Burn My Heart (16 page)

Mugo had seen the boy holding up a packet. Even before he saw it tear on the wire and Duma snuffling his nose over the red earth, he had guessed it was a bag of Mzee Josiah’s biscuits. When the boy used to sneak a batch of biscuits to eat in his den, he always slipped them into a brown paper packet. Afterwards Mzee Josiah’s grumblings would reveal he was secretly pleased that his biscuits were so popular.

A sudden lump caught in Mugo’s throat. It would have been better if the bwana had never taken him into his house and made him the kitchen toto! If he had stayed herding the cattle, he would never have got to know the mzungu boy whose grandfather had taken away his own grandfather’s land. He had taught the boy how to make his first sling from goatskin. He had shown him how to make a ball out of banana leaves, a money box from bamboo, a snare out of sisal… all the things he would show a younger brother. When the boy had been silly or showing off, he had done his best to ignore it. He had looked after the boy like Baba said he had looked after the bwana when they had been children. So how could he ever forget the way the bwana had looked at Baba and him on the night of the fire, his eyes full of suspicion, accusing them of betraying him!

Did Gitau know what had happened to them?
Mugo could imagine his brother’s enraged eyes narrowing as if to say: ‘
Now do you see? Now, do you understand?
’ Mugo leaned over to a cooking pot and pulled out his small leather bag stuffed between some wooden spoons. He slipped his hand inside, his fingers pushing aside marbles given to him by the mzungu boy, a catapult, the piece of memsahib’s china, and other childish treasures. When he pulled out his hand, his little wooden elephant lay upside down in his palm, its feet and tusks in the air. He revolved it with his fingers until the creature was facing him, trunk raised, tusks forward, ready to charge.

Mugo squeezed it in his palm, feeling the solid weight of its body carved out of Kirinyaga’s wood. He prayed that Gitau was safe with Maina, and that his brother still kept the little elephant’s companion with him. It was rough and dangerous up there in Kirinyaga’s forests. When the long rains set in, pouring in torrents, it would be worse. Kirinyaga was now out of sight, no longer even an anthill. The truck was taking them somewhere far away, and Baba would be taken to some unknown place behind more barbed wire. Only the land would still join all of them to their mountain. They had been dug up… roots pulled out… and scattered like weeds to shrivel.
But the wazungu cannot dig up the land. It will always be here
. Wasn’t that what Baba would have said… would
say… if he could? As long as the land was there, they had to have hope.

Mugo glanced at Mami. His brother and sister had fallen asleep, their heads lolling against her. With her eyes closed against the dust, lines of worry cut her face like shadows on a mask. He had never thought of Mami as old. He was no longer a child. Without Baba, it was up to him now to take care of his family. But if he were called to join Gitau and the others fighting for
ithaka na wiyathi
, their land and freedom, would he not go? Mugo trembled at the burning tearing deep inside him. The fire was eating everyone and he did not know how to keep the blaze from his heart.

It feels strange to stand in a place that appears so beautiful, calm and peaceful when you know that if the earth, grass and trees could speak they would tell you another story. This is what I have felt watching the morning mist rise up the slopes of Mount Kenya… Kirinyaga.

55,000 British soldiers were sent to Kenya during the Emergency, declared in October 1952. The Mau Mau killed thirty-two white settlers, although people who remember the news reports often say that ‘it seemed like more’. Over 1,800 African civilians were murdered for being loyalists and hundreds disappeared whose bodies were never found. Many terrible stories were reported at the time. However, British forces killed at least 12,000 (possibly as many as 20,000) Mau Mau fighters and suspects.

The Emergency was a disaster for the Kikuyu people. Even families became divided. It was like a civil war. At least 150,000 Kikuyu men and women were imprisoned as Mau Mau supporters, most of them without any trial. If a hooded informer pointed a finger at someone, that was enough. Whole communities were punished as ‘collective
punishment’. The government extended the death penalty to cover a wide range of offences. People were sentenced to death even when the evidence against them was poor. 1,090 Kikuyu men were hanged and thirty women were sentenced to life imprisonment. There were far more executions in Kenya than in any other British colonial struggle. The government said that it had suspended human rights because of terrorism.

