quiet and distant confidence in his belief.

I think Kenyans deserve to know the truth about what has come to be known as the fight for Uhuru and why it is the sons of the homeguards, not the "freedom fighters" who reaped the fruits of independence. Why is it that the Mau Mau continued to be a proscribed organisation up till 2003? Why do we insist on honouring dead fighters while ignoring the plight of those still alive? The blog What An African Woman Thinks has informative interviews with some of these fighters including Field Marshal Muthoni, in which one General Karangi, "is hard put to understand why those who successfully evaded bullet, bomb and grenade are less praiseworthy than the one who got caught".

While the Mau Mau lost the military fight against the British, they lived to see the White Man ejected from Kenya. However, 50 years on, their land and legacy is now being stolen anew by those who collaborated with the colonialists. It seems to me that we, as Kenyans, have striven to erase from our minds what should be a heroic chapter in our common history. Instead we seem determined to construct a new tale in which the villains of yesterday become the heroes of today while the real fighters, their accomplishments, and eventual betrayal is consigned to history's dustbin.

Othe 50th anniversary of his hanging, the Kenyan government took the step of honouring Kimathi by erecting a statue. A better memorial would be an honest retelling of the story of his struggle, and an explanation of why he was allowed to rot in an unmarked grave while Kenyatta’s body deserved the splendor of a mausoleum.