A persistent belief across scholarship and popular activism suggests that a “self-consciously transitional” late-colonialism consciously birthed a neo-colonial successor.Footnote 1 Authoritarian states dependent on Western capital and military aid that repressed local alternatives were the outcome of mere “flag independence.” Kenya is no exception. In fact, it has perhaps been seen as the highest representative of this policy.Footnote 2 The defeat of the Mau Mau Uprising (1952-1960), which allowed for the inheritance of the state by colonial loyalists and moderate Western-educated “petty bourgeoise” elements, is presented as the chief explanation of this historical process in the Kenyan context.Footnote 3 This assertion gives the late-colonial state far too much credit. It presents decolonisation as exclusively an instrumentalist bargain between metropole and the rising African elite in business and the civil service.Footnote 4 The reality, as explored by a generation of historians of decolonisation, was a much more complex settlement. It was forged primarily in the few short years at the very twilight of colonial rule. This process of forming this settlement was marked above all by newly-empowered local political activists who melded vernacular and global political discourses, cross-hatched with selective incorporation, authentic hopes for the future, and remarkable ‘buy-in’ to the new state.
This article will suggest that the roots of this complexity lie in the triangular politics of late colonialism, particularly the need to reconcile segments of society driven apart by the effects of colonial interventions. In the areas of Kenya that had been affected by the Uprising, the transition to independence was marked by a contest over what constituted legitimate terms for communal unity. All actors acknowledged that only a unified and ‘stable’ community could demand self-government. Therefore, elites, local politicians, and colonial administrators battled over different models of a post-war transition, including specifics like the potential lustration of chiefs, land reparations, and the structure of local government after independence. In this manner, the straightforward repression of one form of decolonisation by another appears much more complex, allowing us to understand better the contradictory and bargained nature of the post-colonial state. This exploration also sheds more light on the activation of a peculiarly ‘ethnic’ form of politics, predicated in large part on the internal dynamics of specific communities, which continues to mark Kenya to this day.
Initial studies of the struggle for decolonisation, driven by the imperatives of national unity, fostered a historiography which valorised the “few good men” of the revolutionary vanguard.Footnote 5 In the words of Miles Larmer, “much of the richness, heterogeneity and ambiguity of anticolonial activism was neglected or disregarded by early historians of African nationalism.”Footnote 6 Historians since the 1990s have begun to correct this imbalance, following the invocation of Frederick Cooper to consider the radical flux of the post-war decades, where the politics of citizenship remained open and contested.Footnote 7 How common people’s struggle preceded, shaped, and contradicted elite nationalism has now become a central focus of the study of Africa’s independence.Footnote 8 What this paper seeks to do, without returning to the old nationalist school, is illustrate how, nevertheless, the politics of unity (whether ethnic or territorial) was central to the post-colonial political project. What Miles Larmer and Baz Lecocq call the “competing nationalisms” of this period were substantiated through contests in local arenas of immense importance to populations.Footnote 9 The colonial state, sometimes with success but more commonly with significant lapses, sought to manage these processes to their advantage. Such processes are evident across the decolonising world, as every territory had to deal with divides between traditional leaders, constitutional gradualists, and radical leftists, but they become particularly apparent in the wake of anti-colonial violence such as that which swept up Kenya in the 1950s. A detailed study of the Central Kenyan district of Nyeri, an area well studied regarding the Emergency but remarkably neglected in its aftermath, can provide clear evidence of this contested politics of unity and reconciliation.
Some of the most important historical work on Central Kenya, represented most directly by the work of Derek Peterson, has concerned the work of Gikuyu “political entrepreneurs” who wrote into being a fractious but nevertheless distinct political community.Footnote 10 A disciplined, morally upright Gikuyu community was the objective for interwar activists, although on which terms unity was to be achieved remained disputed. Divisions between those empowered by colonialism and their clients, and those who felt these Chiefs, Christian-educated elites, and wealthy farmers had betrayed the community’s moral compact, would fuel Mau Mau.Footnote 11 Daniel Branch has provided the most comprehensive account of loyalist motivations in the conflict and suggests that in its wake the colonial state used its continuing control of the state to empower them in the post-conflict, decolonising transition.Footnote 12 In this telling, the internal Gikuyu conflict over who held “the agency of tribal reconciliation” is regained by the chiefs, well-educated, and Christian converts at the expense of those who fought for Mau Mau.Footnote 13 Jomo Kenyatta’s conversion from “leader to darkness and death” as alleged Mau Mau leader to pro-Western authoritarian who maintained the loyalist-staffed “bureaucratic-executive” state is seen as a product of the colonial state’s successful pressure.Footnote 14 This article seeks to complicate that conclusion by examining the actions and agency of the generation of political entrepreneurs who emerged during the anti-colonial struggle. In some areas, like the Kalenjin of the Rift Valley or the Luhya of Kenya’s West, this process saw the re-mapping of the community and the unification of various groups into new composite ethnicities.Footnote 15 Among the Gikuyu of Central Kenya, this was about restoring communal unity after the violence and injustice of the Mau Mau Emergency. The figure of Wanjohi Mungau and his associates in the Nyeri Democratic Party are representative of this phenomenon. The chapter traces their political project, a demand for reparative and punitive transitional justice against a reconciliatory bargain between outgoing colonial administrators and incoming elite nationalists. Crucially, this is not simply a story about repression but of an active debate that framed Central Kenyan politics for the coming decades and laid the basis for the nation’s peculiar ethnic politics.
