KIZUIZINI: DETAINING OUR STORIES

KIZUIZINI:DETAINING OUR STORIES.

Just like Japan in the late 18th Century, ever since Kenya was exposed to the European world in the 1980’s, it has been faced with the herculian task of embracing the new and at the same time not letting any of its sedimentary self be replaced, sometimes with violent resistance. So was China’s resistance to the outside world during its cultural revolution. The resultant impact on the lives of its people created a rich fodder for serious study, and in the case of Japan, the resultant literature in subsequent periods has been a documentation of such periods in the Shiden style of historical-literature propagated by the likes of Mori Ogai, author of Saiki Koi And Other Stories. However, a look at biographical and autobiographical works for the Kenyan literature scene reveals that very little has been done in documenting lives of people who lived in this and other periods. The revelation that so far only two Swahili novels have been written about the Mau Mau period, namely P.M. Kareithi’s Kaburi Bila Msalaba and JM Kariuki’s Mau Mau Kizuizini makes the news that a Karatina peasant farmer Joseph Muthee has written Kizuizini; http://www.kwani.org/books/index.htm a book about his life in detention a cause to both celebrate and at the same time wonder why a vacuum exists in our literature in terms of the historical-literature genre.

Joseph Muthee was a trusted farm hand employed by a colonial settler, Captain C. O’Hagan, who so loved him that he called him ‘son.’ However, when the fight for independence started, O’Hagan tricked Muthee into the hands of the colonial police, marking his journeys across five detention camps all over the country after being labelled a Mau Mau hardcore. He therefore narrates his life in the ‘personal-history’ novel published by Kwani? Trust.

Reading Kizuizini reminds one of Wild Swans-Three Daughters Of China by Jung Chan; the book that won the NCR Book Award in 1992. Her use of first person to describe her journey from a peasant worker in Yibin, China into a lecturer at London University makes it a vivid reading. In the two books, this style of ‘personal histories’ acts as a window through which we can gaze into the histories of a people and nation. Other books in personal- history strand include Frederick Douglass’s The Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written By Himself, as well as Mori Ogai’s historical biographical works.

Though Ogai differs from Muthee in the fact that he did not favour the contemporary narcissistic ‘I’ narrative style that Muthee uses to give a personal account of his life during the Mau Mau period, a lot of similarities are seen in the two who combine aesthetically entertaining writing (Rekishi Sosetsu to Ogai) and historical, (auto)biographical accuracy (Shiden to the Japanese). This fusion of personal, historical , religious , philosophical and aesthetic dimensions in the novel form becomes more powerful (though necessarily not better) in articulating important responses to the problems of their days than historical text books like Prof. Caroline Elkin’s Britain’s Gulag, Histories of the Hanged and the rest.


Kizuizini narrates both small and big events to reveal some useful themes which lend credit to the fact that the Mau Mau war is so central to the conceptualisation of our Kenyan-ness. There is the concept of hard work, perseverance, and diligence, where regardless of where one comes from, the observance of these ideals will ensure a future full of fortune and everlasting glory. Muthee articulates these ideals with his never die attitude that made him survive detention to become a leader in his local village when independence came, having been elected in-absentia. He can be equated with Chuhei in Mori Ogai’s ‘Yasui Fujin’ who despite being ridiculed for being ugly, educated himself to become the nightingale that finally sings with glory, a leader of his people. Jung Chang too persevered through her ordeals as a worker in a steel factory, a peasant doctor walking barefoot, life in Spartan camps, and despite Mao’s disdain for Europeans where he said following them is like ‘sniffing after foreigners farts and calling them sweet’, learnt English and went abroad to get a more fulfilling life.

Kizuizini details the activities of the Mau Mau intelligence as offered by their sympathisers giving insights to the colonial period, analysing the myths of the Imperial governance and the Mau Mau resistance to it. So simple and unbelievable are some of their surveillance networks, yet they worked. Muthee reveals a lot about the fighters, both the great ones and the lesser ones, as well as the betrayers during the cause with amazing objectivity.

Social criticism as well as subtle commentating of the colonial and post colonial rule remind a lot of the abuse of power that authority can succumb to. Just as international politics are shown to influence local events and plans to protect motherlands in Ogai’s ‘A Plan to Repel Foreigners and Defend the Harbours’, Muthee in his simplistic way captures the impact of International forces on his life in detention. The letters that the detainees wrote to Her Majesty’s attention, the fights against torture in some of the camps, all these got the attention of the Parliament in an imperialistic Britain whose credibility started to erode and changed the world agenda from colonialism.

The need for deep appreciation for human beings due to their human nature than superficial appearances is a human ideal that runs across most of autobiographies and historical biographies that document turbulent social times.
Perhaps this superficialities are the ones that lead to the writings of personal historical biographies. History is often revised and written to favour the status quo, which has led to a lot of Mau Mau research and documentation being accused of thrusting Gikuyu Nationalism to the national discourse. Catherine Fourshey says in her review of the book Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority, and Narration (edited by E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale, eds) in Jenda Journal of Culture and African women studies that ‘Official state endorsed histories tend to be the stories of the status quo and they must be recognized as such, distinct from the multiple realities that accompany nationalist movements. This seems to be the repeated conclusion throughout the text’. Well, since Muthee writes from a position of personal experience, one can’t accuse him of such traits, a fact that makes personal histories more believable.


