Meeting of Strangers: Glimpses of Life Under Colonial Rule

By J Kimanzi Mati

Sitting on the balcony one cool evening, Wa-Noa momentarily lapses into deep meditation as he reflects on the gaping disparities in his life. His thoughts wander around three consecutive generations of an African family, over a time span stretching from the eighteen eighties to the nineteen sixties.
Narrated in a candid and richly informative historical background, Meeting of Strangers underscores the impacts of colonialism and its gruesome manifestations, on the natural lives of Africans. It is a story of a boy growing up in the British Colony of Kenya, the acrimonious confrontations between cultures and religions, colour prejudice and segregation in all facets of life and the traumatizing moments under an imposed State of Emergency. It is about denial of justice, marginalization, arbitrary arrests, forceful land annexation, and restriction of movement, unjust taxation, forced labour, conscription to war, and a segregated education system specifically crafted to ensure only a minuscule of African children ever progressed beyond the rudimentary level. It is about perseverance, struggle, determination and hope, and above all, it is about one of the lucky few who surmounted the daunting colonialist hurdles to achieve academic and professional accolades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Africa
• Release date: Apr 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482806410

J Kimanzi Mati

Born and bred in Britain’s Colony of Kenya, the Author is a former Head of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Dean of Medicine, University of Nairobi. Educated in Kenya, Uganda, United Kingdom and United States of America, he is widely travelled, published internationally, and a fervent blogger.

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Copyright © 2015 by J Kimanzi Mati.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4828-0640-3

                eBook          978-1-4828-0641-0

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1: White man on the mule

Chapter 2: ‘Beasts of Burden’

Chapter 3: Strange Bedfellows

Chapter 4: Of Soldiers and Scribes

Chapter 5: The Scare at Kaimu

Chapter 6: Cactus Outside Dorm One

Chapter 7: Justice at the Assize Court

Chapter 8: A Whiff of Freedom

Chapter 9: Epilogue

DEDICATION

Thomas Ndŭvi wa Mboo

&

Naomi Kǐlŭtǐ wa Kavyŭ

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

O ver the years, I have had the privilege to interact with many individuals, whose stories, comments, shared documents, and networking have helped shape this story.

Top of the list are my parents, siblings, and uncles, who liberally shared many tales, not only about our origins and ancestry, but also about their individual encounters with strangers to our lands.

Also treasured are the incalculable contributions by my wife Margaret Mwikali, especially through her immense capacity to tolerate the many hours I have spent on the book. The curiosity of our children and grandchildren about our past was what hatched the idea of telling this story in the first place.

My nephew, Professor Kamuti Kiteme of City University of New York, greatly enriched the manuscript with his insightful comments.

Last but by no means the least, am I hugely indebted to my Niece Jackie Mati-Maina of Joyfreto Creative Solutions, for her unreserved advice and support, especially with design work.

PROLOGUE

Future cannot be painted in abstract:

Past and Present are critical colours

(Anon)

O ne evening, Wa-Noa sat alone on the balcony of his house on the hill, and cast his gaze at the gilded layers of thick cloud as the sun approached the summit of the horizon. Although it was rapidly sinking out of view, it still managed to emit fiery flames, like the chimera, which cast a golden hue over the western sky, creating a spectacular sunset. It was in the year of the Golden Jubilee in Kenya, his country.

As he took another long draught of the drink in his hand, he began reflecting on his seven plus decades, the things he had personally done or witnessed, as well as what he had gathered from others, along the way. Suddenly, he remembered that question one of his grandchildren had asked during a recent celebration of a birthday.

Grandpa, what was it like growing up in colonial Kenya? she had asked. She was curious to know what life was like under colonial rule, before Independence, the ‘time zero’ when the ‘count to Golden Jubilee’ began.

As Wa-Noa wondered about where to begin constructing the answer, he slipped into deep meditation, and soon he was virtually in a trance.

