THE MAU MAU WOMEN

My mama can’t go a week without mentioning that grandmother was part of the Mau Mau movement that fought against the colonial rule here in Kenya and even though things have changed and racism is frowned upon; the things she did, seem way far too great for my frail ailing grandmother but I wouldn't put anything past her. She always had a way with words and people so I wasn't as surprised as my little brother Teddy when she said she had been the one to rally the women to support their men in that cold war. The sun was setting in the far west, it’s yellow glow cast on the clouds. I remember we’d just taken our evening tea and went to sit with grandmother under the green leafy tree at the center of her compound. She had always loved sitting there especially in the evening when most of the work had been done. She didn’t take kindly to laziness. Teddy was the first to ask her about her teenage years and how she’d come to be among the women leaders of the Mau Mau movement. I secretly wanted to ask but lately I had become shy… my mama attributed my shyness to adolescence but grandmother said I was just in the age of self discovery. I waited eagerly for her to narrate her life. Story time with my grandmother had always been my favorite thing to look forward to even when she visited in the city.

“Seems Teddy here has lost his memory,” she laughed, “haven’t I told you the stories time and again?”

“Please grandmother, "Teddy pleaded.

“Alright baba,” she teased. She’d always called him baba as a reference to her father who’d died in the second war of the world. The sun dimmed, no longer shining golden rays in the compound. My cousin Ruto was chasing the hens into the poultry house while his mother milked the cow at the cowshed.

“I was at the farm with my grandparents, weeding because it was the season of planting beans… the earth was warm and moist. The earthly smell of wet soil filled the air,” she closed her eyes as if reminiscing, “good days they had been,” she said, “until the village drunkard passed by yelling at the top of his lungs about people with skin like milk and hair as long as his cows’ tail,” she paused to sip the glass of milk I had brought her earlier. Teddy’s eyes were wide with anticipation, his hands clasped together waiting on each word that rolled off grandmother’s tongue as if he’d never heard it before, “the villagers had dismissed him until the next day when the chief called a meeting of the whole clan elders to his hut,”

“It was the beginning of a new world and a new way of life,” Teddy cut in. I shook my head, of course he knew what she was going to say next. The strangers had been welcomed into the lands and they lived together for a while until the chief begun giving the fertile lands to the white men… chasing away the natives of the lands to clustered places where soil had never been fertile. People had said that it was witchcraft and they would often whisper of their walking metals that rolled on the ground with people on it. Even the chief had been given one. It was at that time that grandmother got married to my grandfather but as my uncle says, “I know not of my father’s face,” because he was drafted to war as a soldier in the war and never got to see my uncle as he’d died in the war…his remains were never brought back. When my mother and uncle had been old enough to speak; my grandmother had taken them to her parents house because her mother in law had chased her out of the compound with claims that she had bewitched her son to go into the war. There was wide spread cruelty everywhere, grandmother had observed. She saw the way the white people had turned cruel. They were made to work in the tea plantations of the lands grabbed by the white settlers yet they were given little pay as compensation for their laborious works in the fields. Children were send to work in the white man’s field while women were made maids to the wives of the colonialists. White children couldn’t associate with the black children and schools were set aside to separate them in terms of the color of their skin. My grandmother worked as a servant to the wife of the District Commissioner of her area; a short bald man with a long yellow mustache called Mr. Smith. Mama even told me what happened that night when she’d gone to see grandmother but found the little girl of the DC. The little girl had taken her to her bedroom where they had played with her toy, she remembers that she was called Annie. Mrs. Smith had come to see her daughter when she saw my mama playing with Annie’s doll. She’d scowled her face and stomped out but came back a few moments later with a leather whip. The story always made me sad because I can still see the whip marks on my mother’s back. They’re so deep and still make me wince as if I can feel her pain but mama had always laughed it off saying, “It wasn’t Annie’s fault… racism is taught dear. Annie was the sweetest girl I had ever known,” she says. Grandmother had found Mrs. Smith whipping mama and that was when she slapped Mrs. Smith across the face and vowed to never step foot in that house. They had headed straight home to her parents house and the next few days, she’d walked around tirelessly in all bomas asking the women and mothers to come out and defend their children. It was on those visits that she heard of the brutality that some of the women themselves had gone through the houses of their masters and the scrapes their children had to eat just because the white households didn’t consider them deserving to be served the same way the white children were. It was a taboo for a white child to sit with a black child or plat together. Grandmother had formed a coalition for the women, “the Mau Mau women group,” to fight against the racial injustice and chase away the white man from their land.

“We’d go days without food while hiding in the forests because the government was on the look out for the women causing trouble and disturbing the peace of the white man,” she continued, “but if you want freedom…nothing else matters. My parents were arrested and taken to the cells in Kapenguria where they were held without food for days and sometimes beaten up to reveal our locations,” she went on, “our children were left to fend for themselves,”

“Were you caught?” I asked even though I knew the answer.

“Grandmother was caught by the chief’s guards when she went to see mama,” Teddy offered, “don’t you remember?”

I smacked his head, “were you there?” I snapped at him though not in anger.

“I was held in custody. No food as was the norm… only water and food not fit for human consumption,” she said, ignoring our little banter with a slight smile, “but when you want something so bad…the world conspires to give it to you,” she added, “detained for a year and a half before the white man went away and our lands became ours once again but not under the circumstance we had hoped,”

“I also want to receive a prize like yours,” Teddy said, “but instead of bravest woman Icon it’ll be bravest man Icon award,”

My grandmother laughed, “go help your cousins with the food,”