A Writer’s Tribute to a Kenyan Hero

I first heard of him in 1963. His book Mau M au Detainee had just come out. It was immediately the centre of a critical rage and storm. The European managers then in the offices of the Nation News papers would not allow the African staff to review it. They handled it themselves in order to smear the book and its author and his celebration of Mau Mau resistance. The European bourgeois and the settler establishment in Kenya were angry and bitter, not simply because Oxford University Press, a pillar of the British Literary publishing world, had brought out a book on Mau Mau; not even because Margery Perham, a liberal doyenne of the British academic establishment, had written a favourable foreword; but because an African, a Kenyan native, had dared to write openly and proudly about Mau Mau as a national liberation movement. They, together with the brainwashed African intellectuals who later reviewed the book in academic journals, were stunned. They did not know how to cope with Kariũki. How could they handle a Kenyan whom they had not managed to cage and tame in the corridors of their hollow colonial schools; a Kenyan who looked to his past and to his involvement in Mau Mau, not with guilt, not with any qualifying apologia, but with a positive glow of pride and achievement; a Kenyan who could state that Mau Mau oath to liberate Kenya from 60 years of British imperialist robbery of a people’s soil and soul turned him into a man, a complete man, restored to his humanity? Kariũki had refused to be defined in a framework of values set by the oppressor and it was with a contemptuous tone of triumph that he wrote of his enemies: Lord forgive them for they know not what they are doing!

Later in 1964 I met him in his office in Nairobi, near the law courts, the present site of the Kenyatta Conference Centre. He was then not only the MP for Nyandarua North but also leader of the National Youth Service. I wanted to write an article on him, the first in a projected series on people’s representatives (MPs) at work. I wanted him to give me a day when I could follow him touring his constituency. My novel, Weep Not, Child, had just been published and we talked about it.