Wa-Noa, who over the decades had enjoyed tolerable amity with demographers, quickly realised he could not be too far off-target in assuming that only one in every twenty living Kenyans was there, at ‘time zero’. Hesitatingly, he also worked out that his age cohort and anyone else older, constituted only a pathetic two percent of the population; indeed, his age group was rapidly sliding into the zone of ‘endangered species’.

He wished he could make the innocent child appreciate how come he was born as His Majesty’s subject, but later changed to be Her Majesty’s ward. Could she, for example, believe the commonly repeated story of a Princess who ascended the Treetops Lodge on the slopes of the Nyandarua (a.k.a. Aberdare) Mountains, only to descend next morning as the Queen of the Empire?

How was he to explain the riddle that his own father, the girl’s great grandfather, was born a free man, long before Kenya was? Would she understand that there was no land bearing that name before 1920? How did the name come about, anyway?

It was going to be a demanding task explaining the various competing forces that determined the African’s pattern of life and survival, those days.

First, there was the nation, which the colonials downgraded to a tribe; then the clan and sub-clan, all exerting control over the way one lived, thought and behaved, being the mechanism to foster and sustain strong kinship bonds for overall survival of the community.

Then Christianity, a foreign religion brought by white, and often racist, missionaries who, whilst preaching the Bible, condemned and abused African religious practices, culture and traditions, and literally plucked the adherents out of their native communities and their ‘natural’ way of living.

Thirdly, the colonial administration; impressed by the plentiful treasures of the land, unilaterally crafted policies and laws that ensured exclusion and dislocation of African societies. With the cooperation of missionaries, colonials made certain that Africans converted into obedient subjects of the monarch, as well as providers of cheap, near-slave, labour for European farmers’ plantations.

Last, but not the least, there was school; a racially segregated education system with its biased curricula, and a multitude of hurdles that his generation had to surmount to complete school in colonial Kenya?

How can he describe to her the three-tier class system in which the African always came third, the discrimination and exclusion? The Colour Bar that regulated all aspects of life in colonial Kenya; what they did or thought, where they moved or lived and where finally they were interred. Indeed, racial segregation operated in employment, housing, schools, hospitals, buses, and lavatories for the living, and in cemeteries for the departed. It was undoubtedly, the most dominant feature of British colonialism.

Obviously, Wa-Noa was well aware that these were but a few of the many challenges of the period, which an increasingly large majority of his fellow citizens never experienced. He wondered how he might tell this story, for their benefit and for posterity, in the strong belief that the past and the present are what illuminate the future.

Narrated chronologically, Meeting Of Strangers is a story of a boy born in a far removed village, as he grew up in colonial Kenya. It is about his family background, the three contrasting generations of his parents, himself and his siblings, and his children and their children; and the bitter confrontations between cultures and religions.

It tells of colour prejudice, segregated and biased education which ensured only a minuscule of African children ever progressed beyond the primary level, and the traumatising moments under a brutal State of Emergency. It is about denial of justice, marginalisation, arbitrary land annexation and restriction of movement, unjust taxation, forced labour, conscription to war ….. Above, all it is about perseverance, struggle, determination and hope.

The story is set over a period stretching back to the late-nineteenth century, around the time the British were establishing the British East Africa Protectorate, to around the time of Kenya’s Independence, in 1963.

JKGM

Mua Hills,

Machakos County

CHAPTER 1

WHITE MAN ON THE MULE

I n the closing years of the nineteenth century, somewhere on the southern banks of the River Tana, in an area called Ǐ kole near M ǐ kon ǐ in today’s Kitui County, a group of boys aged about ten, were busy playing their games as they watched over family flocks of sheep and goats.

On that particular day, it was a hunting competition using small bows and arrows which they had made themselves. The winner was he who killed the largest number of grasshoppers and lizards. There were other times when they competed at wrestling or swimming in a nearby river.

Suddenly, there was some commotion;