Th
e question of ethnicity was one of the most diffi
cult issues to
confront Muoria’s contemporaries in their search for co-operative
unity. It remains so, indeed has become still more so today since, for
the past half century, power has been shared unequally and abrasively
between diff erent Africans whereas previously it was denied to all of
them, impartially, by the British. Powerlessness can sometimes confer
the semblance of unity whereas power, an inherently unequal commod-
ity, tends to divide. Tribal loyalty is therefore as historically contingent
as Renan thought nationhood to be. A century and more ago ethnic
affi
liation was one among many social ties in Kenya. Other, closer,
obligations were more demanding—to one’s household, to a patron, to
21 Adrian Hastings, Th
e Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and National-
ism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Benedict Anderson’s infl uential Imagined Communities: Refl ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London
& New York: Verso, 1983, rev. ed. 1993) did not suffi
ciently consider how far nations
are continually re-imagined and contested—an insight I owe to Peterson, Creative Writing.
22 Tom Mboya, Freedom and Aft er (London: André Deutsch, 1963), 61–5.
23 For classic accounts of Kenya’s nationalism see, Carl G. Rosberg & John Nottingham, Th
e Myth of ‘Mau Mau: Nationalism in Kenya (New York & London: Praeger & Pall Mall, 1966); John Spencer, KAU: Th
e Kenya African Union (London: KPI, 1985). For
explorations of complexity: Ogot, ‘Mau Mau and Nationhood’; John Lonsdale, ‘KAU’s Cultures: Imaginations of Community and Constructions of Leadership in Kenya aft er the Second World War’, Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, 1 (2000): 113–15; David Anderson, ‘Le déclin et la chute de la KANU. La recomposition des partis politiques dans la succession de Moi’, Politique africaine 90 (2003), 37–55; idem, ‘ “Yours in the Struggle for Majimbo”: Nationalism and the Party Politics of Decolonization in Kenya, 1955–64’, Journal of Contemporary History 40 (2005), 547–64.
henry muoria, public moralist
15
commercial partners, to age-mates at the same cattle camp, and so on.
But there were wider connections too. Most Kenyans are multi-lingual,
even before one adds their modern facility in English. Women, who
oft en married at some distance from their parental home, used to be
said to have no tribe at all. Ethnicity has a harder edge today. Aft er
a half-century of sovereign power wielded—like all state power—in a
partisan self-interest, ethnicity is probably the most important identity
that Kenyans recognise in politics and in the job market. In daily life,
however, Kenyans remain pluralistically tolerant, with multiple human
ties of companionship and trust—of age, gender, wealth or poverty, of
locality, church or mosque, street-corner bar or golf club. Ethnicity is
never their only identity, even in situations of extreme fear and mis-
trust. ‘One tribe cannot survive on its own’, as Tony Kirui, a Kalenjin
business-management student, refl ected in early 2008, when surveying
the burnt-out ruins of Kikuyu-owned businesses in his home town of
Kericho.24
Just as people may choose between their diff erent layers of identity
according to the situation in which they fi nd themselves, so any one of
their identities can appear to them in a diff erent light according to cir-
cumstances. Th
at certainly applies to ethnicity. Muoria had many views
on what it was to be Kikuyu; he did not inherit an essential Kikuyuness
directly from an ancestral past. He was taught its cautionary tales as
a child in stories round the cooking pot; he learned a more adventur-
ous version, unthinkingly, in playing with his friends; he awoke to its
romance as a young railwayman when reading Kenyatta’s imaginative
ethnography, Facing Mount Kenya; he rethought its moral requirements
for himself when he came to ask what African colonial subjects should
do for themselves; he re-imagined it with exile nostalgia in London—as
24 W. H. Whiteley (ed.), Language in Kenya (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1974); Bodil Folke Frederiksen, ‘African Women and Th
eir Colonisation of Nairobi:
Representations and Realities’ and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, ‘Kula Raha: Gendered Discourse and the Contours of Leisure in Nairobi, 1946–63’, both in Andrew Burton (ed.), Th
e Urban Experience in Eastern Africa c. 1750–2000 (Nairobi & London: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 2002), 223–34, 254–64; Hélène Charton-Bigot & Deyssi Rodriguez-Torres (eds.), Nairobi contemporain: Les paradoxes d’une ville fragmentée (Paris & Nairobi: Karthala & IFRA, 2006); Mshai S. Mwangola, ‘Leaders of Tomorrow? Th
e Youth and Democratisation in Kenya’, in Godwin R. Murunga & Shadrack
W. Nasong’o (eds.), Kenya: Th
e Struggle for Democracy (Dakar, London & New York:
Codesria & Zed, 2007), 129–63; Tony Kirui quoted in Steve Bloomfi eld, ‘Hundreds Flee from Homes in Kenya as Power-sharing Fails to Halt Mob Violence’, Th
e Independent
(London, 7 March 2008), 33.
