It used to be a tradition on the Sunday Nation that Christmas would not be Christmas without a homily by Mr Tony Massie-Blomfield, the headmaster of Cavina School. Mr Blomfied was a well-known contributor to the Nation stable where he expressed himself effusively on matters of political history.
On the sub-editor’s desk, it was taken as a matter of fact that Mr Blomfield had been a colonial DC during the Mau Mau war. Colonial DCs were very powerful people. They were not just administrators, they were also magistrates, commanded the security services, oppressed the natives, naturally, and were more like presidents of their districts, who headed not just the executive and the judiciary, but they were the legislature; their wishes, dreams and imaginations, were law.
Mr Blomfield took a dismal view of the Mau Mau and was very confident of the positive contribution of colonialism to the development of Kenya. While it was difficult not to agree with the latter to some degree, many of the journalists, especially the editors who had been born in the late 1950s or very early 1960s and worshipped the Mau Mau and the patriotic armed struggle, could not stand the former.
To illustrate the point, one of my editors, the celebrated Mundia Muchiri, an Alliance man of the Carey Francis ilk, columnist, editor and later, media entrepreneur, together with Mr Joseph Karimi, who with Philip Ochieng’ wrote The Kenyatta Succession , led the effort to find and repatriate General Mathenge, a Mau Mau fighter, who during the war went into Ethiopia, like many fighters did for arms and training, but mysteriously vanished.
While, as it eventually turned out, they did not find Gen Mathenge, the money they spent on the quest was not wasted. They did find Mr Lema Ayanu, a colourful, if a little potty, Ethiopian peasant, whose hands and legs were showered with kisses of adoration by delegations of peasants and political leaders alike from the Mt Kenya region in general, and Nyeri, where the general came from, in particular, before it became ridiculously clear that this was no general of the Mau Mau, or indeed any other guerrilla army, dreadlocked or otherwise.
Mr Lema Ayanu.
Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group
The pro-Ayanu group went to Nyeri and fished out the bride General Mathenge left behind in the 1950s in the faint hope that the electricity of long forgotten intimacy would cackle into flames the buried and tragic romance of the presumed couple. Alas, it was not to be. Mr Ayanu, with several wives of his own, had no head, muscle or any other memory of Mrs Mathenge. Similarly, the general’s wife had never seen the bugger in her life and experienced no tender feelings towards him at all.
Miriam Muthoni Mathenge, the wife of Mau Mau general Stanley Mathenge, who disappeared without trace.
Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group
The Kibaki State House, which had pro-Mau Mau factors from Nyeri, and which had cautiously entertained the whole drama, quickly realised that the man was what he obviously was, an Ethiopian, and discreetly retreated. Mr Ayanu was back in Addis Ababa in very short order.
This is the environment into which Mr Blomfield expressed his unpopular views, not that there was any danger of his ever being censored; the team was scrupulously professional and the editors knew that their job was to protect the writer’s right to express his unpopular opinions freely.
I had an interview with Mr Blomfield in the headmaster’s office at Cavina School and while he was as jovial as a headmaster can get, my news nose caught the faint aroma of a subtext: I was like an old boy who had initially shown faint promise but was now downright headed in the wrong direction and was hauled in to gaze upon the countenance of his teacher and recalibrate his moral North. Well, hand me my machete and shred my Mau Mau back with birdshot.
Mr Blomfied is a man of strong character and rather rigid moral rectitude. In my tribe, we have a lot of respect for men who speak their mind no matter what. It is a big part of why so many young people joined the Mau Mau. They were like a gourd, full of fermented porridge, locked tightly, that had been shaken and shaken until it exploded.
Englishmen in Kenya that I have observed over the years were like rags drenched in English culture. Wherever they were, they soaked the surrounding with change – and many times progress. The British empire was not built by the Queen, or King, or Prime Minister. Not even by Whitehall, it was built by individuals, acting alone or in concert, who transformed the people and lands where they ended up.
My father, himself a man of strong character, an urban guerrilla in these same streets no less, and who had the misfortune of having had to hack quarries in British Gulags for a very long time, would almost certainly disagree.
But that is exactly the point. I think we lose the plot when we de-mainstream some communities over issues that are now settled. The war is over, we are free, our 60-year experiment of bringing our village boys to run things has mainly failed, and it’s Christmas.
The charity and cheer of the season should inspire a new experiment of genuine integration and acceptance. There is a lot to learn, and to let go.
Merry Christmas from Makandune, where men are men, the snakes don’t sleep and the rains – they don’t come.