Stylistically, the book is a proof that great works are not just about great events, but that they are also a blend of great aesthetics too. The act of narrating real occurrences of a phenomenal past like the Mau Mau war, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Meiji dynasty in Japan can easily dissipate into an archaeological paper presentation. Muthee circumvents this through his narrative skills.

He tells his story in the first person narrative, lending credence to inner emotions and well placed hooks in each chapter. Personal histories told in first narrative like Muthee’s give emotional appeal, the movement and inner journey of a person in nightmarish situations, with a passion that is lacking in most third person accounts.

Another stylistic devise that the author uses to crystalise reality is the intense detailing of events. There is intense information given about dates, times and people. Even mundane routine activities are shown. This comes in as a way to ensure that the facts are accurate; part of historical literature attempts to provide details so as to counter disbelief. It is therefore no wonder that even the most unbelievable paragraphs in Muthee’s novel collaborate with archival history.


And here in lies one of the major issues about the book: Too much detail. Some sections tend to be clustered with very many names and even those of minute characters, times and places. His descriptions for example of the process whereby milk is finally made into cheese in his days as a farm hand emphasises his diligence and love for his job, the rudimentary machinery then, and so on but also makes feel slowed down a bit as the story moves fast in the preceding sections. Jung Chang’s Wild Swans also has such paragraphs where she details her job in a steel factory and in an electrical factory, while Ogai’s descriptions of rituals like tea drinking in the Meiji Dynasty and names of soldiers in the war dot his works. They read like a cataloguing of events better found in historical shelves in the archives and the cataloguing section in Moby Dick.


The non linear form of narration in the book, is reminiscent of the jolting of time and normalcy all through the harrowing colonial times. While Jung’s Wild Swans adopts a linear style tracing China’s history and the author’s ancestral lineage from 1909-1978, Muthee’s jumps from the colonial present to his grandparents days to his detention and back to his Gikuyu’s ancestral days to show disruption of his inner psyche. So is the constant revision of time where he hacks back to an idealized Gikuyu nation that was full of harmony (as his grandmother used to tell him while young) at the time when his own life is in extreme disharmony during his detention. The book starts off with the day he was arrested, then going back to lay the historical background as to why he was arrested and the politically volatile situation of his environment at that time, then back to tribulations in detention. This is good work in not making the narrative boring, sort of a compelling popular history narrating.

The use of not so complex everyday Kiswahili rather than over -vocabularised, stylistically complex Swahili a la Ken Walibora’s Siku Njema makes it accessible even to readers not very deeply into Swahili readership.

Inner meditations and musings make picturesque passages in most personal histories books, almost poetic in their sensibilities. Just as Frederick Douglass on the banks of Chesapeake Bay reveals his yearnings for freedom and doubts whether he will see that day, so does Muthee offer some of the most brilliant passages in his book that illuminate his personal fears when he was detained in Mageta Island and stares into the lakes waters in moments of near death.

The lack of adequate women presence in the novel and the state of Muthee’s family during his detention is another problem that makes one question whether this is as a result of disconnection from the family set up during turbulent times, or a result of their absence in the historical power structures.

The book however benefits a lot from the concluding chapter where you get the reflections of the man years down the line after all this happened, giving it a sense of organic inner peace and structure, both of the book and of the author. Like Wild Swans, The Slave Narrative and Mori Ogai’s works, it is ultimately a book of courage, an uplifting book, a celebration of humanity despite the horrors of the times.


The un-understandable ironies that history books will never be able to capture, the complex paradoxes that are human beings especially after being brutalized, are the strength with which personal narratives draw their attraction from. The fact that Muthee can bear no hatred to the whites saying “they had to do what they had to do and we had to do, it was fate,” beats the logic in historical texts that see only hatred in their black and white lens. The fact that Muthee can criticize priests (and in effect the hypocrisy of Christianity during the Emergency period) and yet now be a devout catholic saying it was through God’s grace that he lived through it all. The fact that he can laugh as he recounts death defying torture instead of shedding tears to recount the pain. Or the fact that he goes into silence over some things and casually says “lets not give details as I don’t want to make readers cringe,” as if he thinks he is telling a comic story which the novel definitely isn’t, are its strengths. In Jung’s Wild Swans, the use of humour as she talks of feet binding among Chinese ladies is ironical, as is her admiration and appreciation of some aspects of Maoism like hard work under which she served as a Red Guard, which contrasts with her demonisation of communism which she felt led to the death of her father.

With all these strengths, one wonders why personal histories (and historical -biographical literatures) have for so long been a rarity not just in Kenya’s Swahili literature circles, but even in Kenyan literature written in English. Evan Mwangi’s Bildad Kagia: Patriotic Rebel and Ezekiel Alembi’s Elijah Masinde: Rebel with a Cause are great books about great heroes, but how we wish there were more, or we could have had inner emotions from the heroes themselves in their personal accounts.

Heroes are not just the people mentioned in history textbooks, but also include common people like Muthee with compelling stories to tell, people who could have passed unnoticed. Many more people need to be encouraged to write about their lives, if we are to understand our selves. There-in lies the strength of our literature.