It wasn’t the first Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA, popularly known as Mau Mau) oath that transformed Wambui Otieno into an anti-colonial militant, it was the second one.
The KLFA instituted oath-taking during the anti-colonial struggle against the British empire as a tactic for building security, secrecy and discipline within a large, countrywide network of fighters, who, physically, could hardly connect with each other. In a movement that could be seriously handicapped by, say, a cadre divulging too much to a nosy relative or ignoring an instruction, “discipline and secrecy were [the Mau Mau’s] greatest weapons in this unequal war” (Kinyatti, 2009: 9). The oath also figured as a way to provide freedom fighters with what Muoki Mbunga describes as a “life force present in the spoken word to generate courage, self-sacrifice, love, faith”. As Mbunga reminds us, freedom fighters were ordinary people—dispossessed peasants, exploited and unemployed workers, those worst affected by the advent of colonial capitalism—who had committed their lives to waging war against the empire despite “not knowing whether the war would end during [their] lifetime” (Mbunga, 2013: 78). To take the oath was to take a collective deep breath, before risking everything.
While Otieno’s first oath was unintentional, the second time she stood naked in that dim room in Gaitumbi next to her fellow revolutionary dissidents, she meant it. The second time she committed her life and wealth to a struggle against empire and its collaborators—words which could render her a signatory to her own death if she betrayed them—was not a mistake.
I swore to:
1. Fight for the soil of Gikuyu and Mumbi’s children, which had been stolen from them by the whites.
2. If possible, get a gun from a white or a black collaborator and any other valuables or money to help strengthen the movement.
3. Kill anyone who was against the movement, even if that person was my brother.
4. Never reveal what had just happened or any other information disclosed to me as a member of the movement, but always to do my utmost to strengthen the movement; and if I didn’t keep my words, may the oath kill me.
(Otieno, 1998: 34)
If the oath is an initiation into anti-imperial militancy, what does it mean to honour it as a person whose interests do not fully align with the movement you fight alongside?
In an anti-colonial war that was delineated by profound ideological and material contradictions, not only between the coloniser and the colonised, but also among the colonised—the collaborator and the militant freedom fighter—Wambui Waiyaki Otieno had to betray her kin to commit herself to struggle.
Otieno was born in 1936 to Elizabeth Wairimu, a daughter of squatters who had migrated to Naivasha in response to the rapid settler-catalysed land degradation and land theft in Central Kenya, and Tiras Munyua Waiyaki, the first African Chief Police Inspector and the grandson of Waiyaki wa Hinga. To be the daughter of the first African Chief Police Inspector, at a material scale, was to be part of an emerging class of Africans who had “access to money and influence by virtue of their literacy and salaried employment” (Bogonko, 1983) and the opportunity to access basic secondary school education and tertiary education abroad. Otieno’s family was able to donate approximately 2560 acres to the Church of Scottish Mission somewhere between Kikuyu and Dagoretti (supposedly, without the consent of the mbari (clan)) and her older siblings had all been able to study at universities abroad. This elite class formation coincided with a moment in which the brutal effects of settler land accumulation were painfully reshaping most people’s life chances. Many young people Otieno’s age were faced with choosing between two non-choices in the wake of settler land accumulation: to work as the underpaid labour in the segregated city or cash crop farm in the White Highlands, or to squat on mbari land at the behest of relatives whose life chances were also rendered bleak by land that was too scarce and degraded to divide between themselves and newcomers. The most fortunate of these young people, may have been able to access a technical or vocational education—“schools for ghee producers”, “schools for agriculturalists”—designed to produce a semi-literate workforce that could only do the day-to-day tasks that drove settler capitalism and ensured settler comfort (Bogonko, 1983).
