Hi everyone,
I’m so excited to share the story of Mekatilili wa Menza with you all today. She was a leader of the Giriama rebellion against British colonization in coastal Kenya and her story is remarkable. So often rebellious people are painted as youths, but Mekatilili was in fact between 50 and 70 years old when were rebellion began. I love to see it.
This is the last post of season 2! I’ll be back for season 3 in September. Between now and then I’ll be sharing bonus episodes, like this one on Balloonomania, and behind the scenes updates with paying subscribers, so if you’ve been considering upgrading, now is the time.
Okay, let’s hop into the show!
🎙️ Transcript
Hey everyone, welcome to Unruly Figures, the podcast that celebrates history’s greatest rule-breakers. I’m your host, Valorie Clark, and today I’m going to be covering Mekatilili wa Menza, a key figure in the early fight against British colonization of Kenya.
But before we jump into Mekatilili’s life, I want to give a huge thank you to all the paying subscribers on Substack who make this podcast possible. Y’all are the best and this podcast wouldn’t still be going without you! Each of these episodes takes me nearly 30 hours of work, which means they’ve become a full-time job. So if you like this show and want more of it, please become a paying subscriber for just $6/month or $60/year! Contributions help ensure that I will be able to continue doing this work. Becoming a paying subscriber will also give you access to exclusive content, merch, and behind-the-scenes updates on the upcoming Unruly Figures book. When you’re ready to do that, head over to unrulyfigures.substack.com.
Also, this is the final episode of season 2! I’m taking August off to catch up on some other work, then I’ll be back in September to get season 3 underway. I’m already excited to be back. But, until then, let’s talk about Mekatilili wa Menza.
Today, she is a legend in Kenya. In the early 20th century, Mekatilili wa Menza encouraged her people, the Giriyama of coastal Kenya, to fight against British domination and destruction. She showed, quote, “fearlessness in the face of physical danger and imprisonment, denouncing the local chiefs who cooperated with the colonizers and focusing much of her effort on mobilizing women to refuse to send their sons to fight for the British in World War I.”1
In many of the great resistance histories of Eastern Africa, women are rarely mentioned. But in Kenya, Mekatilili is a key figure in the grass-roots resistance against British rule during the early 20th century. It’s frustrating that these stories are rarely mentioned because, statistically, the resistance movements led by women were, quote, “more successful and more abiding than the largely military and short-lived struggles waged by men.”2 So, let’s get into Mekatilili’s story.
We believe she was born during the 1860s, though it’s possible that she was born as early as the 1840s. She was born into the Giriama people, which is one of the nine Bantu ethnic groups that make up the Mijikenda peoples. Today, the Giriama remain the largest ethnic group of the Mijikenda. They live along the coast of Kenya and Tanzania, between the Sabaki River north of Mombasa and the Umba River, which is very close to the Kenya/Tanzania border.
Historically, the Giriama were a strong agricultural community, and they traded their crops internationally. They also have a reputation as resistance fighters; in the past, before Mekatilili’s story starts, they had successfully resisted, quote, “the Galla, the Swahili, the Maasai, [and] the Arabs… under pressure at times they have migrated to new lands, other times they have negotiated with their oppressors, and they have occasionally violently resisted.”3 Knowledge was passed down orally, from Giriama spiritual leaders, who would have told these stories as Mekatilili was growing up.
We know very little about her childhood, unfortunately. We think that her birth name was Mnyazi wa Menza.4 But we do know that she had one sister and four brothers, one of whom was kidnapped from a market by enslavers who were forcing people into the Arab world. This isn’t taught much in US education—I can’t speak for anywhere else, of course—but “during the nineteenth century alone, 313,000 East Africans from the Kenya and Tanzanian coasts were transshipped to Arabia, Iran, and India” as part of a slave trade.5
She grew up and married another Giriama man named Dyeka wa Duka. They had a few children together; their oldest son was named Katilili. This is how she gained the name Mekatilili—it means mother of Katilili.6 After Dyeka passed away—it’s unclear how—she became a, quote, “formidable trader.”7 She was known to be intelligent and clever.
Okay, at this point I’m going to give some background into what was happening in Kenya around the turn of the twentieth century, just so we’re all on the same page.
