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PAN AFRICANIST AMÍLCAR CABRAL DECLARED THAT PEOPLE FREE THEMSELVES BY RETURNING “TO THE UPWARD PATHS OF THEIR OWN CULTURE, WHICH IS NOURISHED BY THE LIVING REALITY OF ITS ENVIRONMENT”.[1] For many throughout the African diaspora, this return includes communal connections to the land.
The ways in which African people sought to re-establish their connections to the land offer a path to understanding their resistance to colonialism. A notable example is found in one of the resistance movements that took shape in Kenya. The Mau Mau rebellion, officially known as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, is essential in understanding the struggle over land and freedom in Kenya. While this resistance is central to this discussion, the focus here is on the movement’s environmental resistance.
Kenyans’ ties to the land were central to their freedom struggle, shaping the many strategies they used in pursuit of liberation. Centering physical space in this discussion reveals how environmental resistance, particularly during the Mau Mau rebellion, served as a means of rejecting colonialism. Drawing from a range of sources, this analysis explores the significance of that resistance within their broader fight for agency.
This paper adopts a human-centered approach to environmental historiography, emphasizing the role of human agency, and its impact on human ecologies. This argument is grounded in the understanding that culture and environment are mutually shaping forces, and it further recognizes that land is inherently political. This drives us to adhere to the suppressed voices that oppose the environmental impact of capitalist expansion.[2] Within the context of Kenyan resistance, these voices represent those of the leaders, spies, soldiers, supporters, and descendants of the Mau Mau.
In understanding the environmental resistance in Kenya’s liberation movements, it’s important to recognize their deep connection with ‘land roots’ that spurred much of their activism.
These ‘land roots’ are formed in the existing epistemologies, specifically Kikuyu religious and cultural ties to the land. From these roots emerged a struggle to eradicate the colonial regime. The Kikuyu people provide a unique example of how spiritual attachment to the land can shape the intersection of environmental assertions and liberation movements.
Through personal recollections, Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya documents the Kikuyu spiritual systems and practices. Kenyatta
captures the essence of Kikuyu beliefs in his writings of Ngai, the God who rests atop Mount Kenya, the Earth, and the people’s relationship to both. According to the Kikuyu people, the land supplied “the material needs of life, through which spiritual and mental contentment is achieved”.[3] All physical space was a gift from Ngai, exemplifying the spiritual connection to the natural environment. For the Kikuyu, life was undoubtedly shaped by this connection, attaching the land to their identity.
ACCORDING TO THE KIKUYU PEOPLE, THE LAND SUPPLIED “THE MATERIAL NEEDS OF LIFE, THROUGH WHICH SPIRITUAL AND MENTAL CONTENTMENT IS ACHIEVED”.
Mickie Hudson-Koster notes in “The Making of Mau Mau: The Power of the Oath,” that Kikuyu and Mau Mau practices represented an integrated belief system, a reciprocal relationship between humans and nature.[4] Louis Leakey, a Kenyan-British archaeologist and scholar studying the Mau Mau resistance, reinforces this, asserting that “worship of God not only consisted of acts of supplication and prayer for relief of drought or epidemic, etc., but also in acts of thanksgiving, for good harvests, for rain sent in answer to prayer and so on.”[5] In this context, land was not only a means of offering but signaled one’s place in the world, tying it to individual and collective identities.
The Kikuyu governed their interaction with the land according to these cultural and religious principles. Spiritual connections with the land were central to their livelihood. This translated to ideas of ‘ownership’, land tenure, and occupation. Land negotiation was a religious and political process that exemplified communal decision-making. These social and political elements structured their relationships with the environment.
Recounting the stories he heard as a child and how they influenced his understanding of his people’s relationship to the environment, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote that they “followed the animals in their struggle against hostile nature, drought, rain, sun, wind—a confrontation often forcing them to search for forms of co-operation.”[6] The Kikuyu tradition of storytelling was embedded with this knowledge. Communal narratives illustrated a search for harmony and balance that foregrounds how Kenyans responded to environmental change. Understanding these connections and societal structures is crucial for understanding the impact of colonialism and the ways in which Kenyans resisted.
This freedom struggle originated with the introduction of the Imperial British East Africa Company near central Kenya in 1888.[7] Documenting the native Kenyan movement and the early accommodation of European colonizers, Overton argues that exposure to Kenyan resources, specifically the fertile land, led to a transformation of the settler economy, which in turn contributed to the foundation of the colonial conflict.[8] This relationship led to a wave of British colonial policies that directly opposed Kikuyu identity and their deep ties to the land. At its core, this tension gave rise to the Mau Mau and their struggle for freedom and self-determination in Kenya.
