The Chief ’s Daughter: Untold perspective of Mau Mau story

The Chief ’s Daughter: Untold perspective of Mau Mau story
The Chief’s Daughter (2014), by author Marjory N Kimani is interesting. Setting the story in the period of the State of Emergency (1952-1960) as she does, the author brings us the other side of the Mau Mau insurgence as told by a progeny of one of the families that came to be known as collaborators, traitors, and more derogatorily as “homeguards” in Central Kenya.

This is the story of a young girl called Nyambura who is born to a colonial chief just before the declaration of the State of Emergency and who comes of age as Kenya gains independence.

I have read many accounts about Mau Mau; from those that attempt piecing together historical facts and render a honest and truthful account, to those that are fictitious and serve to achieve the author’s limited end.

Prof Mutu wa Gethoi in his forward to the book says that told from an adult’s point of view, “most of the stories are not real records devoid of bias.” They should be read with a pinch of salt.  The Chief’s Daughter is semi-autobiographical.

It blends real life experience with fiction. The life of the protagonist Nyambura mirrors that of the author Marjory who happens to be a daughter of a chief born in that tumultuous phase of the liberation struggle and who, although innocent, is caught in the conflict of competing political pursuations.

The events in the story are true, only the names of characters have been fictionalised. Thus Marjory relives her childhood in the character of Nyambura and in doing so she brings to life part of Kenyan history that is best erased from our annals of history — that of families who collaborated with the colonial government and who were rewarded with material wealth and favoured with other goodies.

But it is a heartrending story.   At the height of the insurgence, they were an endangered species who were repeatedly attacked and murdered by Mau Mau fighters because “colonial chiefs like Ikinya, African policemen and home guards were assisting the colonialists against the Mau Mau.”

Nyambura is separated from her family when Ikinya (her father) becomes a target and he has to move the family from Kamatu village in Kagio-ini in Nyeri, near Tumutumu Mission, to safer places where they live in perpetual hiding.

Some of Nyambura’s siblings go to live with relatives while her mother is taken to Kisii to live with a family friend. Young Nyambura soaks these traumatic experiences which unfold before her own eyes, ironically disrupting the education of a child from an otherwise privileged family.

This story is a microcosm of an important streak of Kenya’s past which continues to direct post-independence Kenya. The origin of the Mau Mau tag, unknown even to members since it was not from the Gikuyu vocabulary, is still obscure. Marjory says that “according to folktales, sentries, who had a tendency to use codes, would alert their colleagues by reversing the Gikuyu word ‘uma’ (get out), to mau.”

In school, we were told Mau Mau was a Kiswahili coinage ‘Mzungu arudi Uingereza Mwafrika apate Uhuru’ – which simply translates to “the Whiteman should go back and leave the African to chart his destiny.”

The enduring Kiswahili insertion in the name should not be taken for granted. Historians must look at the relationship between the insurgence and the trade union movement in cosmopolitan Nairobi. Otherwise we may not be able to deflate the claim that Mau Mau was simply a war for land and a class struggle among Kikuyus.

David Anderson in Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire alludes to this possibility when he tells of the cold reception the former squatters in the Rift Valley received when they were repatriated to Central Kenya in 1940s where their land had been expropriated.

Jomo Kenyatta would call Mau Mau “a disease that has been eradicated and must never be remembered.”   At the Kenya National Archives sits 475 skeletons in boxes, said to be Mau Mau victims killed in Nairobi, which were exhumed and used in the trial. But what about those murdered by the colonial government?

For inquiries or to order the book, contact Marjorie on 0722 361100 or email-furahatroupe@gmail.com

Source- the-star.co.ke

The Chief ’s Daughter: Untold perspective of Mau Mau story