At an ideological level, Otieno was being groomed to discipline the recalcitrant masses. Then, as it does now, the relatively affluent family functioned as a site for the reproduction of the colonial norms that were valued in the public sphere. The British system and standards that Otieno’s father was being coached to uphold and enforce among the colonised as a police administrator, must have also diffused into Otieno’s socialisation. In her memoir, Otieno mentions that Jomo Kenyatta would regularly visit her father, Tiras Waiyaki. There, just outside the Waiyaki home, they would discuss reform and non-confrontation as pathways for achieving self-determination—a compromise that would later on result in the continuation of the colonial status quo, only now governed by Black African leadership. As colonial counterinsurgency was mounting in response to the KLFA’s militancy, Tiras would regularly publicly disavow the Mau Mau and identify with the colonial state (Cloete, 2006: 122). If one of the strategies of settler domination was to mould the affluent colonised “to the point of disappearing [them]” into coloniality, Otieno could have easily been sculpted in the mould of a collaborator (Wolf, 1973: 402).
Yet, by the time The Emergency was announced in 1952, Otieno had developed an “intense resentment” for colonialism (Otieno, 1998: 33). In part this bitterness was driven by a desire to preserve her family’s dynastic legacy by correcting the colonial record. Throughout her memoir, Otieno asserts that her great grandfather, Waiyaki wa Hinga, for whom Waiyaki Way in Nairobi is named, was not an early collaborator who helped in creating inroads for Lord Fred Lugard, chief explorer of the British East African Company. Instead, in Otieno’s telling, Wa Hinga is a deceived and then heroic warrior who fought the British for breaking their treaty and for molesting Kikuyu and Ndorobo women—eventually exiled to and murdered on the way to Kibwezi. Additionally, Otieno was also aggrieved by parts of the missionary education she received at Kikuyu Girls’ Secondary School, where missionary teachers demonised cultural practises (including circumcision) and rituals like indigenous naming practices, Kikuyu songs and ancestral veneration.
The missionary classroom and the colonial archive may have radicalised Otieno against the aspects of colonialism that specifically affected her and her family’s lives, but Otieno’s family’s farm, where she planted and harvested vegetables together with a farmworker whose name we never learn, enabled her to reconsider colonial reality through the eyes of a peasant, whose family were likely landless squatters. The KLFA that Otieno would eventually fight within, emerged in response to the very conditions that structured the life of the unnamed militant farmworker and her family: a colonial state that had not only pioneered an apartheid-like geography that confined “natives” in rural reserves and apportioned parts of the city, but had also overseen legalised land theft in rural areas that generated a squatter class of low-waged farm workers.
It was there, on property which otherwise functioned as a product of the class contradictions among the colonised, where conversations with The Farmworker enabled Otieno to draw connections between her own experiences and those of the peasant and working-class masses—an experience that pushed her to militantly recommit to fighting in solidarity with the KLFA movement. So, when the militant farmworker explained the motivations of the KLFA and later organised for her to take the KLFA oath for the second time, the militant farmworker was helping Otieno trace a more disciplined, revolutionary pathway for the expulsion of resentment that might have otherwise found a more permanent, stationary function in the body—searing the throat, constricting the chest, scrambling the stomach. Instead, Otieno’s personal grievances were transformed into a disciplined commitment to work together with a coalition of militants who wanted to get “rid of the colonialists and their black collaborators”, against her own class interests (Otieno, 1998: 34).
Between 1953 and 1961, Wambui Otieno acted as a KLFA scout—first in Nairobi as part of the urban guerrilla wing and then in various locations in Central Kenya supporting the forest guerrilla wing. As a scout in the urban struggle from 1954 onwards, Otieno collaborated with domestic workers, taxi drivers, young unmarried women and sex workers to identify the right locations for attack, steal weapons and critical documents from settlers and colonial officers. The arms and documents would be obtained with the support of domestic workers who would leave a window unlatched or a sex worker who would encourage a British soldier to drink to the point of intoxication. Thereafter, the weapons would be circulated to freedom fighters across the country to arm them for attacks and the documents stolen would support cadres in developing radical propaganda to counteract the influence of the colonial government and shape the KLFA’s public narrative. Reportedly, the Supreme War Council (which later became Kenya Defence Council in August 1953), the vanguard of the armed movement charged with overall strategy, planning and coordination of military campaigns, was so impressed by Otieno’s ingenuity on the urban front, they instructed her to shift the focus of her scouting work to the Mount Kenya front. She remained in this position until the KLFA movement tapered out in 1956, largely as a result of state-led counterinsurgency. Her work largely revolved around identifying police and home guard posts that would be the location of attacks by KLFA armies to generate huge casualties among British soldiers and also yield arms that would strengthen the KLFA.
