Jogging Our Minds towards Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s Kapenguria Trial: A Bird’s Eye View of Kapenguria One (1)!!

• ELDER STATESMAN PAR EXCELLENCE: –
• Our Founding Father and First President of the Republic of Kenya Kamau wa Muigai, a.k.a. Kamau wa Ngengi, a.k.a. “John Peter” (after Jesus’ leading disciples) Kamau wa Ngengi, a.k.a. Johnstone Kamau wa Ngengi, a.k.a. Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, a.k.a. Son of Wambui, a.k.a. the Burning Spear, struggled for more than half a century to free our country, Kenya, from the yoke of colonialism and colonial rule, a cause for which he was vilified, humiliated, ridiculed, persecuted and imprisoned.
• Yet the Kikuyu herdboy who had stared with open-eyed wonder at the first Europeans to arrive in Kenya was to become President of one of Africa’s most progressive States.
• The Burning Spear was born at Ng’enda in the Gatundu Division of Kiambu, where the mbari or clan of his father Muigai stood on a spur of land between a fork of the Thiririka River. His mother’s name was Wambui.
• The exact date is unknown. Even Son of Wambui himself, as he was to state at the infamous Kapenguria Trial many years later in 1952, was unable to place the year with any certainty.
• “I do not know when I was born – what date, what month, or what year – but I think I am over fifty,” he stated when taken through his evidence by Chaman Lall, Nehru’s emissary to the international team of counsel assembled to defend Mzee.
• Available evidence from his personal recollections and records of his later childhood, however, seemingly indicate that this was probably no earlier than 1895 and possibly a year or two later.
• Young Kenyatta was circumcised in early 1913 at the Nyongera River in accordance with Kikuyu custom; Rev. Musa Gitau, Kenneth Stanley Njindo Matiba’s father-in-law, acted as Jomo’s sponsor at this important ceremony.
• The following year (1914), young Jomo was baptised. Traditionally, the boys chose a name from the Bible… and Son of Wambui expressed the wish to be called John Peter – after Jesus’ leading disciples.
• This, however, did not find favour with the missionaries, so Son of Wambui very brilliantly and shrewdly changed Peter into “stone” – the “rock” on which Christ’s church was founded – and added it to John. Johnstone became his baptismal name!
• Son of Wambui travelled to England twice, as secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), long before Kenya became an independent nation, to fight against injustices of colonialism and for the basic grievances and rights of the “natives” on land, on education, women’s hut tax, representation on the Legislative Council (Legco), retention of tribal customs and treatment of Africans as human beings.
• The first time KCA sent its secretary was in the New Year, 1929, aboard the Bernadino (ship), on February 17. The Burning Spear arrived in London on March 8, 1929. He returned after 18 months in Europe, reaching Mombasa on September 24, 1930.
• On May 2, 1931, Son of Wambui was on board the Italian liner Mazzini bound once again for Europe. He was not to see his homeland again for over 15 years.
• During this time, Johnstone Kamau continued the campaign on behalf of his people.
• Over the next few years he studied at University College, London. As a result of his earlier contribution to Barlow’s Kikuyu dictionary, work on a book of the Kikuyu language and phonetic recordings of the language for the University College, Jomo won the opportunity to study under the world-famous Professor Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics.
• Facing Mount Kenya, Mzee’s study of Kikuyu life and traditions was published in 1938. Malinowski was lavish in his praise: “It is one of the first really competent and instructive contributions to African ethnography by a scholar of pure African parentage,” he noted in his introduction to the book. For the first time, Mzee Kenyatta adopted the name Jomo.
• [NB: Sources say friends of Johnstone Kenyatta called him “Johnstoni” or “Joni”, itself mispronounced as “Jomi” which he would eventually, brilliantly, switch to “Jomo” as he took control of his political destiny, presumably because “Jomi” sounded too young! Brilliant stuff, good people, by Son of Wambui!]