The British began invading Kenya in the late nineteenth century, though it wasn’t called Kenya yet. That name was established in 1920. The British had been present in Kenya before this, for trade and to use the ports that the Portuguese explorers had helped establish and frequented before them. Initially, British goals were, quote, “to acquire raw materials and luxury items in exchange for mass-produced, machine-made goods, particularly cloth, that could be sold in bulk.”8 But it was in 1895 that the British pronounced the land the East Africa Protectorate and began taking it under British control, entering the interior to settle. They were doing this in part to fight Omani domination in the region; the Omani government had been expanding into Kenya first, taking slaves, establishing trade routes, and building up plantations. The Mijikenda peoples who lived there were to some extent caught up in the middle of this power struggle over the Indian Ocean. They also claimed that they were doing this to end slavery in the region, though, as we’ll see, they weren’t like really ending slavery at all.
According to historian Cynthia Brantley, the Giriama people had mostly managed to avoid interacting with Europeans up until this point.9 In fact, it seems like they were thriving until then, experiencing an economic boom. However, during the 1880s they had been forced to move further north toward the Sabaki River due to a famine; the Sabaki River valley was more fertile, and soon the Giriama were doing well. Some young people were already beginning to move away toward cities like Mombasa for work, but for the most part, many remained home to maintain their agricultural economy.
Of course, this distance from the British didn’t last. As Brantley writes, quote, “Initial Giriama encounters with British agents had been mediated by mutual Afro-Arab allies and were regarded as trading exchanges.”10 As a result, the British presence in Kenya seemed, quote, “deceptively innocuous to the Giriama.”11 That would change by the in the 20th century.
In a tale that will seem familiar to anyone who studied early American history, the British brought disease with them into Kenya, devastating the population of indigenous people. Smallpox moved with them as they penetrated further into Kenya, killing people as they traveled.12 The Giriama were fortunate—the British bypassed them. However, around the same time, there was a cattle disease going around called rinderpest; it was an epidemic and killed “virtually all Giriama cattle.”13 Since the Giriama had well-established agriculture, they didn’t starve as a result; but other groups, like the Maasai who were pastoral and reliant on their cattle, starved as their cattle were wiped out.14
In 1895, when the British declared modern Kenya a British protectorate, they nearly immediately entered a war with the Mazrui, an Omani tribe that lived in Kenya and opposed British rule in Kenya. The British wanted allies in this war and they tried to turn to the Giriama, assuming that the Giriama saw the Omani as invaders and that they could follow the age-old adage of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’
However, the Giriama had long maintained a mostly positive relationship with the Mazrui. As Brantley wrote, by the time the British approached the Giriama, the Mazrui had already called on, quote,
their old Giriama alties to assist their rebellion, to feed and shelter them, to hide their arms, to become informants, and, of course, to refuse to assist British efforts against them. The Giriama contribution to the rebel effort consisted of supplying grain and storing what the rebels had confiscated, and allowing the rebels to hide in their villages. They bought cloth at the coast which they then sold to the rebels, receiving money and even donkeys in exchange. Giriama who had become Muslims kept the rebels informed of British whereabouts and some Giriama allowed the rebels' slaves, disguised as Giriama, to cultivate small plots of land alongside their own farms. By facilitating the sale of slaves that the rebels had captured, the Giriama were able to provide the rebels with income to buy food and arms, and at the same time the Giriama could enlarge their own supply of slaves. This Giriama assistance to the Mazrui made it impossible for the British to restrict rebel movements in the hinterland and to prevent embarrassing attacks.15
The British, especially Arthur Hardinge, the Commissioner to East Africa, made it their goal to try to understand the Giriama in order to persuade them but they made several fundamental errors, including dismissing their religious leaders and believing that the Giriama had a centralized government that owned all their land, when in fact it was a very decentralized political structure.
They eventually convinced some of the Giriama people to switch sides. Hardinge himself tried to hammer out this alliance. Through a missionary named W.E. Taylor, he had heard that the Giriama had something called a fisi, literally translated to the hyena oath, which they considered incredibly sacred and binding. He set out to cement this new alliance with a fisi, but he misunderstood it—Taylor had not understood that the fisi could only be enacted by the highest-ranking spiritual leaders of the Giriama. (Taylor was, unsurprisingly, also the person who had somehow thought that the Giriama had a centralized government and that the religious leaders weren’t significant.) So Hardinge got a few powerful local political leaders to swear a fisi of loyalty to the British, and then a year later was annoyed when the entire ethnic group did not see themselves as subservient to British rule thanks to this oath.
