What you didn't know about the Kikuyu Community

BY KAMAU MUTUNGA

KENYA: The Kikuyu people of Central Kenya have several distinguishing characteristics: They are hardworking, have genetic attachment to land and challenge authority when provoked.

Historically, Kikuyus were the earliest community to be demonised by the colonialists and thus punished for agitating for land and other rights. This started in 1945 when Kikuyu career corps returned from World War II only to find their fertile land forcibly taken by the colonial government. The land (scarce as it was to support a ballooning population) was later given as reward to the White War veterans, mostly British soldiers. These former frontline war porters took to Mt Kenya and the Aberdare forests demanding freedom and land. From then henceforth, the British vilified the community as dangerous ‘terrorists.’

Cruel Colonial Intelligence Officer Richard Meinertzhagen had long predicted in his 1904 diary that the people in Central Kenya “will be the most susceptible to subversive activities. They will be one of the first tribes to demand freedom from European influence and in the end cause a lot of trouble.” 

There are many reasons as to why the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest community if their “tyranny of numbers” is any yardstick to conduct census, are the way they are, including their much-stereotyped chromosomal predilection to money that gave rise to the informal “kwoya kwoya is my policy.”

Roughly translated, that defines accumulating money as something akin to hereditary dogma. In fact, “kwoya kwoya” inculcates astute business acumen of the minutest profit margin. That is besides capacity and work ethic to manage a boiled eggs peddling side-business with a large wholesale entity. By the way, both run simultaneously, blending seamlessly with shylocking and a “long-distance” rural farming venture in genetically modified food and purple tea.

Godfrey Muriuki is Kenya’s foremost historian on the community. In A History of the Kikuyu 1500-1900, his magnum opus effort of 1975, Muriuki contends that the Kikuyu trekked down the shores during the Bantu migration that culminated in their settling down in Central Kenya, Mukureini in Nyeri, to be precise around 1800.

They transplanted the Maasai and the Gumba people whom they found there, before moving to Kabete around 1850 and Ruiru in 1900. Charles Njonjo’s ancestors settled in Kabete around the aforementioned era.

It was this contact with the Maasai that would have the Kikuyu keeping livestock, which the Maasai later stole at the height of World War I in 1914 to 1918. The Maasai refused to have their men conscripted into the War in exchange of supplying beef to soldiers in the King’s African Rifles fighting the Germans in neigbouring Tanzania.

Agriculturalists

More importantly, however, the areas the Kikuyus chose were conducive to farming as they were basically agriculturalists.  Their mixture with immigrant surrounding Mbeere, Meru, Kirinyaga, Embu and Kamba communities saw to it that the Kikuyu have no defining complexion, physical girth, height or facial features.

The prosperous have soft “Cerelac” looks, the ‘hustlers’ in rural Kanyenya-ini have hardy, ‘cereal’ appearances. Indeed, being farmers, the Kikuyu diet is starchy, able to supply energy essential for their plough, mattock and hoe indulgence. Githeri, their staple food is a coalition of maize and beans.  Mukimo, is a variation of githeri with kale or nduma (arrowroot) leaves. Their traditional diet is not variegated and was meant to be eaten in the shortest time possible to avoid wasting plough time.

Unlike the coastal Swahili who communally eat pilau from a sinia (tray), the Kikuyu ate their githeri from individual plates — in line with latter-day individualism after Kikuyu land became scarce in the face of rising population.

Thus land, was and is still an integral part of livelihood and Kikuyu identity. It would be through land that they came into contact with early missionaries and white settlers with irreversible repercussions: They easily absorbed modern education, medicine and worship. 

 But the same land that attracted settlers to the “White Highlands” would provide the powder keg of rebellion that gave rise to the Mau Mau insurgency, the State of Emergency, independence and the rise of the Kikuyu political oligarchy and the ensuing aftermath, 50 years hence.