• The Burning Spear had also written, My People of Kikuyu and the Life of Chief Wang’ombe. Earlier on in 1928, Jomo had founded the first native Kenyan newspaper, “Muigwithania” – The Reconciler – and on its masthead signed himself for the first time as “Kenyatta”. He also penned Suffering Without Bitterness.
• Article-writing and lecture tours took him all over England. Mzee was prepared to speak anywhere and to anyone interested in his people’s fight for freedom – to public gatherings in Trafalgar Square and Rotary Club meetings, but more often to meetings organised by the Fabians and the International Labour Party.
• The outbreak of the Second World War made things difficult for the Burning Spear. Contact with Kenya was finally lost when on May 30, 1940, the colonial Government banned the KCA on the pretext that the Association’s leaders were in contact with Italian diplomatic officials. Its leader Jesse Kariuki and other leaders were exiled.
• Jomo spent the war years in Sussex, in southern England. Here he was to meet his future wife, Edna Grace Clark, a governess. On May 11, 1942, they were married. Their son Peter Magana was born on August 11, 1943.
• Mzee worked on the land in the initial war years; then returned to lecturing on Africa to British troops around the country. But the war dragged heavily for the exiled Kenyatta; back in Kenya, Eliud Mathu was in 1944 nominated the first African member in the Legislative Council (Legco).
• With victory in sight, the lethargy of the war years was quickly replaced with Kenyatta’s fresh involvement in the freedom struggle and fight against colonialism, first in organising the World Trade Union Congress in February, 1945, and then the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in October that year.
• Here Mzee was to meet the young Gold Coast student and later President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. Kenyatta in an address to the session of the Congress thundered: “… racial discrimination must go, and then people can perhaps enjoy the right of citizenship, which is the desire of every East African. Self-independence must be our aim.”
• Son of Wambui teamed up with many other prominent freedom fighters and political activists in efforts to raise global awareness about the debilitating political, economic and socio-cultural effects of colonialism.
• In September, 1946, Son of Wambui finally left England (for Kenya) to help provide new impetus to the independence movement of his people.
• The legend of Kenyatta had preceded him. On disembarking at Mombasa on September 24, 1946, he was quickly surrounded by a large crowd of well-wishers and reunited after 15 years with his wife Grace Wahu and their two children Peter Muigai and Margaret Wambui. Thousands of men and women welcomed him at Mombasa. Thousands of people packed the railway station to carry him shoulder-high on his arrival back to Nairobi.
• If Kenya’s racialist restrictions were as stringent as ever, the African people were no longer content to stand passively aside and watch while the Europeans reaped the benefits of an economy boosted as a result of expanded wartime exports.
• The Forty Group, the returned African soldiers who had travelled widely during the war to Ethiopia, Egypt and Burma and found that death is the great leveller, sought a more militant approach to politics, an outlook echoed by the growingly sophisticated trade union movement.
• Kenyatta quickly became involved in the organisation of the Independent Teachers’ College at Githunguri. Student numbers rose rapidly, from the 250 students enrolled when the college was opened by Peter Mbiyu Koinange in 1939 to nearly a thousand on the outbreak of the Emergency in 1952.
• It was here that Kenyatta was to spend the next six years, not only building Githunguri into the hub of the independent schools’ movement, but providing a convenient coordinating centre for the struggle for independence.
• On June 1, 1947, James Gichuru stepped down to make way for Kenyatta as president of the Kenya African Union (KAU) – the political party that grew out of the Kenya African Study Union, originally formed in October 1944 to assist Eliud Mathu’s work in the Legislative Council.
• Fourteen years later, Gichuru was to play an identical role to allow Son of Wambui to lead the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and lead Kenya into self-government.
• Mzee’s right to the national leadership was thus conceded, and he dedicated himself to the organisation of a united and ordered party, seeking the involvement of tribes in the fight for uhuru.
• The Burning Spear always vehemently condemned idleness and campaigned against robbery and thieving and urged all to make proper use of the land they had while campaigning for the return of the land alienated to the White settlers. They (read settlers) singled him out as their principal enemy.
• Constant efforts were made to discredit him. And by 1948, pressure by the settlers resulted in the Governor setting up a standing committee on security.
