writing for kenya...the original gikuyu was lost. in this case we have therefore gone back to the...
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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.
printed in the netherlands
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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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