Some people in Britain protested strongly, like the socialist MPs Fenner Brockway and Barbara Castle who were active in the Movement for Colonial Freedom. Accounts of torture and abuse in the detention camps were published. But the British government backed its officials in Kenya, who kept giving in to the fears and demands of the white settlers. Even when there were charges, these usually resulted in very light sentences, such as three months’ hard labour and a fine for burning a suspect’s eardrums with lighted cigarettes or £25 for pouring paraffin over a suspect.

By 1957, there were no more fighters in the forests. The Mau Mau had been defeated, but the settlers wanted the Emergency laws to continue. In 1959, eleven detainees at Hola Detention Camp were clubbed to death by black guards while white warders watched. Officials tried to cover up the killings. But the truth came out and it led to a public scandal in Britain.

The Emergency was finally ended in January 1960. The British government prepared to hand over control to a government elected by all Kenyans. In 1963, barely ten years after my story ends, Jomo Kenyatta became the first prime
minister of Kenya. A year later, he became President of the independent Republic of Kenya. A British governor had called him the ‘leader to darkness and death’ and he had been imprisoned for seven years during the Emergency. But, to help bring peace to his shattered country, Kenyatta declared
, ‘Let there be forgiveness… The hatred of the past should be forgotten… Let us build together in unity, not revenge.’

Although stories were passed on within families, and teachers taught Kenyan children an approved history of the struggle for independence, the Mau Mau remained a banned organization for forty more years until 2003. Even in 2005, I found that the National Museum in Nairobi had no displays of this painful past. I went in search of the Peace Museum in Nyeri. I had heard that it was a small room filled with objects, old documents and photographs donated by both rebels and loyalists. I especially wanted to see this memorial in which the stories from each side had been brought together under the same roof. However, the brave little museum no longer existed. There had been no money to keep it going.

Yet the ghosts of the past have a way of rising. In October 2006, lawyers in London launched a test case for compensation from the British government for a group of elderly Mau Mau detainees. Their claim is that torture and illegal abuse were part of the colonial policy to destroy their rebellion for independence. People are talking and writing more than ever. For years, stories have been hidden in hundreds of places… in forests and gullies, caves and
homesteads, villages and towns. Many are now emerging from the undergrowth of memory, breaking the silence.

In all this, I am only the storyteller who has to believe that for Mathew, as for Mugo…

k
ĩ
r
ĩ
ngoro k
ĩ
rutagwo na m
ĩ
ario
…
the word in the heart is drawn out by talking.

KIKUYU AND SWAHILI NAMES

In 2004 I was invited to read my work and run writing workshops in Kenya as part of the UKenya celebrations for the fortieth anniversary of Independence from Britain. My thanks for the very diverse programme go especially to librarian activist Anne Moore and to Mark Norton, Information Officer at the British High Commission. It was during this visit, with its great contrasts, that I decided I would set a novel in Kenya. I knew it would be a challenge, remembering the extraordinary power of the novels of Ngugi wa Thi’ongo that I had first experienced some forty years ago. They were novels that took me beyond myself, into a world that I had not previously imagined.

I am most grateful to all those who have spoken to me about their memories of Kenya before Independence. In addition, my special thanks go to Fred Kiranjui for his assistance on my second journey into the central Highlands. His conversations also made vivid the extreme dangers
of being a Kikuyu child at that time. I am indebted to the work of many authors, including
Mau Mau from Within
by Donald L. Barnett and Karari Njama,
‘Mau Mau’ Detainee
by Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, and
Britain’ Gulag
by Caroline Elkins. Space prevents me naming all the authors whose works have enlarged my understanding but my particular thanks go to David Anderson for his wide-ranging, insightful research in
Histories of the Hanged
.