72 years after the Declaration of Emergency in Kenya triggered one of the bloodiest anti-colonial wars in history, little has changed for survivors.
Mukami Kimathi begins to sing.
Fighters of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), more commonly known as the Mau Mau, who staged a bloody anti-colonial revolt against the British and their African supporters for independence and land reclamation in the 1950s, expressed their daily experiences through songs so that, even when their memories began to fade, they could still narrate what they endured and witnessed.
"We were in Lang'ata [a colonial detention camp], [God] sustained us," Mukami softly croons, seated in a wheelchair at her home in Nairobi.
Mukami, who passed away last year at the age of 96, was the wife of Dedan Kimathi Waciuri, the military and spiritual leader of the Mau Mau. Captured in late-1956 after a four-year hunt that involved the British army, the colonial Kings African Rifles, white settler volunteers (who infiltrated Mau Mau formations in the Mt Kenya forests disguised in blackface), and the African homeguard, he was executed by the British in February 1957. Believed to be buried on the grounds of Kamiti Prison on the northern outskirts of Nairobi, his remains have never been found or identified.
Kimathi's image remains a powerful symbol of the Kenyan independence struggle. Mukami herself became a symbol of the anti-colonial resistance, and remained so throughout her life. The history of Kenya's fierce war of independence flowed through Mukami's veins, guiding her speech until her last breath.
Almost exactly 72 years ago, on 20 October, 1952, the British governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, declared a State of Emergency in response to Mau Mau militants attacking and killing loyalists - Africans who supported the British - along with white settlers. Throughout the decades of colonial rule in Kenya, the British dispossessed Africans of thousands of square kilometres of their traditional lands, renamed these stolen land the "White Highlands" and repurposed them for the exclusive use of white settlers. Africans were squeezed into "native reserves", often marginal, overcrowded and less productive segments of their own traditional lands.
The Mau Mau uprising was a bid to reclaim these stolen lands and expel the British from the country. Ithaka na wiyathi, or "land and freedom" in Gikuyu, became their war-cry.
The British responded with an eight-year campaign of terror that targeted the Kikuyu, Kenya's largest and the most active ethnic group in the rebellion, as well as related communities in the Mt Kenya region, the Embu and Meru.
Deploying a combined force of the British Army, the Royal Air Force - which dropped nearly six million bombs in the forests between June 1953 and October 1955 - and local forces, the colonial authorities herded Kikuyu civilian populations into detention camps and "Emergency villages", where they endured forced labour, starvation, torture, and disease. According to official colonial records, 11,000 Kikuyu were killed in the war. Contemporary researchers have disputed that figure, estimating the death toll at between 25,000 and 50,000.
In the wake of Operation Jock Scott in October 1952, in which the top leadership of the Mau Mau was arrested, thousands of the rank and file retreated to the forests of central Kenya to take up arms against the British and their African supporters. They were led by Dedan Kimathi, who assigned Mukami to the overcrowded and dilapidated streets of Nairobi's African estates. Nairobi was the epicentre of Mau Mau organising in the early years of the Emergency.
Racist economic policies meant that the vast majority of Africans living and working in Nairobi were effectively zoned out of the city. Shanty towns proliferated in the "Native Quarter" of Eastlands in eastern Nairobi. Here, the Mau Mau's revolutionary cause found a ready audience and nestled itself deep into residents' hearts.
In response, the colonial authorities transformed the city into a war zone, brutally cracking down on the Mau Mau in Nairobi after declaring the nationwide State of Emergency.
"Permitted to kill"
At the time of our interview, shortly before she passed away, Mukami was already suffering from various health complications, which made it difficult for her to speak. After some questions, she responded in a slow-paced and repetitive song, narrating her experiences in the city during the rebellion:
"In Nairobi, we were being hounded day and night
And being taken to the detention camp in Lang'ata
That is where the screening was done
And the untold torture
We really suffered in Lang'ata
With children crying of hunger."