• Earlier, in January, 1947, a strike by 15,000 African workers at Mombasa for higher wages had been successfully led by Chege Kibachia (arrested soon after and detained for ten years). Makhan Singh resumed his trade union role and in alliance with Fred Kubai in 1949 formed the new East African Trade Union Congress based in Nairobi – bringing a new dimension to the struggle for liberation.
• By 1951, KAU were demanding independence within three years and Peter Mbiyu Koinange and Achieng’ Oneko were named to carry a last appeal to Britain for the constitutional changes to bring this into effect. The open conflict with settler interests was now obvious.
• The Burning Spear prophetically noted in a speech at Thika that, “the tree of liberty must be watered with blood.” The KAU flag – green for the land, black for the African skin and red for the blood of freedom – underscored his words.
• But Kenyatta’s stand, as he reiterated in speeches throughout Kikuyuland, and across other parts of Kenya, was for the achievement of independence by peaceful means and the safeguard of minority interests.
• But despite his “consistent” stand – for the achievement of independence by peaceful means – such as at the crucial August 24, 1952 meeting at Kiambu where the Government recorded every word he said, to broadcast later to the people of Kenya, threats to his life from militant settler elements continued.
• With the assassination of Senior Chief Waruhiu, events moved rapidly to their climax. On October 8, 1952 the newly appointed Governor Sir Evelyn Baring and Kenyatta were among the mourners at the funeral of the staunchly Christian chief. The next day, Baring was to cable London for powers to proclaim an Emergency and to arrest the Burning Spear and other African leaders.
• On October 20, the Emergency Proclamation was signed, and Operation Jock Scott – the arrest of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and 182 other named African leaders – swung into effect. Son of Wambui was detained at midnight at his house at Githunguri.
• Allowed only to place a few items into one suitcase, he was driven to a military airfield and placed aboard a light aircraft and flown 400 miles north to Lokitaung, close to the Ethiopia border in northern Kenya. Here he was soon joined by other KAU executives Bildad Kaggia, Fred Kubai, Paul Ngei, Achieng’ Oneko and Kung’u Karumba.
• The scene was now set for the infamous Kapenguria Trial, that travesty of British justice resulting from the Government’s compulsion to find a pretext for Son of Wambui’s detention.
• A ton and a half of papers, documents and books removed from Kenyatta’s house at Githunguri were sifted for possible incriminating evidence. Nothing was found.
• Lacking tangible evidence to incriminate him, it was the perjured testimony of Rawson Macharia that finally became crucial to the Government case.
• Jomo Kenyatta and his colleagues were charged on November 18 with the “management” of MAU MAU, a proscribed society. The trial was set for November 24.
• Meanwhile, a defence team of international repute was being hastily organised by KAU leaders still unrestricted and friends of the Burning Spear.
• Indian Prime Minister Pandit Nehru sent Chaman Lall. H. O. Davies from Nigeria and Dudley Thompson, a West Indian then in Tanganyika, joined Kenyan lawyers A. R. Kapila, Fitzwell de Souza and Jaswant Singh in an impressive team of defence counsel headed by Dennis N. Pritt, QC – a leading member of the English bar.
• The trial proper at the remote administrative centre of Kapenguria in the shadow of Mount Elgon, 30 miles from Kitale, did not commence until December 3, 1952.
• Mzee was to spend 58 days in court before judgement was passed by R. S. Thacker, a retired judge of the Supreme Court of Kenya specially appointed to hear the case. After sentencing Kenyatta, he was quickly flown out of the country! Of course, good people, you will recall Justice Thacker had been bribed by the Governor with 20 thousand pounds to jail Son of Wambui.
• First witness was a neighbor of Mzee Kenyatta’s at Ichaweri, Gatundu, Rawson Macharia. His evidence against Kenyatta, the most damaging the prosecution could produce, was perjured, as Macharia himself confessed in an affidavit signed six years later in 1958.