16
chapter one
Kenyatta himself had done twenty years earlier. Like all relationships
ethnicity is subject to argument and amendment as much from within
as from without. It changes its social character—whether as unequal
moral community or argumentative political arena, fuzzy at the edges
or tightly defi ned, more or less co-operative with neighbour commu-
nities—according to the changing economic and political contexts in
which the universal human questions of trust and obligation are framed
from time to time.
In Muoria’s time conscious ethnic patriotism represented a great
enlargement of the social scale of obligation, far wider than one’s house-
hold, age-group, or clan.25 Th
is enlargement had many causes. New
literacies in newly-standardised vernaculars shaped new local histories
with biblical echoes; social mobility engendered wider risks of betrayal
and, conversely, wider networks of trust; multi-lingual labour markets
off ered new competition; the British fostered ‘tribal discipline’ as the
social foundation of their rule; and so on. It would be an error of our
historical imagination, anachronistically shaped by a later age that is in
some ways more respectful towards, and in others more critical of or
more frightened by ethnic diff erence, to suppose that Muoria’s ethnic
preoccupations represented a failure, even a fault, in his own political
imagination. To the contrary, he was calling into being an entirely new,
much larger, political audience and active constituency, with what he
properly called ‘a spirit of patriotism’, inspired by a sense of family
aff ection, and yet at the same time rising above and beyond the minute
rivalries and feuds that characterise Kikuyu society as it was, and still
is, actually experienced.26 Kikuyu were diffi
cult enough to unify; indeed
they never were united, not even by the oft en exhilarating, oft en ter-
rifying, power of the Mau Mau oaths of solidarity and commitment.
How then m
ight one imagine black Kenya? Muoria named his audience
variously, Kikuyu, African, or black, without apparent contradiction
especially in his newspaper, Mumenyereri.27 Did such a vast inclusiveness of the political imagination also demand, in political practice, an
25 Godfrey & Monica Wilson, Th
e Analysis of Social Change Based on Observations
in Central Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945).
26 John Lonsdale, ‘Th
e Moral Economy of Mau Mau’ in Bruce Berman & John
Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Confl ict in Kenya and Africa (London, Nairobi, & Athens OH: Currey, Heinemann Kenya, & Ohio University Press, 1992), 265–504.
27 Frederiksen, ‘ “Th
e Present Battle” ’, 285, 311.
henry muoria, public moralist
17
attempt to adopt a new cultural homogeneity or, to the contrary, a
greater respect for an ethnic equality in diversity?
Muoria himself did not ask such a question directly. His records
of Kenyatta’s speeches in 1946 and 1947, however, reproduced in this
volume, are wonderful sources for our understanding of how his hero
Kenyatta addressed this dilemma. From 1946 to 1952 Muoria was, in
eff ect, Kenyatta’s press offi
cer, from before the latter became president of
the Kenya African Union (KAU) almost until the night he was arrested
for supposedly managing Mau Mau. Th
e KAU purported to represent all
black Kenyans, irrespective of what Kenyans still, unapologetically, call
‘tribe’. Muoria published only in his own mother tongue—although it
is a further sign of the complexity of the times to note that no mother
would then have told stories to her children in the standardised tongue
of textbook, pamphlet, or press.28 Kenyatta seems to have been just as
happy in Swahili, Kenya’s lingua franca of wage-employment, trade, and
city street. KAU’s general meetings were conducted in this common
tongue. Yet not even Swahili was ‘common’. ‘Upcountry Swahili’, the
language of domestic service in white households and a second or third
language for many Africans, was simpler than the ‘clean’, safi , Ki-Swahili of the Indian Ocean coast, its historical home. Only a very determined
nationalism, like that of South Africa’s white Afrikaners, burning with
resentment against British imperialism, would turn a servant’s language,
‘kitchen Dutch’, into the tongue of a chosen nation, Afrikaans.29 Th
e
KAU had no such cultural conviction. It did run a Swahili-language
newspaper, the ‘African Voice’, Sauti ya Mwafrika, but, less popular than the vernacular papers, it soon folded, unable to generate the emotional
fi re in which Kenyans might imagine themselves into a homogeneous
nation of co-equal fraternity. Th
e vernacular papers had an easier task
in persuading local publics of their inner solidarity.
Many Africans, Kenyatta included, saw no contradiction between
emergent local civic loyalties and the pursuit of a national political
project. Today this might be labelled multiculturalism in pursuit of
a rainbow nation. But here we have another historically contingent
28 Peterson’s Creative Writing explores, among other issues, the controversies surrounding the standardisation of Kikuyu orthography.
29 Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘Building a Nation from Words: Afrikaans Language, Literature
& Ethnic Identity 1902–1924’, in Shula Marks & Stanley Trapido (eds.), Th e Politics of
Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London: Longman, 1987), 95–123.
