Mbiyu Koinange: What intelligence files reveal about man Britain hated

Mbiyu Koinange (right), the Minister of State in the President’s Office, receives Zambian Vice President Reuben Kamanga at the airport ahead of the latter’s ten-day State visit. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • While he didn’t get along well with colonial administrators, Mbiyu also did not seem to get along with English girls either.
  • Prior to the State of Emergency in 1953, Mbiyu was a prominent member of Kenya African Union and the founder of a teachers’ college in Githunguri.
  • Dr Louis Leakey had told the colonial office that Mbiyu was not the logical successor to Jomo and was doing “relatively little harm by his presence in the UK”.

The British hated Peter Mbiyu Koinange. They tapped his telephone line -- “Ambassador 2547” -- intercepted his letters and snooped on his girlfriends.

This was all in a bid to understand the inside story of a secretive operator – thought to be the heart of Mau Mau in London.

If there is one man the British wanted to jail, but never did, it was Peter Mbiyu Koinange, the first Kenyan to graduate with a master’s degree.

ACTIVISM

Intelligence files released by MI5 – the British domestic intelligence agency – are starting to shed light on a man about whose sojourn in London little is known, especially after he left Kenya hoping to register for a PhD at the London School of Economics and continue with his activism together with Jomo Kenyatta.

While he didn’t get along well with colonial administrators, Mbiyu also did not seem to get along with English girls either, perhaps because of his approach. One of them, Audley, decided to advise Mbiyu as a friend on how to go about it in a letter dated April 1953.

“You ought to realise that no English girl at any rate, not even a seasoned woman like myself, will feel at ease and trust you even in fun or playfulness (should) you show any sign of physical advance to her. It is natural enough that Evelyn — and any other girl you treat in the same way — should put up her defences if you behave towards her even in the way in which you have sometimes behaved towards me. And if I have not equally ‘taken offence’ it is perhaps because I like you and also because I felt that, underneath, your needs were very much deeper than a mere sexual need.”

MALE ANIMAL

‘Close friendship’

She added: “I say all this because I feel that you do not understand that with the complete freedom English girls enjoy, there is also a very strong wariness of the male animal.”

But Mbiyu had a “close friendship” with a West African girl named Eugenie Dorcee, according to MI5. Dorcee was a great supporter of Mbiyu until she returned to Enugu, Nigeria, to look after her sick mother. It was this girl who raised suspicion that Mbiyu’s letters were being tampered with by MI5, forcing him to write short non-controversial letters. As such, we might not know much from Mbiyu’s thinking during the emergency years.

In a letter dated July 1953 to Mbiyu, Dorcee said: “I am enclosing your last envelope in order that you may see how it was handled. I never knew that it was legal for mail to be censored during peace time – what does this mean really? Do remember that the darkest hour always comes before the dawn- Love, Eugenie.”

EXPOSED

When the intelligence opened this letter, they were surprised that their underhand deals had been exposed. “Suspicion of the person concerned has been aroused,” a letter from state agents indicated after Dorcee filed a complaint at the post office and informed Mbiyu.

Prior to the State of Emergency in 1953, Mbiyu was a prominent member of Kenya African Union and the founder of a teachers’ college in Githunguri. So highly placed was Mbiyu that he was put under surveillance by M15 in a task given to a top sleuth, H. Loftus Brown – the man who also trailed Kwame Nkrumah (later President of Ghana) and George Padmore.

“Discreetly obtain UK address and particulars of foreign visas and documents of interest,” a letter dated July 1952 by M15 to immigration office stated. But the Mbiyu Koinange files have some interesting revelations too, especially on the death of Lewis Mungai Njonjo, a brother to Charles Njonjo.

In a letter to Mbiyu, an informant says that Lewis shot himself during the State of Emergency when his father, Chief Josiah Njonjo, was in London. By then, Lewis was the acting chief and was pestered by the local District Officer to identify locals who were to be killed. After he refused, they dismissed him as a Mau Mau sympathiser and he shot himself in protest.

HOMEGUARDS

“People are being removed from their homes, tortured and killed by homeguards and police,” the letter signed by a Mr Mugo said. But it was his dalliance in London with Fenner Brockway, the leader of British Centre for Colonial Freedom, that was also a cause of concern.

Brockway was an ardent socialist and anti-war activist whose friendship with the Senior Chief Koinange family was well known. At the onset of Mau Mau rebellion, when most of the Koinanges were arrested over the murder of Senior Chief Waruhiu – a murder that triggered Kenya’s State of Emergency – it was Brockway who organised for a Queen’s Counsel to represent the family in court.