• The weakness of the Government’s case has been clearly exposed in transcripts of the trial. Pritt himself summed up the defence stand. “Managing MAU MAU. Well, where? Not why, of course, but how? In what fashion, with what assistance, in what office, with what policy, with what documents? Never, never anything. … I would submit that it is the most childishly weak case made against any man in any important trial in the history of the British Empire.”
• Kenyatta was sentenced on April 8, 1953 to the maximum term possible, seven years’ imprisonment with hard labour and to indefinite restriction thereafter. He was to serve his time at Lokitaung.
• Pending the hearing of an appeal, Kenyatta remained behind bars. Sitting at Kitale, on July 15 the Supreme Court of Kenya upheld an appeal on the technicality that the Government had appointed Thacker to the wrong district, a decision quickly reversed on August 22 by the East African Court of Appeal.
• Petitions to the Privy Council were twice dismissed: in October, 1953, and again in July, 1954. When this later petition to obtain leave to appeal had been refused the Burning Spear finally exchanged his clothes for the convict’s uniform, the coarse white drill shorts and shirt with the two black bands around the chest. His beard was shaved and for several months he wore chains around his ankles.
• Over 90,000 of his people – mainly Kikuyu, but including members of many other Kenyan tribes – were to suffer similar indignities as Operation Anvil (April, 1954, when some 30,000 Africans were detained in Nairobi) and similar repressive measures throughout Central Province and the main towns of Kenya were put into effect.
• In the forests of the Aberdares and Mount Kenya, the Freedom Fighters, supported by the action groups in Nairobi and drawing on the passive wings in the reserves for their supplies, were waging a determined campaign against the British Army brought in to reinforce the locally recruited Kings African Rifles, the Kenya Regiment and a much expanded Police Force.
• Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi wa Waciuri, leader in the Aberdares, defied the Security Forces for four long years, before being shot and wounded at Kabiruini, near Nyeri, tried and hanged.
• Earlier, General China (Waruhiu Itote) of Mount Kenya fame had been similarly captured, but confined with Kenyatta at Lokitaung.
• Because of his age, Son of Wambui was released from the hard labour – breaking stones, digging, then filling in holes – his colleagues were called upon to perform. He acted as cook for the group, and later taught General China to read and write and spent much time studying the few books he was able to have sent in from outside.
• As a result of the hardships of the arid Turkana region coupled with the deficiencies in diet, Jomo suffered badly from eczema – and sores and swelling broke out all over his body in a violent reaction to a smallpox vaccination. These conditions prompted the writing of a letter published in the London Observer on June 8, 1958.
• “We political prisoners, of Lokitaung, are desirous that the world and Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom should know that we are being subjected to treatment which we think is not given to any other human beings in any part of the world,” the letter recorded.
• Rumours of Son of Wambui’s suffering had already resulted in the African Elected Members seeking a statement on the health of Mzee Kenyatta and his colleagues at Lokitaung in the Legislative Council.
• In March the following year, African representation in the Legislative Council was increased by six seats under the Lennox-Boyd Constitution for Kenya. In 1958, the Pan African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) was formed at Mwanza. Africa was on the march.
• Concern with regard to the health of the Lokitaung exiles was again voiced in the Legislative Council in July, 1958 and thereafter at public meetings in Nairobi.
• On September 21, 1958, the Nairobi People’s Convention Party decided that October 20 (anniversary of Kenyatta’s arrest) would be observed as a day of fasting and meditation. It is now a designated national holiday.
• On completion in April, 1959 of three-quarters of his sentence Jomo Kenyatta became eligible for release. But the restriction order passed by Thacker was immediately applied and he was moved only 90 miles south to Lodwar where bungalows had been specially built for the Lokitaung group.
• The revelation by Rawson Macharia that he had lied at the Kapenguria trial in return for promises of an air passage to England, a two-year course in local government coupled with subsistence for his family until his return to a guaranteed post in the Kenya Government threw a different perspective on the Kenyan issue.
• Macharia was eventually sentenced to 21 months imprisonment for perjury – for swearing a false affidavit with regard to his evidence at the Kapenguria trial!