18
chapter one
construct. Renan would not be surprised if it did not last long, since
where multiculturalism is the object of government policy it runs the
risk of defeating its own purpose of creating a mutually tolerant diver-
sity of citizens. Offi
cially protected ethnic or religious diff erence can
all too easily overwhelm all the many other civic identities that people
otherwise enjoy sharing with others who are not of the same offi
cial
minority status. Cultural identity may, as Kenyans rediscovered in the
2007 elections, poison both individual liberty and neighbourly aff ec-
tion. But that was not the risk that faced black Kenyans in the 1940s.
Th
ey had then no state power to use or abuse since it was in the hands
of whites. While British governments in London saw Kenya’s white
settlers as increasingly problematic allies in post-war reconstruction,
economically essential but hostile to the political reforms that might
placate black opinion, Africans thought government and settlers to be
at one. Th
at was their overriding problem. Previous African attempts
to make government attend to their needs rather than to those of the
white settlers had gone unheeded. Africans had been too weak, because
too disunited.
Th
e main challenge facing the KAU, as Kenyatta never tired of
repeating, was therefore ‘unity’. But how was it to be achieved? Th
e
means were not at all obvious, as the fate of Sauti ya Mwafrika showed.
Central control under a vanguard minority with a determined aim was
one possibility, a loose alliance of diff erent interests with a minimal joint agenda was another. Neither was easy, when Kenya’s peoples were of
diff erent languages, and had unequal access to education, to the labour
and produce markets and, therefore, to political potential. Politics is
costly; it needs transport, communication by press or telephone, a
secretary or two, an offi
ce, an ability to pay party offi
cials the cost of
prepared to pay such expenses or, better, to make such an investment
in their future hopes. Not many black Kenyans could aff ord politics;
few were able to visualise its costs as the price they must pay for real-
istic hopes of future entitlement to power.30 Vanguard politics, as Mau
Mau was to learn, was the expensive option; loose ethnic coalition cost
much less. But for a man with Kenyatta’s view that tradition was the
best guide to action—reinforced by his distaste for what his Soviet Rus-
sian mentors had tried to teach him in the early 1930s—there could in
30 For KAU’s fi nances see, Spencer, KAU, 149–50, 155, 166, 173–4, 181–2.
henry muoria, public moralist
19
any case be only one answer. It was to foster mutual respect between
Kenya’s several ethnic communities. Th
eir several histories had taught
them strikingly similar civic and household virtues; these gave them the
right, indeed in honour obliged them, to exercise responsibility for their
own aff airs. A corollary was that KAU must not commit itself to any
policy or action demanded only by a militant minority. A convinced
vanguard might too brazenly lay claim to a monopoly on all loyalties.
Nationalism should not presume to deprive its several parts of their own
road to self-mastery. As Muoria reported Kenyatta to say on his arrival
back in Kenya aft er the war, ‘I have not come to rule you so as to tell
anyone, do this and do that. But I have come as your servant’.31
In Kenyatta’s view no vanguard minority, whether of education,
ideology, or ethnicity, had the right to claim to know the interests of
others better than they knew it themselves. Moreover, the patriots of
each ethnic group generally had the same objective, namely, a wider,
even global, recognition of their equal status with others.32 Th
ey could
therefore be allies in principle—if also rivals in practice—in pursuit
of political progress. Black Kenya had many patriotic histories to get
wrong, not one only. Th
e colony had no common memory; it was a
British creation, scarcely a generation old. Muoria, if not explicitly then
certainly implicitly, as his writings show, shared Kenyatta’s view that
African Kenya had therefore to be a multi-national association in the
making, a miniature United Nations as Kenyatta called it years later,
when President.33
Th
e problem was that, despite Kenyatta’s scruples, he could do noth-
ing to alter the fact that representatives of Kenya’s diff erent peoples
came to the KAU coalition from diff erent starting points. Some, those
in the more northerly, pastoral, areas of the colony, came not at all. Th
e
Kikuyu people, inevitably, were the best represented. Over time, they
became overwhelmingly so, as others, feeling ignored or threatened,
31 See below, ‘Th
e Homecoming of our Great Hero’, section headed ‘ “All Human
Brains are the Same”: Kenyatta’.
32 John Lonsdale, ‘Jomo Kenyatta, God, and the Modern World’, in Jan-Georg
Deutsch et al. (eds.), African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate (Portsmouth NH & Oxford: Heinemann & Currey, 2002), 31–66; idem, ‘KAU’s Cultures’; idem, ‘Writing Competitive Patriotisms in Eastern Africa’, in Derek Peterson
& Giacomo Macola (eds.), Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Twentieth-Century Africa (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2009).
33 Jomo Kenyatta, Suff ering without Bitterness: Th
e Founding of the Kenya Nation
(Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968), 247.
20
chapter one
lost interest or looked elsewhere. Th
ere was an attractive alternative,
immersion in the politics of local government. It was here, in the African