Mukami is recounting when British soldiers rounded up all the Kikuyu, along with the Embu and Meru - ethnicities that also became heavily involved in the uprising - from Nairobi and transported them to the camp in Lang'ata on the southeastern periphery of Nairobi, one of dozens of internment camps established by the British throughout the country to incarcerate tens of thousands of actual or suspected Mau Mau. The mass roundups were part of Operation Anvil, when in April 1954 colonial forces rounded up nearly the entire population of Kikuyu (and related Embu and Meru) men in the city in an attempt to remove all suspected Mau Mau from Nairobi.
Four years before this operation, in March 1950, Nairobi was officially declared a city by Britain's King George VI. White settlers celebrated with a parade through the city's commercial district, while African workers in the industrial area in the east of the city went on an eight-day strike, bringing the empire's newest city to a standstill. Demanding immediate self-government, cheaper food and higher wages, the workers picketed and lit fires on the streets. Police encircled the protesters with armoured vehicles, shooting tear gas and charging them with batons.
This historic general strike was instigated by the East African Trade Union Congress and led by Makhan Singh, the pioneering Marxist trade unionist. Some of the young leaders who took part, such as Fred Kubai and Bildad Kaggia, were identified by the authorities as some of the main organisers of the "Mau Mau", and were among the first to be arrested when the Emergency was announced.
By 1950, recruitment of Mau Mau members in Nairobi was well underway. Oathing ceremonies, a traditional Kikuyu spiritual practice used to bind men, women, and even children in the anti-colonial struggle, was the means of recruitment. Mau Mau officials administered up to seven oaths, all of which varied in ritual and represented a greater commitment to the uprising.
According to David Anderson, author of Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, those who organised these oathing ceremonies in Nairobi took their message of revolt to the "mass of unskilled and illiterate Kikuyu...appealing to ethnic solidarity, but also to the embryonic class-consciousness of the unemployed, the disadvantaged, and the dispossessed."
Evans Wahome Mwenja, who is about 96 years old, migrated from his rural home of Nyeri in Kenya's central highlands to Nairobi in 1950, when he was about 22. He settled on the Pumwani estate, established by the British in 1922 as the city's first planned African neighbourhood, and became a tailor. Little did he know, Nairobi was already in the throes of war by the time he arrived.
Mwenja, who is Kikuyu, took his first oath in 1952, two years after having moved to the city on the eve of the Emergency. According to Anderson, by this time Mau Mau organisers were holding mass oathing ceremonies for groups of up to 800 Kikuyu in Pumwani. While some veterans have said the oathing rituals could incorporate the drinking of animal and even human blood, along with the eating of various animal parts, both Mwenja and Mukami tell me they never witnessed this during their time in Mau Mau.
These mass ceremonies, however, were not always voluntary, says Mwenja.
"At that time, there were other Kikuyu youths who were organising the oathing ceremonies and ensuring all the Kikuyu in Nairobi had taken the oath," he tells me. "I was rounded up with other Kikuyu in the middle of the night and brought onto a bus. The bus took us from Pumwani to Kiambu, without turning on the headlights to evade any detection from colonial authorities. They only followed the moonlight."
"We weren't allowed to see the face of the person administering the oath," he continues. "He had red clay smeared on his face. We weren't allowed to look him in the eyes. We had to keep our heads lowered to the ground. If we looked in his eyes, we would be killed."
Mwenja narrates what he witnessed during the ceremony, but then abruptly stops speaking. Tears blur his eyes and his head falls down. "I've said too much," he says, his voice tremulous.
Mau Mau veterans are highly secretive about the specifics of these oath-taking ceremonies, as they believe revealing too much about their oaths could attract the wrath of "Ngai", leading to a supernatural punishment of sickness, injury, or, more commonly, death.
I assured Mwenja that I would not publish any further details he gave on the oath-taking ceremony but received permission to write the details provided above.
"The oaths are very strong and binding so if I reveal too much here, I may die," Mwenja explains. "I know so many people who revealed their oath and it did not take them long to die." Mwenja would go on to take seven oaths - the rest of them voluntary.
