Notable Moments and People (Life Post-Concentration Camp)
The village, 1954: People had to relocate from the farms and go to live in villages set up by the colonial government. The villages provided security and helped the government curtail the relationship between the freedom fighters living in the forest and the rest in the community in the villages. My mother was allocated space in the Kanyore village yard to build her family home. The building materials consisted of blue gum posts (itugī), sticks (mbito), and horizontal tubes (mīitīrīro) for roofing. Bark peeled from young bluegum (mīthandũkũ) trees and was used to bind the whole house structure. The roof was thatched with grass, and rūthirū was used to keep the grass from collapsing into the house. No nails were used.
My baby sister Joyce was born in 1954, and was sent to detention with my mother because she was still breastfeeding. One evening my mother came home groaning in pain and could not sleep. We were all devastated, and felt helpless because we couldn’t help her. The guards had beaten her, and her thumb had been bent out of shape. The next day she had to continue working on the house because it was mandatory to be present in the yard every day. That day she did not come back home, and we were left alone in Wamaitha’s house. We endured hunger, severe thirst, lice and jigger infestations.
I believed that someone knew what had happened to my mother, and I hoped to find out about it. I would walk along the path outside the house hoping that someone would tell me that they saw my mother. For a while, this didn’t happen. I found myself crying a lot. One day, a lady told me, “I saw your mother,” and gave me directions to where she was. She told me, “Take this path and turn left when you get to the junction. Walk until you see a big market on the left side and a police station on the right on hilly site. Walk towards the police station, and you will see many women sitting on the grass. Your mother is amongst them.”
I found my mother holding Joyce where the woman told me I would find them. I don’t remember saying anything to my mother, but I sat next to her quietly, joyful and comfortable. She asked me, “Who told you where I was?” I told her a woman. She said it was good, and told me that they would be taken to a big prison the next day. I left her and my baby sister and walked back to the house.
Our cousin: Wamwaria, the eldest son of our father’s brother, Kariũki Cege, took us to his house at Gītiha village near Lari. Two days later, he was detained, leaving us with our grandpa and grandma, who we had just met. Gītiha village was surrounded with barbed wire and a nine by nine feet trench. There was only one entrance, which was guarded. White guards were perched on high towers to keep watch throughout the day and night.
My cousin’s house only had three stones, and we all sat and slept on the floor. We had no water or food, and since I was the oldest child, I had to go outside to collect maize grains from the ground in the village. Children were not permitted to leave the village without adult supervision. One day I decided to sneak off to the farms where the adults would get their food. We did not have a farm, but I had been told that people did not necessarily harvest from their own farms, but from the farms near the road so that the guards could see them. I harvested about five big potatoes, and on the way home, I saw one of the guards at the gate staring at me. When I got near him, he asked me how I had walked out of the gate without them noticing. When I saw him picking up a whip, I dropped the potatoes and ran away as fast as I could and entered our house. I hid under a pile of sticks, which completely covered my tiny body.
After that incident, I never left the village again. One day I saw our neighbor washing clothes, and I asked him to give me the water after he was done. The water was soapy, dirty and blue because of blue soap (gakara bar soap), but at least we had some water to drink for the day. One of my siblings had terrible diarrhea for two days after drinking the water. There was a time that the children were given milk through a program called tata wa iria (auntie with milk) but this was short-lived.
My grandfather was very tall, very old, and had chocolate skin color. I later heard my parents say that he and my grandmother belonged to the Ngigī age group. He sat day and night. His legs were long, and he sat with his legs bent so far that his knees were next his ears. I never saw him move or talk. My grandma was short and light skinned. She always sang one verse of a song in the morning and another one in the evening. In the morning, she sang “Jithũ (Jesu) mwega Mũtheru igua riu mwana waku nīekwenda gũkũinīra okīroko gwathera, Nyoni rīu nīikũgamba tarī nyīmbo ikũina, nītũgambo twacio…” In the evening she sang “…Mwathani wakwa ũnjikarie, Tũndũ rīu gũkirie gũtuka, Ona nĩkūrĩ mogwati maingĩ, We Mwathani wakwa ūnjikarie . . .” I had never heard about God, Jesus, or church before, and her songs made no sense to me. My grandma was baptized, and given the name Mariamu, but my grandpa was not.
She sniffed ground tobacco, and she gave me some to use for treating our jigger infestations. My siblings cried out in pain whenever I applied the tobacco between their toes and pulled jiggers out. We didn’t like the treatments but it really helped us.
Gītiha Village: Life in Gītiha village was harsh. We barely had any food or water, and as time passed, our energy slowly diminished to the point that we could not sit anymore. All we could do was lie on the floor.
Mother came back: When my mother was finally released from detention, she found us in deplorable health conditions. For one week, she tried to transport us to the hospital, and finally, she managed. She carried all three of us, one on her back, one on her shoulder, and the third one on her front. As she walked from the house to the road, she would try to stop the vehicle passing by. After several days, one lorry driver carrying logs stopped. We were placed on top of the logs where the worker were already sitting. One person gave us scones, and I can still remember how tasty it was since we had not had food for quite a long time.
Hospital: My mother took us to Gĩhûngûri clinic, and the doctor told her that we were not sick, but that we were severely malnourished. He referred us to Kĩambu District Hospital where we were treated for several weeks until we got better. I remember the ambulance transferred us from the Gĩhûngûri clinic to Kiambu district hospital while a lorry driver carrying logs to the fullest transferred us from Gĩtiha village to Gīthūngūri clinic.
In hospital, I remember sharing a bed with a mother who had a two-year-old son. I heard her say that her son’s feet were swollen and that he had holes because he had kidney problems. The mother and son lay with their heads on one side of the bed, and I lay with my head next to her legs on the other side. One day they brought lunch for the son, and I heard her say that he had died. The nurse offered me the food instead, and I accepted. The mother seemed sad, but I didn’t know what was going on. I never saw the son being taken away from the bed, so I thought that he must have died while I was asleep.
The doctor at Kiambu District Hospital wrote a letter to the chief at Kambaa village and referred my mother to Kambaa Rehabilitation Center near Githunguri for further assistance. A nurse at the hospital offered to take care of me, and my mother let him. He took me to live with his family in the Kagongo village several miles from the hospital. His wife asked me to accompany their three children, one boy and two girls, to Sunday school early in the morning. She also made samosa, and I took them to her husband to sell at the hospital. I would walk 12 miles to and from the hospital each time.
Chief: When the chief received the doctor’s referral letter, he transferred my mother from unpaid community service to paid employment so that she could take care of her children. He gave her one of the rehabilitation houses for her to live in, six sisal bags for us to sleep on and one blanket. My mother wore the blanket during the day as a dress, and used it to cover us at night.
Each night before we slept, we helped her kill lice in the blanket, clothes, and to remove jiggers. When we lived in the shamba, there were no lice, bed bugs, or jiggers, but in the reserved Gīkūyū land, we were heavily infested. My sibling even lost their toenails, but they grew sometime later in their life.
In 1960, our family was finally reunited at Kambaa village, Gathangari. There was no open expression of joy, and all of us kept our emotions in check. We never talked about the experiences with others or with each other, and this silence saddened me. However, through the dark times, there was still hope for use. Life went on as God had planned, to this day in my late seventies.
“If you pray anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:14). I did not know how to pray, I cried. I did not know God. He heard my cry and helped me and my siblings.