Mau Mau and the Kikuyu

Louis Leakey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415329934
• eBook ISBN: 9781136531088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This widely-acclaimed book on a troubled period of Kenyan history summarizes some of the more important Kikuyu customs, and a discussion of their break-down under the impact of European civilization. This discussion illustrates why and how the Mau Mau came into being and how the situation could be improved so that peace could once again come to Kenya.

PART ONE
The Kikuyu before the coming of
the European

I
THE KIKUYU AND THEIR LAND

The Kikuyu tribe, or, as they call themselves, the Agikuyu, is one of the Bantu-speaking peoples of East Africa and the biggest and most important tribe in Kenya. The Mau Mau terrorist movement which is, at the moment, causing so much trouble, is composed almost entirely of Kikuyu people. In consequence, if we are to understand the underlying causes which made it possible for the movement to come into being and to reach the proportions which it has reached, we must know something of the history and customs of the Kikuyu and, still more, we must understand their relationship over the years with the British Government and the other Europeans who have settled in Kenya.

The Kikuyu traditionally trace their origin to a woman Muumbi, who had as husband and father of her children one Gikuyu. The offspring of Muumbi and Gikuyu are regarded as the founders of the nine Kikuyu clans and each clan is named after one of them. According to tradition the Kikuyu first started as a tribe in the Fort Hall district, the exact point of origin supposedly being at ‘Mukuruwe wa Gathanga’, marked by a large acacia or Mukuruwe tree. As the descendants of Muumbi grew in numbers and multiplied they first of all spread over the area which is now the Fort Hall or Muranga district, felling the forest and carving out fields and gardens for themselves and their children. Tradition relates that the only inhabitants before the spread of the Kikuyu and their occupation of this area were a people of small stature and hideous features known as the Agumba, who ‘lived in holes in the ground’ into which they disappeared whenever they were frightened.

All over this part of Kikuyu country can be found scattered saucer-shaped depressions from eight to twenty feet in diameter. From excavations that have been made of similar depressions in other parts of Kenya, we know that these holes represent the partially filled-in pits of very late Stone Age and Early Iron Age underground pit dwellings. Similar underground huts are still in use among the Wambulu of Tanganyika Territory (although these are of larger size), and we may, with some degree of certainty, identify the Agumba as a small group of surviving prehistoric peoples who were living as hunters in the forest when the agricultural Kikuyu started to occupy what is now the Fort Hall district some hundreds of years ago.

It is not easy to fix in any certain way the date of the birth of the Kikuyu tribe—the Ciana cia Muumbi —but it was probably some seven or eight hundred years ago, for the tribe had increased in numbers to such an extent by the late sixteenth century that they had to find fresh living room. The movement southwards across the Chania River into what is now known as the Kiambu district of Kikuyu land started about that time, as did a movement north-wards into the area now called Nyeri, lying at the foot of Mount Kenya. The expansion northwards into the forested foothills round Mount Kenya was, according to tradition, a slow and simple process of penetration into a zone which had no occupants at all (or at the most a few Agumba), but the movement to the south across the Chania was entirely different and the differences are of vital importance to an understanding of Kikuyu land problems today and of some of the real grievances which underlie the Mau Mau movement.

By Kikuyu law and custom, land occupied and owned by other people cannot be acquired simply by conquest, for if this were done and the previous owner forcibly dispossessed, the Kikuyu fully believed that the spirits of the owners would make it impossible for the new occupiers to carry out their agricultural activities with any hope of success, or with any hope of the blessing of Ngai, the God of the Kikuyu. Now the whole of the forested land lying south of the Chania River and between that river and the Ngong Hills was formerly occupied by a hunting tribe known as the Wanderobo. This was a tribe relatively few in numbers, practising no agriculture whatever and living by hunting, by collecting honey, and by gathering wild edible fruits, seeds, and roots.

The Wanderobo peoples had already divided up this country into ‘hunting territories’; each family group had its own immense zone, running sometimes to thirty or forty square miles. The boundaries were mainly geographical (prominent ridges, streams, and so on) and these were known and respected by the members of the family concerned and by the other families of Wanderobo in adjoining zones. No Wanderobo would hunt or set his traps or collect honey from any part of the country other than his own family zone and each family looked upon this zone as personal property .