Looking below the turbulent surface of national politics prompts the issue of working with the colonial archive. Rich sources for this study are the district-level intelligence reports that the Kenyan local Administration and Special Branch produced throughout the latter years of colonial rule. Scholars have not explored these files, with many having only been revealed since 2011 as part of the so-called ‘Migrated Archive,’ removed from across the British Empire in the run-up to independence.Footnote 16 The data produced is, however, far from straightforward, and any historian using it must be sensitive to the politics of colonial knowledge. As Ann Stoler notes, the behaviour of colonial subjects, particularly when that behaviour was violent or drew on indigenous ritual, was a field of “epistemic, ethical, and political unease” for administrators.Footnote 17 Attempts to render this behaviour legible led to relentless dichotomies of “personal” and “political” behaviour, “criminals” and “subversives.”Footnote 18 This relentless production of binaries, typified by the colonial state’s brutal response to Mau Mau, has made it challenging to identify how debates over reconciliation and unity were at the forefront of local debates in these years.Footnote 19 As recently argued by Tim Livsey, there is one advantage to these files. The ‘lateness’ of the Migrated Archive means they are distinctly “polyvocal,” with petitions and local informants playing a far more prominent role than in earlier periods.Footnote 20 Through this correspondence, the triangular nature of late-colonial politics can be revealed, supplemented by alternative sources like memoirs by actors involved, emerging from detention into a rapidly expanding political arena in the years after the end of the Mau Mau Uprising.
Politics after Mau Mau
Decades of scholarship on the “second colonial occupation” in Africa after 1945 has indicated the titanic impact it had in reshaping social relationships, accelerating class formation and deepening inequalities.Footnote 21 This only accelerated the process which had caused so much anxiety for Gikuyu intellectuals before the War, devoting their “energies to healing the Kikuyu divisions caused by colonial ‘slavery’.”Footnote 22 In Nyeri, as was happening across Central Kenya, local grievances and nationalist mobilisation exploded in a wave of violence from around 1950. This was primarily driven by young men disillusioned by the moderation of Kenya’s one significant nationalist grouping, the Kenya African Union. The activists’ ideology involved the departure of Europeans, the “return” of ancestral land, political independence, and the abolition - or at least election - of local chiefs, all captured under the rubric of “self-mastery.”Footnote 23 Many landless and young Gikuyu were often as angry with their co-ethnic landlords and chiefs as they were at white settlers or the abstract colonial state.Footnote 24 The moral duties of the rich to the poor, male control over women, and the capacity for younger sons to leave and form new farms (as before the advent of colonial border-making) needed to be restored. However, this was not a call for social revolution, as some have argued,Footnote 25 but a restoration of an earlier moral economy, an expansion of economic opportunities, combined with the nationalist demand for the end of colonial rule. Gikuyu unity, seemingly so ruptured by colonial rule, was to be restored using a cultural idiom familiar to all – oathing – although transformed for the needs of a popular struggle by bringing in women and children and conducting the rituals by force.Footnote 26
The colonial state would not accept the unification of the Gikuyu based on a radical, younger leadership that threatened both colonial rule and the white-settler economy. When their allies, especially chiefs and informants, were threatened and killed by Mau Mau activists, a State of Emergency was declared in October 1952. Leaders were arrested, and many of the oathed young men, landless and desperate, took up arms in the forests and mountains around the Gikuyu homeland of Central Kenya. Branch argues that the Mau Mau Uprising constituted “a helix, intertwining anti-colonial and civil-war violence.”Footnote 27 25,000 Kenyans served in the loyalist Home Guard, while upwards of 80,000 of their opponents would be taken into a “Pipeline” of detention camps where torture was regularly used to ‘rehabilitate’ them before release.Footnote 28 In the “Native Reserve,” including Nyeri, civilian life was transformed through crash villagisation, forced labour, and consolidation of land holdings, all of which benefitted loyalists and penalised Mau Mau supporters.Footnote 29 The violence of the conflict crystallised the divisions within the Gikuyu, the opposite outcome to what the counterinsurgency had intended.Footnote 30 Furthermore, the colonial state envisioned a Gikuyu reconciled under loyalist leadership, with rapid cash-crop development and registration of freehold tenure to stabilise the community. This was to be the final resolution of the problem of Gikuyu social differentiation: an idealised version of an earlier pastoral Britain, complete with sturdy yeoman and faithful labourers. Yet, the reality was corruption by loyalist land consolidation committees, producing increased inequalities as development resources were lavished on loyalist “progressive farmers.”Footnote 31 Heavy forced labour was imposed on the landless, the land-poor, and the ex-Mau Mau as a class. This meant that when Kenya began formally moving towards independence later that decade, Nyeri’s politics would be shaped by the conflict’s aftermath and the need felt by all sides to find some basis for unity. Competitive politics in the district would cohere around what form this reconstruction would take.
