Villagers want Mau Mau veterans to apologise for brutal killings

The ghosts of the Mau Mau rebellion still haunt central Kenya -- 46 years after independence.

In June this year, former Mau Mau fighters trooped to London to file a suit against the British who crushed their rebellion more than 50 years ago.

But the former rebels now have to confront their history at home and the relatives and friends of the Kenyans they killed, maimed and abused.

As the uprising reached its peak in the early 1950s, the rebels opened a new battlefront in the villages; demanding that villagers take an oath of allegiance to “freedom and the African soil”.

This put them on a collision course with many of their own people who had embraced Christianity – the white man’s religion – and who were chopped to pieces with machetes and axes for refusing to take the oath.

In Karuthi village, Othaya, the Sunday Nation found some of the relatives and friends of the Christians the Mau Mau killed.

Simon Waweru Mariano, the fourth-born son of Mariano Wachira Gichohi, said his father, a devout Roman Catholic, was killed for refusing to take the oath.

The rebels then tracked his mother Natalina Gakui to the mission compound where she had taken refuge with her five children and murdered her as well. They also killed Mariano’s two friends – Domenic Nyota, a Catholic catechism teacher, and Joseph Gacheru Mwaniki.

The freedom fighters chopped off the arms and legs of all the four before slitting their throats. Then they burnt down their houses, erasing all records of their lives, including their photographs.

“That was how we dealt with traitors,” said 84-year-old Mwangi Kaguma, an ex-Mau Mau fighter. He said refusing to take the oath of allegiance was punishable by death.

But Mariano’s son says his father was never a traitor and did not deserve the brutal death. “My father was not a home guard. He was just a Christian who bought land to put up a church and school; that was why they killed him,” Simon Waweru said.

The British imposed a state of emergency on Kenya on October 20, 1952. It was lifted in 1960.

Scholars estimate the African civilian dead at 50,000, victims of both the British and the Mau Mau. Thirty-two Europeans and 26 Asian civilians were killed.

Local Mau Mau fighters in Karuthi were not happy with Mariano Wachira Gichohi’s Christian activism, his son said, and were incensed when he bought a piece of land in the protected colonial village on which he erected a small church made of banana leaves. The makeshift church doubled as a primary school.

And Mariano and his family refused to take the Mau Mau oath. The rebels tried several times to kill Mariano.

On December 9, 1952, they lured him out of the village with a letter allegedly written by a British district officer summoning him to Nyeri. He set off for the town about 25 km away. It was a long walk, and the preacher took along his trusted friend, Domenic Nyota, and fellow villager Joseph Gacheru Mwaniki. They never returned.

His son said the rebels attacked the three men with machetes and axes just before they crossed the River Chinga.

Mariano was the first to die. But first, his killers gave him a last chance to renounce his faith and take the oath. He refused.

“They cut him up, chopped off his fingers and toes, and then slit his throat,” said his son.

The rebels dumped the bodies in the river and weighted Mariano’s down with a stone so it lay on the river bed for more than a month. After the bodies were finally retrieved, they were buried at Gikondi parish church, about 35 km from Nyeri.

A local priest hid Mariano’s wife Natalina and her five children inside a missionary compound, but the rebels tracked her down and killed her in a trap as well. Today, 50 years after the rebellion was crushed, a group of Christians in Nyeri have joined relatives of the slain Karuthi villagers to demand an apology from the Mau Mau veterans.

They say Mariano and his band of Christians may not have taken up arms against the colonialists, but they were not traitors and did not deserve to die in such a manner.

“They were not traitors. Why did they kill them? Why would freedom fighters kill the people they were fighting for?” asked 73-year-old Teobaldo Macharia, a retired teacher who was an altar boy when Mariano was murdered.

But the Mau Mau veterans say they have no apologies to make. Christians like Mariano, his wife and two friends were enemies of the freedom struggle and, as such, they deserved to die. The Mau Mau Veterans Association says it is ready to face the Christians in court.

“We have no apologies to make. We killed to protect ourselves,” said veterans’ spokesman Gitu wa Kahengeri. “Let them go to court. We will face them.”

The Christians will not give up easily. They argue that the veterans ought to at least acknowledge the role Mariano and his band of Christians played in the struggle for independence.

“They should recognise them for putting up the first schools in the country,” said Christine Nyambura, the chairwoman of St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Karuthi, Othaya, the church Mariano helped build.

“What schools?” asked Mr Njogu, adding that many children of Mau Mau fighters were barred from attending the schools because they were said to be children of the devil.

On December 9, 1995, the then Nyeri Archbishop, the late Nicodemus Kirima, consecrated the freshly painted graves of Mariano, Natalina, Domenic and Joseph, and last year church authorities allowed St Joseph’s church in Karuthi to erect a monument in their memory outside the church they helped found.

Every year on December 9, the church holds a memorial service for the four who are now revered by Catholics of Karuthi as martyrs of the faith. Some even hope they will one day be made saints.