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Geoffrey Karanja, a tall, lanky Kikuyu, introduced me to John Kibrenga Richanga, a veteran Mau Mau fighter now 85 years old. Richanga stood about five and a half feet tall, not an unusual height for a Kikuyu, had a fringe of white hair, and appeared to be in good health. For the interview, Richanga invited me into his home, a three-room wood shack on his shamba, or small farm.

Since Richanga didn’t speak English, he spoke two or three sentences in Kikuyu which Ayub Githaiga Ndungu translated. In contrast to many people I have interviewed, Richanga began at the start of his story, continued logically and coherently through it, and then allowed a time for questions to clarify any points.

John Kibrenga Richanga served as a foot soldier for the Mau Mau before being captured by British security forces. He views the war as a success which led to independence.

Richanga said the Mau Mau movement was well underway in 1951 and although all of the Kikuyu were aware of it, they had been able to keep the movement secret from the muzungus, or settlers. During 1951, the Mau Mau worked at administering the secret oaths to villagers. As an aside, from historical research I have done, it is important to understand an oath administered during a ceremony is much more binding to a Kikuyu than a similar oath administered to a westerner in a court. If a Kikuyu violates his or her oath, it is believed they will either die or be killed.

Richanga said the ritual involved slaughtering a goat and mixing its meat, blood and some of the feces together. This is eaten as the oath is given. Richanga said the oath he took was to swear not to tell the muzungus about the Mau Mau movement. If so, this would have been one of the preliminary oaths the Mau Mau gave. More advanced oaths, for instance, included pledges to kill the settlers.

Richange stated frankly that when the Mau Mau arrived at his village, he had no choice about whether or not to take the oath. If he had refused, he would have been immediately killed.

In Richanga’s opinion, the Mau Mau movement was founded by Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president and a revered man who is regarded as the father of the independent country. Kenyatta himself denied this during his life and appears to have had an ambiguous attitude toward the Mau Mau rebellion. At this point in the interview, Richanga took time to fetch two pictures of Kenyatta. The first wasa zeroxed copy of a wood engraving depicting Kenyatta's arrest in teh early mornign hours of Oct. 21, 1952, and the other was a zerox copy of a photograph of Kenyatta. 

After the Mau Mau oath was administered in his village, Richanga said a village leader for the Mau Mau was elected. This process was repeated across the Kenyan Highlands until all the Kikuyu, the Emba and Meru had sworn allegiance to the Mau Mau. This seems to be a somewhat overstated point. The Kikuyu fractured along clan lines with some backing the Mau Mau and others backing the colonial government. The Meru and Emba tribes did participate in the rebellion but only in a much more secondary role.

In 1952, Richanga said he and the others who had decided to fight the muzungus fled to the forest.

Asked why he joined the Mau Mau, Richanga said, “When we took the oath, they (the Mau Mau) took all the strong men by force. Those who didn’t want to do this were killed. If you refused the oath, you were killed.” Richanga said he was forced to take the Mau Mau oath. Before he took the oath, John worked for an Indian as a truck driver based out of Nakuru in the Rift Valley..

In his case, his home base was Aberdares Mountains, an incredibly steep and rugged mountain range stretching up to peaks at 13,000 feet. ichanga served as a foot soldier and as a food transporter, a highly dangerous job since he had to go to the edge of the forest to pick up supplies. The goal of his Mau Mau unit was to raid settler farms, kill the occupants and to steal their guns.

“When the muzungus realized this, they sent the army to fight the Mau Mau,” Richange said. At midnight Oct. 20^th, 1952, Governor Evelyn Baring declared a State of Emergency and rushed reinforcements into the colony. Richanga said most of the patrols sent into the forest were unsuccessful in finding the Mau Mau fighters and the Mau Mau were able to raid farms at night. Certainly around the first of the year in 1953, the Mau May conducted a number of spectacular raids against settler farms during which they killed any Europeans they found, including children.

Although the Mau Mau were not then and never would be able to match the British security forces in fire power, they had the advantage that the workers on the settler farms supplied the Mau Mau with considerable information about the comings and goings of the settler community as well as food, ammunition and other supplies. They could then strike at the most advantageous moment. The Mau Mau also targeted fellow Kikuyu on the farms if they didn’t support the movement. These Kikuyu were killed.

Richanga, who was a member of Mau Mau unit under the overall command of Dedan Kimathi, said a British patrol tracked his unit as it retreated into the forest after a raid. While the British patrol moved through the forest, Richanga and his fellow fighters formed up undetected on both sides of the column, in the front and in the back. Using what guns at hand as well as bows and arrows, the Mau Mau unit attacked the surrounded British patrol and wiped it out. Richanga said about 100 Mau Mau fighters attacked the patrol which he described as being “under 30 men, both muzungus and Africans.” Typically, British patrols consisted of two European officers but the bulk of the manpower was provided by Maasai, Sambura or Kikuyu soldiers. Richanga said this attack occurred outside of Fort Hall near Kangema. I have not searched yet for a historical reference to such an attack, but it is likely that it would be mentioned somewhere because the killing of an entire British patrol would have been a highly unusual event. In fact, during the entire rebellion, only about 62 British soldiers were killed in action.

