“The ban on Karing’a and KISA schools, especially the Kenya Teachers’ College at Githunguri, was a practical and psychological assault on the African initiative for self-reliance. Much had gone into their organization. Mbiyu Loinange had narrowly escaped arrest alongside Kenyatta because he happened to be in England at the time, representing the Kenya African Union. Many others associated with the college were among the thousands arrested. But the biggest blow to the collective psyche occurred when the colonial state turned the college grounds and buildings into a prison camp where proponents of resistance to colonialism were hanged…up to then there had been two competing and parallel systems of modern education, that of the government and missionaries on one hand, and the African-run independent schools on the other. I had been able to move from one to the other. And now? There was no choice.
I didn’t know how long I lived with the uncertainty. But the following year, 1953, it was announced that a number of KISA and Karing’a schools would be reopened under government control. Some trustees refused to give up their independents and hence their schools did not reopen. Many others were not given that option. Manguo was among those whose board members agreed to have the school reopened under the government-sanctioned Kiambu District Educational Board. The syllabus would be determined by colonial masters.”
“My mother was a thinker and good listener loved for her generosity and respected for her legendary capacity for work. Though she would not confront my father openly, she was stubborn and let her actions speak for her. She was like the minister of works…she was a great storyteller. Every evening we children gathered around the fireside in her hut, and the performance would begin. Sometimes they led to stories about events in the land and the world…some of them sounded stranger than fiction: like the case of a white man named Hitler refusing to shake the hand of the fastest runner in the world in 1963 because the man, Jesse Owens, was black.
I looked forward to these evenings; it seemed to me a glorious wonder that such beautiful and sometimes scary stories could issue from their mouths. Best for me were those stories in which the audience would join in the singing of the chorus. The melody was invariably captivating; it felt like I had been transported to another world of endless harmony even in sadness.”
“…evidence of war was not to be found simply in stories; it was all around us. Peasant farmers could sell their food only through the government marketing board. Movement of food across regions was not permitted without a license, creating shortages and famine in some areas. Though I did not know the reasons at the time, this system of food production and distribution was actually the colony’s contribution to the British war economy.
Even before I was born, Benito Mussolini had entered Ethiopia in 1936 and had forced the African emperor Haile Selassie into exile and added insult to injury by creating Italian East Africa out of Ethiopia and neighboring territories.”