In fact, the Giriama had only switched their allegiance quote, “judiciously, in order not to suffer as rebels to the British… They did not interpret their support in this instance to mean that they would henceforth serve the British administration.”16 And the fisi sworn by the wrong people had probably had very little influence on the Giriama, if any influence at all. Their decision reflected their view that the Mazrui were losing the war and they didn’t want to have to fight the British next.
Once the Mazrui-British fighting ended—it only lasted about 11 months—peace reigned again for the Giriama. The British continued consolidating their power in Kenya, but for many years their interactions with the Giriama were minimal. Medical historian K. David Patterson wrote in African Historical Studies that, quote, “[British] administration was almost nonexistent in this…region until 1903, when a touring officer inaugurated a superficial annual tax collection and headmen were gazetted.”17 This ‘superficial annual tax’ was also known as the hut tax, and it was not considered superficial by the Giriama. Howvever, it was barely enforced until 1909, and the only real interaction the Giriama had with the British was when they sold grain in the towns.18 Administrators noted that the tribe was growing in size—a sure sign of prosperity—and complained that the men drank too much tembo, an alcoholic drink very similar to palm wine.19 But other than that, most accounts claim that they mostly left each other alone.
The uneasy peace that had been established between the British and the Giriama ended in 1912. There had been a drought going on since 1910, and food was growing increasingly scarce. Even the Giriama, who had previously been less impacted by disease and famine because of their agricultural dominance, were feeling teh pinch this time. And it was at that moment that the British re-engaged.
Unlike most colonized African regions, the British came to the Giriama looking for wage laborers.20 Throughout the East Africa Protectorate there was a labor shortage, and it was most severe on coastal plantations and on government projects in Mombasa.21 It seems like in the 17 years since the Mazrui-British war, the British hadn’t managed to understand the Giriama any better, and so they thought of them as poor and powerless, easy to manipulate and force into low-wage labor.22 And it’s worth pointing out that individual British employers would often use any excuse to not pay someone, so low-wage labor often became unpaid labor.23
Requests for labor went unheeded. According to Brantley, quote, “The Giriama disliked regular, long-term employment, and objected to leaving their homes in order to work.”24 Which, like, same girl, I too want a relaxed work-from-home lifestyle. To try to force their hands, the British tried to pressure the Giriama to work by imposing higher taxes, but the Giriama could easily pay them without resorting to wage labor. Somehow they didn’t connect this with the wealth of the Giriama though. They just didn’t get it—they were so determined to see them as poor and stupid that they couldn’t see past their own blinders. They did, however, complain that the Giriama spent money on cattle and tembo, and not luxury European goods. It feels wilfully ignorant at some point.
In 1913, the British demanded that Giriama men work on a water project in Mombasa, but the headmen of the group ignored the order.25 Enter Arthur M. Champion, the new Assistant District Commissioner for Giriama. His goal was to crack Giriama resistance to British domination.
Champion was, well, a champion of bureaucracy. He aggressively set out to collect taxes and finish censuses, concluding that the Giriama numbered about 61,000 people at that time.26 He also ordered the building of roads and council houses, as well as banned the trading of ivory by the Giriama, claiming that the restriction was acceptable because, quote, “all the proceeds were used to buy tembo.”27 However there was also, quote, “an ivory frenzy” happening in Europe at the same time, so my bet is that the ivory trade was not off-limits to European traders at this time.28 In fact, I haven’t looked into this, but I would bet that the British Protectorate’s real motivation for this ban was to monopolize the lucrative trade all for themselves.
Next, he and his boss, C. W. Hobley, began pushing the Giriama people off of one bank of the Sabaki River, though he did at least compensate them for the palm trees they were losing.29 Though whether it was a fair compensation could probably be debated. Hobley delightedly explained that forcing them out would ensure that, quote, “a large area of most fertile land will be opened up for white settlement.”30 They then had the audacity to be surprised that the Giriama viewed their subsequent approaches with resentment, often remaining armed if either Hobley or Champion were nearby. They wouldn't even clear the roads that the British had ordered them to clear without providing any support, resources, or reason to do so! How dare they! Ugh. It’s the classic story, right? Colonizers who think they know everything without bothering to get to know anyone and ruining a traditional way of life with their audacity.
Not only did the Giriama not like British policy and interference in their way of life, but they also personally disliked Champion. First of all, he was young—29 or 30 when he was appointed to his post, but the Giriama equated age with power and respect, so they didn’t like having this youngster come in and try to order them around.31 Champion also confiscated the banned ivory personally, making several enemies. (I wish I had access to Champion’s financial records because I bet he sold that ivory on.) People began to refuse to sell him food, and one headmen tried to, quote, “kill one of Champion’s interpreters by witchcraft.”32 And the harder he worked at his job, the more they hated him.
