(Part 2 of 3)
Oduor Ong'wen
[In this second installment of three-part discourse on our resistance against exploitation and domination, I look at resistance to colonial rule and how colonialists hijacked it]
The social oppression, political repression and economic exploitation that afflicted the Kenyan people in the post-independence era had had its roots firmly planted in more than four centuries of foreign invasion and imperialist domination and four centuries of patriotic resistance by the people determined to defend or regain their freedom. However, the “national” History that is being taught in our schools and colleges is custom made to glorify forces of occupation, oppression, repression and exploitation against our people and to ignore, distort or demean the gallant efforts of the peoples of Kenya from the Indian Ocean Coast to the shores of Lake Victoria and for close to five centuries. But the real history reveals to us that every effort to subjugate and oppress our peoples was met by equal determination to repel and reverse. Sometimes our people were victorious while other times the forces of domination, occupation and exploitation had through their superior weaponry, organisation or mere treachery, been able to prevail over our people. But even in their temporal triumph, they were unable to extinguish the flame of freedom in our peoples.
While the British colonial authorities had seen peasant revolts as a nuisance and had always devised ways to contain them and succeeded, the swell in the ranks of the Kenyan trade union movement, the revolutionary content of its goals and the growing political stature of its radical leadership presented the colonial government and settler community with waking nightmares. This was exacerbated by the intensifying nationwide discontent against imperialism and covert organisation and mobilisation for armed struggle. The workers affirmed their power on the May Day Parade of 1950 held in Nairobi that drew tens of thousands of workers and the general public. The people were thrilled and excited by the radical and fiery speeches by the leadership and their clear demands. Barely a fortnight after this rally, on May 15, 1950, EATUC was banned and its General Secretary Makhan Singh as well as its President Fred Kubai arrested and jailed. Makhan Singh, seen by colonialists as the ideological brainpower of the trade union movement, stayed behind bars for ten years. The workers were not cowed. They immediately responded by organising a nationwide strike to demand the immediate release of their incarcerated leaders Makhan Singh, Kubai and Cege Kibacia. Their other demands included new minimum wage, the abolition of repressive taxicab byelaws, an end to arbitrary arrests of workers and total, immediate and unconditional national independence for Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. Involving more than 100,000 workers, for nine days the strike in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru and other towns brought the colonial economy to one of its greatest tests so far. The colonial authorities resorted to their tired script. They rounded up hundreds of workers, including strike organisers and other activists and jailed them for long periods.
If the colonial authorities were deluded that the repressive response to the workers struggle would quell the restlessness for freedom, they were in for a shocking reality. Banning workers’ organisations and incarcerating their leaders was like adding petrol into a raging fire. It was like the 1950 General Strike was the Launchpad for Kenya’s Liberation Struggle. After it, Kenya’s workers became more militant and involved in the ongoing national political struggles. During the June 1951 KAU elections, radical trade unionists captured most of the key leadership positions in the Nairobi branch and immediately transformed the branch from a dull outfit into a vibrant mobilising force which recruited members raised funds for KAU. Some of these leaders formed the nucleus of the clandestine Mau Mau Movement. The void created by the banning of workers organisations, the imprisonment of their leaders and growth of anti-imperialist consciousness aided by KAU’s failure to champion the immediate demands of the Kenyan people led to phenomenal increase in underground political organising. The radical KAU leaders in Nairobi coalesced around a more covert grouping called the “Forty Group” (Anake a 40) and apart from Kaggia and Kubai, its other members included Isaac Gathanju and Eliud Mutonyi. It is this group that formed the Mau Mau Central Committee. The Committee became the nerve centre of anti-colonial armed struggle. Comprising twelve people, the Mau Mau Central Committee initiated and coordinated a recruitment drive during which anti-colonial oath of unity was administered. The oath was to bind members to uphold discipline, secrecy, solidarity and commitment to the cause. Eliud Mutonyi was the Committee’s chairman and Gathanju secretary. Workers’ leaders like Kaggia and Kubai were Central Committee members, although held no official posts. By 1952, a crisis situation had developed in Kenya with the downtrodden masses exhibiting unprecedented restlessness for political change. Incidents of open defiance against colonial authorities became the order of the day and civil disobedience a regular occurrence. The British colonialists were staring at the prospect of an open insurrection.