• Demands for a judicial inquiry into the trial of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta in view of the issues raised during the Macharia hearing were, however, refused by the Colonial Secretary.
• Jomo occupied a small, two-bedroomed bungalow at Lodwar. He was free to move around and shop in the tiny Indian dukas. The monotony was relieved later that year when in October, 1959, Son of Wambui was joined by his wife Mama Ngina and two daughters namely, Jeni Wambui and Kristina Wambui.
• [NB: Soon after his return from Europe, the Burning Spear married Grace Mitundu, daughter of Senior Chief Koinange and sister to his close confidant Peter Mbiyu Koinange. Prior to her death in childbirth before the Emergency, they had one child, Jeni Wambui.
• Jeni Wambui is mother to President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Private Secretary, Jomo Gecaga. Kristina Wambui is the first born to Jomo and Mama Ngina. Now you know.]
• That Christmas there was a family reunion, when Peter Muigai and Margaret Kenyatta – who did so much during her father’s imprisonment and detention to provide him with small comforts, books and newspapers – travelled to Lodwar. “The first really happy Christmas for eight years,” Mzee Kenyatta noted.
• Demands for his release were becoming increasingly insistent. British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan speaking in South Africa coined the phrase “the winds of change”.
• A “Release Kenyatta” campaign was started in Mombasa; the Nairobi People’s Convention Party passed a resolution demanding the immediate release of Kenyatta with the All-Africa People’s Conference in Tunis adding their weight to the demands.
• Yet even in mid-1960, the recently appointed Governor Sir Patrick Renison was to state: “Jomo Kenyatta was the recognised leader of the non-cooperation movement which organised MAU MAU. Here was an African leader to darkness and death.” The inference was that Kenyatta would remain indefinitely restricted.
• On May 14, 1960, Mzee was elected in absentia President of the Kenya African National Union (KANU) at a meeting of African political leaders convened at Kiambu.
• The acting President, James Gichuru, told reporters that he was “keeping the seat warm for Jomo’s return”. Pressure by the African Elected Members to see Son of Wambui and for his release finally told. A few of the leaders were allowed to visit him at Lodwar.
• But from April 4, 1961 when the Burning Spear was flown out of Lodwar to Maralal, significantly halfway between Lokitaung and Nairobi, the pressure for his return to lead Kenya into Independence became a clamour.
• A week after his arrival in Maralal, arrangements were made for the world press to visit him. On April 11 Mzee found himself besieged by news editors, reporters, feature writers, radio-commentators, cameramen and television crews.
• Before he answered questions, Jomo made a short statement and noted: “… for more than eight years I have been bottled up in remote districts away from public life and world affairs. During that time I have been greatly misrepresented by some of you, but today I hope you will stick to the truth and refrain from writing sensational stories about me.”
• Hard on the heels of this press conference came a statement that, “The Governor has agreed that the Government will now begin to build a house for Mr. Jomo Kenyatta and his family, on a site to be agreed in Kiambu District, in readiness for Mr. Kenyatta’s return from Maralal to his home in Kiambu in due course.”
• On the morning of August 14, 1961, three light aircrafts of the Kenya Police Airwing took off from Maralal. Seventy-five minutes later, Jomo stepped out at Kahawa Military airstrip, briefly greeted political leaders and drove the remaining few miles to Gatundu. Mzee Jomo Kenyatta was back. Besieged by reporters and cameramen he entered the house to meet relatives and close friends.
• News of his return brought tens of thousands of people, anxious to see him, streaming across the ridges of Kikuyuland.
• Eight days later, Son of Wambui, now free of all remaining restrictions, met the Governor Sir Patrick Renison at Kiambu. The Burning Spear received back his ring and black, carved stick taken from him when he began his sentence at Lokitaung… The rest, as they say, is history.
• Our honest and considered position, good people, is that history has already been made and/or repeated: If Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s Kapenguria trial is Kapenguria One (1); then his son Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta’s fraudulent case at The Hague-based bogus ICC court is Kapenguria Two (2). Nothing to add: Enough said! Everything is in black and white. Alluta Continua.