The colonial state sought to manage the re-emergence of politics across Kenya closely, especially in Central Kenya. Expanding electoral participation had become a central feature of late colonialism across Africa, seeking to make continued colonial rule palatable in the face of shifting global rights discourses and the galloping precedent of Ghana. Inclusion in national legislatures might cultivate “responsible” leaders disconnected from subversion in the districts. This process was particularly stark in Kenya, where colony-wide nationalist associations had been banned with the Emergency.Footnote 32 The 1957-8 electoral franchise remained restricted to the educated, the propertied, and government servants.Footnote 33 In Central Province this went further, where only holders of loyalist certificates were enfranchised.Footnote 34 “Responsible” leadership was typified by the sole Gikuyu legislator, Julius Kiano, who was educated to a doctoral level in the United States and, therefore, avoided being besmirched by choosing either side in the Emergency.Footnote 35 In the enforced absence of colony-wide parties until 1960, Kiano personally formed district parties throughout Central Kenya. The Thika People’s Progressive, Kiambu Freedom, and Fort Hall Democratic Parties were all founded with identical constitutions, and office bearers which the Special Branch believed were handpicked by Kiano.Footnote 36 In his politics, Kiano attempted to square the circle between the population, reeling from the counterinsurgency and the loyalist electorate that benefited from it. A rapid end to Emergency Restrictions was demanded, but Emergency-era land reform was accepted.Footnote 37 Steering between these poles would come to characterise the policy of the nationalist elite when dealing with activism in Nyeri.
Control of district parties by men like Kiano has produced the notion, advocated for instance by Bethwell Ogot, that Kenyan politics from the start was dominated by petty bourgeoisie and ethnic concerns, producing Kenya’s particular patrimonial clientelist form of politics without a strong central party.Footnote 38 Trade unionist and later Minister Mboya suggested that “District chairman became kings in their own right in their own areas,” and politics henceforth would have to work through such kings.Footnote 39 Yet this reading misses the immense contestation, often leading to their defeat, men like Kiano faced from below. Widespread political involvement mushroomed from about 1958, brought in through mass meetings and financial contributions to parties perceived as the local nationalist vanguard. The strict requirements of the Societies Ordinance forced associations to adopt a specific form, with elected officers and formal meetings, which provided leadership opportunities to ex-Mau Mau, who broke with leaders like Kiano over the terms of Gikuyu unity. Only if parties and officials were formally registered could they collect money and hold meetings, continuing to supply lists of speakers and topics for approval. This was designed to render African organisations legible to the late colonial state, obsessed with their regulation.Footnote 40 Under the surface, however, known to local administrators, there was remarkable conflict. For instance, in Kiano’s Fort Hall, former detainees occupied many key positions in the party, organised boycotts of loyalists, and threatened civil disobedience against emergency-era land reform.Footnote 41 These splits were even more visible in Nyeri.
The district provides a microcosm of debate about the terms of post-conflict justice, dealing with the Emergency’s legacies, and the distribution of power and resources at the time of independence. It had been an epicentre of the rebellion, home of its most prominent leaders.Footnote 42 Of 100,000 adult males in 1960, at least 20,000 had been detained during the Emergency.Footnote 43 As late as June 1962, the District Commissioner (DC) felt that “the basic problem in this District is the maintenance of law and order amongst a population who have a bad Emergency record.”Footnote 44 The area also had a significant loyalist movement, organised in Chief Muhoya’s Nyeri District African Association (NDAA).Footnote 45 The group explicitly hoped to “discourage the Nyeri people from joining the irresponsible bodies and taking part in irresponsible politics.”Footnote 46 Such associations were fostered by the government throughout the 1950s as an alternative to nationalism, encouraging Gikuyu unity under loyalist leadership.Footnote 47 The strength of the loyalist faction, the vast numbers of ex-Mau Mau, and the fact that Kiano’s formal machine did not stretch to Nyeri meant the contested politics of post-conflict reconciliation was most overt there. In the environment of lifting restrictions, in November 1958, village elections were dominated by ex-detainees.Footnote 48 It was also in 1958 that the ex-detainee Wanjohi Mungau came to the attention of the government, proposing to print a newssheet, Habari za Kenya (News of Kenya), after having been the editor of the proscribed Wihuge (Stay Alert) before 1952.Footnote 49 Mungau, according to fellow detainee H.K. Wachanga, having been a clerk with East African Railways, had chaired their section of Mau Mau, creating fake passbooks for fighters.Footnote 50 Now, he was the moving force behind a new group, the Nyeri Democratic Party (NDP).
