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Ayub Githaiga Ndungu, left,  and John Kibgrenga Richanga stand in the doorway of John's house. John was a Mau Mau foot soldier and, among other task, was assigned to picking up food drop offs near the farms of white settlers. This was a very dangerous job since the pick up marked one of the few times the Mau Mau would emerge from their bases and come close to the farm lands. Ayub's grandfather Joram Gitei Githaiga used his encyclopedic knowledge of herbal cures and the medical properties of plants to act as a medic in his Mau Mau. Sadly, Joram died in 2003, but Ayub was still able to tell me his history in the Mau Mau rebellion. 

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This is one of three Mau Mau hideouts I found while in Kenya. This particular cave is said to extend about a kilometer into Mount Kenya, but I have no way of verifying that. Ayub, Eric Eshikumo, and I were carrying only two cheap flashlights and went a couple of hundred feet back in the cave. Like the two other Mau Mau sites we found, this one had a source of water close by, the Nairobi River. The British security forces apparently did not locate this cave during the fighting because if they had, they likely would have dynamited the entrance. Ayub speculated his grandfather used this cave as a refuge during the fighting. Ayub said the Mau Mau units would only use a hideout for a day or two before moving on. Any longer than that and their walking around the site would leave tell-tale foot trails on the ground which could be spotted from the air .

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A shot of Mount Kenya as dawn breaks over the Savannah. Although Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first president, denied being a Mau Mau leader, many regarded him as such. His book, "Facing Mount Kenya," provides a well written portrait of the Kikuyu people. John Kibrenga Richanga has kept  photos of Jomo Kenyatta and credits him with ending colonial rule.

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Who says you have to suffer when you do research. This is a shot of Sandai Homestay, my base during my stay in highlands. Located in Mweiga, a village about a half hour's drive north of Nyeri, Sandai was smack in the geographical center of the area invovlved in the Mau Mau rebellion. I saw my first Mau Mau hideout cave just five miles away. Petra Allmendinger  runs this excellent guesthouse, and she provided most of the introductions to the fascinating people in the highlands. The ambiance and the food here can not be beat.

niels and tutti.htm

Niels Fjastad, who was born in Kenya and was the son of one of the first settlers, returned to Kenya  from Sweden during the Mau Mau rebellion. Two of his brothers had joined the colonial security forces  and Niels was needed back on the family coffee farm to help provide security. After being approached by the Kenyan police and the Kenyan regiment, Niels said he formed his own patrol of 12 Kikuyu fighters. Although he said he had many contacts with Mau Mau fighters, the bush fighters were so physically fit his patrol rarely caught them. In memoirs, British soldiers spoke of Mau Mau fighters traversing 40 to 60 kilometers a day through the incredibly rough Aberdares mountain range. Niels' father was a close friend of Bror Blixen whose wife Izak Dinesen wrote "Out of Africa." This was the first of many connections I made between the early settlers and the rebellion.

Tutti Hessel took over a 700 acre farm on the slopes of Mount Kenya, one of the fiercest battle grounds in the rebellion,  in 1953.  Although her farm was never attacked, Tutti said she knew Kikuyu women working on the farm were secretly putting out supplies for the Mau Mau fighters, a common experience for the settlers.  Tutti's husband Jens was a hunter, and she practiced her marksmanship with a .38 special every morning. They both owned a pack of five German shepherds. All of this probably acted as a deterrence to the Mau Mau. Tutti's neighbor, Arundel Leakey, was not so lucky.  He was killed during a Mau Mau sacrifice ritual, an event that captured world wide attention and helped discredit the Mau Mau cause.

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This is the first Mau Mau cave I came across. Not a true cave, it is a very deep overhang that is currently occupied by a leopard. The floor of the overhang is covered with leopard prints and the leftover bones of Impala and  Eland. Like all Mau Mau hideouts, there is a source of year round water just below the entrance. Although the overhang is huge, it is well hidden in a forest of Cape Chestnut and Wait-bit Thorn.  You can only see the entrance from  close by on the sides of the valley. The man standing in the picture is Ayub Githaiga Ndungu. His grandfather, a Mau Mau medic, used this overhang as a refuge from British security forces. The overhang is about five miles from the village of Mweiga which is located in the foothills of the Aberdares mountains, one of the key Mau Mau battlegrounds. Ayub said his father's Mau Mau unit moved between Mount Kenya and the Aberdares regularly and ventured as far afield as Meru. This would have made this overhang a key lay-over spot.

the mau mau were here.htm

I found this bit of graffiti on the back of an overhang on the Burguret River. The Burguret comes down off the slopes of Mount Kenya. Clearly a recent addition, but still it gave the overhang a certain ambiance. The overhang was used by the Mau Mau as a refuge during the rebellion.

a torch found in mau mau cave.htm

While exploring a Mau Mau cave near the Nairobi River on the slopes of Mt. Kenya, we stumbled across this torch made from a branch with one end wrapped in cloth.  If you dip the cloth into kerosene and ignite it, you have a source of light for penetrating deep into the cave. Ayub Githaiga Ndungu, who is holding the torch, said the Mau Mau would have used goatskin as the wrap and dipped that in oil.  Clearly this torch is a more modern version of what the Mau Mau would have used to explore the kilometer-deep cave, but I still wouldn't plan on counting on that as a light source in a cavern.

burguret river overhang.htm

Standing with me on the left is Eric Eshikumo. His grandfather worked on the  Mombasa- Kampala railway. If you were looking for the roots of the Mau Mau rebellion, it would be this railway, dubbed at the time of its construction as "The Lunatic Express" because it started nowhere and went nowhere. Following its completion, the British government heavily promoted settlement in what is now Kenya so the railway would actually have a use. On the right is Ayub Githaiga Ndungu. We are standing just above a Mau Mau hideout on the Burguret River on the slopes of Mount Kenya. The opening to the overhang is the dark patch behind us. This photo illustrates just how hard it is to see and find these hideouts.  The colonial security forces had a mixed record on locating the hideouts and routinely dynamited them when they did. It is not clear to me whether the current opening once led to a cave that is now sealed up by blasting.  

