HOW JOMO KENYATTA ACQUIRED LAND IN GATUNDU - FORMER MOI-ERA DETAINEE AND ACTIVIST KAMONYE MANJE

Former Moi-era detainee, Kamonye Manje, from Gatundu South, is a teacher by profession, having trained at the University of Dar es Salaam which was a bastion of revolutionary ideas at that time. This is where revolutionary luminaries, such as Yoweri Museveni, trained and got exposed to the socialist ideas that sent him to the bush to fighit against the oppressive regimes in Uganda. He was born in 1951, a year before the declaration of the State of Emergency. Kamonye joined the university in 1972 and graduated in 1975. He has taught in various secondary schools, trained teachers, and is currently lecturing in the area of Peace and Conflict at a Kenyan university. While he was too young to have been in the Mau Mau, he was old enough to remember what happened during those years. The Emergency and the colonial world are therefore the world he grew up in and was the only reality he knew as a child. His are the perspectives of a child born in wartime, and are helpful for understanding how war looks like to a child’s brain. As a scholar who grew up during the war in Gatundu South where Jomo Kenyatta hailed, he is peculiarly privileged to talk about the Mau Mau and the independence era from a fresh and unique perspective which is insightful, erudite and at the same time raw! #maumau #africanhistory #kenya #kenyatta