In her critical analysis, New Bones Abolition, Joy James delineates meaningful solidarity at an individual scale, as the difference between caretaking and war resistance. James, an African-American thinker working to theorise how revolutionaries, or “captive maternals”, transform from individuals who caretake in line with state or imperially sanctioned functions, through political education and struggle, transform into war resisters who take on risks, in line with revolutionary movement strategies to confront the state. According to James, caretaking is support for movements that comes in the form of performative humanitarianism or benevolence determined by individual ideas of what would best empower the oppressed. On the other end of the spectrum is war resistance, which is direct confrontation with the oppressive imperial state, with all the risks implied, that is guided by care for and discipline to the interests and the methods of the masses—a decision that can be made as an individual. James contends that genuine solidarity for individuals who are members of the petit bourgeoisie or middle-class entails “merging with the masses” which itself leads to war resistance (James, 2023: 26). Wambui Otieno, transitioned from a student or member of the colonial African petite bourgeoisie being groomed to protect the state and settler interests, to a war resister who disciplined herself to the principles of a mass anti-colonial struggle that explicitly attacked both the state and collaborators. But what did “merging with the masses” in relation to the KLFA mean, what did it require?
In Kenya’s Freedom Struggle: The Dedan Kimathi Papers published as a public education tool to provide the Kenyan public with first-hand information on the politics, strengths, weaknesses and organisation of the KLFA, Maina wa Kinyatti shares key KLFA documentation including organisational charters, declarations and correspondence between freedom fighters. The KLFA charter documents the KLFA’s militant anti-imperialist motivation and emphasises that the movement was guided by a love of Kenyan people—a love that translated into a genuine desire for self-determination, freedom and independence, all contingent on the complete eradication of foreign influence. In a letter to Georgi Malenkov, a member of the Moscow Press, Kimathi expresses that KLFA’s struggle was about more than just winning political freedom. Political freedom meant winning the power to ease overcrowding and resettle the landless by recovering white settled land and overseeing a program of free land redistribution, fighting wage exploitation and ending colonial state violence, including rape as a weapon of oppression. It was a political programme that reflected the will and aspirations of the masses (Kinyatti, 2009: 18-20).
The KLFA also recognised that the success of the movement was contingent on public support for militant struggle as the only pathway for decolonization. Both wa Kinyatii and Maloba argue that beyond the oaths that the KLFA encouraged members of the communities they were in to take, in order to guarantee their loyalty and willingness to resource the movement with food and intelligence, there was no coherent mass political education programme focused on raising class consciousness. However, from The New National Regulations1, we learn that the KLFA offered public guidelines for civil disobedience against the colonial occupation. For example, they urged that “no African…obey the laws of the white man”, in turn rejecting legal reformism as a strategy for winning freedom, but instead encouraging the public to look to militant struggle as the only pathway for total decolonisation (Kinyatti, 2009: 15-16). In reading the KLFA Directives, as well as documented correspondence between Dedan Kimathi and other KLFA actors, it becomes clear the KLFA regarded discipline as a critical principle for building a stronger, more effective decolonial struggle. One directive declares that “discipline is our greatest strength” and another states “no Guerrilla should disobey the orders of his Commander” (Kinyatti, 2009: 21). The KLFA believed that carrying out tasks as instructed was critical for its success. At the same time the KLFA also prioritised building unity and devotion within the movement by encouraging militants to grow their consciousness and cultivate a love for their “revolutionary duties” by praying, where prayer can be read more broadly as ritual which includes singing—a critical form of political education within a movement of people who could not read the written word, as argued by wa Kinyatti.
