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Some of it is true but not really. My grandfathers had taken the oath. In fact My mom's dad was a Mau Mau Freedom fighter and was imprisoned at Hola for 11 years. He never saw my mother when she was born, they met when she was about to turn 12. My mom's mother was tortured and raped for hiding Mau Mau freedom fighters while my Dad's father was a cook for one of the colonialist district officers. Dad's mom and his siblings picked coffee at one of the settlers farms for many years. My father vowed to buy the very land where his little brother was born while they kicked coffee and build a huge white house bigger than their Mnyapara ( settler boss) His mother kept on picking coffee after the birth of her last child and reported to work the following morning. Yes my dad did by the land where he picked coffee as a young boy with his family and yes he did build his big white house. My parents still have their British Passports that are mentioned in the first story. Their birth certificates do not identify them as Kenyans but as Kikuyu British subjects. My paternal grandfather kept the bicycle he used to ride about 80 miles to his village when he was given time off by his Mnyapara and all his stamped expired passes allowing him to travel home for the weekend. He finally left the Mnyapara and was among the first black E. A railroad builders ( much , much history etched in my heart)....
My mother's father's locks were cut off and used to make a tiny baby blanket for the first child born after his return home from prison in 11+ years.
Hotep Dedicated to Big Blak Afrika (Mos Def's character in _Bamboozled_). The story of what is known as the "Mau Mau rebellion" (from 1952 to 1959), is the tale of the African response to British imperialism in Kenya. Before the uprising, Europeans were living a life of idle luxury based on African land and labour. But in the post-Second World War world, resentment against colonial rule increased. One by one, African countries demanded self-rule. John Maina Kahihu from the Mau Mau's political wing said, "In 1942 we had fought for the British. But when we came home from the war they gave us nothing." The settlers felt themselves immune to the changing times. Willoughby Smith, a district officer in the Colonial Service from 1948 to 1955, testifies to this. "The settler knew a lot about how to use African labour. But he could not see what the use of that labour and the production of money was beginning to bring about. He could not see the political change." The fiercest opposition to the colonial authorities came from the Kikuyu (or Gikuyu) tribe who, 50 years earlier, had been evicted from their traditional areas to make way for the European farmers. By the end of the Second World War, 3,000 European settlers owned 43,000 square kilometres of the most fertile land, only 6 percent of which they cultivated. The designation "Mau Mau" was never used by the Kikuyu and does not exist in their language. It was, most probably, invented by the British as part of an attempt to demonize the Kikuyu people. Historian, John Lonsdale, explains how the movement was portrayed by the settlers and the government as "the welling up of the old unreconstructed Africa, which had not yet received sufficient colonial enlightenment and discipline, which proved that colonialism still had a job to do." The African population of 5.25 million occupied, without ownership rights, less than 135,000 square kilometres of the poorest land. On the "native reserves" much of the land was unsuitable for agriculture. The poor peasants had been forced to abandon their traditional methods of extensive agriculture and did not have access to the new technology that would make intensive agriculture viable. The population could not feed itself and the peasants were desperate. The core of the LFA was the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), which was formed in 1924. Its original programme was a combination of radical demands such as the return of expropriated lands and the elimination of the passbook scheme, (similar to the internal passport system in South Africa), with a striving to return to the traditional pre-colonial past. In the late 1930s the KCA led a wave of mass peasant struggles against the forced sale of their livestock to the government. In the 1950s the KCA began conscripting support from the Kikuyu masses, believing it was possible to consolidate their support through the administration of "the oath". Jacob Njangi, an LFA fighter, explains, "We used to drink the oath. We swore we would not let white men rule us forever. We would fight them even down to our last man, so that man could live in freedom." When a staunch British loyalist, Chief Waruhu, was killed on 7 October 1952, the government saw the LFA as the first serious threat to colonial rule in post-war Africa. Two weeks later, on 20 October, a state of emergency was declared. Thousands of British troops and equipment were flown in to "clear the colony of the menace of 'Mau Mau'". Over 100 leading members of the Kenya African Union, a political party demanding greater African self-rule, were arrested. Along with others, Jomo Kenyatta was put on trial for subversion. Lonsdale, says that despite the fact that Kenyatta had publicly denounced 'Mau Mau' and advocated peaceful change, "the British and the white settlers were convinced that he was the brains behind the movement.... But they couldn't get the evidence." Nevertheless, Kenyatta was found guilty of incitement and imprisoned in a remote part of Kenya for seven years hard labour. Ten days into the start of emergency rule, almost 4,000 Africans had been arrested, but the attacks from the LFA continued. A wave of hysteria swept through the European settlers. In January 1953, after the killing of a European farmer and his family, angry settlers stormed government house demanding stronger action. In fact, more white settlers died in road accidents on the streets of Nairobi during the emergency than at the hands of the LFA. On March 25, 1953, a British loyalist village was destroyed and most of the