How Catholic Church aided Tigoni land grab and led to Lari massacre

A few weeks ago, I took a slow drive around Tigoni in Kiambu just to have a feel of the land which caused a lot of pain in the early years of the Kenya Colony.

The lush serenity of Tigoni still thrives. The sense of injustice, here, is neatly camouflaged by the well-manicured lawns and where colonial-era bungalows are, occasionally, swallowed up by the hedges and towering trees.

The real story of Tigoni, thus, remains hidden behind these closed gates of private homes and institutions that looked the other way as the previous owners were kidnapped, driven off and dumped in Lari. It is also a story hidden beneath the luscious coffee and tea plantations of Tigoni which, without any apology, have never acknowledged the wrongs committed against the previous owners. Perhaps, they know. Perhaps, they don’t.

Tigoni would later lead to the Lari massacre as angry Mau Mau fighters descended on loyalists and home guards who agreed to exchange the fertile Tigoni land for the inferior dry land in Lari where there was no water.

Records indicate that the first interest in Tigoni land was by Consolata Catholic Mission, which applied in 1903 to have the land to build their mission headquarters. By this time, the colonial government had declared most of the land around Limuru as alienated, meaning it had been reserved for white settlers. As such, the locals, around Limuru, had been forced to vacate and give way to the tea and coffee farms.

When the Catholic mission applied for the Tigoni land, records indicate that it was reserved for them – but, somehow, the land office did not issue them with a title deed. Instead, there was confusion after the collector, the man allocating land on the ground and normally in the rank of a District Officer, claimed that the land had already been alienated to a Mr Duirs. For the next 11 years, one record indicated that the Tigoni land was allocated to a non-existent Mr Duirs and the other showed that it was reserved for the Mission. 

Nobody seemed to think about the families that owned and eked a living on this land and who continued to cultivate it – surrounded by emerging white-owned settlements of tea and coffee.

In 1915, we now know, a Catholic Bishop named Purloe applied for the title deed and that is when the colonial government realised that Tigoni had not yet been allocated to any settler. In order to deprive the Tigoni people off their land, the Kiambu district commissioner, G.S. Northcote, decided to declare Tigoni a township reserve.

“The only object of it is to get the natives out of the way so that Tigoni may be made available for white settlement,” a report from the district commissioner said.

New all-white Tigoni Town

Soon, the Survey Department marked the area as Tigoni Township and the idea was to shift white settler’s attention from the emerging Limuru town and have a new all-white Tigoni Town. But, like a jinxed town, the DC failed to gazette Tigoni Township. The powerful Limuru Settlers Association now started to present the presence of Africans surrounded by white farms.

“For various reasons,” they wrote in a memorandum, “It is extremely undesirable that there should be a small island area, in the middle of white settled area, owned and used by natives, yet outside the proper reserve… already it is frequently used for ngomas and native gatherings, and may become a menace to the health of the district.”

While the colonial government had gazetted what was known as Kikuyu Native Reserve, Tigoni was left out and was neither part of White Highlands, nor was it a native reserve. The settlers regarded Tigoni “sanctuary for criminals” and started pressuring the DC to reserve it for European settlement.

“Action (should) be taken without delay to remove natives thereon, take steps to divide it into suitable residential areas and settle the same and reserve areas for church and graveyard, and sports and grounds.”

While in 1925 the DC proposed to move the Tigoni people, this was, at first, thwarted by the provincial commissioner who invoked “native rights” and had the Chief Native Commissioner declare the area a Native Reserve in 1926.

Tigoni was to be the first test on the Devonshire White Paper of 1923 and which, in a bid to lock out Indians from the White Highlands, declared that on land “the interests of the African natives must be paramount and that if, and when, those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.” It was this paper, which partly saved Kenya from following the South African path of colonial – and later on white supremacy – occupation.

Even as the DC was doing all these, the Roman Catholic Mission Limuru moved in and took the Wakahangara clan land while the balance was taken by W.Hudson Cane who built the Brackenhurst Hotel as the meeting place for the settlers. 

He also grazed cows and made sure that the locals did not keep any within the vicinity. Hudson had apparently got some of the lease from the Catholic Church which had grabbed more land belonging to Kimonyi and Mugaki clans. 

During the hearing by the Kenya Land Commission of 1933 on the claims by Kikuyu from Kiambu, Hudson appears to have laid blame on Roman Catholic: “ When we came the land for all practical purposes was held by the Italian Mission and the boys who were there were working for them. If anybody wanted to apply for land they applied to the Italian Mission, and until Mr Northcote discovered that their title was poor we all treated the land as belonging to the Italian Mission.”

All Saints Church in Limuru is built on land which had been forcefully taken by Mrs Collin Campbell, the family which established the modern day Maramba Tea Estate in Limuru, from Kimonyi and Mugaki clans. In all these, those who could not leave were turned into squatters in Tigoni and those who left became landless.

A memorandum by the evicted clans that was sent to the Kenya Land Commission, and which was ignored, said as much: All these lands were taken away from us about the year 1912 and from that year, our people have scattered here and there all over the country, some of them have become squatters on European farms and some have lived on borrowed land amongst other Kikuyu... It makes us very sad when we think of all these lands from which we were evicted without being given anything, and that the small portion of land that has remained to us for our use, is still hankered after by the government. We are deprived of this land not for any other purpose except to sell it to the European settlers.”

Removal of Tigoni inhabitants 

But the fate of the Tigoni people appear to have been sealed.

The governor then decided to enter into a deal with one of the Tigoni elders: Luka Wanganga Kahangara. He was to be turned into a chief in Tigoni and he would later agree to have the people moved. Actually, he had sold out.

When colonial secretary William Ormsby-Gore was confronted in the House of Lords about the matter he said: “I am aware that accusations were made that Luka had been bribed by government to agree to the move, and that the absurdity of these accusations has been made known locally.”

The Tigoni question is the one which brought Jomo Kenyatta to the attention of most people as he presented the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) views. 

But finally, the Secretary of State would say that “the removal of the inhabitants of Tigoni to an exchange area (was) carried out on the recommendation of the Morris Carter Land Commission (and that) it would be to the advantage of the natives and the Kikuyu Reserve as a whole that they should leave Tigoni.”

After agreeing to leave for some inferior land in Lari, Luka got some of the best land for his clan and other loyalists and left the balance to the others – dismissed as Aregi (Decliners).

It was an anger that would boil by 1953 when Mau Mau fighters raided his homestead and killed 97 people in what was known as the Lari Massacre. They were angry about Luka’s handling of the Tigoni issue and his loyalist position.

Parliament was told that the Lari Massacre was a selective attack “upon the houses of the families of the home guard and of the servants of the government.”

But it was Fenner Brockway, a well-known supporter of the freedom fighters in Kenya who told the House: “The African people are seething with grievances…They have their land problem. There are 1.2 million Kikuyus on 20,000 square miles of cultivable land looking at 12,000 Europeans on 12,000 square miles of land.”

Tigoni was the genesis of the Lari massacre – and there are many more such mistakes that only require an open apology. The church can lead from the front, now that they know what their forefathers did.