If genuine solidarity, “merging with the masses”means subordinating individual interests and principles to that of the collective, Otieno’s resolve to fight within and in solidarity with the KLFA, meant acting in accordance with KLFA’s strategy, principles and communal ethics, against personal feelings or colonial common sense. When Otieno’s mother was almost physically assaulted by a European officer at the nearby Kinoo Home Guard Post, she stormed the District Officer’s office and refused to leave until the DO had removed the officer. She did this despite the threats of execution from nearby home guards and police, and her mother’s request that she seek intervention from a friendly missionary. In line with the KLFA’s demands for civil disobedience, she rejected colonial structures of community support and public order. When Otieno was transferred from the urban front to Mount Kenya front, she expressed that it was “a lonely and often hazardous job” particularly at a time when the penalty for being caught carrying an unlicensed firearm was death by hanging (Otieno, 1998:39). However, she did not refuse her assignment. As someone disciplined by KLFA directives, she could not disobey commands from higher ups. Instead, she used well-crafted lies to escape surveillance and leveraged her personal connections to avoid loneliness and support her survival in line with the spirit of the KLFA.
Once when Otieno was conducting reconnaissance for an attack in Kandara (an attack that would become one of the KLFA’s most successful operations) she was arrested for moving around without a movement pass. Even here, she used deceit and leveraged connections in the communities she was scouting in—a high school friend, a secondary school headmaster—to escape prolonged encounters with the state and ultimately complete her missions successfully. If the KLFA’s War Council had pre-empted that good community relations would ensure that their soldiers were fed, housed and hidden as evidenced through their insistence that the movement maintain good relations with surrounding communities, then Otieno appropriated the rapport she had developed to safeguard her ability to complete her tasks and in turn that of the struggle. She even weaponised her association with the colonial civil service via her father, to extract intelligence for the struggle, while hiding in plain sight. After the Kandara attack, she got a ride to Nairobi from some unsuspecting senior chiefs. She then intercepted their meeting (focused on discussing the Mau Mau), to take images that were then smuggled to army commanders in the forest. As Otieno notes “while they were dedicated to destroying Mau Mau, I was devotedly serving the movement” (Otieno, 1998: 41).
Yet, as Otieno notes several times in her memoir, fear and low morale were real threats to the will to continue resisting. They hovered over the everyday of struggle and were heightened by increasing state repression, the possibility of a comrade or a relative betraying the struggle and the continued alienation from one’s own family. Otieno herself had left her three children in the care of her mother, unable to balance both scouting and motherhood. Moreover, Otieno’s father, Tiras Waiyaki, made several public disavowals of the KLFA and regularly aligned himself with the colonial state. As Otieno writes in her memoir, “many things could and did go wrong” and she and her comrades often “felt defeated, or hungry or depressed” (Otieno, 1998: 43). During these difficult moments, upon instructions from their commanders, Otieno and her comrades would lean on the directives of the Kenya Defence Council and pray and sing nationalist Mau Mau songs to boost their collective morale. Here, songs that were devised as a form of political education, also functioned as a source of inspiration and movement building, reminding Otieno of what exactly she was struggling for and affirming her belief that “the cause [was] just” (Otieno, 1998: 43). Ethics and tactics of discipline, unity, obedience, political education and spiritual strengthening shaped Otieno’s capacity to militantly support the anti-colonial struggle.
If an oath confers upon its participants the responsibility to achieve a specific goal, what is one’s responsibility to a struggle—its ethics, its principles, its strategies—if said goal is not achieved in their lifetime?
If flag independence inaugurated a new dynamic of power—neo-colonial politics—and a fabricated vision of political freedom, then it also signalled a reinvention of the mainstream meaning of solidarity and the kinds of political formations and alliances that would be prioritised to achieve it. Where the KLFA had fought to impose militancy as the only pathway for achieving independence for all across social class, in a post-colonial world where interests would become more differentiated, Otieno’s choice to continue diverging from her own class interests, and take on the principles of the oppressed masses would not hold.
The KLFA collapsed in mid-1956, four years after its founding. Its pacification, unfolded in two parts.
On one side, the movement continued to splinter, its weaknesses continuing to compound. While some movement leaders actively pursued a truce with the state, others wanted to continue to struggle, generating disunity. Unavailability of an organised and guaranteed food source meant that when the colonial state dug trenches around the forest in order to isolate the guerrilla fighters from their communities as part of the so called “villagisation program”2, many fighters were forced to abandon their positions in order to look for food and other resources. When the colonial government instituted collective punishment for everyone even marginally associated with the KLFA, the absence of organisation and a strong political education program among the movement’s supporters, compromised their capacity to continue supporting the movement.