the aberdares are a bit steep.htm

This is Karuru Falls in the Aberdare mountains and shows just how steep these mountains can be. Colonial security forces had to hunt down the Mau Mau in the thick,  high altitude forests on both sides of the range. The forest changes from tropical rain forest at the lower elevations to temperate hard forests before becoming a bamboo belt around 8,500 feet up to 10,000 feet. After that, the forest shifts to Rosewood before giving way to moorlands. The Aberdare peaks reach 13,000 feet and feature glaciers despite being on the equator. Fans of the movie "Out of Africa" may recognize this waterfall from the scene when Robert Redford squires Meryl Streep up in a Gypsy Moth, and fly through a lush valley with two waterfalls. The second, which is not in the photo, is Gura Falls. Also, Jens Hessel, a white settler who lived through the Mau Mau rebellion,  flew the plane in the movie as Redford's stunt double.
 

the woods are a bit thick.htm

This photo of the Burguret River as we approached a Mau Mau hideout illustrates just how dense the forests on Mount Kenya and the Aberdare mountains are. Generally speaking, if you can see 50 feet in the savannah bush, you're lucky to see 30 feet in the forests. In the papyrus swamps around Lake Naivasha, visibility drops to nothing amid the 20 foot tall reeds. In this forest, colonial security forces and the Mau Mau fought with the main tactics being either tracking or ambush.

the other players in the bush war.htm

In Kenya's highland forests, colonial forces and the Mau Mau were just as apt to run into wild animals as each other. Several memoirs from British soldiers recount unexpected encounters with black rhinos, Cape buffalo, elephant and lions in both the Aberdare mountains and on Mount Kenya. Sadly, the rhinos were largely wiped out in the great poaching epidemic of the late 1970s and 1980s. Some believe the Kenyan government's decision to ban hunting in 1978 was simply a ploy to get the professional hunters off their hunting concessions where they acted as de facto game wardens. With them out of the way, the poaching rings, with high level government contacts, were able to slaughter the wildlife with the rhinos being virtually wiped out.  Whether these suspicions are true is not clear and hunting remain banned.  The Aberdare lions were culled later on by the Kenyan Wildlife Service but elephant and buffalo still roam the forests.

the opening to a mau mau cave.htm

This is the opening to the Mau Mau cave on the Nairobi River, and illustrates just how difficult it was for the colonial security forces to find these hideouts. Note the heavy growth of creepers over the entrance of the cave which would have shielded it from sight from reconnaissance aircraft.  The Kenyan settlers organized a force of very effective spotter aircraft using light planes that would report on Mau Mau movements.  These spotter aircraft effectively prevented the Mau Mau from moving in the opening on the moorlands of both the Aberdares and Mount Kenya during daylight hours.  The RAF also used Harvard light bombers against the Mau Mau. John Kibrenga Richanga, a veteran Mau Mau fighter, lived through some of the bombing runs and matter of factly explained the Mau Mau would scatter so "not so many of us would be killed."

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This is Ayub's grandfather, Joram Gitei Githaiga,  who fought in the rebellion as a medic in a Mau Mau unit. According to Ayub, Joram was captured but escaped when a Home Guard, a Kikuyu working for the colonial security forces, allowed him to get away. Once back in the forest, he was captured by his former Mau Mau comrades and underwent two days of torture to determine if he was really a British spy or not. Mau Mau suspicion towards any fighters that had been in British detention was well founded.  Some were turned by the British and helped the security forces track down their former comrades, a highly successful British tactic that helped break the power of the Mau Mau. Joram remained in the forest until 1971 having regarded news of independence as a British trick. Once he returned to his village, he found lingering bitterness over the Mau Mau rebellion and fled to Tanzania in 1972, presumably just after this photo was taken. He returned to Kenya in 1978 when emotions had cooled and died in 2003. His exact age was unknown but he was probably 95 years old when he died.  During the rebellion, he fought under the nom de guerre of "Koori."  All the Mau Mau fought under assumed names to protect relatives that remained behind. Koori means youngest goat in the herd. Ayub said that even though his grandfather was already well into middle age when he joined the Mau Mau, his particular unit was made up of even older fighters.

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Elephants are both uncanny and amazing. You would think it would be hard to hide when you weigh 10,000 pounds, but it's not. Imagine coming around a corner in the forest on patrol and finding this as your greeter. This elephant was in the Aberdares Mountains at about 7,000 feet.

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Another elephant shot that proves the impossible. Elephants are stealthy. Running into one in the wrong circumstance can ruin your whole day.

the usual.jpg

Life in Africa. Petra Allmendinger, Jim Gaunt, and Eric Eshikumo deal with a recalcitrant Land Rover, a near daily occurrance. Jim Gaunt arrived at Kenya's Rift Valley Academy, a school for the children of missionaries,in 1955. Although the figthing was mostly over, he has clear memories of a formidable security fence that had been built around the school. The high school's junior and senior classes all carried side arms during the rebellion because , as Jim  commented, "they had been brought up in Africa and knew how to use guns." The tactic worked. The Mau Mau planned a major attack on the school but when they realized how well armed the students were, they called off the assault. A successful and bloody attack on the school may well have changed the course of Kenya's history given the reaction of the settlers.

Today, the Rift Valley Academy continues to thrive, and its students often head to top U.S. colleges.

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A picnic in the highlands. When the Land Rover is carrying the gear, the tables and chairs are no problem.