The Story of a Mau Mau Detainee

Those of us who read Mau Mau Detainee when it first came out in 1963 admired the triumphant ring of hope rising above the sober and restrained tone of its rendering. The hope reflected the mood of the time. We in Kenya were emerging from more than 80 years of British colonial domination, the last ten of which were marked by a state of emergency that had seen the suspension of any legal restraints against the daily lynching of Africans. Those ten years, since 1952, had seen thousands driven into concen tration camps; thousands others killed and maimed; and countless others having their lives and property disrupted beyond recovery.

The same ten years had seen acts of incredible heroism and courage by ordinary men and women who, grouping and regrouping under Mau Mau, waged a modern-day Davidian struggle against the Albion Goliath. They had run into the mountains and in the forests and for a number of years they had liberated sections of the country around Mount Kenya and Nyandarwa ridges. There was a period between 1952 and 1955 when even the British and the colonial state had to admit that there were two parallel administrations in the country, particularly in Central Kenya: British by day, Mau Mau’s by night. The first free Kenya parliament was not the one declared with the permission of the British in 1963 but the one declared in defiance of the British by Mau Mau in 1953 on Mount Kenya with Dedan Kimathi as the first Prime Minister. In the wider politics of Africa and the world, it was truly Mau Mau that broke the back of the British Empire it being the first armed struggle against colonialism anywhere in the Empire. Even for Algeria, the War for National Independence was to break out two years after Mau Mau.