On the other side, the colonial state had been facilitating a multi tactical counterinsurgency since 1953. The state was determined to prevent further radicalisation of Africans. It created organisations that were focused on indoctrinating and deradicalizing communities. For example, the East African Society of Women created Maendeleo ya Wanawake to fashion African women into loyal colonial subjects by training them in colonial domestic gender norms such as gardening and organising tea parties, and ultimately distract women from participating in the broader anti-colonial struggle (Lutomia et al., 2016: 323). In addition to isolating the movement from its support base, the colonial state also put a significant portion of guerrilla fighters in detention camps where they were subjected to physical torture and psychological warfare focused on forcing fighters to renounce the KLFA’s tactics and objectives—what they called rehabilitation. The colonial state also materially punished KLFA fighters: disinheriting many of them of their land and redistributing it to homeguards and loyalists as part of its land consolidation policy. Even later, when the post-colonial state redistributed about 20,000 acres of land purchased from settlers in the white highlands, potential recipients would be vetted to ensure they were not former KLFA fighters. Both the colonial and post-colonial Kenyan state made it socially and materially costly to be able to identify with militant anti-colonial struggle.
The counterinsurgency also worked to empty the public imagination of the Mau Mau’s ideas and aspirations. At the height of the Emergency in 1953, the colonial state had moved to ban the Kenya African Union (KAU), leaving Kenyans without any formal political organisation, since KAU had functioned as the main nationalist political vehicle. In 1955, the colonial state shifted to allow for the controlled formation of reformist African political parties only at a district level to foster the development of “responsible opinion” and “moderate politicians”. What emerged thereafter were elite dominated formations “centred around specific ethnic groups and their unique problems” as Maloba puts it. This created the conditions for the rejection of radical nationalist militancy and revolt as the pathways for achieving freedom, replacing it with a reformist, ethnonationalist politics that would come to dominate post-colonial Kenyan mainstream politics. Jomo Kenyatta, who would continue to exist as the symbol of African freedom and nationalism, denounced the KLFA, calling the Mau Mau “a disease which had been eradicated and must never be remembered again.” He also foreclosed the possibility of a more equitable, revolutionary postcolonial future in Kenya by both disassociating himself with communism and on several occasions assuring the white highland settlers that the state would never forcefully take away the land they occupied, because of how critical European agriculture was for a postcolonial Kenya’s development. The landless militants who had fought to realise flag independence, were now reduced to nuisances who posed a threat to national prosperity.
In many ways the state’s counterinsurgency against the KLFA constrained the limits of Kenyan political imagination. The KLFA had inspired the public to envision self-determination as defined by land redistribution, the end of wage exploitation, foreign influence and settler violence—a struggle which had effectively positioned poor, oppressed people as the vanguard of political transformation. Now the political elite led by Kenyatta had consolidated itself into two political parties, Kenya African National Union (KANU) and Kenya African Democratic Union
(KADU), which actively distanced themselves from the KLFA and negotiated flag independence based on a single condition: the transfer of the colonial state from imperial to neo-colonial African ownership. Their rise signalled the expulsion of even moderately radical thought to the periphery of political discourse and reimagined the Kenyan masses as validators of elite-produced political solutions or recipients of aid, rather than revolutionary agents of history who could marshal solidarity from other classes in support of their own interests.
Caught at the fraught nexus between the KLFA’s decreasing capacity as an active guerrilla force and the state’s counterinsurgency efforts, Wambui Otieno returned to Nairobi and joined the Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL)3, then led by Tom Mboya. Mboya who Otieno describes as “son of the soil” had become the trade movement leader after the colonial state decided to centralise trade unions to counter some unions’ militant support of the KLFA (Otieno, 1998: 52). At a time when the colonial state would not allow Africans to register political parties, the KFL and the Nairobi People’s Convention Party (NPCP, registered after the state allowed district-level parties to be registered), served as critical urban vehicles for Otieno to engage in political action. Together with a diverse coalition of actors, Otieno organised boycotts, campaigns to encourage other Africans to support the boycott, protests to desegregate schools, hotels and residential areas. Together with her comrades in the women’s wing of the NPCP she smuggled clothes, food and intelligence to the remaining freedom fighters in the forests. When the KANU party was formally registered, and negotiating the terms of independence during the Lancaster House Conferences, Otieno supported the resurgent group of KLFA adherents who were mobilising against what they saw as the opportunism of the professional class or “those who had not fought for freedom” (Otieno, 1998: 71).