inhabitants were killed, including Chief Luka and his family. The British portrayed this event as the LFA slaughter of innocent Kikuyu, to provide more propaganda against the dreaded "Mau Mau" (LFA). However, a short time before this incident, almost 100,000 Kikuyu farm workers and their families had been evicted from their homes in the Rift Valley - where they had been living as squatters on settler farms - and driven back to the reserve. Some of them had already been evicted 20 years earlier, to make way for European settlers. Chief Luka, who had been personally rewarded with good land, negotiated this government "land exchange scheme". The farm workers vented their anger against the chief, whom they considered to be a traitor and responsible for their plight. In a revenge attack the following day, 10 times more Kikuyu were killed by government forces and more houses were destroyed. The LFA faced the full force of British colonial power. The unequal nature of the conflict was illustrated by shots of fully armed British soldiers inter-cut with LFA fighters armed only with bows and arrows and spears. The forests of Mount Kenya, where the LFA had their base camps, were designated a "prohibited area" and heavily bombed. Peasants living on the fringes of the forest were evicted from the land, their animals confiscated and crops and huts burned to clear the way for the "free fire zone". Thousands were herded into overcrowded, heavily militarised "protected villages". In the "free fire zones" any African could be shot on sight. Rewards were offered to the units that produced the largest number of "Mau Mau" corpses, the hands of which were chopped off to make fingerprinting easier. Settlements suspected of harbouring "Mau Mau" were burned, and "Mau Mau" suspects were tortured for information. Reports of brutality by the British forces began to appear in the press. The Daily Worker carried a report under the headline: "Officer who quit says, 'It's Hitlerism'". The officer concerned was 19-year-old Second Lieutenant David Larder, who after killing an African, chopped off his hand. Afterwards he wrote home in anguish asking, "What has happened to me?" Other reports told of officers who paid their men five shillings a head "for every 'Mau Mau' they killed". One soldier testified in court that his officer had said he could shoot anybody he liked as long as they were black, because he wanted to increase his company's score of kills to 50. In late 1953 the British opened a new campaign, code named Operation Anvil, to cut off the supply network to the LFA. The first target was Nairobi, which was believed to be the centre of their organisation. On 24 April 1954, the police rounded up all the African inhabitants in the city - around 100,000 people. The 70,000 Kikuyu were separated and screened. Of them, up to 30,000 men were taken to holding camps. The families of the arrested men were pushed into the already overcrowded native reserves. In rural areas Kikuyu were forced into fortified villages, where they lived under 23-hour curfew. This policy, known as "villagisation", was claimed to be "purely protective and beneficial for the Africans". It gave the colonial authorities total control over the Kikuyu. Taking the Mau Mau oath was made a capital offence. Between 1953 and 1956 more than 1,000 Africans were hanged for alleged Mau Mau crimes. Public hangings, which had been outlawed in Britain for over a century, were carried out in Kenya during the emergency Lonsdale explains, "A mobile gallows was transported around the country dispensing 'justice' to 'Mau Mau' suspects.... Dead 'Mau Mau', especially commanders, were displayed at cross-roads, at market places and at administrative centres." In 1954 one-third of all Kikuyu men were said to be in prison. These detainees had not been convicted of any crime and were held without trial. The British government insisted that every prisoner had to denounce "the oath" and submit to a "cleansing ceremony". By 1956 the LFA had been militarily defeated, but the camps still held 20,000 detainees who refused to confess to taking the oath, so the emergency remained in force. The huge cost involved forced London to demand that a faster way be found to "cleanse" detainees of their oaths. PEace Solarus "Activism is the practice of using an internal, self-determining source of power to live one's life and/or enact some sort of change. Power is the ability to define reality, while self-determination is to decide or define one's self. Therefore activism, is not simply something done to right some wrong or to fight some cause but rather it is a way of life. Activism is the way of life where one can define self and change anything that may impede or control the reality that one chooses to live."-Solarus
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>PEace
>Solarus
>
>***Words of Wisdom***
>
>"If it's not about NATIONBUILDING, it's
>not about ANYTHING."- Dr. John
>Henrik Clarke
>
>"We are not the victims! We
>are just fighting forces that
>we cannot see!"-2001 Sankofa Conference
>
>
>"You don't have the RIGHT to
>have free time from your
>children."-Kwame Agyei Akoto
>
>"It is the worst feeling to
>hear the call of the
>drum and not be able
>to respond."-Solarus
>
>On understanding Afrakan thought:
>"it's like explaining astrophysics to a
>whino, the explanation can't be
>done like that. when people
>try to simplify it, they
>ask the other person to
>tailor the answers their cultural
>context. and trying to cater
>afrikan ideals to european understanding
>is a REAL sin."-utamaroho
"Don't Hate the PLAYA Boy...hate the GAME," Granddad Freeman of the Boondocks(7-11-99)
*Twenty-three percent of women are "autoerotic singles" — they prefer to achieve sexual satisfaction alone(source-bet.com)
*If U have won a Grammy, one of two things are at play: 1. Your shit is TIGHT
2. U are white
-(Me)
"'Cuz U answer the phone 'peace' that means U not a freak?"-The Questions(c) Common
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Oooo baby I like it raw. Oooo baby I like it RAAAW!(c)ODB- Shimmy Shimmy Ya
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