When Mau Mau used animals to ward off British soldiers

British soldiers in action during the crackdown on Mau Mau fighters. [File, Standard]

When former First Lady Mama Ngina Kenyatta took the lead in shaving Muthoni wa Kirima’s dreadlocks last week, some of the younger generations may have taken the action as merely discarding a lifestyle. 

But for the 92-year-old Ms Muthoni, the locks represented life in the forests where she fought the British government for about seven years. With little time for grooming, the thick hair would naturally twist and ‘lock’.

While there were other women who actively joined the freedom struggle, Ms Muthoni was the only woman to have attained the rank of Field Marshal.

In an earlier interview with a local media house, Ms Muthoni narrated the hardships the fighters had to undergo, including chewing fresh sisal into a pulp which they would then swallow to fight hunger. Her experience, however, is just a sneak peek into the tribulations that befell most of the freedom fighters. More often than not, they were forced to use ingenuity to beat the British in their own game, even using wild animals to their advantage.

As Mr Donald Barnett and Mr Karari Njama wrote in Mau Mau from Within, the animals had an aversion to “modern” smells and loathed white soldiers in boots and who smelled of soap, cigarettes and laundered clothing.

Rhinos, elephants and buffaloes had a field day chasing the whites, who, despite having sophisticated weapons, had little chance of success against forest gangs who were in league with local fauna.

According to the two writers, the freedom fighters made friends with the animals in Mount Kenya forest and the Aberdares, with the exception of the rhino which they nicknamed ‘Home Guard’ due to its brutality and little regard for human life. “They [wild animals], became accustomed to our presence and smell and, after a few months in the forest, they treated us as simply another form of animal life.”

According to Mr Barnett and Mr Njama, the Mau Mau’s best sentries were the deer, monkeys and some birds that could smell the approach of the White people and send out shrieks that alerted the freedom fighters.

“Almost without exception, we found the warnings of our ‘allies’ to be accurate,” they wrote. The unwritten rule was that such “friendly” animals should not be killed, either for fun or for food.

The Mau Mau complimented these methods by hiding underwater and breathing through reed pipes for hours on end, a rare feat before modern snorkels became common.