How little known squatters inspired gallant Mau Mau to fight colonialists

After being lured out of their ancestral homes with force and false promises, the peasants anxiously waited for the wrongs to be corrected but in vain. When they could wait any longer, they started a silent rebellion, at first trusting the law was on their side.

But they could not afford the price of skewed justice that was being administered by the colonial administrators they wanted to eject out. Slowly but surely the dislike hardened, blossoming into open revolt that gifted the other militants the script and the ingredients to engage the government in open war.

Despite their sustained revolt against the British colonialists the peasants who pioneered a new wave of violent opposition to the colonial administration in Olenguruone have been largely overlooked by history, while forest freedom fighters are glorified.

The echoes of these peasants’ struggles as they resisted the European settler Community are still audible, although they throb faintly like muffled drums.

However, this settlement scheme is the test that redefined oath administration, a tactic later adopted by Mau Mau to establish terrifying bonds to bind hundreds of thousands of peasants in armed resistance.

Historian David Anderson, the author of Histories of the Hanged, details how the squatters fuelled dissent. According to Anderson, European settlers sent scouts to recruit labourers into their farms in the Rift Valley and the Mau escarpments from Central Province after the end of the First World War with promises they would cultivate their own crops on the European farms.

By 1920, about 70,000 peasants had migrated from Central to the Rift Valley where they were squatting on European farms. This movement had started in 1904.

Simple village boy

Elspeth Huxley, author of Whiteman’s Country explains that the Africans were allowed to live on the farms, where they could also graze their animals on condition that they gave labour to Europeans at subsidised rates.

By the 1930s, the number of squatters from Central Province on European farms in the Rift Valley had swollen to 150,000. This was at a time whites adopted mechanised farming and had little use for African labour whose numbers were swelling, creating tension as the demand for additional grazing area and land for cultivation increased.

The settlers also started limiting the number of livestock to be reared on their land by the squatters in 1945, decreeing that each family was to be allocated not more than two acres for cultivation.Whiteman’s Country

  “This plunged the squatter’s into economic despair as the annual family income dwindled from Sh1, 400 per year in 1942, to Sh300 in 1946. Squatter contracts that came up for renewal were cancelled and the affected families were supposed to get rid of all their animals,” Anderson writes.

In protest the squatters withdrew their labour and in 1946 widespread strikes erupted as workers in more than 400 settler farms rejected the tenancy contracts.

In retaliation a number of settlers started ejecting the unco-operating tenants in a move that saw more than 100,000 squatters evicted from the Rift Valley. They were repatriated to Central Province that was also witnessing a land crisis occasioned by acute shortage of the resource.

Part of this shortage, Central Province politicians felt, had been brought about by the seizure of all the best agricultural land by the settlers since 1904 leading to loss that was estimated to have been 60,000 acres. Citing veterinary diseases, the colonial authorities prohibited the expelled squatters from taking away their livestock from the Rift Valley to Central. They were forced to sell their animals at throwaway prices in a flooded market.

But even as the tens of thousands were evicted from the Rift Valley, the Government sought to establish a pilot settlement scheme in Olenguruone, in bamboo forest in Nakuru in 1941.

Anderson says 11,000 squatter families from Kiambu were selected for the scheme. To pave way for tea estates in Limuru and Tigoni, the settlers evicted the families in 1900.

The settlement scheme faced immediate problems as the squatters rejected instructions by agricultural experts on how to farm their land, arguing that since the portions had been allocated to them to compensate for their lost ancestral land in Kiambu, the Government had no business ordering them around. 

Through their leader, Samuel Koina Gitebi, the squatters challenged the Government by filing cases in courts even as he established links with a political party, Kenya Africa Union.

While presenting the grievances of his people Gitebi had sworn that colonial chiefs, Josiah Njonjo and Koinange WA Mbiyu who had ascertained that they had really owned land in Kiambu, had vetted the Olenguruone squatters.

Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau 1903-1963, explains that this was the main reason the squatters were opposed to dictation by the agricultural officers as they perceived themselves to be owners of land, and not ahoi (beggars).

Unhappy with what they interpreted as the Government’s blackmail, the Olenguruone squatters started a new brand of resistance by administering oath in 1944 where partakers included young men, women and even children.

Militant oath

Conventionally, oath administration was a solemn affair reserved for old men. The new oath introduced in Olungurone was according to historians more militant and threatened anybody who betrayed its cause or defied the leaders with death. Those who took the oath were also bound and committed to use violent means if called upon to defend the interests of their community.

The oath quickly spread from the nearby farms in Olunguruone to other parts of the Rift Valley and later to Nairobi and Central Provinces.

 By the time the eviction orders were issued in Olunguroene in 1948, the system of oath administration had been adopted by the militant wing of Mau Mau who had grown impatient with political resolution of the African problems in Kenya. In the meantime the Olenguruone squatters were finally evicted in 1949 in a process that saw hundreds of their property destroyed and livestock confiscated by the Government.

David Anderson says although most of the evictees had never been in Central Province since their parents had migrated more than 40 years earlier they were repatriated to Kiambu where there was acute shortage of land.

 Other districts such as Murang’a and Nyeri were also in the eye of the agragraian crisis. Interestingly, a survey conducted by the colonial Government at the time showed that in Nyeri the average size of the family landholding had declined from eight acres in 1931 to six acres in 1944, despite a dramatic rise in the population.

The repatriation of the squatters coincided with increased land cases in the native council where Anderson says the Government was reaping a lot of revenue from land cases where fees shot from 13,000 sterling pounds in 1949 to 25,000 sterling pounds in 1951.

This happened even as colonial chiefs went on a spree of amassing land at the expense of the people they were supposed to serve. Such chiefs as Muhoya and Nderi in Nyeri and Tetu respectively are reported to have awarded themselves more than 150 acres.

Some of the squatters who could find no place to call home migrated to Nairobi where they lived in squalor and were easily recruited into the underground movement to fight the colonial oppression.

When the Government realised how widespread the oath administration had become, with regular complaints from settlers, it banned Mau Mau as a society in August 1950. In the following year the Government vigorously hunted down known militants such as James Beuttah who would later be jailed for two years and hard labour.

In the meantime the attacks on white farms escalated as Government headmen and home guards were brutalised. To neutralise the oath administered by Mau Mau, the Government following the advice of Louis Leakey also started its own.

Abyss of violence

Some of the most prominent chiefs in the counter oath administration were Waruhiu and Njiri and the Mau Mau responded in kind, pouncing on collaborators who were mainly informers and headmen who were killed and their bodies displayed publicly.

The final push that plunged the country into an abyss of violence happened on October 7, 1953, when Waruhiu was gunned down in broad daylight.

His killing sparked off a string of events that culminated with the arrest of all suspected leaders of Mau Mau, including Jomo Kenyatta, Achieng Oneko, Paul Ngei, Kung’u Karumba, Bildad Kaggia and Fred Kubai.

These are the freedom icons now recognised as heroes whose exploits were commemorated yesterday while no word on the role of the peasants is given any thought during such national celebrations.

akareithi@standardmedia.co.ke