Gathenji had been three years old, in October 1952, when the colonial government declared a state of emergency. The British had responded to the rebellion by forcing most of the Kikuyu population into barbwire-enclosed camps and villages like this one, with its encircling spike-filled moat, one entrance and one exit. A cadre of Home Guards—Africans loyal to the Crown who had been given rifles and uniforms—policed the premises, collected taxes, and inspected the despised dog tag–like identity cards, called kipandes, that all adults were made to wear around their necks. The guards, with their berets, long black trench coats, khaki shorts, and heavy black boots, were remote and fearsome figures with a reputation for casual cruelty, more loathed than the British soldiers themselves. Their whistles would pierce the air before dawn; Gathenji’s parents and other adults would be herded off to perform compulsory “communal work,” digging ditches and clearing brush on the surrounding European farms.
Gathenji watched them beat anyone suspected of Mau Mau sympathies, and he watched them whip old people who were not quick enough in answering the whistle. Once, he was whipped himself after attempting to walk to school during a siege. Around their homes, villagers were forbidden from erecting fences or growing thickets that might impede the guards’ view as they patrolled the pathways between the long, straight rows of huts.
The village was structurally divided between the “Royals”—those seen as sympathetic to the government, like Gathenji’s immediate family—and Kikuyus deemed sympathetic to the insurrection, a group that included Gathenji’s paternal grandmother, a hard-eyed, slender woman clad in beaded necklaces and traditionalist wrappings and ornaments. Between the groups, there was always tension; their huts faced one another across a clear path. Now and then, boys from the other side pelted Gathenji’s hut with stones and chanted songs depicting his family as traitors.
Sometimes, during insurgent raids on nearby villages, Gathenji could hear the screams and smell the smoke, and the gates of his village would close, the guards stationed in a protective ring. Sometimes the British troops, known as “Johnnies,” poured into the village with their rifles, hunting for rebels. It was a childhood pervaded by fear.
If you were a Kikuyu boy growing up in a protected village in the 1950s, you knew certain things in the marrow.
You knew not to talk to the guards; if your people saw, you would be made to give explanations. You knew not to talk to the few white people you brushed past at the markets outside the village, or the ones you saw rumbling down the roads in their Land Rovers and Bedfords; they were armed, and any of them could do anything to you. You knew not to look in their eyes and draw attention to yourself. If possible, you disappeared.
If white people asked you a direct question, you knew to answer as briefly as possible and then shut up, to turn your face into a mask and your words into riddles, and never—never—to volunteer information. In many cases, your lingering distrust of white people would remain ineradicable even half a century later, and you would find yourself weighing your words carefully around them. You knew not to take shortcuts across the European farms, because you’d heard stories of other kids being shot as trespassers. You knew not to confide in the blacks who worked as field hands and domestic servants at those farms, because their allegiances were in doubt from every side: They might pass information about your family on to the whites, or they might be secret Mau Maus.
Above all, you were made to understand that talk was dangerous. You knew this at a cellular level, as law so universal and mundane that you couldn’t even recall when you had first learned it, in the same way you had always known that the gigantic armor-plated ants known as siafu would draw blood if your bare feet landed in their nest for more than a few seconds.
AT THE CENTER of the insurgency was its loyalty oath, which drew on—and bastardized—a long Kikuyu tradition. In earlier times, oath takers held a Bible in one hand and a pile of earth in the other; now, as the fighting intensified, Scripture was scuttled in favor of goat meat. At secret ceremonies, initiates would pass under an arch of banana leaves and strip naked in a symbolic shuffling off of their old selves. The goat would be slaughtered, a piece of its flesh ingested, its hot blood smeared on the bodies of oath takers. A series of vows was affirmed: Kill the enemies of Mau Mau. Never betray Mau Mau. Never reveal the oath to whites.
To the British, the oathing represented the atavistic savagery of their enemy, “the most bestial, filthy and nauseating incantation which perverted minds can ever have brewed.” To the Kikuyu, most of whom reportedly took it in some form, it was regarded as transformative, a rebirth, a thing of transcendent power: God, or Ngai, would visit death on those who broke it. In detention camps, the oathing flourished, sometimes accompanied by the promise that initiates would get a plot of land once the whites were banished. The oath was often coerced, and as the war dragged on, it came to involve the drinking of blood and the binding of initiates with goat intestines.
To reject the ritual meant one was too dangerous to live, a potential stooge. Kikuyu Christians, a minority, were especially vulnerable. Many refused the oath, not out of colonial sympathies necessarily, but because the Church portrayed the goat blood as a blasphemy, the satanic counterpart of Christ’s blood. Militants strangled obstinate Christians with blankets, slashed their throats with jerry-rigged blades, and—if they were suspected informers—cut out their tongues.
On his mother’s side, much of Gathenji’s family sided with the rebellion, but his father, Samuel, an itinerant carpenter, occupied the gray and dangerous zone of staunch Christians.
After serving with the King’s African Rifles in the battle against Mussolini in Ethiopia, where he had lost many of his front teeth, he had become a pacifist and an evangelist with the Presbyterian Church of East Africa. He preached at the pulpit and on the streets, anywhere he could find a crowd, and his themes were peace and reconciliation. He recited the story of the Good Samaritan and hummed “Nearer My God to Thee” when he walked.
He was a puzzle to his traditionalist, fervently Mau Mau in-laws. He had adopted the unswerving missionary stance against the genital mutilation of girls, which his in-laws clung to as an indispensable rite. He abjured old rituals, like spitting on your own chest as a blessing and offering goat sacrifices at the sacred mugumo, or fig tree. He rejected the notion that his wife, who had died as a young woman in childbirth in the late 1950s, had perished as a result of mistreating ancestor spirits, or, as her grieving mother insisted, by a curse placed upon her by a jealous neighbor.
He had a reputation as a consummately gentle man who avoided quarrels. When neighbors argued, they inevitably found themselves in Samuel Gathenji’s hut, seeking a peacemaker’s counsel. Still, he retained basic Kikuyu notions of child discipline and the importance of instilling obedience toward elders; he didn’t hesitate to raise the cane when young Charles came home muddy from fishing for tadpoles at the lake or had strayed beyond the compound into areas where so many hazards waited—colonial soldiers, settlers, feral animals, and Mau Maus, who were rumored to anoint children into their cadres by smearing castor oil on their faces.
Though he had no interest in politics, some fellow Kikuyus perceived Samuel Gathenji as an ally of the Crown, so deeply was Christianity associated with the establishment. The churches had helped to provide the Manichaean language of the struggle, after all. Through the detention camp’s loudspeakers, some missionaries railed against the evils of the rebellion, urging detainees to repent of their oaths and accept Christ’s salvation.
In young Charles Gathenji’s government-run elementary school, he and other children were tutored in the splendors of British civilization, made to memorize “God Save the Queen” and to recite the names of the royal family.