However, Champion at least began to understand the Giriama. After eight months, he wrote to his superiors to advise a change in tactics: Instead of trying to force the Giriama to become laborers, he advocated allowing them to expand their agricultural holdings and asking them to plant more cotton and rubber, which they already grew, and to collect more of those products as taxes rather than asking for labor or other currency.33
This could have worked. But Hobley ignored it, instead touring the Sabaki Valley in June 1913 to demand their taxes right before the harvest, which would force men to travel to Mombasa for months of wage labor rather than be at home for the harvest, thereby risking the entire harvest.34 He also began making threats of reducing their agricultural land and usurping their traditional ruling councils to support the British government.
And now we finally come back to our heroine: Mekatilili wa Menza, who was by this point around 50 years old and considered an elder of the tribe; Patterson also calls her a “female diviner,” though others argue against that interpretation of her role.35 We don’t really know what she was up to in the lead up to the British government putting pretture on the Giriama. But, we know that she heard Hobley speak in June 1913 and was horrified by his suggestions. She began talking with the people she lived near in Gallana, seeking their thoughts and opinions on the matter. She especially gathered women together to discuss their grievances. Together they determined that they wanted to, quote, “restore the country to its old condition,” as well as prevent Giriama men from laboring for British benefit.36
After this, she began traveling to other Giriama villages. I’m not totally clear on how many villages there were, though I have mentioned that the Giriama were the largest of the nine Mijikenda peoples and their villages were spread along the coast. So I’m also not totally clear on how many she visited. But as she traveled, she would perform a dance called the kifudu, a funeral dance.37 It shares its name with a matriarchal secret society within Giriama culture; some have suggested that Mekatilili would have to be a member of that society to know the dance. Regardless, kifudu is performed usually by communities as a way to help guide spirits into the realm of ancestors, as well as to experience community and solidarity in times of grief.38 So, the dance both acted as a spiritual movement against the encroachment of the British and attracted a crowd so she could talk with them. She brought her concerns to other villages, assessing what their thoughts were as well.
Out of these roving discussions came a concern that the wage labor that the British were asking for was not, in fact, wage labor. Many young Giriama men argued that, quote, “laborers had gone to the coast and never returned, and that the call for labor was a government bluff.”39 It’s unclear to me how true this is; perhaps some had gone and never returned due to death or changing interests, but this makes it sound like all of them had never returned. However other records claim that no Giriama men ever worked for the British, so maybe these were rumors that they were hearing from other Mijikenda peoples.
Mekatilili’s main message to people in every village, it seems, was her anguish over the, quote, “growing disitingetation of Giriama society.”40 Later, she would be quoted as worrying about Giriama women wearing short skirts and becoming prostitutes, but there is good reason to doubt that this was her specific complaint. Instead, it seems like she was more worried about losing their economic freedom—I know I sound like I’m harping on this, but the Giriama were wealthy due to their great harvests, and losing all their men to wage labor would have impacted their whole society, especially since she could probably guess that the wages the British were paying were going to be lower than what the men would make selling their grain and rubber as they always had.
In discussions with other women and Giriama young adults, it became clear that people wanted a revival of the kaya structure, and a return to many customs which had been, quote, “spoiled” by the arrival of the Portuguese and then the British.41 More importantly, both the young men and the young women all agreed that the men should not be leaving to become laborers. Mekatilili could see that the British had no respect for Giriama culture—again, they still hadn’t learned their basic societal structure—and she saw the way the British were demanding Giriama labor as forced labor, even if it was paid. She began to see working for them as a form of slavery, and disseminated this view within the community.42
Mekatilili and another elder, Wanje, encouraged people from their area to travel back to the traditional Giriama kaya, a sacred forest that was used as a place for prayer and high-level discussion with leaders. Today 10 of these forests have been protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the name Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests.43 There, they would discuss their concerns and ask the elders to recommend a course of action that met their needs. It seems like Mekatilili was at the kaya, though I’m not 100% sure. One account from Hannah Tsumah claims that Mekatilili led people to the kaya herself, and threatened that any woman who would not come with her would pay a fine, but I didn’t see this repeated anywhere.44 The Giriama did have an internal system of taxation and offerings for honoring their god, Mulungu, which could be food or livestock, so maybe it’s a conflation of one of those things. Nevertheless, the gathering at the kaya happened that summer. Together, the people there settle on forbidding all Giriama to concede to any labor demands, tax collection, or construction of British roads and buildings. The rebellion was on.