It can be argued—in fact it has been so argued by Europeans—that the Wanderobo had not established any land property rights at all by virtue of their hunting rights, but the fact remains that they—by their own law and custom—regarded their hunting zones as their own inviolate property and, moreover, their neighbours also recognized such rights.

When the Kikuyu population increased so much in the Fort Hall district that there was need to extend farther, it was not unnatural that this virile agricultural people should look southwards to the forest and bushlands across the Chania and seek a way of obtaining land there for cultivation.

Undoubtedly, by virtue of their greater numerical strength, they could have driven out the Wanderobo by force, but to them such action, as we have seen, would have been futile, for the land so obtained would have been valueless to them for settled occupation and for crop growing, since God and the spirits would not bless activities carried out under such conditions.

The Wanderobo for their part were envious of the easier way of life of their Kikuyu neighbours, their possession of stock and crops, which meant that the feeding of the family was much more certain than when based solely on a hunting and food-gathering way of life.

And so an entirely new system of land acquisition—new, that is to say, as far as the Kikuyu themselves and most African tribes of that day were concerned—was evolved and came into being. This is not the place to describe in great detail the very complicated processes by which a Kikuyu would enter into negotiation with a Wanderobo family for the purchase of a part of the latter’s land, nor to analyse fully the way in which the purchase was transacted and the transfer of property rights completed to the satisfaction of both parties, as well as of the spirits of the departed. All these details have been dealt with by me in another book—which, however, is still unpublished—but a brief summary must be given here.

A Kikuyu elder, accompanied by a few others to act as his witnesses, could go out into the forest across the Chania and seek out a Wanderobo family, taking presents to win their friendship and carrying a bunch of grass as a sign of peaceful and honest intentions. The talk would be led round to the fact that the Kikuyu wanted land to cultivate and was willing to pay a good price in goats and sheep and other things. If, as was usually the case, the Wanderobo family was willing to part with a portion of its hunting zone in return for such payment, negotiations would be carried further by the Kikuyu suggesting that the two families should undertake a ceremony of ‘mutual adoption’ as a preliminary to the actual purchase of land and the transfer of property rights. This ‘mutual adoption’ was considered by the Kikuyu as vital to the success of the transactions that were to be undertaken, for several reasons. In the first place, once the two families had been united by the very solemn rites of this complicated ceremony there would be no fear of treachery by either party during the subsequent prolonged negotiations. Secondly, the religious ceremonies which would form part of the negotiations would not be possible from the Kikuyu point of view unless all the participants were Kikuyu or adopted Kikuyu. Thirdly, the adoption ceremonies would make the departed spirits of the Wanderobo members of the Kikuyu family spirits’ group and so these Wanderobo spirits would be amicably disposed towards the Kikuyu when they took over the land.

If the Wanderobo family that was first approached was unwilling to undertake ‘mutual adoption’ ceremonies, the Kikuyu would break off the talks and seek out some other family. But gradually the process became more and more recognized and accepted by the Wanderobo as an increasing number of Kikuyu moved south and they came to see the value of this idea to themselves.

When the ceremony of ‘mutual adoption' had been successfully concluded the sale of a piece of the Wanderobo estate was carried out, the negotiations being conducted by people who now had equal status and equal obligations towards each other. At length, when the preliminaries had been completed and the due payment made, the Wanderobo family would call in members of other Wan-derobo families in the region to act as witnesses to the marking of the boundaries of the piece of land that had been sold to the Kikuyu.

This marking of the boundaries was itself a very solemn religious ceremony, accompanied by sacrifices to God and to the ancestral spirits of both parties, and by prayers for blessing. Such a piece of land bought by the Kikuyu was called a githaka and a Kikuyu usually bought a far bigger piece of land than he required for his immediate needs, as he was setting himself up as the potential founder of a sub-clan or mbari all the members of which would, in due course, want a share in the ownership of that piece of land, unless they became sufficiently wealthy to go off and buy further land from other Wanderobo and start yet another mbari on a new githaka.

