On 19 november 1956, Mau Mau rebel field marshal Dedan Kimathi stood or, more accurately, sat in front of Her Majesty’s Supreme Court of Kenya at Nyeri and asserted a “plea of not guilty.” After eight days of trial, Chief Justice Kenneth Kennedy O’Connor found Kimathi guilty of unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition and sentenced him to be “hanged by the neck until he is dead.”
His dreadlocked visage, captured while he sat in the defendant’s chair on trial for his life, can be seen on T-shirts, in graffiti art on the sides of Nairobi buildings, and on the sides of matatu (minibuses) throughout contemporary Kenya and farther afield. His name has often been considered synonymous with the anticolonial rebellion that engulfed colonial Kenya in the 1950s. He was the self-fashioned Field Marshal of the Mau Mau, a movement that had many names, many faces, and even more interpretations.
The Mau Mau rebellion, which emerged predominantly among the Gikuyu, Embu, and Meru populations of Central Kenya, was a radical response both to colonial settler policies of land appropriation and squatter labor restrictions on the one hand, and to the repressive local African governing apparatus in the reserves and the slow-moving constitutional nationalists of the anticolonial movement in Kenya on the other.
Kimathi rose to prominence in the early 1950s out of relative obscurity, first as an administrator of the oaths of loyalty sworn by “Mau Mau” adherents and then as leader of the fighters who moved into the forests after the colonial declaration of a State of Emergency in October 1952. His charisma, flair for oration, and ability to evade British forces became legendary. For the British, Kimathi was a fearsome adversary. Special Branch superintendent lan Henderson, the man in charge of the “hunt” for Dedan Kimathi, compared him to Hitler.
In his memoir, The Hunt for Dedan Kimathi, Henderson pictured Kimathi as both a formidable intellect and a cowardly criminal. In 1953 the East African Standard compared him to Mussolini. For many in Kenya, however, Kimathi conjured other historical comparisons. William R. Ochieng’ argued Kimathi had been “elevated to the ranks of Mao, Lenin and Guevera.”6 Ali A. Mazrui placed Kimathi among the top candidates in Kenyan history to be anointed a national martyr, akin to other global anticolonial heroes the likes of Gandhi. 7 While the Emergency and counterinsurgency operations would officially last until 1960, the capture and execution of Kimathi, in 1956 and 1957 respectively, allowed the British to claim victory over Mau Mau and solidified Kimathi’s position among the martyred leaders of a failed rebellion.
But Kimathi’s legacy was never a simple exemplar of patriotic martyrdom, and his place in the postcolonial imagination reflected the complicated legacy of the Mau Mau rebellion: at times suppressed or downplayed, at others lauded and filled with mythic importance, but always contested.8 When Nelson Mandela visited Kenya for the first time, in July 1990, he invoked Kimathi’s name in a speech at Kasarani Stadium: “In my 27 years of imprisonment, I always saw the image of fighters such as Kimathi, (General) China, and others as candles in my long and hard war against injustice.”
He lamented the absence of Kimathi’s widow, Eloise Mukami, at the festivities and the lack of a proper burial site for Kimathi: speaking of his desire to pay homage to the fallen heroes of Kenya’s independence struggle, Mandela lamented “it is an honor for any freedom fighter to pay respect to such heroes.” Mandela’s speech provided a pointed, if implied, critique of Kenya’s second president, Daniel arap Moi, and his government’s treatment of former “freedom fighters.”
Moi’s stolid expression during the speech revealed the more problematic aspects of the choice of Kimathi as hero in postcolonial Kenya. As Marshall Clough observed in his important study of Mau Mau memoirs, those who exalted Kimathi often failed to “address the incongruence between Gikuyu revolt and Kenyan nation, … between guerrillamartyr Kimathi, champion of the fighting Mau Mau and enemy of loyalism, and living statesman [first president Jomo] Kenyatta, representative of the Gikuyu elders and the constitutional politicians and apostle of peace, reconciliation, and (the policy of] forgive and forget.”
10 Clough pointed to the “irony” of elevating Kimathi as a national hero, with many of his contemporaries questioning his revolutionary credentials and pointing to his loss of support due to his notoriously strict disciplinary ethos and his legendary antagonism with the more populist General Stanley Mathenge.
11 Kahinga Wachanga, an early follower but later rival for leadership in the forest, described Kimathi as a great leader who fell from grace, turning jealous and power hungry in his later years.
12 Wachanga was quick to remind his public that Mau Mau was not one man but a movement: “we had no one leader or commander except the oath. The oath was our leader.”
13 In memoirs and popular Kenyan literature, Kimathi could be a tragic folk hero, a misunderstood rebel commander, a power-hungry despot, a prophetic patriot, a reminder of the lost dreams of revolution, or a dangerous precedent for future dissidents against the postcolonial order
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