The men swore the Fisi oath and the women swore—and I apologize, I’m probably pronouncing this wrong, but I had trouble finding a good example online—the Mukushekushe oath. This latter one is very serious; it was cast as preemptive revenge against children who dishonored their parents and could discredit an entire line; it ensured that no one betrayed the goals set forth the Giriama elders.45 The water used in the oath was then carried throughout Giriamaland by the women who had sworn it, where they sprinkled it into local water sources and repeated the oath.46 In a way, the oath acted less as a promise to fight the British and more to ensure Giriama loyalty to independence, especially for those who were afraid that the government was more powerful. Another account, however, mentions that the water was not part of the oath but was blessed by the spiritual leaders of the Giriama to cleanse the land of the Europeans who had tainted it.47
Brantley’s account says that Mekatilili was at the oath swearing but did not participate because she didn’t have a high enough ranking to take part. In fact, it seems that Mekatilili didn’t hold any official power in Giriama society. She was, however, charismatic and a compelling public speaker. And, it seems that actually being outside of the Giriama’s loose government structure actually helped her. Brantley writes that, quote,
the growing freedom of the Giriama from their pattern of government a century before had become so strong that had one of the clan elders suggested returning to greater control by authentic Giriama councils, many men who held positions of importance due to their wealth or achievement would have opposed the suggestion, fearing loss of their independence. Since it was Mekatilili, however, who pointed out the need for a revitalization of tradition…she was able to provide a sense of unity of purpose the Giriama had not had for over a century, in a form that was not threatening.48
Also, perhaps just as important, the British didn’t regard her as a threat at all. Because she was not part of traditional Giriama governance, and because she was a woman, the British dismissed all the early reports of her power and advocacy as nothing more than old wives’ tales.49
Champion, who had taken a little vacation in August, returned in September with renewed energy to collect taxes, and building a new government outpost—but he received absolutely no cooperation from the Giriama.50 No one came to meetings, no one paid taxes, nothing.
He went on a tour of villages that he’d visited before and found them empty. Another station was robbed, roads that had been cleared were overgrown again, and the council houses he’d ordered built sat unfinished, their materials ruined. The headmen who had previously worked with Champion refused to help, bound by the oaths. But they did tell Champion who was behind their renewed rebellious energy.
Champion tracked Mekatilili down and had her arrested on October 17, 1913, near a town called Garashi. He forced her to sign a statement, but she never confessed to any wrongdoing, though it sounds like she explained the oath they had taken to protect their livelihoods. That same day, Champion also arrested Wanje, probably at his home, and had both of them deported to another part of Kenya. In his report at the end of that month, he came just short of admitting that the government had lost all control over the Giriama:
The time has come for firm action and the placing of the administration on a sound basis. The tribe will then, and not until then, realize its position with regard to Govt. [They] are no exception to the rule and ours must be asserted if it is to receive the respect which is so essential…51
He goes on, but that’s about the gist of it. As white savior-y as it is, Champion, Hobley, and the rest of the British in Kenya believed honestly that the changes they were trying to force onto the Giriama were in the best interests of the people; but they also couldn’t stand to be told they were wrong. And, of course, “it never occurred to [The British] that they might have to make a military conquest fo the Giriama. The Giriama were hardly a warlike people…the Giriama warrior’s responsibility was exclusively defensive.”52
Champion suggested pursuing stringent action—he claimed they were to, quote, “serve both as punishment for Giriama misdeeds and to ensure the promised labor. In reality, they were desperate measures, a last-ditch attempt to gain administrative control.”53
Hobley decided to interpret the Giriama oaths at the kaya as an effort to “wage war against the British” and he decided to make them confess to this, as well as make them accuse Mekatilili and Wanje of being the “ringleaders” of this war.54 He publicly started calling Mekatilili a witch, which probably contributes to the confusion over whether or not she held some sort of religious significance with the Giriama.55 Hobley decided to bring them both on a tour to all the Giriama villages, where he’d have local elders rescind their support, he’d levy a fine, and then he’d have the kaya closed.