Coincident with the new system of acquiring land by direct outright purchase from the members of another tribe, and the consequent development of a real landowning class, there also grew up a new system of tenant occupation or the muhoi system. When a wealthy Kikuyu had completed his purchase of a githaka from a Wanderobo, he would very soon be approached by many Kikuyu members of families still living in the Fort Hall region who were not wealthy enough to go across the Chania and buy land. They would seek permission to become tenants on the new estate with cultivation and building rights but no actual ownership. Those who made such a request would do so because of the much greater fertility of virgin forest and bushland in the trans-Chania compared with land in Fort Hall, with the consequent chance of increased wealth and the possibility of eventually being in a position to purchase land on their own account.

From the new land-owner’s point of view there were also great advantages in accepting such tenants, until such time as his own family increased so much as to need the whole estate for its own use. The presence of tenant families meant that there would be a small community living fairly close together in an itura or village, and so social and religious life would be able to be carried out on a normal basis. Moreover, the presence of ahoi (plural of muhoi) or tenants meant that in such work as hut-building and forest clearing the land-owner could count on man-power to help, for every such tenant had certain obligations to the land-owning family. Thus, as the purchase of estates from the Wanderobo proceeded, the land so acquired became much more rapidly occupied to optimum capacity than would have happened if each estate had only been peopled by the actual land-owner and his own descendants.

This process of acquiring land across the Chania River, in what has become the Kiambu district of today, started, so far as can be estimated, in the mid-sixteenth century, and had proceeded so fast that by the closing decades of the nineteenth century the early travellers and explorers of Kenya, describing Kikuyu land as they saw it, used such terms as ‘as far as the eye could see it was one vast garden’. The Kikuyu district of Kiambu also became known as the granary of the caravans that were moving up and down the country to Uganda, since it was the source of vast quantities of grain, beans, etc. There can be no doubt at all that the Kikuyu population of the Kiambu district of that time was very considerable and that cultivation was very extensive indeed.

By this time too there was only a narrow fringe of forest, varying from one to three miles wide, separating the open Athi plains, where the Masai pastoralists lived, from the Kikuyu agricultural lands that lay behind the fringe. Even the fringe itself—the forest belt—was already occupied and owned by Kikuyu families who had bought it from the Wanderobo. This is shown not only by the evidence of the Kikuyu themselves, but also by the references to Kikuyu fortified villages, within the forest zone, by early travellers. The evidence is reinforced by the fact that the position of a big line of fortresses in what was then the forest fringe is known, and that where these fortified villages stood, huge middens of rubbish and broken potsherds of Kikuyu type can still be identified.

This forest fringe zone of Kikuyu land, with its fortresses, had a pivot point in the region of the Muthaiga suburb of Nairobi and Ngara Road in Parklands, and ran from there along the high country bordering the plains towards the Ngong Hills via Langata Forest. On the other side it ran towards Kiambu, Ruiru, and Thika. The object of the retention of this zone by the Kikuyu as forest was quite simple. The Masai on the plains were their traditional enemies and the zone with the fortified villages formed a kind of ‘Maginot Line' which made raiding expeditions by the Masai much more difficult to accomplish successfully, and therefore enhanced the security of those living in the agricultural land behind the strip.

Although this land was very fully populated, as shown by all early accounts written towards the end of the last century, it must not be imagined that it was entirely clear of forest and bush. It was not. Kikuyu law and custom had already laid down that considerable patches of forest must be left intact to provide timber for building and wood for fuel, and when I was a boy there were many such fuel and timber reserves set aside for the purpose, not by Government authority, but by native law.

Towards the end of the last century, then, at a time when the British were just beginning to move through the land in the days of the British East Africa Company, the Kikuyu were a big tribe living in Nyeri, Muranga (Fort Hall) and Kiambu districts, with the whole of the Kiambu district owned by individuals and families on the basis of actual purchase of huge estates or githaka. The occupants of the Kiambu district, however, were not all of them landowners and the population included many who were ahoi or tenants.