Internationally, revolutions had broken out simultaneously in China, Korea and Vietnam and the British were determined to forestall similar situations in Kenya. They decided on a pre-emptive strike against the nationalists with the declaration of a State of Emergency on October 20, 1952 and unleashing Operation Jock Scott – arresting hundreds of national leaders, banning all political organisations and instituting martial law. The War Council of the Mau Mau Central Committee responded to the British declaration of war by mobilising the Kenya Land Freedom Army for a military counter-offensive. From its strongholds of Kirinyaga and Nyandarua forests and mountains, KLFA led a sustained armed struggle using sophisticated tactics. Between 1952 and 1955, the Mau Mau forces scored strings of victories that were attributed to the coherence of the movement’s political vision, commitment, sacrifice and discipline. The Mau Mau Charter outlined the movement’s immediate political programme which included the demand for an African government in Kenya; the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of foreign troops; rejection of foreign laws; demand for major commercial and economic activities to be put in African hands; and for immediate stop to the harassment, imprisonment and rape of Kenyan women. Kenya Defence Council was born at the Mwathe Conference, held in August 1953, at which Dedan Kimathi wa Waciuri was elected President of KDC and Field Marshal of KLFA. The Conference divided KLFA into eight armies under semi-autonomous commands. In February 1954, the Kenya Parliament was formed with objectives of intensifying military campaign while separating the military and political aspects of the struggle but remaining under the overall direction of the Mau Mau Central Committee. The Kenya Parliament had a national character and comprised twelve elected members with Kimathi as the first Prime Minister. The feat of setting up a military edifice comprising eight armies and sustaining it with little outside assistance for over seven years of ferocious guerrilla campaign technically superior military machine attests to Mau Mau’s level of discipline, determination and commitment. The fact that the Mau Mau Central Committee was able to see that engaging the colonial authorities needed complementing the armed struggle with other forms of resistance like the highly successful Bus Boycott of September 1953 revealed that not only was the leadership flexible and mature but also the massive popular support it commanded.
Women played a pivotal role in the struggle. They gathered and supplied intelligence, coordinated the supplies, and engaged in full combat activities. No prior organisation had involved Kenyan women to the extent that Mau Mau did. Indeed there were many women commanders, including Field Marshal Muthoni. But the biggest tool of colonial penetration was not the gun. It was the Bible. The missionaries fiercely and violently fought against the indigenous peoples’ customs and traditions in a clearly well orchestrated cultural onslaught that was aided by missionary-sponsored schools and settler controlled mass media. This bred an upsurge of cultural resistance. As early as the 1930s a vibrant patriotic indigenous press had emerged. Newspapers like Sauti ya Mwafrika, Ramogi, Mugambo wa Mu Embu, Wasya wa Mukamba and Inooro ria Gikuyuwere some of the more established titles. As a direct antidote to the missionaries, the Kenya independent churches movement emerged and acquired a distinctly anti-colonial flavour. In Mount Kenya region, a religious movement known as Andu a Kaggialed a cultural mass movement that aimed at creating a “purely African movement” diametrically opposed to and divorced from Eurocentric theology. It did away with European customs and replaced them with a new doctrine emphasising African customs and traditions: all converts had to be baptised or re-baptised in their mother names and weddings conducted in the African customary tradition. Andu a Kaggiahad a mirror parallel in Marandamovement in Nyanza. Marandawere determined to prevent missionary penetration and to reverse their foreign cultural influences.
The most controversial of the independent churches to emerge was the Dini ya Msambwaled by Elijah Masinde. Beginning early 1940s, it became locked in one confrontation after another with colonial authorities in Elgon Nyanza (now Bungoma and Trans Nzoia counties) where it developed strong taproots amongst the poor peasants and agricultural workers. Masinde and his followers refused to carry the hated kipandeor be conscripted into forced labour. They mounted massive protests when the colonial authorities attempted to requisition their cattle for the British war effort. They later called on African people to start manufacturing guns in preparation for armed struggle against continued colonial rule. On February 10, 1948, colonial police opened fire on a peaceful rally called by Dini ya Msambwaat Malakisi where they killed eleven and wounded not less than sixteen. Six days later, Elijah Masinde was arrested and deported to Lamu. Dini ya Msambwa’smilitant followers were not deterred by these acts of state terrorism. They simply retreated and reorganised underground and continued with the liberation struggle.
The struggle for independence in Kenya, led by Mau Mau, was not an isolated nationalist uprising. It fit to the global confrontation between progressive social forces and desperate imperialist regimes being forced to beat hasty retreat. It was the same period South Africa was witnessing the Defiance Campaign, the Algerian war for national independence, the Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam and the beginning of the Cuban revolutionary insurrection. Fearing the struggle in Kenya acquiring internationalist character, British colonialists devised a “carrot and stick” approach. The carrots were neo-colonial reforms that would devolve a little muscle to the local puppets while the British colonialists retained the real power. Under the Lyttleton Constitution of 1954, the colonial government increased the number of African seats in the settler-dominated Legislative Council and permitted the resumption of organised political activity but restricted this to district associations and excluded districts that were predominantly Gikuyu, Meru and Embu from this partial relaxation of the ban. The increased African representation in the LegCo had its unintended consequences. It brought on board patriots like Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, who effectively used the colonial House to denounce the evils of colonialism, demand the immediate release of all political prisoners and push the colonialists to concede to more constitutional reforms to the dismay and frustration of pro-colonialist members led by Gikonyo Kiano. Odinga stunned the LegCo membership and irked the colonial authorities when he declared that “in the heart of hearts of the African people, their true leaders were those in detention, jail and concentration camps.” The Synnerton Plan created a rural petty bourgeoisie with interest in commercial farming drawing its membership from the scum of homeguards, colonial chiefs and other collaborators.