In July 1960, when she was incarcerated in Lamu on suspicion of being part of a resurgent group of KLFA fighters Kiama Kia Muingi, the people she communed and continued to agitate with were KLFA adherents. In January 1961, pregnant with her health deteriorating, having been raped and brutalised by the colonial police, she was sent to Nairobi with the promise of being released but her release was delayed as she still refused to denounce the KLFA. This is to say, Otieno did not end her relationship with the KLFA by sharing a dangerous secret or ignoring an instruction. Her departure was not loud or even particularly discernible in the pages of her memoir. It would not even be classified as betrayal in the classical sense. Instead, what transpired occurred in two intertwined acts.
Act I: Otieno’s aspirations gradually began to align with her social class. What had shifted between her KLFA days and her engagement in post-colonial politics, was that the narrow class interests she was willing to betray then, now became the ones she was working to strengthen.
Act II: The colonial state and then the post-colonial state killed the possibility of the emergence of any revolutionary tradition that might have seen Kenyans unite through organised political vehicles to determine the country’s future. While there might not have been a strong vehicle to define and realise a revolutionary vision, Otieno would, for a long time, participate in the state machinery that would foreclose the possibility of one emerging.
After Otieno’s release from detention, her network was largely limited to doctors, judges, lawyers, politicians, for whom political freedom from imperialism simply meant the permission for a narrow section of the population, the now educated elite, to have ownership of the state—not freedom from imperialism, land and wealth redistribution and development or economic liberation. As this (non)transition unfolded, Otieno joined and actually led many of the institutions that would administer the neo-colonial state. In 1960, Otieno was elected as the first chair of KANU’s women’s wing in Nairobi and the vice chairperson of Maendeleo ya Wanawake, among other positions. It is important to note that Otieno challenged patriarchal domination of electoral politics by becoming one of the first women to vie for electoral office as MP of Lang’ata in 1969—an election where she would also be the victim of political violence waged against her by her former party KANU when she vied for the Ngong’ MP seat as part of FORD—the party that would end KANU’s one party rule during the first multiparty elections in 1992. Moreover, through her legal battle for the right to bury her late husband as a woman, Otieno challenged sexist inheritance and property ownership laws. She also used her position in Maendelo ya Wanawake to decrease exploitation of women artisans by working to connect them to export markets, bypassing exploitative middlemen. As has been argued by Grace Musila, and other feminist scholars, these contributions would be central to threatening “heteropatriarchal nationalism” and to some degree challenging the exploitation that low-income women workers were subjected to in a neoliberal capitalist economy (Musila, 2020: 600).
However, Otieno would fight for these rights under the banner of a government that would not only neglect and abandon KLFA freedom fighters, but also actively repress and punish them, and any other politically progressive alternatives. In The Anatomy of Neo-Colonialism in Kenya, Maloba’s critical study of neocolonialism in Kenya, he argues that Kenyatta not only made capitalism Kenya’s de facto economic model and ideology, but also worked to indigenise capitalism as an African ideology while relegating communism and ‘left’ ideologies in general as alien and un-African. The state repressed the formation of any collectives that would challenge the state’s capitalist ideology and put forth alternative visions as the colonial state had done before it. Sessional Paper No.10—pronounced by Kenyatta as “the end of ideological debate” in Kenya—developed in 1965 under the guidance of Tom Mboya and Mwai Kibaki announced that social classes amongst Africans had been determined non-existent, individual land rights were guaranteed, trade unions were centralised under a single entity controlled by the state to maintain “good industrial relations” and the question of nationalisation of the country’s key resources was dismissed (Maloba, 2017: 82). The state’s assault on mass-based politics would begin with the refusal to consult anyone beyond the cabinet in determining the state’s stance on pressing political matters. When Sessional Paper No.10 was developed, the state deliberately only consulted cabinet members, and Mboya, then minister for planning, defended this choice by snidely remarking that such a critique assumed that “the government has no responsibility to lead, but only to follow” (Maloba, 2017: 84). In November 1965, the state also consolidated the government and western-adjacent Kenya Federation of Labour and the radical Kenya African Workers’ Congress4 (its leaders agitated for the collective ownership of all means of production) into a single government-controlled entity: the Central Organisation of Trade Unions, effectively foreclosing the possibility of unions existing as a site for revolutionary worker organising and political influence. The state also worked to repress socialist politicians, including Oginga Odinga, Pio Gama Pinto and Bildad Kaggia who were the subjects of an anti-communist campaign organised by the state and both the US and UK via their local embassies. Leftist politicians particularly Odinga Oginga, were situated as un-African and unpatriotic and in turn communism was labelled a pathology and foreign ideology.