The NDP and Gikuyu unity
On the surface, and in the colonial official mind, the NDP was an overtly anti-reconciliatory movement seeking the destruction of loyalists and the immediate destruction of colonial authority. Mungau seemingly recruited among illiterate and semi-educated Gikuyu in the townships of Nyeri and Karatina in late 1958 while he was in close contact with Nyeri-born urban activists in Nairobi’s People’s Convention Party. Recruitment initially included paying membership fees and electing branch officers, but this process soon began to re-mobilise politically minded people. Local officials were apprehensive that, with explicit pro- and anti-government political associations, the civil conflict of the Emergency would reappear.Footnote 51 As a result, the Administration refused the NDP’s registration, as they retained tight control using the Societies Ordinance.Footnote 52 The party was deemed to be prejudicing land consolidation and post-war reconciliation, having won the support of “the majority of the partly-educated politicos, ex-detainees, township corner-boys and the anti-government elements.”Footnote 53 This list indicates precisely what officials feared: the coming together of the unreconciled Mau Mau and young semi-educated nationalists centred not on closely controlled Emergency Villages but in the more open towns. By June 1959, the party was believed to have at least 2000 active members.Footnote 54 These could overthrow the loyalist hold on communities, which the state had studiously built up over the previous years.
To the extent that we can glean the movement’s beliefs, in the writing of its members and the assessments of security officials, a more complex picture emerges – rendered legible through the existing politics of Gikuyu unity recounted above. It is clear from Special Branch documents, cross-referenced with contemporary petitions, that NDP followers demanded that white-owned land be expropriated and redistributed, goods and land confiscated during the Emergency be restored, while unjust Chiefs ought to be ousted. Here was a package of reparations and reforms drawn from a specific post-Mau Mau vision of what constituted moral politics, which caused anxieties among men like Kiano. The colonial state sneered that NDP founders were “of such low calibre that it is doubtful whether the intelligentsia will tolerate their leadership.”Footnote 55 In reality, ex-detainees, small traders, and clerks were mobilising against a silent transition that did not remedy the injustices of the earlier period. On the other hand, the late colonial state wanted to manage politics in favour of the “intelligentsia”, teachers and “progressive farmers” – the beneficiaries of Emergency policy.
Yet the men around Mungau did not seek a total revolution in land tenure or local power relations; they sought a more inclusive and just transition. In a remarkable petition to the Colonial Secretary, the freshly appointed Iain Macleod, Mungau and his colleagues themselves claimed they:
“Above all we wanted to engender a spirit of co-operation among all our peoples - e.g. the loyalists, the ex-detainees, the ex-prisoners, and the ex-terrorists who surrendered, so that in this co-operation that may bury the past and build for the future in confidence and security.”Footnote 56
This letter came a month after they had formally been refused registration. They suggested that the very project the colonial state had embarked upon, the reconciliation of the Gikuyu, had been prejudiced by the aggressive wielding of the Societies Ordinance in favour of the loyalist NDAA. What the colonial state seemed to struggle with fundamentally was that the locus of agency for reunification would be with the radicals, precisely what they believed had led to the whole Mau Mau malaise in the first place. This statement, however, makes evident that lower-level leaders like Mungau had internalised a project of unity but demanded that reparation be made before this could be embarked upon.
One figure of particular importance was the detainee leader and later prominent national politician Josiah Kariuki, who dedicated himself to the NDP upon his release in 1959.Footnote 57 Behind the wire, he had become deeply politicised, penning petitions that articulated a nationalism focused on dismantling the “European settler farm economy.”Footnote 58 Joining the NDP was illegal under the terms of his Restriction Order, which prohibited joining political societies after release. Through these Orders, the Government attempted to control political development and “reassure loyal Kikuyu.”Footnote 59 Despite being re-detained and acknowledging that Chiefs opposed the NDP, Kariuki said the party was needed as “unless something was done quickly the bitter antagonism between the loyalists and the detainees would be magnified and [Nyeri people] would lose once more the chance of unity.”Footnote 60 Kariuki, who combined a clear sense of economic justice with the personal accumulation valorised in the Gikuyu tradition, presented the NDP program as an essential part of resolving intra-community splits. Kariuki claimed that the district was deeply divided and that a formal political party might be able to channel these grievances away from haphazard violence. In a 1963 speech to the National Assembly, he called for urgent assistance to Mau Mau widows and orphans to “finally reconcile those who were thrust apart by the interests of imperialism.”Footnote 61 In his later activism and support for the NDP, Kariuki suggested true unity required significant reparations – a very different version of reconciliation than the one advocated by the colonial state and elites like Kiano.
To this end, Kariuki was privately discouraged by Kiano from joining, who believed the NDP to be dangerous to the project of Gikuyu unity. By contrast, he had been encouraged by Mboya, then leader of Nairobi’s district party, who wanted to build a national support base open to taking civil disobedience further against the wishes of Gikuyu elites who feared another Emergency.Footnote 62 When one of these Nairobi Gikuyu, Joseph Mathenge, was restricted back to Nyeri in September 1959, nationalist politicians (led by Kiano) encouraged him to begin the rival Nyeri Independence Party. This 1959-60 period saw the active effort by Gikuyu leaders to cultivate an ethnic support base, fearing Mboya’s growing power, but this fear was explicitly intertwined with the decades-old project of Gikuyu unity. Ethnic unity trumped national mobilisation in the power politics of late-colonial Kenya. Mathenge, upon his arrival back in Nyeri, wrote to the District Commissioner about general “dissatisfaction with the NDP and in particular its effect of dividing the people into loyalists and non-loyalist groups.”Footnote 63 The DC believed there was a desperate “need of a political party with an intelligent person at its head” to rival the “subversives.”Footnote 64 This is an indicative moment, illustrating how the new elite, collaborating with the Administration, tried to defuse ex-detainee militancy and foster a particular form of ethnic unity.
