Suffering without bitterness: Kenyatta’s prison letters

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CHRONOLOGY

1952 Operation Jock Stock. The colonial administration goes for natives thought to be sympathetic to the Mau Mau uprising. Among the key political leaders arrested are Jomo Kenyatta, Fred Kubai and Paul Ngei. This is also the same year that Elizabeth Alexandra Mary ascends to the English Monarchy following the death of her father.

1955 Heart Trouble: Mzee’s heart condition gets worse, attracting the attention of his detainers. The then North Eastern DC P de Robeck, in his 1955 Annual Lokitaung Report, wrote that Kenyatta’s heart rate was so high that he was expected to “snuff it” at any moment.

1957 Attempt On Mzee’s Life:Kariuki Chotara, a minor who had been sent to prison in Lokitaung after being convicted of murder, attempts to kill Kenyatta by stabbing him with a knife during breakfast.
1959 House Arrest: Mzee is released from Lokitaung and put under house arrest in Maralal. He was to report to the DC, never enter private buildings, and he was to shop for only three days a week for two hours from his monthly stipend.

This is the first Kenyatta Day that is not Kenyatta Day. It is also, courtesy of the new Constitution, the first Mashujaa Day, set aside to honour the heroes who fought for Kenya’s independence.

But it would never have been Kenyatta Day in the first place had plans to murder the future president while in prison succeeded. Kenyatta, whom London’s Daily Telegraph had ignorantly described as a “small-scale African Hitler”, was arrested together with Fred Kubai, Kung’u Karumba, Achieng’ Oneko, Bildad Kaggia and Paul Ngei under what was called “Operation Jock Stock” on October 20, 1952.

It was the same year that Elizabeth Alexandra Mary learnt she would be England’s Queen Elizabeth II while on a holiday in Kenya.

Kenyatta & Co are famously known as the “Kapenguria Six”, and Judge Ransley Thacker, who tried them, received a £20,000 (Sh2.8 million at current exchange rates) bribe from the colonial government to ensure they were imprisoned, according to Imperial Reckoning by Harvard historian Caroline Elkins.

In a trial that had no jurors, Judge Thacker found them guilty of jointly managing the Mau Mau, a proscribed society that had “conspired to murder all white residents of Kenya.”

“You have persuaded them in secret to murder, burn and commit atrocities which will take many years to forget,” Judge Thacker told Kenyatta, who had all along denounced the Mau Mau.

All six were sentenced to seven years’ hard labour at Lokitaung Prison, which Ngei called the “St Lucifer’s Monastery of Lokitaung” as there were no “women, alcohol and cigarettes”.

Kenya’s history has invariably centred on the Kapenguria Six. Lokitaung, however, had other inmates, and one of these was Kariuki Chotara, a convicted murderer who almost killed Kenyatta; and Waruhiu Itote, who saved his life.

Kenyatta never had a rosy time. First were the age disparities: Kubai was 35; Karumba 32; Oneko 32; Kaggia 30 and Ngei, the Alliance High School and Makerere University graduate, the youngest at just 29. Kenyatta was in his 60s.

Due to age, he was excluded from crushing boulders and digging graves on rocky ground and made the camp cook. This fuelled the inmates’ simmering hatred for him.

Kenyatta’s only contact with the outside world was through letters, which helped keep his sanity inside the 12-by-20-feet cell of bare stone floor, with a sisal mat and single blanket, as his biographer Jeremy Murray-Brown informs us.

The bare stonewalls had a window so high he could hardly peer out and see the thorn covered hillsides.

Prisoners were required to write letters in Kiswahili or English. Kenyatta’s, which sympathetic guards sneaked out, were in Kikuyu. Most of the letters were exchanges with Margaret, his eldest daughter whom he reassured: “Your great love for me consoles my heart.…”

The letters were censored. So politics was avoided. Most dwelled on requests for vitamin pills and special items to improve his diet, and the latest news about Kenya.

But one inmate came across Margaret’s address and began penning her letters detailing the prison’s maddening solitude in “flowery and passionate language full of neat Kiswahili phrases”, Murray-Brown writes.

The correspondence continued until one day when Kenyatta was handed Margaret’s “replies” by mistake. Murray-Brown tells us that Kenyatta read the letters, but on realising he wasn’t the addressee, turned to Ngei.

“Hi, what are you going to say now. I’ve caught you, ehee! You’ve kept mum for a long time and you are a son in-law... and never said a thing, hey?” Murray-Brown quotes Kenyatta as having told Ngei.

In a letter to Margaret, Ngei wrote: “Sister, every one of my friends here nearly passed out when I told them the story.”
Margaret had moved to Nairobi at the time, and she was living under the care of an Indian bookbinder who supported the freedom struggle. She wrote to daddy, and Kenyatta replied in January 1956.

My dear child, Wambui,
“…. When I got your letter, my heart was filled with joy to know that you are in good health…. As you know, the last letter I sent you was about the end of 1954. When I didn’t get an answer I was full of fear. I just put my hope in Almighty God, for He knows all.”

Kenyatta’s farm in Gatundu had then been grabbed by the colonial government and allocated to an agricultural college.