"After you take the first oath, you become more committed to the struggle," Mwenja tells me, finally regaining his composure. "Then you take the second one, and you become more committed. Then you take another one - and then another. When you take the final one, the seventh, this is when you're permitted to kill."
"War zone"
As radical politics took hold in the impoverished African estates, the Mau Mau targeted other Africans they believed to be collaborators with the British - many of whom belonged to the Christianised, Anglophile salaried class. The Mau Mau referred to them as "Tai tai," which ridiculed their fashion of European-style jackets, trousers, polished shoes, and neckties. In contrast, the Mau Mau - particularly the forest fighters - often sported long dreadlocks which fell down the lengths of their backs, an assertion of African identity and, simultaneously, an expression of defiance of British colonialism.
Mau Mau militants began assassinating the "Tai tai" in Nairobi, along with policemen and informants, while shops owned by known loyalists were blacklisted by the Mau Mau with youths stationed outside on the street to discourage anyone from going inside. According to Anderson, "hardly a day went by without a murder attempt".
"If [the Mau Mau] noticed you were someone who cannot keep a secret or you provided information to the enemy, it was punishable by death," Mwenja tells African Arguments. "You would be quickly removed - beheaded and thrown into a pit. That's how we were able to keep the movement a secret."
Mwenja became an assassin for the Mau Mau, identifying the andu a njuku, or the ones "who talk too much". These people were not known informants or loyalists, but Mau Mau who showed qualities that would make them vulnerable to becoming an informant. "In Mau Mau, keeping a secret was a matter of life or death," Mwenja says. "So my job was to identify those who talk too much and who show signs that they will potentially betray the movement. I was their leader so it was very easy to identify them."
"The ones who took the oath and then told others about it were the most dangerous people," he continues. "These people would be identified and immediately eliminated before they could go any further." Most of the weapons in Nairobi were being funnelled to the Mau Mau fighters in the forest after the onset of the Emergency so Mwenja resorted to a more crude way of killing.
"The best way to kill them was with a machete - it was the easiest and simplest way," Mwenja tells me, in a flat tone. "I would go to their houses in the middle of the night, cut them up, and then go home."
From his base in Nairobi, Mwenja also commonly participated in Mau Mau raids on police stations, white settler homes, and military bases, mostly acting as a lookout guard outside while about 20 fighters ransacked them and collected weapons and ammunition, which would then be smuggled into the forests for the guerrilla fighters. "The guns and ammunition would be delivered to a person waiting at a particular location, then that person would take them to another person - and then another and another - until they were brought to the fighters," explains Mwenja, who adds that he is unable to count the number of people he killed during the war.
Sometimes the Mau Mau would dig trenches in the African estates and stash the weapons there, burying them under dirt until they could get an opportunity to transport them to the forests, according to Mwenja. By this time, Mau Mau operatives in Nairobi were the most important source of supplies and weapons for the fighters waging war against the British and African loyalists in the mountains.
The British responded by clamping down on the entire Kikuyu community. Police patrolled the streets of the estates in armoured vehicles throughout the day and night, while roadblocks were mounted on all the main thoroughfares. Cordon and search operations were frequent and widespread on the estates.
According to Anderson, there may have been as few as 300 active Mau Mau fighters among Nairobi's residents by January 1954. Yet the majority of the city's African residents were passive supporters of the movement, assisting in supplying and supporting the forest fighters and hiding Mau Mau who carried out attacks in the city. [1]
But some Nairobi residents ardently opposed the Mau Mau.
Maalim Hassan, 87, was a teenager during the Emergency. He was raised in Pumwani, whose original residents were Muslims, many of whom hailed from the coastal regions of East Africa. Most of the Muslim residents of Pumwani were loyalists during the uprising. Hassan's father was a sergeant in the King's African Rifles (KAR), a multi-battalion British colonial regiment, and fought for the British in Burma during World War II.