The crisis of 1960
Refusing to register the NDP did not mean Mungau and his activists stopped, and in Operation Pied Piper in September 1959, he and his ally Tom Gichohi were restricted to their homes.Footnote 65 Informants reported that talk in the NDP’s office got wilder, especially under the influence of alcohol, including conversations about murdering loyalists.Footnote 66 A second iteration of the party, the Nyeri Progressive Party, would also be refused registration, with a third going underground.Footnote 67 This would be Agatiri (Protectors), deemed to be a secret society on the Mau Mau model, based on NDP branches in all parts of Nyeri. Of the 110 members the Special Branch identified, sixty-eight were ex-detainees. Agatiri’s aims, according to documents seized, alongside releasing the remaining detainees and obtaining more land for the landless, was “to replace Chiefs and Headmen” and “understudy” policemen.Footnote 68 This latter point is notable, a form of ersatz lustration that was a core part of their vision of a just transition. Moreover, efforts to create a shadow administration allowed ex-detainees to continue the bureaucratic “counter-state” begun in the forest during the Emergency, preparing a new local administration to take over at independence.Footnote 69 The failure of the colonial state to build up representative organs of local government encouraged the creation of such institutions by Kenyans themselves. The group was also backed by a renewed programme of oathing, the hallmark of Mau Mau, emphasising unity and secrecy in the face of continued government repression.Footnote 70 The Daily Nation, a newly-founded newspaper inclined to the new African middle class, nevertheless emphasised the threat of Agatiri. It is indicative of how, in the terminal phases of colonial rule, the rising African political class were drawn into a colonial fear of the mob, equated with anything that smacked of Mau Mau. The paper called them “The Blackshirts of Karatina” in May 1960: “mainly hardcore ex-detainees who have adopted their black-shirt uniform as a sign of mourning for the continued restriction” of the Mau Mau leaders. Moreover, their necklaces were reported as including as many cowrie shells as murders committed during the Emergency.Footnote 71 This lurid description, referencing Benito Mussolini’s strongmen, echoed a colonial administration pathologically fearful of “Kikuyu Subversion” and wishing to weaken radical nationalist voices.
Other sources, including those from the Special Branch, can provide more information nuancing the motivations of Agatiri. The uniforms, for one, are notable as a further attempt to claim the trappings of bureaucratic authority in a recognisable political project. A petition from Mungau to the Minister of Labour complained of the forced labour imposed by Chiefs on women in Nyeri.Footnote 72 The issue of chiefs was salient across late colonial Africa, local representatives of alien rule, often simultaneously vanguards of colonial capitalism and dispensers of illegitimate justice.Footnote 73 In Central Kenya, moreover, they were bound up with the intimate violence characteristic of civil war and, as this analysis argues, unmerited disruptors of the perceived unity of the pre-colonial Gikuyu. This was precisely the argument made by Jomo Kenyatta, then detained as an alleged Mau Mau leader but soon restored to a position of national leadership, in Facing Mount Kenya.Footnote 74 Kiano tried to capture some of the NDP’s appeal, arguing to audiences that Chiefs should be popularly elected.Footnote 75 Here is a clear indication that as politics opened up in 1959 and 1960, even politicians that depended on a loyalist (and therefore made up primarily of Chiefs and their clients) electorate were willing to make concessions to a mode democratic form of politics. Moreover, informers revealed that Agatiri were not just ex-Mau Mau but also “cadets of households which had previously supported Mau Mau.”Footnote 76 This indicated how the new politics attracted a younger generation who had suffered in the Emergency Villages while not directly participating. These were the generation that had missed schooling, lost family, and suffered the difficult conditions described by David Sandgren.Footnote 77 Furthermore, the desire for a land market based on notions of fairness, as well as secondary and further education, which were so foundational to the insurgency and the desires of this seemingly lost generation, was bound up in Agatiri initiatives.