He wrote to Margaret:

“Everything that is being done there is according to the will of the Almighty God, so I see it as good, especially the way the shambas are being used for teaching agriculture and animal husbandry. This is very useful for those who are learning to help improve the life of the people. Let us thank God to guard us and keep us in his grace, with mercy and kindness.”
Au revoir.
I’m your loving father, J.K.

By then, Kenyatta’s family had split up, and his Hudson car left rotting in a shrubbery.

My dear child,
“…. As you say, I know it’s very hard for the children to be separated with their parents and to be left desolate and orphaned to face the troubles of the world…. I have no doubt all this has happened according to God’s plan to teach his children to forsake the evil of hatred, and to follow goodness according to the righteousness and faith in God.

Greet all those at home, and the children and the womenfolk. If you write to Muigai (his son), give him my greetings. God willing we shall meet again.”

Health problems posed constant danger to Kenyatta’s life as he refused medication from government doctors, preferring what Margaret sent.

The then North Eastern DC P de Robeck, in his 1955 Annual Lokitaung Report, wrote that Kenyatta’s heart rate was so high that he was expected to “snuff it” at any moment.

Robbeck even kept a ready-written telegram in his drawer to secure the immediate visit of a high-powered doctor “and an unprejudiced post-mortem,” Elizabeth Watkins’ writes in her book, Jomo’s Jailor.

Kenyatta also suffered from eczema, a persistent skin condition that was aggravated by his duties as a cook. He went down with eczema, a situation worsened by a smallpox vaccination that made him even more ill.

He wrote Margaret after recovery in 1956.

“… My whole body was filled with much pain and constant itching as if someone were covered all over his body with ‘stinging nettles’…. The intense itching almost drove me crazy. Remember, in this world, God sends to men trials of various sorts, and he who overcomes is he who endures with a pure heart free from anger and complaining.”

It is unclear whether it was Kenyatta’s discovery of Ngei’s correspondence with his daughter, or their frequent arguments over food rations and tasks that triggered the rift that saw fellow inmates gang up against him.

“They would ridicule him and shout obscenities when he went to the latrines” writes Murray-Brown.

The Lokitaung Annual Report for 1954 mentioned the inmates’ long drawn antagonism. Part of it reads: “Ngei was arraigned for having shouted at Kenyatta that he was a thief and had been nothing but an agricultural labourer in England.”

Ngei had complained about some money the inmates’ relatives had sent during the Kapenguria Trial, and which Kenyatta received but, allegedly, never delivered. “There was only circumstantial evidence,” Watkins writes, “Kenyatta’s account with the authorities was full and those of the others were empty. The hatred between the prisoners was serious.”

Kenyatta described himself as an “author and anthropologist” in prison records, and his fellow inmates spent idle time tormenting him about “his eight degrees” and how he managed to write Facing Mount Kenya.

The prisoners even formed a party — the National Democratic Party — held elections and distributed positions: Kaggia (president), Karumba (VP), Kubai (Secretary), Chotara (Treasurer) and Ngei as Assistant treasurer.

Lokitaung got a new prisoner in 1954, a “cheerful old-fashioned Kikuyu” named General China (Waruhiu Itote). The 32-year-old was arrested sporting a turtleneck pullover, sandals and khaki shorts on July 15, that year.

He had a bullet wound in his throat. Two years earlier, China had sought Kenyatta’s blessings in his Gatundu home before taking to the forest to join freedom fighters Dedan Kimathi, General Stanley Mathenge, General “Cargo’ and Field Marshal Musa Mwariama.

Colonial police officers Bernard Ruck and Ian Henderson arrested China after a bungled raid for guns at a police station in Nyeri.

A deal was struck out. General China was to convince Mau Mau chieftains to surrender. He wrote 26 surrender letters, but the Mau Mau generals didn’t budge. The British hoped to win with words what 6,000 regulars and 24,000 police had failed to win by war.

Having failed his end of the bargain, General China was tried and sentenced to death by Judge J L Mac Duff, even though he maintained that he was planning to surrender in response to the government’s amnesty to forest fighters.

China’s plea was not accepted, and his sentence was commuted to “indefinite detention”. At Lokitaung, Gen China was held in solitary confinement for a year, and had to sing to announce his arrival to Kenyatta who, in the songs, was instructed to clear his throat to acknowledge he got the message. Kenyatta would then sing a reply, writes Murray-Brown.

When General China was released from confinement in 1955, Kenyatta became his tutor, teaching China the spelling, usage and pronunciation of two English words a day.

While schooling in England, Kenyatta had met Dinah Stock, the secretary of the British Centre Against imperialism at a rally he attended in Trafalgar Square.

Murray-Brown notes that the friendship — with Kenyatta holing up in her flat in Camden County — “lifted Kenyatta out of his student world of petty debt and into political maturity”.

Stock edited Kenyatta’s essays contained in Facing Mount Kenya. At the outbreak of World War II, they moved from London to West Sussex, where Kenyatta met Edna Grace Clark, a school teacher.

He married her in 1942. Their son, Peter Magana — now 67 — was born in 1943, sharing a birth year with English rocker Mick Jagger and American film star Robert De Niro.