Otieno not only supported this project, but actively worked as one of its ambassadors. For example, in 1972 Otieno represented Kenya at the Afro-Asian Women’s Solidarity Conference, a progeny of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference in 1958 which sought to promote African and Asian cooperation in opposition to colonialism and neocolonialism. During a conference plenary, she announced that Kenya’s priority was to maintain “close ties with Britain, our former colonial master, which in [her] view had more to share with us than pro-Moscow Leninist ideals” (Otieno, 1998: 114). At the same conference, Otieno insisted that “Kenya was building a democratic country based on improving its people’s status and fighting against poverty and disease”, while erroneously claiming that capitalism was indigenous to Africans (Otieno, 1998: 114). Meanwhile, KLFA fighters who had fought for land redistribution and an end to foreign influence on national politics—demands that were deliberately side-lined by the ruling party—continued to languish in poverty and disease. When she did engage with peasant and working class Kenyans it was at the level of a caretaker—developing policies on their behalf, transferring aid to them on behalf of international organisations—participating in NGO-ized caretaking that would become the dominant mode of interaction between the elite/middle classes and working/peasant classes in the wake of the state’s elimination of organised mass politics. At a time when the state and its imperial sponsors were fighting to transmute Kenyans from agents of history into passive recipients of aid, Otieno chose against cross-class solidarity and militancy as her dominant mode of political action. Just like the political elite she was a part of, she made a choice.
Amilcar Cabral, agronomist, teacher and one of the revolutionary founders and leaders of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), the mass-based party of freedom fighters in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde that would free their countries and the colonial metropole from Portuguese fascism helps make sense of this choice. In The Weapon of Theory, Amilcar Cabral’s 1966 speech to the first Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America5, two years after Kenya had become a republic and at a time when most African countries had become flag independent and Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde were still fighting for their own independence, Cabral argued that post-national liberation, most African countries were being sabotaged by a pseudo-bourgeoisie that acted as “native agents” who managed imperialism locally on behalf of imperial countries. As such, formally liberated African nations were in a state of neocolonialism, in which this native ruling class was preventing the development and industrialisation of their own countries, in order to accumulate wealth on their own behalf and that of imperial countries. Importantly he notes that this class had emerged from technocratic, salaried bureaucrats and professionals—the bankers, the lawyers, the economists, the doctors, the professors, the intelligentsia. Cabral argued that the movement to defeat neocolonialism, those who now constituted the technocratic bureaucratic class now had a choice to make: to continue to become more bourgeoisie as the ruling class before them had, or work in an alliance with working classes and peasants and work against, not just imperial domination, but capitalism itself and in turn the possibility of accumulating more wealth, which he saw as the product and condition of neo-colonialism. It was a choice between “betraying the revolution or committing suicide as a class”; a choice to allow oneself to be transformed ideologically and politically by struggle or become stagnant and stall its realisation (Cabral, 1966).
Faced with the possibility of furthering national liberation, following flag independence, the then-emerging middle class and now-national bourgeoisie made the choice to consolidate their wealth and monopolise the fruits of a struggle it would repress, and in Otieno’s case, a struggle she had participated in and would continue to identify with even as her party attempted to wipe its memory from history.
If an oath is betrayed by a forebear, what is the duty of her contemporaries?