Itinerant Agatiri were deemed to be responsible for selling “GMK” (Gikuyu, Mumbi and Kenyatta) receipts in the so-called “White Highlands”: European owned farmland. In the Gikuyu tradition, Gikuyu and Mumbi are the ancient progenitors of the community, explicitly indicating how claims were couched in ethnic terms.Footnote 78 Sold to Gikuyu labourers for a few shillings, these receipts were claimed to “entitle the holder to a portion of his employer’s land when Uhuru [independence] arrived.” The DC in Laikipia was worried this was highly dangerous to the transitional policy of only gradually transferring white-owned land by “willing buyer, willing seller” principles.Footnote 79 Agatiri combined their desire to raise capital with a populist appeal to land distribution on the basis of labour, i.e. those who worked the soil should inherit it, echoing traditional Gikuyu values of accumulation.Footnote 80 Receipt-sellers played “on a person’s fears or expectations of the future,” part of the jockeying for the post-colonial settlement, a process that was taking place across Africa at the time.Footnote 81 This was another crucial part of late-colonial political life, but couched in the traditional idioms of Gikuyu accumulation. The clash over the morality of land ownership was vital in causing the divisions that precipitated the Uprising and would continue characterising post-colonial conflicts. One of the most likely theories for the use of GMK monies was to build up Karatina Commercial College by Mungau.Footnote 82 Such an institution was indicative of the continued importance of education to the Gikuyu and the continuing prestige associated with those who could control access to educational resources. In the pre-Emergency era, Githunguri Teacher Training College had been an epicentre of political organisation, and its leaders (including Jomo Kenyatta) were elevated to communal leadership.Footnote 83 Mungau’s College should also be seen in the context of the post-Emergency transition, attempting to give those who had lost schooling during the Emergency the opportunity to rival their loyalist and foreign-educated co-ethnics. Education had moreover been a continuous theme of pre-Emergency Gikuyu intellectuals demanding a forward-looking and unified tribe.Footnote 84 The role of local political initiatives can thus be read as more nuanced than what colonial officials assumed, focusing on seditionist “subversion” and financially-minded “racketeers.”Footnote 85
By the middle of 1960, the official mind was gripped with a fear of “Kikuyu subversion,” which jeopardised the whole late colonial transition of power to moderate elites. Nyeri was marked by threats against loyalists and the resurgence of Mau Mau songs.Footnote 86 This can be read as evident dissatisfaction with the failure to effectively make reparation for the losses of the Emergency period. Phantoms of earlier subversion, “witchcraft and thuggery,” were regularly referenced in Administration correspondence.Footnote 87 Unsurprisingly, when an arrest operation was initiated against subversive Gikuyu in Nairobi in July 1960, curfews and mass “restriction” were also utilised against Mungau and Agatiri in Nyeri. Especially notable about these mass arrest operations (Operation Coachman), which took some seventy-four “bush politicians” into “restriction,” was that it took place precisely at the moment when elections were being held to convert district parties into the branches of the new Kenya African National Union (KANU).Footnote 88 After the Lancaster House Conference in January 1960 and the end of Emergency, the colonial state allowed for the formation of colony-wide African associations.Footnote 89 This led to the formation of KANU by nationalist elites (including Kiano), who brought the district parties to Kiambu in March and May 1960 to elect the new party’s executive.Footnote 90 The Union was intended in part to reconcile the fractious local branches. To that end, both the NDP (now named the Nyeri District African Congress (NyDAC)) and the Independence Party were invited.Footnote 91 However, the political conflict would persist when they had to unite and elect a new Nyeri KANU branch executive. Mungau and his supporters voted out the Steering Committee appointed by the national KANU leaders in June. Coachman followed shortly after.
Into KANU
These arrests should be seen as an aid by the late colonial state to supposedly ‘moderate’ nationalist leaders seeking to stabilise Nyeri and prevent the radicals from becoming the locus of reconciliation. This 1960 incident, when the colonial state was still fearful of KANU as an extremist nationalist group, shows they were nevertheless willing to collaborate in the context of ‘subversion’ – tacitly acknowledging that it would become the centre for political mobilisation. For Special Branch, the local election, in which Mungau voted out his opponents:
“Indicated the pattern of things to come whilst Agatiri hold the district in its grip. The implication of a KANU Branch led by bush politicians, thugs, and ex-detainees, was enough to worry even extreme nationalists and prepared the ground for the DC to solicit assistance from KANU leaders to put a stop to subversive activities.”Footnote 92
In the following days, a rally of 15,000 people, including KANU leaders James Gichuru and Mwai Kibaki, condemned secret organisations and “appealed to the ex-detainees to forget the past” in a plea for unity.Footnote 93 The purge of Mungau in Coachman is thus an indicative moment in the weakening of radical politics in Nyeri, where the late-colonial state sought to intervene directly in the politics of Gikuyu unity. Mathenge of the NDP’s rival became Branch Chair, and J.M Kariuki refused to take office.Footnote 94 The general “public” in Kenya supposedly welcomed the operation according to the colonial state, likely referring to its allies and elites of all races. At the same time, the “majority of the illiterate Kikuyu attribute reports [of subversion] to Government propaganda designed to hinder Kikuyu, and therefore African, political progress.”Footnote 95 This report suggests a general disdain among the general Gikuyu public towards labelling NDP-style groups as ‘subversion,’ even as their leaders supported the repression. A just transition to independence required the reparations Mungau and his ilk advocated.
