Children of the Mau Mau don’t want to be compensated; they seek the truth

This Mau Mau fight for compensation from the British brings to mind stories from my childhood and raises interesting questions about who is going to be paid and for what.

My father and many of his friends were arrested in Nairobi during Operation Anvil, I think. This was a massive vacuuming up of all young men from certain tribes.
They were locked up in gulag-type camps all over the country where they were beaten, tortured and forced into hard labour.

My father was not an innocent victim; he was a Mau Mau fighter. The miracle was that he wasn’t among the 15,000 suspects who were hanged during the emergency.

I am, of course, not interested in compensation. I don’t know whether the core Mau Mau would touch the white man’s dime either.

For me the compensation is in the release of the complete records of the gulags and the truth about what want went on there.

It is important for me and my children, and their children and the inheritors of this land to understand our history and what racism did to us, even as we appreciate the benefits of colonialism.

But the story of the men in struggle has been told many times. Less well known is the story of the women. I wonder at the situation of my mother, herself a child taking care of another child, facing the might of a brutal empire on one hand, and a bloodthirsty insurgency on the other.

Women like my mother were herded into fortified villages where they were forced to dig defensive moats and perform other communal punishment.

The villages were also surrounded with spikes and walls where homeguards with arrows and guns stood watch. The whole idea was to deny the insurgents the support of the villagers, which they needed for food and moral support.

The villagers were let out every morning to go to the fields. In the evening, they would troop back to the stockade where they were locked in for the night.

I have heard many fantastic stories about a young woman staying the night to guard her garden from monkeys, risking death from wild animals, and they were many in those days, insurgents and agents of colonial government.

One of my uncles, a major-general no less, gave his eldest son to our neighbours from the north. When he came back years later, he had changed his name to Abdi, and for the last 50 years has been the only Muslim in my village.

The homeguards killed, maimed and brutalised women, left defenceless either by the slaughter of their men or their mass incarceration. I think part of the bitterness of independence is that it is these same homeguards who benefitted from independence.

My mother waited for her husband for seven years. But freedom came at the expense of what they had fought for in the first place: He was stripped of his lands, as were all Mau Mau. A good part of the land on which they settled was bought by his wife, clever girl, from wealth she had quietly accumulated by working, saving and fighting off hyenas in the dead of the night. And that, too, they had to share with the offspring of the major-general.

My admiration for the Mau Mau generation was not that they fought at all, but for the speed at which they moved on. They got jobs, they planted coffee and other cash crops which they had been barred from doing, they raised money and bought settler farms. In 15 years, they had completely taken over the white man’s economy.

At some point, somebody had decided to shoot my father. He died with a huge collection of birdshot on his back many years later. He never bothered to go to hospital to have it cut out.

So, I ask myself: If the British decide to pay us, what will they pay us for? Which of our many pains will deserve the thirty pieces? Compensation is not for all of us.

For me, the real payment is finally getting the true and complete records of those gulags. And, between you and I, it is not to find out what the British did to my father that I want them: I want to find out how he took it.

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