Actually, when the State of Emergency was declared on October 21, 1952, Koinange had angered the British government for dismissing the move, in an article he published in the Daily Worker, as “unnecessary” and that “the whole business was intended to serve the white supremacists and keep Africans in perpetual helotry.”

Charles Karuga, his only brother who had not been arrested, wrote to Mbiyu on October 22, 1952, according to archival letters, asking him to return: “I am very worried of the father and the three brothers,” he said. “Owing to my official work, we need your help to look for the legal defence of the father and explain their case to advocates.

UNHAPPY

“If you can come and request some advocates here like Mr Amin or Mr Mangat, or bring some good advocates from England, it would be good. Otherwise I do not know what will happen. Your school also has no leader, our mothers are unhappy and your wife also…if you have no money send telegram.”

Mbiyu was actually broke at this time. In April 1952, he had asked KAU for more money. According to the intelligence records, KAU had been collecting “large sums at their recent meetings, held ostensibly for this purpose of financing Peter Koinange.”

There was fear that Jomo Kenyatta was embezzling most of the money given to him. “At one meeting the amount realised was £200; clearly a lot of this is finding its way into others people’s pockets. Jomo Kenyatta is suspect in this connexion,” wrote Security Liaison Officer for East Africa.

The intelligence feared Mbiyu after he was heard telling George Padmore, a leading Panafricanist, in April 1952 that he intended to fly back to Kenya to start a campaign of non-cooperation similar to that of Convention Peoples Party of Kwame Nkrumah. But much of the fear was that Mbiyu was a sympathiser of communist parties.

COMMUNIST PARTY

As early as 1947, the colonial government had started reporting of Mbiyu’s dalliance with the Communist Party, especially Michael Carritt and Maud Rogerson. This was the same time he was contemplating to start a PhD programme at the London School of Economics.

But when the colonial government started checking his accounts, and who was sending money to him, they realised that besides his father and KAU, Mbiyu was also receiving cash from AB Patel and SG Amin, two Asians who continued to finance the freedom movement. Patel was by then a member of the Legislative Council.

He had another good side too. When Jomo left London for Kenya, Mbiyu took it upon himself to keep checking on Edna Kenyatta, Jomo’s other wife. In one of the letters Edna wrote to Mbiyu, she appreciated his generosity to Peter Magana, her son.

“I have bought him winter shoes, boots and socks, and ordered some underwear for him. He is very well except the stubborn cough which doesn’t seem to worry him much except at night… I have not been very well and the doctor too put me on a special diet -- I have to feed like a baby, every two hours, chiefly on milky foods and fish… a friend of Jomo has asked me for the return of a book he loaned him: ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’”, a philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. That shows the kind of books that Jomo was reading.

NUISANCE

The best description of Jomo came from a letter dated October 15, 1947 to Mbiyu by Dinah. He described him as a “wily bird – I think he must have accepted that government nominated post as a sort of nuisance against arrest.”

The British in Kenya did not know how to rank intelligence on Mbiyu. In 1953, MI5 wrote a letter asking whether Mbiyu’s case is “one which might suitably be handled in B.1.B. In the MI5, there were several sections B1(a) was for Special Agents, B1(b) Special Research and B1(c) Sabotage. What they knew up to that point was that Mbiyu was showing “little enthusiasm for communism.”

“Koinange would undoubtedly be a far greater security danger as a leader of the Kikuyu than he is now as a propagandist among Europeans, but if he did return to Kenya and cause trouble, the government could arrest him under the Emergency Regulations,” wrote MI5’s H. Loftus Brown.

In May 1953, there were secret talks in the London colonial office on whether to extradite Mbiyu back to Kenya. But the Intelligence Adviser to the government, AM MacDonald, counselled that there would be no advantage “but considerable disadvantage in acting until such time as the Kenyatta appeal has been decided.”

LOGICAL SUCCESSOR

Actually, Dr Louis Leakey had told the colonial office that Mbiyu was not the logical successor to Jomo and was doing “relatively little harm by his presence in the UK”.

“If we are to bring Peter Mbiyu back to trial in Kenya, he would undoubtedly cite Kenyatta and half of the inmates of Kajiado as defence witnesses. This would undoubtedly result in a miniature Kapenguria trial,” the chief Native Commissioner told the Governor.

The governor was told that, if the Mau Mau continued to be stimulated by Mbiyu’s presence in the UK, “we should bring him back and break him, provided always that the case is sufficiently strong to ensure conviction.”

But Mbiyu was never brought back. Instead, he became a figure of hate by the British during the Lancaster talks, was an adviser to Nkrumah in Ghana and later became Kenya’s most powerful Cabinet minister under Jomo.

Had he calculated his moves, he would have led Kenya – perhaps.

[email protected] @johnkamau1