Hassan's family owned a small kiosk in Pumwani, where they sold basic items. "One night, during Ramadan, when we were at the shop taking Iftar [the evening meal during the holy month when Muslims break their fast], some Mau Mau entered and robbed us," he recounts with a faint chuckle. "They took all our money and stole some food." During the Emergency, Mau Mau militants raised cash for supplies by carrying out armed robberies or extorting shop owners who refused to assist the Mau Mau.
"All of Pumwani was turned into a war zone," Hassan tells African Arguments. "I did not like the Mau Mau. I was a believer in peaceful political organising. We would still have gotten independence without the Mau Mau. All of this violence was unnecessary."
"Black man's government"
At the start of 1953, Mukami joined her husband Kimathi, who was 32 at the time, in the forests. She was in charge of the day-to-day living of the guerrilla fighters, organising food supplies and medical care for the sick and wounded. After a year in the forest, however, Kimathi gave her a new assignment in Nairobi.
"[Kimathi] thought he was helping me by sending me away from the forests," Mukami says, in a slow and scratchy voice. "He had no idea that he had thrown me directly into the lion's den that was Nairobi."
Mukami, who was in her early-20s and accompanied by her newborn daughter, followed orders and migrated to the Bahati estate, where she was responsible for organising communication lines between the guerrilla fighters in the forest and Mau Mau leaders in Nairobi, ensuring that food, blankets, clothing, medicine, and other supplies were shipped to the forest on time. She was also tasked with gathering intelligence from Nairobi and the surrounding areas.
"My main role was to make the youths realise that we were in a war and that they should not feel scared," Mukami told African Arguments. "People were getting killed at this time solely for not accepting that there was a war. So my role was to help the youths feel strong and prepare their souls for the realities of war and the fact that many of them would die. They had to learn to accept their own deaths if they were to truly fight for liberation."
Mukami threw herself into convincing individuals from all ethnicities in Nairobi of the Mau Mau cause, building up a steady stream of new recruits. As Mukami discovered, the city was fertile ground for the planting of revolutionary ideas. "I was struck by how poor black people in Nairobi were," she recalls. "People were barely scraping by and there was a lot of hunger."
Her husband Kimathi had instructed her that when a potential recruit expresses interest in the Mau Mau, she should ask them a single question: "Unataka serikali ya mweusi ama ya mweupe?" Or, in English: "Do you want the white man's government or the black man's government?" For those who wanted a black man's government, she would link them together with others in their localities and form a new Mau Mau cell.
But not too long after arriving in Nairobi, in April 1954, Mukami was arrested - along with her child - after being caught without the special permit mandatory for Kikuyu in the city. Soon after this, Operation Anvil began. According to Anderson, the operation was the largest urban cordon-and-search action ever mounted at that time. More than 20,000 men were deployed to carry it out, including five British battalions and one battalion of the KAR, along with 300 police and several hundred Home Guards, or unpaid armed militia from each African ethnicity that supported the British.
Africans in Nairobi awoke at dawn on 24 April to find their city under siege. No Africans were allowed to leave or enter and the British hastily erected barbed-wire enclosures alongside each estate. "They started the operation when everyone was still asleep," recounts Mwenja. "Everything was being done by white men. After every 10 feet there was a white soldier; I didn't see a single African soldier. The white men just surrounded the entire area."
Africans were hustled out of their homes and herded into these barbed wire enclosures, where soldiers checked each person's kipande - the colonial identification card for natives, carried around the neck - and separated the Kikuyu men, along with the Embu and Meru, from the other Africans. The Kikuyu men were forced to present several documents, including an employee registration card, a card detailing their history of employment, a poll tax receipt - the tax levied specifically on Africans in the colony - and a receipt for a special tax imposed on Kikuyu. Not possessing just one of these was grounds for suspicion, explains Anderson in Histories of the Hanged.