Unfortunately, it worked. He made more arrests on his little tour, mostly of elders who wouldn’t repudiate Mekatilili, and forced them to close the kaya on December 1, 1913.56 He held Mekatlili and Wanje as prisoners at Kisii, in the far west of Kenya. They were allowed, quote, “a hut, ten cents a day for food, and a blanket apiece.”57
Now I think is a good place to note that the relationship between Mekatilili and Wanje is not totally clear in the historical records. Some British reports call him her “son-in-law,” suggesting that he was much younger than her; in other reports, he’s basically just her assistant.58 What is clear is that during or after their imprisonment, they began to treat each other as a romantic couple. Later on, they lived together by choice, not through imprisonment.
What quickly became clear was that Hobley and Champion had still learned nothing about the Giriama’s traditional societal structure. They continued to rely on headsmen, but the headsmen were mostly middle-aged adults who traditionally didn’t have much power and had even less power at that time because they helped the British collect taxes. The real power was with the Giriama elders who had the most life experience. Moreover, though the oath sworn at the kaya had been done by the elders of the tribe it was only in response to agitation by the younger Giriama who had been, quote, “the most defiant” but were too young to take the oath.59 All the elders had been doing was setting the course for how the Giriama would defy British authority, but they weren’t the energy behind it. The result was that the youth were only more intensely radicalized by the arrests and closure of the kaya. By forcing the elders to rescind the oath, Hobley had actually radicalized them to some extent, accidentally creating a second group of people who actively wanted to defy the British.60
The result was an outward display of cooperation, but an ongoing seething of hatred. The Giriama helped clear roads and attended meetings with government officials, but they still weren’t providing labor to the British. Hobley had written triumphantly in his journal in December 1913 that everything was settled, but he would be proven wrong soon.
Then, in July 1914, Champion was made away that Mekatilili and Wanje had reappeared in Giriama lands. They had apparently escaped from prison nearly three months before, on April 20th, but no one had bothered to pursue them because, quote, “due to their age, no official had expected that they would survive a trip on foot to the coast.”61 Literally they could not underestimate the Giriama any more than they did.
Champion received reports that Mekatilili was agitating among the people again, and in fact had been “for months.”62 She was encouraging them to stop paying taxes and to continue keeping young men away from the British so that they wouldn’t be wage laborers. She also began advocating for a complete return to the kaya, claiming that, quote, “most calamities came about because people did not adhere to the taboos and instructions of either the medicine men or the kaya elders. Also, the Europeans had made their land unclean and they needed to go back to the kayas to cleanse it.”63 As punishment, someone on the British side—it’s unclear who—ordered that the Giriama kaya be destroyed.
On August 4th, 1914, the British made a, quote, “ceremonial occasion of the event” to display their power.64 They forced the Giriama to watch as they dynamited the main trees and the entrance to the kaya, and burned down the rest. The next day, the Giriama left quietly and the British thought their control was finally absolute.
Remember, the kaya was a sacred religious space. This was an act of war. They did not immediately attack, but they did begin to prepare for violent conflict. Just a few days later, Mekatilili and Wanje were recaptured and sent back to Kisii, though other accounts state that they were sent to a city in Somalia, probably because of some fighting near Kisii.65
And so, just as tensions were starting to boil over, the First World War arrived in East Africa on August 5th, 1914 with a skirmish at Lake Victoria, which, actually, was very close to Kisii. Anyway, with the build-up of the war machine, the British were once again shorthanded and really wanted to have Giriama laborers—as porters, not as soldiers—to help with the war effort. Caught between the Germans on one side and the Giriama on the other, the British began to get desperate.
While Mekatilili remained in British custody near the Giriama lands, she apparently told Champion, or maybe his boss, that, quote, “If he wanted African children to go and fight in the war, to try and pick one chick and see what the mother hen would do to him.”66 Whether or not he understood this riddle is unknown. Other accounts say that she actually brought him a hen and chicks, long before he arrested her, and humiliated him in public.67 His response was to shoot the mother hen; as author Jason Porath points out, this is not a particularly subtle metaphor.68
The Germans, meanwhile, had been watching the British struggle to pacify the Giriama and used that opportunity to undermine and distract British authority. The Giriama had had interaction with German traders ever since the British had made the ivory trade illegal, so they sent in German spies to promise the Giriama assistance against the British. They also told them to put black flags in front of their homesteads so that when the Germans invaded, those villages would not be burned—and, indeed, many black flags were later found by British troops.69
About a week later, Champion was told that he needed to recruit and send 1,000 Giriama men to Mombasa to help with the war effort.70 Considering that literally not even one man had been successfully recruited for wage labor, the idea of getting 1,000 men to suddenly support the British war effort was… I mean, does ambitious even cover it? It’s delusional. Unfortunately, Champion didn’t send back a note being like, “I’m so sorry, you must be unfamiliar with what is going on here. I can’t even promise you a single person.” Which might have been the best course of action. Instead, he wrote back, quote, “any attempt to collect men in gangs will I fear result in bloodshed and quite possibly cause a revolt of the whole tribe which at presnt might be inconvenient to have to quell.”71 Inconvenient.
