imperial reckoning

i just finished reading “Imperial Reckoning” by caroline elkins about the brutality that the british visited on the kikuyu (mostly) in response to the mau mau threat. the book paints the suffering of the kikuyu in the emergency (from 1952 to 1960) as “unspeakable”. many of the interviewees in elkins’ book talk of their inability to effectively use words to describe how horrible life was during that time. forced labor, random beatings, humiliation, torture, rape, summary executions, starvation, disease, family separation were all facts of daily life to the 1 million + people who were forced off their land or rounded up from nairobi and the rift valley and forced to live in overcrowded “reserves”.

i have recently been very curious about how the history of the mau mau has been written; attributing their negative image to the fact that the british were devastatingly effective in painted them as primitive savages in the press of the early/mid 1950’s. but the truth is more nuanced than that:

1. during the emergency one was either a mau mau, a mau mau suspect or a british loyalist. in the wake of independence, many of those who were loyalists inherited power and access to resources and were the real beneficiaries of wiyathi (independence). it would have been very difficult for former homeguards, now in positions of leadership, to reveal what they did during the emergency. the best strategy was to bury the memory of mau mau with the hope that they wouldn’t have to answer for the beatings, torture, rape, murder and land grabbing that they were party to during that time.

1a. related: kenyatta was no mau mau radical and was even shunned by his fellow detainees at lokitaung for his moderate views on how kenya could shake the colonial yoke. he was is no position to lionize the mau mau legacy; he was not one of them. he owed his hero status among kenyans partly to the british who so vigorously (and wrongly) painted him as the mastermind of the mau mau insurgency.

2. even within the kikuyu community, the mau mau phenomenon was very divisive. those who had embraced christianity couldn’t join mau mau as part of it involved invoking the traditional god ngai and participating in traditional rituals that they had already distanced themselves from culturally. there was also a class dimension; the mau mau oath attracted most those without land who felt this was their way to redress this problem (land is economic power in kikuyu culture). also, during that time the mau mau offered two choices; join us, or die as an enemy our cause. so, in my family’s case, i now understand the context within which both of my grandfathers were murdered; my paternal grandfather most likely for his christian faith (he was a lay preacher).

3. ithaka na wiyathi (land and freedom). that was the rallying cry of the mau mau. kenyatta and the former loyalists who formed the first kenyan government amassed huge tracts of former settler land after independence. very few, if any, former mau mau vets had the money or connections to buy this land. thus kenyatta, et al needed to “forget” the mau mau struggle. ostensibly it was to unite the country (”we all fought for independence”), and to keep settlers from bolting from the country (and undermining a fragile new economy). but it also allowed the government to shut down any talk of land reform, using the same administrative and law enforcement structure that the british had used on the mau mau. admittedly kenya may have avoided what is happening in zimbabwe today, but when i think about how much of the country is owned by a handful of people, and see an overcrowded nairobi full of young unemployed people from the countryside, i wonder if kenya is not still sitting on the same powder keg that exploded in 1952.

this book has whetted my appetite to understand more about kenya and its history. Imperial Reckoning has only scratched the surface of this, not so much because of any deficiency on the author’s part, but that so little is available anywhere. our parents’ generation talked about the emergency, reserves, detention, johnies. many homes have that painting of kenyatta being led away to jail on oct. 20th 1952. but that is about it. this is a critical part of our heritage, one i fear will go to the graves with the many survivors who are now growing old. where is our kenyan ken burns when we need one to bring this history to life and show how much more we can understand and be proud of our national heritage?