Kenyatta kept contact with his English family and a 1957 letter from Edna states that “the news from you gave great comfort and consolation to my soul”.

Facing Mount Kenya had sold some 9,000 copies, and Stock suggested that a portion of royalties be used for Magana’s tuition.

In a letter to Stock, he wrote:
“I entirely agree with you that the money should be used to help Magana with his education. I will certainly make the necessarily arrangements with the people concerned.”

Although Stock sent the letter to Edna, no money arrived, writes Murray-Brown.

Stock visited Kenya in 1953 from India, where she was teaching. Kenyatta would renew contacts with Stock, who later graced Uhuru celebrations as a guest of the state. He wrote to her on March 15, 1955, the year scrabble became a game:

Dear Friend,
Just a few lines to send my salaams and to let you know that I am keeping well. I live hundreds of miles away from home; the prison is built on a small village called Lokitaung, an isolated kind of place in the heart of Turkana. The surrounding country is very dry and totally useless for cultivation — it is in fact a desert. We have a few books and reading helps break the monotony of prison life.
I would like to hear from you and to know that you are well.
Yours,
Jomo.

Stock sent him books on the world’s major religions that Kenyatta described as the “only means available to satisfy intellectual hunger” in a January 1956 letter in which he requested for the English translation of the Holy Quran, which Stock duly sent.

But “The continuous bullying of Kenyatta resulted in his depression, and it was China, alone among the convicts, who provided him with friendship,” writes Watkins, detailing how the prisoners went on a two-day hunger strike protesting about “the filthy habits of Kenyatta, who is a cook”.

The inmates were also agitating for prison reforms, and sent a letter to the Observer newspaper, which was published on June 8, 1958. It read in part:
“We the political prisoners of Lokitaung are desirous that the world and Her Majesty’s government in the United Kingdom (should know) that we are being subjected to treatment which we think is not given to any other human beings in any part of the world.”

Comparing the prison to a Nazi concentration camp, the letter outlined, among others, brutal beatings and ridiculous food rations.

Kenyatta and General China didn’t sign the Observer letter, further escalating the rift that pitted them in one camp, the other five in another.

Watkins writes that they refused to share room with him, and Kenyatta had to be allocated his own cell.

General China got even closer to Kenyatta when he informed the DC of a plot fellow inmates were hatching to kill Kenyatta.

The plot was scuttled and from that day, China became Kenyatta’s bodyguard, besides that small duty of throwing government medication meant for Kenyatta down the latrine pit, writes Murray-Brown.

A new inmate brought the number of prisoners to eight in March 1957, the year Dedan Kimathi was executed. He was Kariuki Chotara, who had been convicted of three murders but could not be hanged as he was only 16.

“His arrival was to give the other convicts another opportunity to attempt to murder Kenyatta. The attempt was nearly very successful,” notes Watkins.

The Lokitaung Annual Report of 1957 states how, during the last week of July, the convict Karioki Chotara (sic) attacked Kenyatta in the compound.

He went for him with a knife during breakfast as Kenyatta went to fetch water, luckily the attacker’s trousers was caught in a splinter of wood on the table. Kenyatta caught his attacker’s arm.

He shouted to China, other inmates tried to restrain China from saving Kenyatta, but he threw them off and grabbed Chotara’s knife.

Chotara’s trousers upset the table, spilling their breakfast porridge over them as they struggled on the ground until the wardens ran to separate them.

“The potential murderer was incited by the others; since he was too young to receive the death sentence. What difference would another murder make?” Watkins poses.

Chotara was transferred to Lodwar and sentenced to solitary confinement, penal diet and 12 strokes. This would explain why Chotara languished in the equivalent of political Siberia during Kenyatta’s presidency, only to reappear during Moi’s reign as a rabid Kanu supporter.

News of the attempt on his father’s life reached Margaret. Kenyatta wrote her:

“Envy and hatred had no mercy… now, calm your heart, for although the attack was planned secretly and craftily, it didn’t achieve its aim. Almighty God brought me out of this danger…. I was not badly injured…. I think you are aware that envy, desire and ignorance are a trouble to many people in the world.”

Surprisingly, General China, in his biography, Mau Mau General, mentions neither how the inmates almost killed Kenyatta nor how he saved the future president’s life.
In April 1959, Kenyatta was released from Lokitaung and put under house arrest at the hillside market town of Maralal, 144 kilometres South of Lodwar.

He was to report to the DC, never enter private buildings, and he was to shop for only three days a week for two hours from his £6 (Sh864 at current exchange rates) monthly stipend.

In 1961, Margaret and Mama Ngina visited Kenyatta in Maralal, with fresh supply of provisions. It was the first time he saw his family since 1952.
Kenyatta later wrote that her visit made it “the first really happy Christmas for eight years. This teaches us that nothing lasts forever, events come and go as night succeeds day.”
He wrote to Edna in July 1960, the year Kenya’s State of Emergency was lifted: “It is comforting to see that there are clear signs everywhere that Kenya is slowly and surely marching to her freedom.”

And sure it did as Kenya gained her independence three years later, with Kenyatta as Prime Minister and later president.