If mentions of sexual assault trouble you, skip the next 45 seconds.
Nevertheless, Champion ordered headsmen to send 50 men from each village; they refused. So he took police into Giriama villages to try to round up men in gangs. One policeman, finding that the men were not in the village, decided to rape one of women. He was fired on by Giriama men who had been hiding in the bushes; the rapist unfortunately survived this attack, and Champion came running after hearing the shots fired. The police told Champion that they had been fired upon, but neglected to mention why, which makes it sound like they were all watching this rape go on and just, like, jeering. It’s vile. Since the police lied, Champion assumed the Giriama had shot at the British without provocation; he of course did not bother to ask the survivor or any of the other women what had happened because why would he?
This whole incident of course inflamed Giriama rage further. Not only were they now afraid that Giriama men were going to forced into providing labor for the British, but they were afraid that while the men were away from the village the women would be attacked and victimized by the British men who stayed nearby. They began to prepare for an attack.
Meanwhile, the incident was reported to British higher-ups as Champion being attacked. Again, no one bothered to talk to any of the people who witnessed the crime that day to figure out why they had fired upon British police. So, initially, they actually ordered the British evacuation of the area. And if that had been pursued, the story might end here. But then someone pointed out that the Giriama already had connections to the Germans and that they lived very close to the warfront; they could easily ally with the Germans, which would be disastrous for the British. So the King’s African Rifles were sent in and the British offensive against the Giriama was underway.
I’m not going to get into the whole conflict, but it only lasted about a month. Suffice it to say that there were losses on both sides, though the Giriama experienced more losses than the British. Their villages were burned down, the people scattered and abandoned crops that hadn’t yet been harvested, and government outposts were robbed. The Giriama were unhappy with the turn of events but felt trapped into it; the British were not getting what they had set out for.
At the time, Mekatilili was still in prison. No doubt she was receiving updates on this conflict, even if they probably came in the form of taunting by her captors.
By September 22, 1914, attempts at creating peace were underway, mediated by Sheikh Fathili bin Omar, an Omani man who was respected by both sides.72 By October 10th, the peace terms were reached:
a fine of two goats or six rupees was to be levied on each male;
the 1914 tax collected was to be omitted;
1,000 laborers were to be sent to Mombasa;
leaders were to be handed over and bows and arrows surrendered;
government headmen were to submit;
the move to the south of the Sabaki was to be completed.73
Though these terms clearly indicate that the Giriama had lost, the agreement was not well enforced since most of the Giriama had scattered and the British were still fighting World War I. Moreover, the terms of the treaty contradicted themselves; if the Giriama abandoned their homes, they wouldn’t have the money to pay their fines, nor would they be able to spare laborers for the British.
Initially, only 141 laborers were provided, and 43 of them had escaped.74 And of the fines, which should have totaled around 100,000 rupees, only about 30,000 had been collected.75 Very few people had moved south of the Sabaki, and eventually several of the people that had moved returned. Nevertheless, the British felt that the Giriama needed to be punished and kept brutally enforcing the rest of the terms. Administrative relationships remained strained. It was five years of frustration for both sides.
Now, Tsumah’s account has a slightly different version of events. She states that Mekatilili escaped and returned to Giriama lands in a second time in 1914 and that the British at this point were stretched so thin because of the world war that they basically gave up. They, quote, “saw that they could not contain her nor influence what she was doing. They decided to make her a leader of her people. She told the white men that, if they wanted peace, they had to agree to the establishment of the kayas and the council of elders. The white governors agreed to her conditions.”76 I actually believe this more than the British account because they had a lot of reason to try to recover their dignity and power in their story of this ending. They really did not want to admit that they had failed in their paternalistic goals to quote-unquote “help” the Giriama, so I can see them lying about releasing her from prison instead of admitting that a probably sixty-year-old woman escaped twice.
