A TOUR OF SENIOR CHIEF KOINANGE'S HOME

Senior Chief Koinange wa Mbiyu was an enigmatic, conspiratorial, forward-looking, strategic African nationalist. Displaced from his family land by the colonial administration and left with a brand new religion, he was convinced to join the colonial administration. Embittered by his experience, and witnessing the impoverishment of his people, he started organising politically using subterfuge that will be studied for generations. He was a Chief by day, and conspirator against the colonialists, an oath administrator, gun collector, and Kikuyu traditionalists at night. The famous Kiambaa Parliament was based in his compound. Although a born-again Christian, he refused to divorce any of his wives in order to become the embodiment of a great Christian, threatening to donate the wives to the white missionary who was admonishing him to do so. He was at the centre of the establishment of Kikuyu independent schools. He educated his sons, particularly Mbiyu, with liberation in mind. Some of his sons, such as John Wesley, were deeply involved in Mau Mau and they were linked, together with their father, in the murder of Senior Chief Waruhiu Kung'u. He hobnobbed with the Kabaka, and Emperor Haile Selassie, and other African nationalists, as well as the likes of Jomo Kenyatta, who became his son-in-law. He visited England, pretending to be sick the entire journey so that the white people in the ship could not extract any information from him throughout the voyage. He was later demoted, made a chief without jurisdiction, then detained. Mau Mau Chronicles takes you on a tour of his homestead to see the house that he built in the early 1920s, the trees he planted, and the water tank that Jomo Kenyatta constructed, the store Kenyatta and Mbiyu slept in after their return to colony after their sojourn in America and Britain, and his family mausoleum where he and his famous sons are interred. We are taken around the homestead by his scion, Mr. Leonard Karuga Koinange, a walking encyclopeadia of the family history and Kikuyu culture. Given this history, and specifically the family linkages with Kenyan nationalism, the family plans to open the house to the public soon and an announcement will be made as soon as arrangements are finalized.