A Journey Through the Mau Mau War of Independence

The Heart of the Memoir

The narrative in this book is, in many ways, like a classic fable. It features heroes, victims, warriors, and other characters, with me somewhere in the mix. The interplay between the events in my personal life and those of my country (Kenya) is evident. However, this interplay is sometimes far from glorious, as the reader will discover.

I have had to depend on memory. Memory can be as clear as water and, at times, a disjointed mess—a blurry, choppy jumble of half-remembered events. They slip and blend into one another like a moving mass of waving tendrils, highlights, and lowlights.

Fortunately, I have not relied on memory alone. I have used many primary and secondary sources to present as factual a narrative as possible. The clamour for freedom comes early in the book. I was born into the blustery storm of the war of independence. The arrival of the colonists was a long prelude to a national disaster. When the war broke out, it was like a disease. From its first intimations to its climax, it was apocalyptic—a bolt of lightning in a blinding flash that struck the country, leaving nothing unshattered by its cataclysm. One moment, the country was peaceful; the next, it somersaulted into an intense war—dead bodies piling up.

Like all wars, the arc of Kenya’s independence war is heartrending—part bitterness, part lament, all tragedy. “War is hell,” so the saying goes. The places where wars are fought are said to be haunted by the spirits of the dead. For many years, Kenyans lived under the cloud of war, close to death—having their brains blown out or facing some other fatal ending.

The war was all-consuming and barbed. It had strange, invisible edges that startled one in their sleep. It clung to one’s skin like a parasite until it drew blood, staining everything touched. Indeed, everything was painted with the colour of war—the chaotic swirl between power and subjugation, with the colonists on one side and the colonized on the other—creating absolute carnage. The native African entered the dark recesses of a war economy in a world that was gloomy, sordid, and vicious. It was all too real.

As often happens in any great conflict, the boundary between the living and the dead seemed to erode. Kenyans faced the untenable myths of a home in chaos, evil lurking everywhere, and the spiralling helplessness that came with the extreme conditions of that era. The collective ambition of Kenyans daring to take on the British colonial army defied the whiff of empire and the natural power structures of the day.

What many heroes laid down their lives for was freedom. Today, freedom may mean freedom of speech, the liberty to do whatever one wants, or, in our social media world, the ability to scroll through our phones—hopping from one social media account to another, liking, posting, and hashtagging on Instagram or seeing messages whooshing away on WhatsApp.

But when I was growing up, freedom meant being free from colonial domination. It was a long and painful journey. That freedom sometimes felt tantalizingly close, like a figure of a traveler coming into view on the road. He walked slowly, deliberately, and reluctantly—all with a kind of wonder. Freedom also came at the cost of limb and life. The war had something else, something far subtler and darker—the attempt to break a people’s collective will to live. However, Kenyans remained unbowed, and the clamour for freedom picked up speed, becoming more frantic, urgent, and rushed.

A Simple Life

Away from the war, life was simple.

Before today’s cities of bright lights, with the sterile scent of linoleum floors and the hiss and whirr of machines, there were the simple joys of village life. These joys came in many forms—from the sounds of rustling leaves and the whirr of insects to the heavy drops of rain. At times, the rain angrily lashed the soil, turning it grey, dark, and cold, as if transforming the world into a nightmare. But I took it all in stride, enjoying everything. The days moved at a pleasing rhythm, lulling me into a stupor of wonder. I woke up each morning with the wonder of a child, greeted by the ricocheting words of the Gikuyu language—carrying a certain weariness in its consonants and a certain sadness in its vowels.

Even the sunlight had a full-force beauty—something light and floral. Breakfast tasted sweeter than any food, and lunch and dinner were tastier still. Our village, even under the fog of war, sometimes buzzed with the communal elation that follows living together in the countryside. The war would occasionally recede, only to be jolted back to life by a sudden cruel event.

Canaan that Never Was

After the war of independence, the second part of the country’s history runs from 1963 onward. It is a brilliant deconstruction of fossilized glamour, characterized by unmet expectations and the unrealized dreams of my generation and those born later. Their main preoccupation was juggling between hope and luck as the country looked forward to an imaginary abundance of everything—in the Promised Land of ‘Canaan’—a land overflowing with milk and honey.

It was a Canaan that never was! Many had taken up arms to fight for equitable redistribution of land and other resources but never received the land. Was the Mau Mau struggle all in vain? Was it wasted time and energy? Or was it a well-structured economic and political behemoth aligned to our national interest, bonded and anchored in ethical values? There is sometimes a nagging feeling that the suffering and deaths of Mau Mau heroes were pointless. But was it?

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