In June 2024, a broad coalition of Kenyans—peasants, working class Kenyans, bureaucrats and technocrats rose to contest a series of oppressive fiscal decisions. Not only was the state (led by William Ruto, backed by the International Monetary Fund and in turn, imperial power) working to impose a set of repressive taxes on an already struggling population, but it was also gradually reducing social benefits and access to critical services including subsidised healthcare, tertiary education and infrastructural development. It was, and continues to be, a struggle against neocolonialism, a struggle against the political elite’s ability to appropriate national resources in service of its own pockets and that of imperial powers it manages the country on behalf of. This struggle has been reimagined as one against corruption, ignorance of the rule of law and lack of political transparency—a liberal legalistic fight where the colonial state continues to operate intact, its neocolonial structure remaining unaddressed. Those of us who are participating in this struggle, yet still exist as part the bureaucratic, professional class—the bankers, the lawyers, the economists, the doctors, the professors, the intelligentsia—just like Otieno before us, are faced with the choice Cabral poses: to “betray the revolution” and stunt its revolutionary potential by limiting it to a legalistic fight or to “merge with the masses” and “commit suicide as a class”. That is, work together with the rest of the working classes and peasants and in turn develop a political consciousness that goes beyond liberal critique to revolutionary critique of imperialism, capitalism, the fundamental class-based arrangement of our society and the way our nation’s resources are distributed—the only true way out of the symptomatic issues of corruption and lawlessness.
In the process of achieving flag independence, Otieno and her generation made their choice. But in the wake of a renewed fight against the political class and its imperial sponsors, Cabral’s challenge emerges once again: will we continue to betray the masses or begin to betray our kin?
Endnotes
- The New National Regulations was a document created by Dedan Kimathi that spelled out some community norms to foster unified resistance by KLFA fighters and community members against the colonial state.
- The Kenya Federation of Labor (KFL) was a centralised labour union, initiated by the colonial state to prevent militant unions supporting the KLFA. The union was also west-leaning.
- The Kenya African Workers’ Congress was a dissident break-away faction of the KFL with a marxist analysis of what would deliver liberation – collective ownership of the means of production by the working class. It was affiliated with Nkrumah’s non-aligned All Africa Trade Union Federation.
- Starting in 1954, the colonial state displaced Kikuyu-speaking people from their homes and forced them to live in isolated internment camps. The colonial state pursued this “villagisation policy” in order to break solidarity links between these communities and the KLFA fighters they supported by organising and delivering food, clothing (mutual aid) and intelligence. This policy of “villagisation” saw the creation of 854 camps that were surrounded by barbed wire and wide trenches and under constant surveillance by colonial officers and homeguards. Read about the Museum of British Colonialism’s ‘Barbed Wire Village’ Project to learn more.
- Hosted by Havana, Cuba in 1966, the Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America was intended to unify national liberation forces across the three third world continents, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Delegates focused on discussing anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism.
References
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Cabral, Amilcar. 1966. “The Weapon of Theory”. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm
Cloete, E. 2006. A Time of Living Dangerously: Flanking Histories to Wambui Waiyaki Otieno’s Account of Mau Mau. English in Africa, 33(1), 113–135. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40399026
Kimathi, Dedan. 1987. Kenya’s Freedom Struggle: The Dedan Kimathi Papers. Kinyatti, Maina (Eds.). Zed Books.
Lutomia, AN., Sanya, BN., & Rombo, DO. 2016. “Fifteen: Examining and contextualising Kenya’s Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organisation (MYWO) through an African feminist lens”. In Women’s Emancipation and Civil Society Organisations. Bristol, UK: Policy Press.
Maloba, WO. 1993. Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of A Peasant Revolt. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Maloba, WO. 2017. The Anatomy of Neo-Colonialism in Kenya: British Imperialism and Kenyatta, 1963–1978. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan Cham.
Mbunga, Henry Muoki. 2013. “”Thaai thathaiyai Ngai thaai”: Narratives of Rituals, Agency, and Resistance in the KLFA (Mau Mau) Struggle for Kenya’s Independence”. Syracuse, NY: Pan African Studies – Theses. 4.
Musila, GA. 2020. The Burden of Representation in the Life Stories of Wambui Waiyaki Otieno and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 35(3), 599–621.
Otieno, Wambui Waiyaki. 1998. Mau Mau’s Daughter: A Life History. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
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