Gakaara Wanjau: In Memoriam 1921-29 March 2001

In January 2001, I shared tea in a cafe on River Road, Nairobi, with Gakaara Wanjau, the Kenyan writer and winner of the 1984 Noma Award for publishing in Africa. We reviewed issues of language and culture in Kenya, as well as the importance of nurturing a national literature and consciousness. The discussion was informed by our work together in UUGI: The Gikuyu Language Committee. Unknown to me, Gakaara would pass on two months later due to a troublesome illness.

In Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, Ngugi wa Thiong'o pays tribute to the writings of Gakaara, especially in reference to postcolonial politics and cultures. Ngugi shows that a cultural renaissance preceded the Mau Mau armed struggle. Newspapers and small publishing houses flourished:

Books of poem and songs, in African languages, were brought out. It was a period of literary upsurge. The energy came from the entire anti-colonial movement. Not surprisingly, when a state of emergency was declared in 1952, culture become under siege. Many books were banned. All the small presses publishing in African languages were closed down. Writers of banned books were imprisoned without trial. The most prominent of them was Gakaara wa Wanjau. (89)

Gakaara wrote in Gikuyu during the colonial and postcolonial era. During the colonial era, he was detained without trial for nine years in different detention camps on account of his writings and in postcolonial Kenya he was imprisoned without trial for a month and badly tortured because of his intellectual work on language and culture.

Mzee Wanjau was born in 1921, the year Harry Thuku, leader of the workers movement, was arrested and about 150 people killed at a march demanding his release. It is the year Mary Nyanjiru led women in a confrontation with the colonial police in the streets of Nairobi. That moment was captured in the Kanyegenyuri poetic compositions of the 1920s. It was to be captured again in the Muthirigu songs, sung according to the Pokomo rhythms of the Kenyan Coast.

In a sense, then, Gakaara came into the world at the moment of struggle. His eighty years of life were laden with the search for a more humane world. At the time of his death, he was the patron of UUGI: The Gikuyu Language Committee, committed to the standardization and moderation of African langgages.

He wrote for most of the twentieth century and set the stage for the growth of Gikuyu literature. Gakaara's writing in the 1940/50s ought to be seen within the context of other writings of the period. For instance, Bildad Kaggia had been publishing the Gikuyu newspaper Inooria Agikuyu and the Swahili weekly Afrika Mpya. The precursos of vernacular newspapers published in the 1940s, in form and content, was Muiguithania (The Reconciler). Started by the Kenya Central Association (KCA) in May 1928 and with the motto "Pray and Work," its first editor was Jomo Kenyatta. In 1940 the colonial government proscribed the KCA and banned Muiguithania. However, in 1945 the weekly Mumenyereri (The Guardian) was started by the late Henry Mworia MwanIki. Further, the late 1940s saw a proliferation of African newspapers and magazines. These included Kenya African Union's (KAU) Sauti ya Mwafrika, Kaggia's Inooro ria Agikuyu (The Whetstone of the AgIkuyu), John Cege's Wiyathi (Freedom), Muthamaki (The Stateman), Hindi ya Agikuyu (The Time of the AgiIkuyu), Mwaraniria (The Conversationalist), Wihuge (Stay Alert), and Muramati (The Caretaker). It is within that context of intense journalistic activity that Gakaara was to start his own Gikuyu na Mumbi magazine as well as the monthly Waigua Atia (What's Up?). In these, he published original articles and songs.

These journalists worked closely with Asian businessmen in putting out the papers and magazines, such as the Regal Printers, V. G. Patel, and G. L. Vidyathi. Patel and Vidyathi were later to go to jail for printing Mumenyereri and Sauti ya Mwafrika, respectively. In order to curb...