Lunches with a Kenyan Freedom Fighter

by Dr. M. Nicholson

Mzee in June 2025

When I started my tree project 20 years ago it was almost unheard of that an indigenous Kenyan would come and buy native trees. The combination of knowledge, increasing wealth and concern about the environment has meant that in recent years, more and more Kenyans come and buy seedlings of East African trees. A couple of months ago a man appeared looking for unusual tree species. His name was Michael Mwangi Muthee and he invited my assistant and me to visit his shamba in Karen, an exclusive and expensive residential area to the west of Nairobi where land without a house now fetches well over one million dollars an acre. Mwangi[1] has an interesting history. He played rugby for Kenya in the heyday of Rugby Sevens and played against England. He became Chairman of Kenya Rugby Union but resigned because he was fed up with the corruption[2] that plagues so many of Kenya’s sporting organizations. He is now the MD of a large company in Nairobi, Biomedica, that makes enzymes for food and health food producers. 

Mwangi Muthee with my assistant Wambua (foreground)

We arrived at an old colonial house with a formal English style garden surrounded by a cultivated area covered in trees. Mwangi calls it a forest farm and he aims for high biodiversity and the integration of organic foods. We supply him with a wide variety of shrubs and trees not usually found on any farm in Kenya.

Traditional Mexican maize known locally as Githugu

A normal Kenyan smallholder plot consists of maize, beans, sukuma wiki (a type of kale), and perhaps potatoes. As we walked round Mwangi’s farm he showed us numerous indigenous vegetables that one rarely sees these days. He still grows Githugu maize, a traditional Mexican variety brought in to Kenya over one hundred years ago. It is a lower-yielding variety but much sweeter and tastier. It is illegal to sell the seed in Kenya because too much money is made from hybrid seed from the USA. Muthee is the first to admit he is a health food addict and his farm is alive with unusual plants such as yams, arrowroot, sweet potatoes (which we were given for lunch), plus a host of indigenous vegetables hardly grown any more.  

On our return to his house, we saw an elderly gentleman sunning himself in a chair. “That’s my dad, Mzee[3]. He is almost 100 and he is one of the few Freedom Fighters left alive”. We went to greet him: to find a beaming face, a white beard, a strong handshake and an articulate voice and mind.

Are you happy to talk about Mau Mau?

“Of course” he replied, “I’ll try and remember as much as I can.” 

He was born in 1928 and he went to work for a colonial farmer in 1943 after he finished school. The farmer was a Captain ‘Dudu’[4] O’Hagan. By coincidence I knew that name because I used to live next to his son Desmond, a retired Provincial Commissioner who died at least 20 years ago in his late eighties. As a young man, Mzee worked his way up till he became the record keeper for 6000 cattle on O’Hagan’s farm near Naro Moru in the flat land between Mt. Kenya and the Aberdare mountains. When he was about 24, he underwent an oathing ceremony to rid his country of the colonials and regain the Gikuyu ancestral land.

“Why was Mau Mau restricted to Gikuyus?” I asked.

“Well, it wasn’t. It also included other tribes around Mt. Kenya such as the waEmbu and the waMeru. But the colonials had stolen Gikuyu land and we wanted it back. The other tribes were less interested because either they were cowards or their land had not been pinched”. I suggested that was unfair because many other tribes were far away and their land had not been taken over.

“So why were you arrested?” I asked.

“I was not arrested or charged because I admitted nothing and they had no evidence. I was questioned by Gikuyu loyalists, whom I hated and then I was detained by our colonial masters. I was a Gikuyu and that was enough.  So we were marched off to detention in the drylands on the way to Mombasa. The first camp was near Mackinnon Road where 30,000 of us were imprisoned under low mbati (corrugated iron) roofs painted with black tar. Can you imagine the heat when the semi-desert sun beat down outside?”

 “Did anyone escape?”

“No, because in those days the place was teeming with lions. After two years we were moved to another hot area, then to Lake Victoria where I almost drowned, then to the Mwea swamps, finally to Athi river south of Nairobi where one man was tortured and then died.”

“Were you maltreated?” I enquired.  

“Did you ever hear of humans treating their enemies kindly? We slept on the ground with scorpions. We had a bucket at night for use as a communal toilet. By day we were allowed to empty it, wash it and refill it from the river for use as drinking water”.  

During the five years of his internment, he was moved to five different camps and endured hunger, boredom, thirst and inactivity. Does that constitute torture?

I asked him if he still hated the British. “Not at all,” he replied. “We won and that is all that mattered.” Would I be that magnanimous? I doubt it.

I went back to mzee on 11 June to have another lunch with this charming, bright eyed and smiling Ancient Mariner.

The next day, I visited a special old friend of nearly ninety from ‘the other side’, the colonial regime. His daughter had produced an article from The East African Annual 1955-56 entitled ‘Comrades in Arms’ in which there was a photograph of him as a 19 year-old ‘Fort Commander’. These white ‘officers’ were undoubtedly brave, hunting for ‘gangsters’ in mountainous bamboo terrain infested by buffalo and elephant. In one instance, three patrols covered 1300 miles on foot and only made two contacts with Mau Mau fighters.

To quote from the article: “In the early days of the Kikuyu[5] Guards organization, young officers barely out of their teens had to contend with the formidable test of nerves. Often the only European in an area seething with Mau Mau, one of the cardinal aims of whose secret oaths was to kill white people, he daily, hourly had to expect an attack on his strong point. And when it came, he had not only to contend with the enemy outside but to wonder whether there would be treachery within - for the terrorists sometimes filtered into the loyalist movement - and Kikuyus frankly admitted that it was impossible for a man to be certain that his own brother had not taken the Mau Mau oaths. Only in action could a man give proof that he was a true loyalist.

But the Guards officers’ main duty is, and always has been, to lead the loyal Kikuyu against the groups of fanatical murderers who have brought disaster on their tribe. The fight will not cease until they have banished the fear which seeps through Kikuyuland. But living, leading and fighting with the Kikuyu loyalists, the Kikuyu guard officers have built a comradeship between black and white which augurs well for the future of Kenya.”

Describing the Gikuyu loyalists, it went on: “Untrained, and equipped with only the poorest of native weapons, the Kikuyu loyalists in the early months of 1953 must have seemed most unpromising material to a casual observer. But they had two great war-winning virtues - unflinching courage and the determination to stand and, if necessary, die for their faith in Christ or, in the case of thousands of pagan tribesmen, their belief in the government and their adherents to tribal customs violated by Mau Mau.”

Let me vex some of my old friends and state the obvious: the colonialists were on the wrong side of history. The Kikuyu Guards and the colonial masters may have won the battle in terms of casualties (653 Guards killed vs. 3827 Mau Mau terrorists killed by 1956) but they lost the war. It was the Mau Mau that brought about Kenya’s independence.

I feel sad that so few young Kenyans really understand the sacrifice such people made in order to gain independence. And of course, it reminds us all that one person’s ‘Terrorist’ is another person’s ‘Freedom Fighter’.   

[1] Increasingly, Kenyans today prefer using traditional tribal names instead of Christian names.

[2] https://www.mpasho.co.ke/entertainment/2015-04-15-mwangi-muthee-finally-speaks-about-the-state-of-kenya-rugby-union

[3] Mzee is a respectful name for an elder

[4] A nickname given him by other settlers meaning ‘Insect’

[5] The terms Gikuyu and Kikuyu these days are interchangeable. Kikuyu (short for ki-Gikuyu) is more common but refers to the language. Gikuyu is the correct spelling.