As early as 1917, there were some attempts began to restore the old Giriama councils. The idea was kicked around for a while, and in 1919 British officers finally urged that the councils be supported in order to, quote, “place younger Giriama men in positions of leadership.”77
Unfortunately, the British attempt to rule the Giriama had resulted in a loss of traditional tribal structure—their elders died out before being able to install a new generation of leaders. Without the traditional rituals of succession, the newer elders didn’t have the same legitimacy as previous generations, and people perceived the old ways as dying out. I mean, their economy was shattered by forced displacement and the forced adoption of the rupee, a currency the British were taking from India to use in their colonies in Africa. The Giriama never served the East Africa Protectorate as laborers, which was their goal, but they also never fully recovered.
At some point, it’s unclear to me when since there are conflicting narratives of when Mekatilili stopped being imprisoned—but, at some point, Mekatilili and Wanje returned to the Giriama lands. The British decided to hand over the previously-destroyed kaya to Mekatilili and Wanje. They moved in, presumably starting the process of rebuilding this traditional center of the Giriama people. Wanje became the head of the council, and Mekatilili was installed as the head of the brand new women’s council, which is pretty cool.78 They didn’t hold positions in the British government, but they did serve as symbolic leaders for the people who wanted to return to the old way of life. Unfortunately, because the traditional ceremonies to legitimize new leaders had been lost, Mekatilili’s and Wanje’s leadership wasn’t seen as completely legitimate, and so things continued to devolve.
A famine developed, in part due to weather conditions and in part due to the absence of men who had gone to work for the British as wage laborers; without them, farming was less efficient. The Giriama were so endangered by this famine that it was brought to the attention of the authorities in London and caused the British government to reconsider the peace settlement; they finally removed the land restrictions and lightened the labor demands, though against Hobley’s wishes.79 The British provided food to help the Giriama survive. After, the Giriama were largely cut off from the rest of the British administration, unable to participate in the coastal economy. It reduced them to small-scale producers, and they never recovered the economic prosperity they had enjoyed before the British intervention.
There are few accounts of Mekatilili’s death, though we think she died around 1924. Most accounts close on her new status as a ruling elder in the kaya. But Tsumah called her death, quote, “miraculous.”80 The story goes that she was, quote, “pounding [grain] in the village, and then the earth opened up slowly as she sank with her mortar, pounding until she disappeared under the ground. […] Her grave is at the place where she sank with her mortar. To this day, there is a bush at the grave, which is never cleared. Instead it is used as a shrine.”81 Every year in August, there is a festival to celebrate Mekatilili wa Menza and her role in resisting colonization.
Some people believe that Mekatilili’s arrival and rebellion were foretold. In the 14th century, a diviner in the Giriyama tribe named Mepoho predicted, quote, “Strangers with hair as white as sisal would come to the land. They would inhale unfamiliar leaves for pleasure. The people would see fantastic vehicles on the waters, on the land and in the sky. Young girls would become mothers before their time.”82 Apparently, she warned her people that when these people came, the Giriyama would lose their land and their culture would be destroyed. But she also spoke of a woman who would rise and fearlessly fight this encroachment. After making this prediction, Mepoho then decided she did not want to live to see this, and she allowed the earth to open up and swallow her whole. This is interesting to me since it’s so similar to accounts of Mekatilili’s death; I wonder if that’s another reason why she’s been confused as a seer or medicine woman.
As Lihamba wrote, quote,
Mekatilili's story shows how she was able to use all the talents and draw on the resources of her position as woman, mother, community leader, orator, and performer. Traditional systems of beliefs and protection through medicines, social equilibrium, trust, and commitment, demonstrated by oath-taking, became vital factors in her campaign.83
Though she was briefly forgotten, her story was resurrected during the 1980s, when Kenya was in another period of struggle. The combined pressures of the “increasingly authoritarian rule of President Daniel arap Moi [and] the increasing awareness of gender issues in Kenya,” drove a resurgence in interest in female leadership.84 She has since been identified as the first Kenyan woman to fight for social change. Though research about Mekatilili was done before that—two of the main books I’ve been relying on for this research were published in the 1970s—it was this popular reclamation of her as a leader in Kenya that has ensured her story has remained important in the public mind. In 2010, a statue of her was unveiled in Malindi, Kenya, close to where she might have been born. It honors her heroism and introduces her to a new generation.
I hope you enjoyed this episode about Mekatilili! You can let me know your thoughts by following me on Substack, Twitter, and Instagram as unrulyfigures. If you have a moment, please give this show a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts–it really does help other folks discover the podcast.
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📚 Bibliography
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Episode 31: Mekatilili wa Menza