There can be very little doubt that, had the start of white settlement in Kenya come at this particular time instead of later, very little (if any) land in Kiambu, Kabete, and Limuru would have been alienated to white farmers, for the land was carrying a big native population and no government would have tried to dispossess them for the sake of European farming.

Most unfortunately for the Kikuyu and for the future relationship between the British and the Kikuyu, the position had materially changed by 1902 when the first alienation of land for farming took place on a big scale. Four major disasters had ravaged the country in the interval; the great smallpox epidemic, the great rinderpest outbreak, an intense drought with consequent famine and a devastating locust invasion. Each of these disasters is commemorated in the names given to Kikuyu initiation age-groups over this period.

As a direct consequence of these terrible events, the population was very considerably reduced. No exact figures are available, for there was no census and estimates of the death rate vary from 20 to 50 per cent. Thus the marginal Kikuyu lands, that is to say those which had been most recently acquired by purchase in the Kiambu district, (and which were also the areas most seriously affected by these catastrophes) had changed from areas with a big population to ones in which the inhabitants were very sparse. Land that had been under cultivation generally returned—as it does in Africa in a year or two—to bush, and by 1902 it could quite truthfully be said that it was hardly being used at all. This sudden and unprecedented reduction in the population and the alteration from ‘one vast garden’ to virtually uninhabited bushland was not only brought about by the deaths of such large numbers of the inhabitants from smallpox and famine. The reduction was accentuated by the fact that thousands of Kikuyu moved away—temporarily—from the stricken land and went back to live with relations and friends in the Nyeri and Fort Hall districts of Kikuyu country, where the drought and famine had been far less severe and the smallpox epidemic had also been less widespread.

This reduction of the population, however, did not in the least affect the ownership of the land. From the point of view of Kikuyu law and custom in the Kiambu district, land, even then, was not and never had been held on a communal or tribal basis but, as we have seen, was owned by individuals and by their families through the right of inheritance. Those who moved away temporarily did not do so as an act of abandonment of their property, but because dire circumstances made such a move necessary if they were to survive at all. They looked forward to the day when they would return to develop and occupy their estate once more, and before moving away took care that even the younger men and older boys of the family knew the details of the boundaries of the family lands and could identify them. In some cases, where the family was already a large one, one unit of the family—a married son or grandson, a nephew or grand-nephew of the head of the family—was left behind while the rest moved to relatives and friends in Nyeri and Fort Hall districts, or in the remoter regions of Kiambu itself. In other cases only one or two tenant families remained behind on the large estates, pending better times and the return of the land-owning family itself.

It was at this point in Kikuyu history that the first farmer settlers, following on the heels of travellers and of missionary enterprise and the dawn of British administration, arrived upon the scene in search of land for farming and ranching and it was at this point that parts of the Kikuyu territory were alienated for white settlement, mainly during the period 1902-7.

II
MARRIAGE CUSTOMS

From this brief summary of how the Kikuyu came to move into the district now known as Kiambu and how, in the process of doing so—or more correctly as a result of doing so—they altered their law and custom in relation to land tenure and land ownership, we must turn to some other matters of practical importance in relation to the problems which form the basis upon which Mau Mau leaders have been able to build up the present position of mistrust and unrest.

We have already seen that the owners of githaka or estates were always willing to accept ahoi or tenants as occupants of part of their land with the right to cultivate and to build a home, subject to certain conditions which of course included the right to terminate the ‘tenancy’ with due notice. These rights which a muhoi obtained presented no great difficulty in the days when this system was brought into being. In the first place a Kikuyu hut was built of such materials and in such a way that its removal to a new site was an easy matter that could be accomplished in a day or so, and therefore if the owner of the land either gave the tenant notice to quit or requested him to move his home-stead to some other part of the estate, no great difficulty was involved. The walls of the typical Kikuyu hut were built of heavy, hand-hewn planks of cedar and wild olive, while the rafters were made of ant-proof hardwood and the roof was thatched with bracken overlain by a thick layer of grass. No nails were used in the construction and all joints and fastenings were made with vegetable fibres....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I The Kikuyu before the coming of the European
• Part II The Kikuyu Today and the Mau Mau Movement