White soldiers were also assisted in identifying suspected Mau Mau by hooded Kikuyu informants, known as Gakunia, who concealed their faces behind sisal burlap sacks with eye-holes carved out of them. Only the Gakunia's eyes were visible. With a single finger-point - implying that someone was part of Mau Mau - the Gakunia could immediately send any African directly into the horrors of the colonial internment camps.
"They saw I was Kikuyu and immediately arrested me," Mwenja tells African Arguments. Nairobi would remain a "closed district" for April-May 1954. By the end of the operation, more than 50,000 Africans had been "screened," or interrogated, and 24,100 Kikuyu males had been detained. The Kikuyu population in the city was reduced by 50%.
Before the operation, new prison camps had been constructed at Lang'ata in Nairobi, Mackinnon Road, and Manyani in the Taru Desert en route to the Coast. It was here that those detained in Operation Anvil would enter into a living nightmare. The British expanded these internment camps into more than 100 across the country, which held tens of thousands of Kenyans who faced brutal torture including electric shock, burning, and castration.
"Straight from hell"
The first stop for the thousands detained in Nairobi was the Lang'ata camp, which served as a transit camp where detainees would be interrogated and given one of three colour-coded classifications that reflected their supposed degree of commitment to the Mau Mau cause - "white", "grey", and "black."
"Whites" were considered non-threatening and were repatriated to their native reserves, but they were barred from returning to Nairobi. "Greys" were suspected of being passive supporters of Mau Mau. "Blacks" were considered the most dangerous and were thought to be active militants; they would become known as the "hard-core".
Mukami describes Lang'ata as an "uninhabitable desolate place full of wild animals". There were no buildings and thousands of Kikuyu were corralled into tents, she says. "The whole place was stinking of unwashed bodies, urine, and human waste." Every 24 hours, the prison officers gave the detainees a slice of bread and tea with milk.
"People began to die from hunger and beatings," Mukami continues. "The prison warders began throwing those who died out to the hyenas and other wild animals hanging around the camp... It was a scene straight from hell."
She recounts one incident through a song:
"With children crying of hunger
And being kept awake by the Nandi [a people loyal to the British]
One Nandi Corporal felt pity on our suffering
He suggested: 'either they get executed, rather [than being] starved to death...
Or they should be repatriated to their homes."'
After convincing a District Officer at Lang'ata to help her, Mukami led a daring escape from the camp with other women. In her autobiography, Mukami Kimathi: Mau Mau Woman Freedom Fighter, Mukami recounts how she appealed to the DO as a fellow Kikuyu and a woman who he might relate to his own wife and daughters. "Before the colonialists came, we had rules of war," Mukami told the DO, her child whimpering and strapped onto her back. "When the Maasai raided the Kikuyu for cattle and vice versa, the warriors would fight each other. Nobody harmed women, children, or the elderly. Who are these people you are working for, who dare arrest women with their children strapped onto their backs? Are they human? Are you working for real humans?"
"They have no respect for anyone, not even those we hold in esteem - our leaders and elders," she continued. "They have turned us against each other and we should not let it happen. What wrong has my child done to deserve being in prison? Please allow us to leave."
Touched by Mukami's words, the DO agreed to help facilitate her escape. The next morning, Mukami woke up the other imprisoned women and told them that whoever wanted to escape should follow her. When they made it to the door of the prison, they found it was unlocked.
Upon Mwenja's arrival at Lang'ata, he was classified as "black" and transported to the detention camp at Mackinnon Road. Mwenja would spend years being funnelled through Britain's network of detention camps. "It was very windy and dusty," Mwenja says, recounting his experience at Mackinnon Road. "They would serve the food outside so all of the dust and sand particles would get into the food...it felt like you were eating sand."
"Sometimes the detainees would be so hungry that they would eat the food mixed with sand so quickly that the sand particles would cut their intestines. I saw people die from this." Prison guards would also order detainees to lie on their backs, while a white soldier would stand on them, sometimes jumping, until their ribs broke, Mwenja remembers. Those who died were thrown into a mass grave.