Nearly every aspect of Kikuyu life was dictated and monitored by colonial oppressors. The establishment of reserves for native Kenyans, while European colonizers took control of the land, signaled the undermining of Kikuyu spiritual and economic prosperity. Colonial control sought to turn communal stewards of the land into tenants for white colonizers. This conundrum reminded Kikuyu in areas coveted by Europeans, “that the tenure of their lands under the colonial system was highly insecure.”[9]
The recognition of the Kikuyu’s lack of agency under colonial rule helped lay the foundation for native Kenyan resistance to the colonial regime. Shiraz Durrani, librarian known for his Kenyan liberation writings, argues that Mau Mau ideology, vision, and strategies were born out of “conditions of the time in the struggle against a foreign power that had captured people’s land, people’s labour, the country’s resources and had created an unequal and unjust system to maintain their power to exploit, to oppress, and to govern.”[10]
The emergence of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) and the Kenya African Union (KAU) shows the initial political efforts of native Kenyans. The KCA, which was suppressed and forced to go underground, represented a growing militancy among Kenyans. Because the group’s land beliefs were tied to traditional, pre-colonial identities, it embedded Kikuyu spiritual groundings and practices within the revolution. In spirit and practice, they returned to the land. They planted trees to combat deforestation, challenged colonial policies that sought to dismantle kinship networks and communal land tenure, and articulated systems that addressed land scarcity. Thiong’o shares that the Mau Mau and their supporters sought “a real control of all the means of communal self-determination in time and space.”[11]
Growing opposition amongst Kenyans to compromise with the colonial government further pushed the conflict toward a breaking point. Dedan Kimathi, field marshal of the Land and Freedom Army, a collective led by the Kikuyu to reject British colonial rule between 1952 and 1960, represented a culmination of those attitudes. Leakey states, “since ‘save the land’ is the battle cry that can stir a Kikuyu more than anything else, it was not surprising that a number of people, more particularly those who already felt a strong grievance about land matters, rallied to the call.”[12]. If British colonial control in Kenya can be positioned as a natural enemy to the environment, then the Mau Mau revolutionaries must serve as a representation of environmental resistance.
LAND NEGOTIATION WAS A RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL PROCESS THAT EXEMPLIFIED COMMUNAL DECISION-MAKING.
Centering Kenyan voices helps reassert the humanity of the Kikuyu people, as they combined traditional beliefs with modern ideas to shape a new vision of freedom. Within the context of Kikuyu spirituality and belief systems, scholars have argued that the use of ritualistic oaths in the Mau Mau movement was an elaborate process that invoked a connection to the physical environment. These oaths sought to “acknowledge a disorder or an unnatural state in the environment that requires spiritual intervention.”[13]
For the militant Kikuyu and Mau Mau collective, nothing was more unnatural than colonial government control of the land. Kenyan activist Koigi wa Wamwere conveys this powerfully, writing that “our world is a reservoir of life whose volume increases the more we draw from it and the cleaner we keep it, by adding into it the purifiers of freedom and justice and removing from it the pollutants of poverty, disease, and oppression”.[14] While acknowledging the destruction caused by colonialism, Kenyans also recognized that their freedom required a preservation of the natural environment.
When viewed through an ecological lens and a closer examination of Mau Mau’s vision and strategy, their practices reveal deep-rooted connections to nature and the environment. The Mau Mau and Kikuyu people were aware of the devastating consequences of colonial land policy. The famine, drought, deforestation, soil erosion, and land alienation experienced mainly by native Kenyans only exacerbated their urge to resist.
In Decolonising the Mind, Thiong’o writes that capitalism “introduced the possibilities of the conquest of nature”.[15] For Kenyans, control of the natural environment was the domain of the creator. Fundamentally, the Mau Mau resistance was concerned with reasserting a spiritual connection to nature and rejecting capitalism. The land, animals, sacred trees, and foods that tied the Kikuyu people to the natural and spiritual world had been exploited and damaged by colonial control. The Mau Mau sought to reverse those trends at any cost and, in doing so, advocated based on an acknowledgment and care for the environment.
In the context of the Kikuyu, Kendi Borona, a scholar researching Kenyan environmental movements, states that “land was shared with other members of the community in a system that was anchored in reciprocity and pursuit of collective good.”[16] British colonialism brought with it disease, loss of livestock, destruction of pre-colonial trade routes, land shortages, food shortages, starvation, extreme poverty, drought, soil erosion, dispossessed families, underdevelopment, and pollution—all of which became driving forces behind the revolutionary aims of the Mau Mau.
The Mau Mau resistance provides an example of the various ways in which African people sought to reimagine themselves and their surroundings during times when their freedom was at stake. Kenyans saw their reflection in the land, their lives bound to the soil. Kenyan political and environmental activist Wangari Maathai noted that “without conscious or deliberate effort”, the actions and traditions of her people “contributed to the conservation of biodiversity.”[17]
One of the Mau Mau’s clear goals was to reject and overthrow colonial control. However, their legacy shows that restoring harmony and balance with the natural environment was also at the forefront of this revolutionary movement and the minds of native Kenyans. Liberation in Kenya involved recognizing not only the efforts to dismantle British colonization, but also the efforts to reverse the harmful effects of mass commercial farming, industrial deforestation, and the privatization of land. This revolutionary movement and its legacy reveal how, across the African diaspora, the freedom struggle must be deeply rooted in a return to the land and the rebuilding of community.
