To Mzee Gikuyu, from your Son

By Yasin Arkan

Mzee,

It is not your fault. You did not fail to lead. You had no thought.

You did not fail to protect. You had no dominion.

You are not a child of two worlds; colonialism and post-colonialism, pre-World War II and post-World War II. You are child of no world.

You are silent because you are lost.

How can you become what you do not know? Who knows what a Kikuyu was? Was like? So that you could be Kikuyu?

What does interring 1.5 million members of a primitive agrarian tribe do to its memory? It sears it. It purges it. It prepares it for loading with new thoughts, new memories.

Mzee, you were de-centred before you were born.

What riika (age-set) are you? Who are you, relative to “the other” in the larger family that is tribe?

Yes, Mzee, you wouldn’t know. And this is through no fault of your own. Your sole point of access to tribal history and initiation in to the social order was interdicted decades before the birth of your generation. That is the “riika” social system. It was not only the repository of the social map of the Kikuyu tribe, but it also facilitated social initiation through ceremonies that defined transition from boyhood to warrior-hood to junior elder to senior and finally to tribal council. It is this information void that makes every Kikuyu as stranger to every other Kikuyu; it is the information that makes every Somali a brother to another Somali. It is the information at the heart of “Somali FIRST”.

There hasn’t been a riika ceremony in a century and a half. The Colonial Government, in a stroke of diabolical genius, banned the one dated for 1910 making the last one of 1898 the last point at which social memory of self-existed.

The breadth and depth of the Imperial war to enslave you was multi-generational and socially kaleidoscopic in terms of spectrum of tools applied – consisting of conventional, economic, psychological, biological and cultural prongs.

Your history and identity was systematically erased at all levels of consciousness and awareness.

The Church Missionary Society that cultured you was all about MISSION – Imperial MISSION. Did you know the idea of the Church Missionary Society was conceived by Charles Grant, the Chairman of Imperial British East India (IBEI)? That it was executed by British Members of Parliament William Wilberforce, in the last quarter of the 18th Century, all secular imperialists, not a single clergyman?

Closer home, the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, which was the institutional protagonist of Christianity in the Central Highlands, is actually the conception of the Imperial British East Africa Company, believe it or not. Yes, it is not a secret, it is public information.

One century after the establishment of the Church Missionary Society around 1891, Sir William Mackinnon, Mr. A. L. Bruce, and other directors of the Imperial British East Africa Company dispatched another group of Imperial agents with Bibles in their hands to British East Africa. As incredulous as it might sound, the spiritual values of the Kikuyu tribe were given to it by its expropriator and slave master, the infamous Imperial British East Africa Company. Can you see why Kikuyus are Capitalists by faith? Why sons kill fathers for land and wives kill husbands for property? Why poverty is the ultimate sin in Kikuyu land? Can you now see the source of the Kikuyu tribes’ pseudo-Imperialist hubris? The Imperial British East Africa IBEA Company is the Kikuyu tribe’s true deity, it is the sovereign source of its spiritual beliefs.

During “the emergency” in the fifties, when the “MauMau” resistance rose, the Church, both Protestants and Catholics, did not remain silent, neutral or inactive. The missionaries threw their weight behind the British forces and joined their ranks even serving on armed patrols. Yes, “the missionaries” did not call for peace and/or love here; there was no division between the Catholics and the Protestants, but a unified call to in-discriminatory armed action against all “natives”.

“Bring them to bear… How dare they resist Imperial expropriation and Christian occupation!?” And this language and phrasing, as harsh as it actually sounds, is actually quite mild.

As bizarre as it may sound, they did see themselves as Christian saviours of savages, and were surprised by the resistance. In fact so much so, their analysis of the MauMau resistance ranged from a form of mental illness to spiritual evil!?

Now that I think about it, it is language exactly equivalent to that being used to describe Muslims resisting the brutal occupation of their land, pillage of their resources and rape of their women – terrorists, irrational, bloodthirsty, extremist, retrogressive, deranged… For how could anyone hate American Democracy? How could anyone hate British Christianity?

I am reminded of a quote by Paul J. Getty “The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights…”

Ours, dear father, is the promise of transcendental real-estate, a “paradise” where we would continue, condemned to servitude, damned to sing for eternity, in praise of a nondescript god who denied us everything in all worlds, for eternity, yes father, for eternity.

The introduction of a cash-crop economy coupled with taxes and forced labour, Mzee, wasn’t economic warfare; it was slavery, a brutal war to enslave

Do you now see what the network of churches and schools in the Mt Kenya region are? Do you understand the ramifications of their concentration in the highlands? It’s the network of churches and schools in the highlands you grew up in, formed the imperial psycho-socio-cultural beachhead. Its concentration intensity is an indicator of the special interest the British Imperialists had in the Kikuyu tribe and its land.

The appearance of Rev. Musa Gitau, the establishment of Musa Gitau Primary school in 1901, the 1907 recruitment, culturing and emergence of chief collaborator Johnstone Muigai Jomo Kenyatta from this institution and the simultaneous banning of the tribal riika ceremony of 1910 are not mere coincidence.

The Kikuyu tribe was being prepared for a special task. Remember the tribe was not simply broken like other tribes, it was actively re-programmed to serve as the vanguard of British Imperial order in the territory – a sociological scale “nyapara”.

And, to compound an already irreversible problem, the colonial territory’s administrative order many think is “their” government actually entrenched and expanded the socio-cultural and psychological warfare infrastructure that is the Christian Imperial-Missionary schools it inherited.

Not just the physical infrastructure but the organisation – schedule, format, management method and so on. Not just the syllabus but even the book contents as well. Imagine, the native administration did not even bother to either review or even re-write the history books.