Mathenge’s successor as Nyeri KANU Chair from 1961, Victor Wokabi, was a “top-ranking ex-detainee” but opposed the previous branch leadership’s more radical anti-loyalist sentiments.Footnote 96 Of 486 officials elected in the months after Coachman, 224 were ex-detainees, and forty-two were known to have been in the Agatiri.Footnote 97 Evidently, there was no straightforward repression of radical sentiments. KANU in the District became a repository of extensive and fractious debates on the extent and shape of post-conflict reparation. Notably, the Youth Wing’s membership, distinct from KANU and with a tendency to use violence for their aims, was deemed to be primarily ex-Mau Mau.Footnote 98 This membership and its continuing espousal of a more radical conception of Kenya’s independence were among the reasons that KANU’s national leadership would studiously attempt to bring the Wing under closer control.Footnote 99 The colonial state continued to work to aid KANU’s moderate faction, with radicals like Thomas Gikonyo, Gichohi Githua, and Kenneth Kingori (all Mungau associates) prosecuted for “highly inflammatory and seditious” anti-loyalist statements.Footnote 100 By contrast, Kiano’s speeches in Nyeri warned people that they must unite with loyalists or they would not get Uhuru.Footnote 101 Controlling expression through restriction, in Justin Willis’ terms, “helped to routinise ideas about legitimate and illegitimate violence and particularly about the legitimacy of systemic violence which asserted order.”Footnote 102
After Mungau’s restriction, his remaining associates continued to organise as NyDAC, which was claimed to have grown from less than 100 members in June 1961 to 6-10,000 members by the middle of 1963, now organised by Joseph Mathenge.Footnote 103 He seems to have turned to NyDAC as a way to restore his power, after losing his Legislative Council seat for non-attendance.Footnote 104 This political promiscuity nevertheless indicates the absence of stark political identities but a wider arena of debate around reparation and reconciliation. Reports suggest their demands stayed broadly similar, growing in popularity as African elites like Kenyatta and Kiano were brought into government and continued to demand unity without making extensive reparations. This was done to assure the British of their competency and other ethnic groups that they were not ethnically inclined towards the Gikuyu. NyDAC was revived especially in October 1961 as ex-Mau Mau leaders “had their positions, particularly with regard to the Youth and Women’s Wings of KANU eroded.”Footnote 105 Internal conflict within KANU was shaped by the question of reparation, as the national leadership sought to discipline fractious branches.
By late 1961, the DC reported severe anxiety among local KANU officials that due to divisions in the branch over land redistribution and the fate of loyalist chiefs, they might fall into second place behind NyDAC.Footnote 106 Heavier attempts by the centre to control the KANU branch led to an outflow of support to the older radical movement. The rivalry between KANU and NyDAC was vociferous, with Youth Wingers attempting to close the Nyandarua Tutorial College (successor to Mungau’s Commercial College) in July 1962.Footnote 107 NyDAC was reported to share the NDP’s platform but now wanting to form “a militant wing to oppose the KANU” with secondary aims to build up the College, raise funds for Mungau’s family, repeal land reforms, recover ex-detainee land, and “list the names of all Loyalists who fought against Mau Mau.”Footnote 108 The hopes for a concrete transitional justice program had not dimmed with the coming prospect of independence. As KANU accepted late colonialism’s bargain, by which white settler land would have to be purchased on a ‘willing-buyer, willing-seller’ basis, ex-fighters and poor landless felt further alienated from the nationalist elites. KANU would be in government from 1962, yet many Nyeri residents reported feeling little change.Footnote 109 Kenyatta, once detained as Mau Mau chief, now opposed ex-fighters’ re-mobilisation and dissent in KANU’s branches. He told 50,000 in Nyeri, a month after his release in August 1961, that “it was time to forget the past,” including “all differences between tribes, chiefs, headmen, ex-terrorists, ex-detainees, homeguards and loyalists.”Footnote 110 The promise of “land and freedom,” so integral to Mau Mau, was seen to be slipping away. This was particularly evident over the Aberdares west of Nyeri, where the Kenya Land and Freedom Army controlled KANU branches in Nakuru and Laikipia. This ex-Mau Mau body took to paramilitary means to demand free land redistribution to the Gikuyu landless. Fearing this rural unrest, the colonial state, with its new KANU allies, accelerated land settlement schemes that allowed Gikuyu smallholders to purchase small plots on formerly white settler farms in 1962 and 1963.Footnote 111
When Mungau was released in June 1963, with a major amnesty for political detainees after KANU took sole power, NyDAC surged again. This amnesty resulted from Kenyatta’s desire to “wipe the colonial slate clean” and close the wound of internal fractions within the community, to the frustration of British colonial officials-become-diplomats.Footnote 112 Oaths conducted by Mungau’s followers included tenets to “unite ex-terrorists and ex-detainees,” swearing not to obey Kenyatta as Prime Minister. They talked of “black-listing and later killing the new African landowners and of the possibility of a new type of Mau Mau rebellion” due to the marketisation of settler land.Footnote 113 KANU being in power seemed to have pushed Mungau to open dissension. The DO for North Tetu, John Nottingham, known for his moderation regarding African Nationalism, actually felt NyDAC offered a “useful safety valve for those whose influence used to be paramount in the country and who are undoubtedly bewildered by the recent political pace.”Footnote 114 By contrast, the DC felt that KANU in Nyeri was a force for stability, and thus, NyDAC had a significant negative “bearing upon conditions of security in the district.”Footnote 115