Eventually, colonial officials caught up with Mukami and rearrested her. Discovering she was Kimathi's wife, Mukami faced prolonged torture during interrogations - including daily beatings, whippings, starvation, and hurting her with pliers. Mukami, however, took many details of the torture she faced with her to the grave because the brutality of it would have left her children "too bitter". Other former women detainees have reported that interrogators mutilated their breasts, sometimes squeezing their nipples with pliers, or shoved foreign objects up their vaginas.
Mukami was swiftly slapped with a "black" classification and sentenced to life at Kamiti camp, the only detention camp that accommodated women. There, Mukami says the torture continued unabated; she would be forced to stand all day until her legs became swollen and was stripped naked during interrogations. The worst, she says, was solitary confinement, where she feared she would lose her mind.
Mukami tells me the small food rations provided to detainees were mixed with particles of cement. Male detainees were paraded through the campgrounds naked, while the women were forced to watch. Those believed to be the wives of the Mau Mau were separated from the other detainees and were kept in an enclosure the warders referred to as kambi ya fisi, or "hyena's camp".
At least 15 women and 15 men were publicly hanged at Kamiti each day, Mukami says, picked at random from the mass of people being transported to the prison. The other detainees, including Mukami, were forced to dig the mass graves into where their dead bodies were thrown.
According to Anderson, the Kenyan courts sentenced 1,499 Kikuyu to death by hanging between October 1952 and March 1958, when the very last Mau Mau offender was executed. Out of these, 160 lodged successful appeals and another 240, including all women convicts, had their sentences commuted. In the end, the British hanged 1,090 Kikuyu men for Mau Mau offences, which included murder, possession of arms or ammunition, participating in the administration of oaths, and associating with "terrorists". [2]
On 21 October, 1956, four years to the day almost since the Declaration of the Emergency, sirens went off throughout the Kamiti prison, followed by an announcement by a prison official: "Dedan Kimathi, the terrorist leader of the Mau Mau in Kenya has been shot!" It was the day Kimathi was finally captured. It marked the end of the war and the surviving prisoners in the camps started being released.
Colonial officials permitted Mukami to see her husband at the Industrial Area Remand Prison in Nairobi before what both of them knew was his imminent execution. During the hours they spent together in the prison cell, Mukami says Kimathi expressed just two regrets: "that he would not live long enough to see his children grow and that he would not live to see a black man raising a Kenyan flag high."
Before Mukami was returned to her cell at Kamiti, a white officer informed her that she would be permitted to return the following day and she could go to her hometown of Nyeri to collect her children so they could also give a final farewell to their father.
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But early the next morning, on 18 February, 1957, Kimathi was hanged without notice - embodying his now famous words: "It is better to die on my feet than to live on my knees under colonial rule."
"Colonial poverty"
Gladys Wanjiku Maina, 81, lives in a small, cramped home made from mud and sticks in Mathare, one of the city's largest and oldest informal settlements.
More than 70% of Nairobi's inhabitants live within just 5% of the city's residential space, squeezed onto overcrowded and impoverished settlements, which lack adequate access to clean drinking water, electricity, proper drainage or sewage systems.
Both of Wanjiku's parents were Mau Mau and, despite being a child during the war, Wanjiku was still responsible for delivering food to the guerrilla fighters in the Aberdare Mountains. Her eldest brother was killed fighting in the forests, while her other brother and father died shortly after being released from the camps owing to the severe torture they endured.
Wanjiku has long dreadlocks that reach past her hips. She began growing them in the 1970s and refuses to cut them - in protest of what she says is the "betrayal" of the successive independent Kenyan governments. "The only one who is allowed to put a scissor to my hair is the person who gives me land," she says, flipping her dreads over her shoulders. "I will never cut them until I feel the soil of my land in my fists."
While the Mau Mau may have lost the battle against the British, they certainly won the war; the uprising is considered among the most important steps that set in motion Kenya's independence in 1963. The Mau Mau fighters believed their lands for which so many of them lost their lives would finally be returned to them; in the years after independence, however, these hopes were crushed.