In effect, it became natives yoking each other and their young physically, economically, intellectually, culturally in a never ending cycle of self-driven slavery in perpetuity.

The Kikuyu tribe was totally socially reprogrammed. Not even your diet was spared. But how could diet escape control, for food in that age was the ENTIRE economy. Food is sustenance: to enslave people control their survival.

Total cultural re-engineering

As an aside Mzee, now that I mention “beliefs”, not even your denomination is a matter of theological consequence. Your denomination is a result of imperial interest. What I mean is, that you are a Catholic or a Protestant was decided by the outcome of the Kikuyu 1913 Conference, a meeting wherein the Mission divvied between its various missions different regions of the Kikuyu highlands with Sykes-Picot level avarice. It was the First Council of Nicaea all over again. Pure empire.

Anyway, in 1893 depending on which version you want to believe, Mr. John Paterson who came to support the “Christian mission” introduced the first coffee seeds.

Why is this significant?

The use of food as a weapon can be later seen as captured by the insidious intent of the Royal Commission on Population, which King George VI had created in 1944 “to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population”.

The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since “a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production”. The combined effects of increasing population and industrialisation in its colonies, it warned, “might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West,” especially affecting “military strength and security.”

Let me digress a bit to magnify the ramifications of this, not as articulated by me, but by the imperialists themselves.

Henry (Heinz) Kissinger in a report for the United States of America, the imperator of our century, in this rather obviously labelled report “Food as a Weapon” revealed knowledge and awareness that dependency on imports for basic food ultimately lead to famine and death that for them has the intended positive outcome of population reduction outside of Birth Control means.

It has statements and questions that any human being would find fiendish. Listen to the ‘celebrated Statesman’ Heinz Kissinger; “Mandatory programmes may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now,” the document continued, adding, “Would food be considered an instrument of national power? … Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can’t/won’t control their population growth?”

He also predicted a return of famines that could make exclusive reliance on birth control programs unnecessary. “Rapid population growth and lagging food production in developing countries, together with the sharp deterioration in the global food situation in 1972 and 1973, have raised serious concerns about the ability of the world to feed itself adequately over the next quarter of century and beyond,” he said.

The report goes on to predict, that the cause of the coming food deficit would not be natural, but a result of western financial policy: “Capital investments for irrigation and infrastructure and the organisation requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many LDCs (Less Developed Countries). For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food.” Kissinger said.

“It is questionable,” Kissinger gloated, “whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis.” Consequently, “large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades — a kind the world thought had been permanently banished,” was foreseeable — famine, which has indeed come to pass.

Based on the this understanding, it becomes clear that the I.B.E.A and P.C.E.A Church, were the modern day Monsanto and Bill Gates Foundation Genetically Modified Organisms (G.M.O) alliance of your time. Where the P.C.E.A church wielded the Imperial Bible, Bill Gates Foundation wields Democratic Equality to veil the dark imperial agenda.

The introduction of a cash-crop economy coupled with taxes and forced labour, Mzee, wasn’t economic warfare; it was slavery, a brutal war to enslave.

Everyone loves to quote Winston Churchill: “We can afford to be generous in victory…” The British were definitely generous; to the French they granted Limestone mining concessions, the American’s off-shore oil drilling rights. They, the British, own everything else; the Gold, the Oil, the Titanium, the Land and even the Women. And what in terms of land or minerals they have been unable to exploit for capacity, timing or other political or economic reasons, they have cordoned off with expropriatory legal tools titled “natural wildlife reserves”, “national parks”, “conservancies” and all other manner of evolving terms.

One hundred and sixty seven years ago (Jan. 2, 1851), Henry Venn uttered these words: — “If Africa is to be penetrated by European missionaries, it must be from the East Coast.”

Mzee, consider us fully penetrated. From the East Coast.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a pre-eminent Daimyō, warrior, general, samurai, and politician of the Sengoku period in the 16th Century, is regarded as Japan’s second “great unifier”. In November of 1586, Hideyoshi ordered the expulsion of all Christian missionaries on Kyushu. Later on in 1596, he ordered the crucifixion of six shipwrecked Spanish Franciscan missionaries, three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese Christians at Nagasaki.

This moment, I submit Mzee, was the moment that bought Japan another 500 years of independence. Mwene-Nyaga does not exist, Gikuyu is lost, and there are no Kikuyu. The land has been conquered and the tribe has been scattered. It was actually effectively scattered in 1890 when the last riika ceremony turned out to be the last.

Victims of history

With its history lost, its identity evaporated, in a Century even awareness of genealogical existence will cease to exist. In simple terms, the tribe will not exist in 100 years. Imperial British East Africa Company with its socio-cultural prong the Presbyterian Church of East Africa succeeded in reprogramming an agrarian Bantu tribe into an amorphous mass of secular capitalist individuals.

The Kikuyu are victims of the victory that strategist Sun Tzu classified as not just victory, but a victory that is complete. The Kikuyu tribe is vanquished, never to rise again. The girls who suffer Kikuyu genealogical heritage should be married and absorbed in to the tribes that survived the imperial scourge, if there are any.

This is the Kikuyu woman’s only hope for safety, security and honour. The Kikuyu men who cannot establish new colonies and tribes should dissolve in to the nihil of time. The only way is forward.

The Kikuyu, as a people or as individuals must reject Man as Sovereign. There is no way back to the past; the “Mungiki” attempt revealed everything about where the path back into the past would lead.

The Kikuyu must find a new Sovereign, or be damned to eternal humiliation. (

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