The stick was the intensification of military operations in Mt. Kenya region, rounding up of thousands of people and herding them into concentration camps, forcing peasants into fortified villages to deprive guerrilla fighters of a support base and supplies network in a genocidal attempt to annihilate the Gikuyu community. Land and other property of those detained or carted away into concentration camps were confiscated and given to collaborators. Supporting the liberation became a very painful and expensive affair for people.
The banning of the militant EATUC and imprisonment of its entire leadership created a crisis of leadership among the working class and colonialists, in alliance with US intelligence, embarked on grooming a new reactionary trade union leadership. It was with this backdrop that the Kenya Federation of Labour was formed. Led by the articulate and indefatigable Tom Mboya, KFL quickly emerged as the national labour centre. KFL drew the Kenyan working class away from such political issues of land and national independence and restricted their demands to narrow shop floor issues like minimum wage, worker housing and workman compensation.
In 1961, KLFA produced a document titled Struggle for Kenya’s Future that was circulated at KANU Conference. The document identified the neo-colonial character of the regime that was poised to replace British colonial one, observing that the British Master Plan was “to carefully relinquish political control to a properly indoctrinated group of the ‘right kind of Africans’ so as to ensure they left in ‘political form’ so that ‘its capitalist sponsors might remain in economic content.’” It in the alternative proposed that the people of Kenya should struggle to “a socialist society … which unlike capitalism concerns itself with the welfare of the masses rather than the profits and privileges of a few.”
When KANU was formed in 1960, it had as its base the former membership of the banned KAU, the Kenyan workers in Nairobi, Central Kenya, Nyanza, and Rift Valley. Many of the recruits to the new party had participated in or supported the struggle in one way or the other as combatants in the armed struggle, strike and boycott mobilisers or organisers, pamphlet or leaflet distributors, recruitment of combatants, supply of food, medicine or ammunition for the fighters. It therefore represented the aspirations of the most radical of the nationalist movement at the time. The original KANU manifesto articulated the wishes and aspirations of the staggering majority of the Kenyan people, unlike KADU, which even though ostensibly championing more or less the same goals, was in reality an opportunistic settler-controlled lobby of collaborators. The KADU leadership worked hand in glove with leading settler ideologues and leaders like Sir Michael Blundell, Havelock and other reactionary elements who fought desperately to keep their obscene privileges.
The settler community had seen the danger signs of what to expect in the wake of inevitable KANU victory. Its radical programme was not what they were ready for. They, with the connivance of the colonial administration worked overtime to ensure their interests would be safe in post-independent Kenya. The main parties – KANU and KADU – were therefore manipulated in the name of “capacity building” to negotiate a constitution that would favour the interests of settler community and foreign commercial interests in the name of being “pragmatic.” Kenyatta was a big disappointment. Never before had a people invested so much faith and hope in one man and ended up with despair and dejection. After he was transferred from Lodwar to Maralal, the colonial authorities organised cleared delegations to visit him and apprise him of the political situation in the country. While radical nationalists like Jaramogi Oginga Odinga or his former inmate Kaggia could not be cleared to go and debrief him, the likes of Daniel arap Moi were facilitated. If old Jomo had any little nationalist traction left in him, it was wiped out at his half-way house in Maralal. The New Kenya Party of Sir Blundell, representing settler economic and political interests and deeply engaged in real politik, emerged from Lancaster talks as the real winner. The Lancaster House Conference strictly followed NKP recommendations both in form and content and KANU and KADU delegates were content to cross the t’s and dot the i’s. “Independence” was negotiated in series. Private property (mainly of the settler community) was protected; foreign military bases remained intact; and all the progressive demands listed in the KANU programme were shunned. Blundell and his NKP cronies managed to enlist the support of the entire KADU reactionary clique and, more painfully but significant, the right wing of KANU party, including the arch demagogue, Jomo Kenyatta. The KANU that emerged post-Lancaster was not recognisable. It was more like an Africanised version of the New Kenya Party.
December 1, 2018
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