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The Kikuyu are a people of dark and mystical dreams whose legend relates that when Ngai (God) first divided up the world, he held Kenya in such affection that he kept Mount Kenya as his favorite resting place. He told Gikuyu, the first Kikuyu, that if difficulty ever arose, Gikuyu should make a sacrifice and raise a hand toward Mount Kenya, and Ngai would help. Not far away, under a fig tree, Gikuyu found a beautiful woman, Moombi, to be mother of the Kikuyu race. Later, when their nine beautiful daughters needed husbands, Gikuyu sacrificed a lamb and a kid under a fig tree, smeared their blood on its bark, faced Mount Kenya, and saw his daughters' wishes come true.
From this legend came the Kikuyu deep veneration of their mountain and the earth of its endless slopes. The Kikuyu looked with bitterness on the 12,700 sq. mi. of land especially reserved for European settlers, the rich "white highlands" whence comes most of Kenya's lucrative coffee, tea, sisal and pyrethrum. The whites in rebuttal said that their highlands were never Kikuyu territory but a neglected no man's land between contending tribes, and that the Kikuyu had badly farmed their own reserve north of Nairobi, leaving it poor and eroded.
Return of the Native. In 1929, fierce, bearded Jomo Kenyatta, wild-eyed Kikuyu spokesman and student of telepathy, magic spells and Kikuyu lore, journeyed to London to demand the white man's land and political rights for his people. After 15 years in London and two in Moscow, he returned to Kenya to set up a network of bush schools, which spread antiwhite propaganda and upheld such barbaric Kikuyu rites as female circumcision,* which the missionaries and government officials had tried to stop. District officers stumbled onto fanatic ritual meetings in forest clearings. Later, word spread that tens of thousands of Kikuyu were taking fierce oaths of loyalty to a strange creed called Mau Mau, sealing the bond by drinking blood and waving cat corpses in the air as they sat facing the holy mountain.
In 1952, marauding Mau Mau gangs began darting out of the Aberdare hills to slaughter white farmers and hack their cattle to death, and the government declared a national emergency. It is generally agreed that Mboya played no part in the savage three-year revolt. But he had been an active member of Kenyatta's Kenya African Union.
When Kenyatta, accused of fostering Mau Mau, was sent to serve a seven-year prison term in the Northern Frontier
Province, Tom Mboya volunteered to help out, and Kenyatta's successor as K.A.U. president, Walter Odede, recognizing a talented propagandist, made him public-relations officer of the party. Odede, in turn, was locked up in March 1953, and Mboya became acting treasurer, despite an order from Kenyatta sent through clandestine channels: "He is a very young man and I've only met him once, so do not confirm the appointment."