During the fighting in the forest, one of the tactics of the Mau Mau was to keep a sharp lookout for flashlights at night since no Mau Mau owned any.

"The muzungus used flashlights at night because they didn't know their way around. This gave them away to us and was an advantage since it marked them," Richanga said.   

In retaliation, the British raided villages in the area and rounded up all the men of military age and imprisoned them.

During 1953, the British also conducted a bombing campaign against the Mau Mau using Harvard light bombers. Although most historians say the bombing campaign was largely useless, Richanga disagreed. He said that Mau Mau soon learned to scatter as soon as they heard any airplane approach “so that only a few would die in the bombing.”

Indicating the oathing ceremonies were not as extensive as he had previously indicated, Richanga also talked about the Home Guards, or Kikuyu who remained loyal to the colonial government. During one clash at night with a Home Guard unit, Richange said he and his fellow Mau Mau fighters collapsed on the ground as if killed when the Home Guard opened fire on them. Once the Home Guard soldiers came up to check, the Mau Mau jumped up and wiped the unit out. The colonial authorities may or may not have bothered to record the destruction of a Home Guard unit.

The enmity between the Home Guard and the Mau Mau was fierce. Richanga said that when the Home Guards raided a village they suspected of supporting the Mau Mau, they killed not only every single person in the village, including women and children, but they killed all the domesticated animals leaving nothing alive.

“In this war, the majority of people who died were blacks,” Richanga said. “We had to settle this between us before settling things with the muzungus.”

Nor were the battle lines as clear cut as one might imagine. The one thing the Mau Mau needed in their fight above all else was guns. Richanga recounted how sometimes when a Mau Mau unit ran into a Home Guard unit, the Home Guards would deliberately drop their weapons and flee leaving the guns to be picked up the Mau Mau fighters.

“When they dropped their guns, we knew not to kill them,” Richanga said.

Richanga’s comments reflect the fact that the Mau Mau rebellion was as much a civil war that engulfed the Kikuyu as it was an uprising against colonial rule.

Giving a taste of the terror that the Kikuyu went through, Richanga said simply, “Everyone was running for their life now. The children did not go to school.”

By 1954, Richanga said the fighting slowed down considerably. Here he veered sharply from the historical record by saying the reason for the slowdown was that so many of the settlers and loyalists Kikuyu had been killed, there were few enemies for the Mau Mau. This is simply the wishful thinking of a man looking back on distant events. In fact, the Mau Mau had suffered a devastating military defeat by the end of 1954 with thousands of the fighters killed.

In addition, by this time, the British had succeeded in setting up their fortified village plan under which Kikuyu villages were surrounded by ditches and barbed wire and guarded by Home Guards. This kept the Mau Mau from killing Kikuyu loyalists and also kept Mau Mau sympathizers from helping out the fighters.

As the uprising was crushed, captured Mau Mau fighters were sentenced to hard labor. In these work camps, the prisoners were supplied with food but had to supply their own clothes. Kikuyu were also picked up in security sweeps. Richanga said these people were interrogated and if the British found out they had been Mau Mau fighters, they were sent to prisons. Others were released.

In June, 1955, Richanga quit his unit and went back to his village where he was sentenced to hard labor outside of Fort Hall. By this point, the fighting was over and the only Mau Mau remaining in the forest were the leaders which the British had vowed to hang. Some of these leaders later fled to neighboring countries and never returned to Kenya, Richanga said.

From 1955 to 1963, conditions for the Kikuyu didn’t improve much but with independence in 1963, life got better, Richanga said. In a comment that probably reflects more of a desire to put an ugly chapter in tribal life to bed, Richanga said no one who served in the Home Guard is left alive. According to him, they all committed suicide. Certainly in the aftermath of the uprising, scores were settled between the Mau Mau and the loyalists but people on both sides of the conflict eventually made an uneasy peace. Richanga’s comments likely indicate there is no point in bring up the issue now.

Looking back, Richanga said he was proud of his role in the uprising but bears no ill will towards whites any longer. He said the uprising achieved its goal of destroying colonial rule and paving the way toward an independent Kenya.

“I own my own farm and I enjoy the fruits of my labor,” Richanga said to me. However, he told a more sobering account of his life since the rebellion to Ayub. While the independent Kenya government awarded him land for his role in the rebellion, Richanga has been forced to sell most of it off in bits and pieces. At the moment, it is not clear what the future holds for him as he farms his one acre parcel.