In the months before independence in December, NyDAC grew among the “have-nots” of Nyeri out of anger at the bargain between the late colonial state and KANU which did not make significant reparation for the Emergency period. Mungau rallied anger at Kenyatta for cooperating with “those who had spoilt Kenya,” claimed the Congress had appointed their own Chiefs and promised to sanctify the “blessing of Uhuru with blood other than animal blood:” in other words, the killing of loyalists.Footnote 116 Meetings of ex-Mau Mau fighters addressed by Mungau in both Nairobi and Nyeri were reported as agreeing that “after the 12th of December, all British laws would be revoked, and [NyDAC] would be able to take the law into its own hands.”Footnote 117 The Administration consciously recognised the NyDAC threat as emerging from the inter-twining issues of “struggle within the KANU leadership” and “post-emergency enmity between the ex-terrorists and the so-called loyalists.”Footnote 118 The continuing hold of NyDAC’s beliefs over thousands in Nyeri and a general feeling that “something should be done to overhaul the Government servants” led to severe fears that reprisals would mark the night of Kenya’s independence.Footnote 119 In Aguthi and Mathira, reported blacklists included policemen, headmasters, and Maendeleo ya Wanawake (female development) leaders.Footnote 120 However, no massacre materialised. As this analysis has suggested, this was only a surprise to the colonial officials who had built up a story of “Blackshirts” and “Blacklists”, the horrors of darkest Africa returning with the coming of independence. The reality was that NDP, Agitiri, and NyDAC activists never lost contact with the overall thread of Kenyan politics. They continuously debated the terms of a specifically Gikuyu unity, and only the strictures of authoritarian colonial political management had forced this into taking a subversive guise. Crucially, that debate was not resolved by independence and persists to this day.
Conclusion
Late colonialism’s final bargain, what Darwin calls the “self-destruct” state, succeeded in Kenya. The post-colonial state was to be prepared for ‘responsible’, pro-capitalist, and pro-metropole independence.Footnote 121 Yet, as this analysis has shown, this was not merely a product of a successful counterinsurgency campaign. In fact, Britain’s efforts failed to the extent that grassroots demands for reparation and justice constantly destabilised their transitional project. As they allowed local political organisations, this naturally continued the longstanding debates about communal leadership and moral obligation – now accentuated by the intimate violence of the Emergency period. What they could see only as subversion reflects a post-conflict transition where the very terms of justice continue to be under debate. The triangular debate between ‘bush politicians,’ Gikuyu elites, and the colonial state would mark the local experience of the decolonisation process. Even after independence, hundreds of Mau Mau fighters stayed out in the forest, whom Mungau’s organisation provided with food.Footnote 122 For this reason, Mungau was arrested in March 1964 and committed to restriction again until 1971.Footnote 123 This analysis has suggested that these struggles ought to be read as part of Kenya’s incipient ethnic politics, concerned as much about the internal politics of the community, as John Lonsdale has so convincingly argued for the pre-1952 period, as it was with the external boundary with other communities.Footnote 124 Hampering radicals, who would upend the internal moral order by demanding the ousting of loyalists and redistributing land, would drive Kenyatta’s regime to concentrate resources and administrative attention on those regions. In this manner, they emulated the colonial state, whose counterinsurgency had similarly lavished developmental resources on the Gikuyu, deepening the very inequalities that now caused ruptures.
Yet what meaning does this have beyond the confines of Central Kenya, with the particular conditions of post-Mau Mau disruption? Detailed histories of the twilight years of colonial rule are crucial to understanding the post-colonial condition. Exciting new work in the last decade has increasingly internationalised late-colonialism and decolonisation.Footnote 125 However, new sources such as the Migrated Archive mean much more work remains concerning ‘on-the-ground’ decolonisation. Straightforward assertions of neo-colonial continuity within societies persist, crediting the colonial state with an immense capacity for political management. The reality, as work on Pan-Africanism and regionalism has suggested, were anti-colonial projects centred on overcoming the effects of colonial divide-and-rule.Footnote 126 Whether this was on the level of an African, East African, a Kenyan, or a Gikuyu community, contests over the terms of unification were the primary mode of political work other than direct anti-colonialism. The late-colonial state was an important, crucially not hegemonic, actor in influencing these political projects. What made it late, perhaps, was that it was no longer in control of these forces it had played a part in unleashing.
Acknowledgements
Personal thanks go out to the staff and students of the Department of History & Archaeology at the University of Nairobi, who helped with feedback on the piece at an early stage. I am further indebted to Professors David Anderson and Daniel Branch for their support.
Funding information
Thanks go to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Warwick for funding this research.
Niels Boender is a scholar of decolonisation in East Africa, currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His doctoral work focused on the legacies of the Mau Mau Uprising in Central Kenya, emphasising the process of reconciliation and its entanglement with local politics. He is currently preparing a monograph on this subject.
Open access
