Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905–1963. Tabitha Kanogo
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were fertile.
Wanjiku and her mother first settled in Ndunyu Buru near Elmenteita, where they had gone to join Wanjiku’s brother, who had moved to the area earlier and become a squatter. There was a strong kinship basis to the squatters’ migration pattern.21 Ernest Kiberethi Kanyanja and his father went to the Rift Valley in 1917 ‘because of poverty in Kikuyu’.22 Although his family had owned land in Githunguri, their plot was infertile and too small. His father therefore decided to move to the Settled Areas where he initially found employment as a ‘forest cleaner’ in Elburgon. As a forest squatter, Kiberethi’s father would clear and cultivate an area, usually for about three consecutive years, after which it would be planted with young trees. He could then continue to plant his crops between the rows of trees for a while before moving on to clear fresh bush and repeat the process.
Some of the squatters who moved to the Rift Valley before 1918 were large stock owners who needed more land for their livestock.23 As Hannah Njoki recalled: ‘My father was a rich man so he hired his own bogie and got other people to board with all their luggage and livestock.’24 The availability of good quality grazing land in the White Highlands was a great incentive for migration. Because of their impecunious state many settlers could only afford to pay meagre wages to these migrants and met the deficit by making part of their excess land available to the squatter. In this way the settler got cheap labour and the squatter access to prime land in return for minimal labour. In Njoki’s case, her father grazed his stock while his son worked for the settler. It has been asserted that squatters leased out their landlords’ grazing lands to their Kikuyu friends,25 so that some of the squatters were grazing not only their own herds, but also those of friends and relations in Central Province.
Other early squatters had been ahoi who had lost their rights to use land in Central Province: a situation prompted on the one hand by an expansion of cultivation in Central Province and on the other by the alienation of lands for European settlement and consequent block on any further Kikuyu expansion. Under such pressures, githaka holders withdrew ahoi rights until the 1940s,26 which forced the ahoi to look for land in the White Highlands.
Taxation
If the possibility of evading taxes provided an incentive for some Kikuyu to move to the Settled Areas,27 they would have gained only temporary relief. This was because, apart from being employers, the settlers also acted as tax-collectors. Indeed, some squatters hoped to earn their tax money by moving to the Settled Areas. As Gitau stated, ‘Some people had no money for the head-tax so they came here where the European would pay the tax for them. He [the settler] would only present the people with the receipts.’28 In this respect, the 1910–11 Annual Report for Naivasha District noted that, since the Assistant Commissioner was confined to his office most of the time, the collection of taxes depended ‘almost entirely on the willingness of the employer to pay the tax for their boys as an advance of wages or to collect and send it in on pay day.’29 In most cases, the employer obliged in the latter manner.
The chiefs’ oppression
The White Highlands were regarded as a haven for people wishing to escape conscription into the Carrier Corps during the First World War. Like several other informants, Shuranga Wegunyi had been captured for the Carrier Corps from his home in Muranga. His father redeemed him by paying in kind, one ndigithu (gourd) of honey and a ram to the local chief. On release, Shuranga and his father decided to move to the safety of the White Highlands. Here, the settlers protected their employees from conscription into the Carrier Corps for fear of losing what remained of their resident labour.30 Some people moved to the Settled Areas to avoid the chief’s authority, for in the reserve the chief and his headmen were entrusted with the task of providing labour for communal and public projects. People detested this form of forced labour, failure to do which could be punished by the confiscation of livestock. Mithanga Kanyumba’s move to the Rift Valley was a direct attempt to escape the chief’s authority. As he himself recalled:
My father was rich. The chief used to choose young men who would be taken to Fort Hall. We [Mithanga and one other] stayed there for two days without knowing our fate. The European [who was to hire them] was at location 2 at Chief Njiri’s. We were told by the Askari Kanga [the chief’s soldiers] to wait for the European who would give us money for travel. We refused the money and went back. I left Kikuyu due to the chief’s trouble. I went to Nightingale’s place where I was employed.31
Other reasons, such as fear of witchcraft, hostile neighbours and family feuds also played a part in making individuals move to the Rift Valley,32 but, in most cases, the move was the result of a combination of reasons.
Early labour recruitment
Naivasha and Nakuru, where the bulk of the work-force was Kikuyu, were among the districts least affected by labour shortages in the period before 1918. By 1918 there were about 8,000 squatter families in the Nakuru District alone. Of a population of 9,116 Africans in the Naivasha District, 6,600 belonged to almost exclusively Kikuyu squatter families.33 Although salaries were low, between three and six rupees per month, because land was plentiful the two areas were exceedingly popular among Kikuyu squatter-labourers and attracted a number of illegal squatters. Incidentally, by 1905, one rupee was equivalent to l/4d, or 15 rupees to one pound sterling. However, by 1920, one rupee was valued at two shillings (2/-).
The first settlers to recruit labour in Kikuyu country promised their prospective squatters large tracts of land for grazing and cultivation. An initial quantity of livestock, including cows and goats, was also promised and actually given to some of the pioneer Kikuyu ‘labourers’. This all helped towards starting them off on a sound footing towards their ultimate goal of amassing wealth. In return, the Kikuyu were required to herd the settlers’ livestock.34 Later, especially after the First World War, this obligation was extended to jobs relating to the commercial cultivation of settler crops, but in the meanwhile the labour demands imposed on pioneer immigrants were minimal.
The early settlers capitalised on the depleted state of Kikuyu lands by offering prospective immigrants larger and more productive plots in the Rift Valley than were available in certain parts of Central Province. As a number of ex-squatters pointed out, it was not actual landlessness that made them decide to move to the Rift Valley, but rather the inadequate size and infertility of their own lands. Some of the Kikuyu who migrated to the Rift Valley in the period before and after 1918 were, however, completely landless, either as a result of direct land loss through land alienation or because they had been evicted by their Kikuyu landlords.
Unlike the Luo, Luyia and Abagusii contract workers, the Kikuyu labour-force brought their women and children to the settler farms, as well as certain items such as livestock and beehives, which could be regarded as indications of the permanent nature of their migration.35
Prospective migrants were initially offered free transport and this continued until the outbreak of the First World War. The Kikuyu, Limuru and Kijabe stations served as departure points, especially for squatters from the southern Kiambu area. One of my informants, Kiiru, who was among them, spoke about these journeys as follows:
People began coming to the Rift Valley in 1909. Most of them were brought by Delamere. People would be put in a ‘bogie’ with their beehives, livestock and skins (ndarwa) for sleeping on. All alighted at Njoro where they would be taken to places where they could graze and cultivate freely without restriction. They were shown large fields which belonged to Delamere, who wanted them to look after his stock.36
Although Delamere’s name was the one most frequently quoted by the ex-squatters, other settlers also made labour-recruiting journeys to Central Province and elsewhere.37 Njoro was clearly not the only terminus for squatters thus recruited. The destinations of such labourers were as varied as the extent of European settlement.
The squatter system
As the squatter system evolved, it began to show a number of characteristics that revealed weaknesses in the settler community and colonial