Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [36]
Which in a way, they were.
SOMETIME IN THE LATE 1940S the General Council of the banned Kikuyu Central Association began a campaign of civil disobedience. They were protesting the British takeover of Kenyan land and the colonial labor laws that forced black Kenyans into a feudal system structured to benefit the eighty thousand white settlers. “No,” Mum says impatiently. “No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Eldoret was not taken over from anyone. There hadn’t been anyone living on it before the white man came. It was too bleak and windy for the natives. The Nandi lived in the warm forests around the plateau. Plus, they weren’t farmers. They were cattle people and they were very independent, very savage, very serious warriors.” Mum pauses. “So we all got on rather well together.” Then she gives voice to a common settler sentiment. “It was not the Nandi who were the problem, it was the Kikuyu who were so difficult.”
Known to themselves as Muingi (the Movement), Muigwithania (the Understanding) or Muma wa Uiguano (the Oath of Unity), the rebellion became known outside Kikuyu circles as the Mau Mau. Possibly the name was an acronym of the Kiswahili phrase “Mzungu Aende Ulya. Mwafrika Apate Uhuru”—“Let the White Man Go Back. Let the African Go Free.” Or perhaps it was a mispronunciation of “Uma, Uma”—“Get out, Get out.”
Members of the Mau Mau bound themselves together through traditional Kikuyu oath rituals that were rumored to involve animal sacrifice, the ingestion of human and animal blood, cannibalism and bestiality. They used traditional Kikuyu weapons—spears, short swords, rhino hide whips, and broad-bladed machetes—and frequently tortured their victims, disemboweled them and hacked them beyond recognition. In early 1952 the bodies of several Kikuyu policemen loyal to the British were discovered mutilated and bound with wire, floating in rivers near Nairobi. Not long after, settler famers near Mount Kenya found their cattle disemboweled in the fields, the tendons in their legs severed.
“No,” Mum says, “we didn’t enjoy the Kikuyu. They were very scary and up to all sorts of horrible, funny business. That made us all very anxious even on the plateau. We sent the servants home before dark, locked the house at night and put chicken wire up over the windows. My father went everywhere with his service revolver and my mother kept a Beretta pistol under her pillow.”
Still, nothing happened to the Huntingfords or to any of their friends. Life went on in all its gauzy, cinematic glory. Then one day in mid October 1952, a note arrived at the Huntingfords’ door carried by one of Babs Owens’s syces. The syce was breathless with fright. A Kikuyu insurgent had appeared on the racecourse. “I can’t think why Babs had to fetch my father for help,” Mum says. “You’d have thought, being Babs, she could have walloped the bloke herself, or bitten his ear off or something, but she didn’t. She sent this note to my father and he was a gentleman, so he grabbed his revolver and off he went, across the road.”
My grandfather kept his back to the ruins and made his way cautiously behind the track. In the unfiltered equatorial light, the crumbling buildings from the Italian prisoner-of-war camp set up spooky blue shadows. “The old jail, all abandoned and gloomy,” Mum says. Suddenly my grandfather saw the alleged Kikuyu dart briefly into the open then sink into the dimness of one of the dissolving buildings. “My father edged his way up to the building and fired a warning shot into the building. He didn’t intend to shoot the chap, obviously, but the bullet ricocheted off the walls and hit him—didn’t kill him. Just a wound. But now it was a police matter and my father was carted off to appear in court.”