Jomo Kenyatta, who was imprisoned in the Lokitaung detention camp in what is now Turkana County in Kenya's arid north - where the alleged inciters and managers of the rebellion were detained - emerged as the first president of free Kenya. Instead of honouring the Mau Mau fighters, however, Kenyatta reinforced the colonial ban imposed on the movement.
While some prominent Mau Mau leaders were rewarded with high-level government positions, many others were arrested. Known loyalists also became influential members of Kenyatta's new administration. But many Mau Mau veterans continue to view Kenyatta and other Kenyan politicians as traitors to the anti-colonial struggle. Most have lived out the rest of their lives landless and in abject poverty.
Kenyatta inherited a challenging post-independence dilemma: the unresolved land crisis in Kikuyuland - with nearly the entire Kikuyu population remaining landless - posed a direct threat to his authority. The return of native territories confiscated by the British to other Kenyan peoples, most notably in the Coast, the home of the Mijikenda and the Swahili and the Rift Valley, where the Maasai, the Nandi, and the Kipsigis - among others - had lost huge swathes of their territories, threatened long-term national cohesion.
Using funds procured from the UK government and the World Bank, Kenyatta resettled hundreds of thousands of landless Kenyans on settlement schemes scattered across the country, from the Rift Valley all the way to the coast. The vast majority of those resettled were Kikuyu. In doing so, Kenyatta was resolving a long-standing land crisis in Kikuyuland, which pre-dated colonialism and the KLFA aspiration for ithaka na wiyathi.
In effect, Kenyatta was using state fiat to nationalise the Kikuyu land question at the expense of other native peoples. As a result, issues related to land and territory in independent Kenya have continued to be the source of inter-ethnic conflict and territorial disputes, which have turned deadly in the past.
Furthermore, the question of whether the Mau Mau uprising was an anti-colonial war or a civil war in Kikuyuland - which pitted native rebels against Christian loyalist Kikuyu, along with urban Africans enlisted in the colonial police and army or who filled jobs left vacant by the mass detention of Kikuyu workers - continues to drive contemporary debates around Mau Mau. According to some academics, the Mau Mau fought to claim land that was taken by white settlers from other ethnic groups, most notably the Maasai.
Mau Mau veterans, however, have consistently maintained that their movement was a nationalist uprising that fought for the return of land to all ethnic groups.
The ban on Mau Mau was only lifted by the administration of Mwai Kibaki in 2003. "The [independence] government betrayed us," Wanjiku tells African Arguments, running her palms across her agitated face. "The children of the Mau Mau are still suffering in this country."
Most residents in Mathare, along with the Nairobi's other informal settlements, are either unemployed or work as casual labourers in the wealthier areas of Nairobi or in the industrial area. "The people in the slums like Mathare are living in exactly the same conditions that the Mau Mau was fighting against during colonial rule," says Gacheke Gachihi, an activist and coordinator of the Mathare Social Justice Centre. "The realities of landlessness and colonial poverty are the same today - nothing has changed."
"The history of the Mau Mau is a powerful reminder of where we are coming from - and how far we still have to go," Gachihi adds.
The Mau Mau, including their signature dreadlocks, are still a source of inspiration for Kenyans tired of the historical reverberations of colonial rule - including the most recent "Gen Z protests" against government corruption.
Wanjiku says she has been harassed by police for decades owing to her dreadlocks. "The police are always assuming I'm up to no good because of my dreads," she tells me, with a grunt. "The government is threatened by dreadlocks because they are still scared of the Mau Mau and what the movement stands for. They know we are still in the midst of the same struggle and we have still not gotten our demands met since the British."
"Most of these poor youths in the slums are the children of Mau Mau," she adds, gesturing outside to the narrow alleyway bordered by lines of shacks made from tin sheets. "Our government fears them because they know at any moment they could rise up and resist just like their parents did."
[1] Anderson, David, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, p.200
[2] Anderson, David, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, p.291
Jaclynn Ashly is a freelance journalist.
