f Lari was a nest of Mau Mau influence, then it was also a place where loyalists were prepared to make a stand. By the end of November 1952 there were 3000 Home Guard in Central Province, a kind of 'Dad's Army' gathered around those loyal Christian Chiefs, like Makimei, who feared that they and their clients might be a target of Mau Mau attacks. Self preservation and personal security were a necessary response of these respectable Christian Kikuyu to the 'lawlessness' of Mau Mau's 'hooligans'. When the British decided to give their blessing to the Home Guard and to encourage recruitment, from December 1952, numbers rapidly increased. The 'Dad's Army' now became a formal militia, given authority to act in assistance of the police and army. The Home Guard would be the force that would confront Mau Mau head to head in the struggle for the hearts and the minds of the Kikuyu people. Lari would be the critical site in that struggle.
By the end of January 1953 there were reckoned to be 7600 Home Guard recruits, comprising 2333 in Nyeri, 1387 in Murang'a, 1083 in Meru, 1000 in Embu, and 1863 in Kiambu. At Lari, the hundred or so men who had by then joined the Home Guard were mostly drawn from the landed elite gathered around Makimei and Luka Wakahangara, the wealthiest man in the location and the person whose influence had been behind the resettlement of those who had moved from Tigoni. Makimei and Luka had numbered the murdered chiefs Waruhiu and Nderi among their closest friends and allies. As the Mau Mau murder count mounted,they knew that their own lives were under threat. For men such as these, combating Mau Mau was quite literally a matter of life and death. The dogs of war finally caught up with them some five months into the emergency.
Each night at dusk, Lari's Home Guard unit gathered to begin their rounds, patrolling the main paths and principal properties in the location. Just after 8 p.m. on the evening of 26 March 1953 the Lari patrol was summoned to investigate the discovery of a body in the location of Headman Wainaina, three miles to the east on the Lari boundary. When they arrived on the scene, they found the mutilated remains of a local loyalist, nailed to a tree alongside a busy footpath. The body had evidently been left there deliberately, with the intention that it should be found. It had taken the patrol almost an hour to get to the spot. As they now looked back to the west, just after 9 p.m., they began to notice fires breaking out in the direction of their own homes in Lari. They hurried along in the darkness, first reluctantly fearing the worst, and eventually running as they realized the terrible truth. They had been purposely lured to Wainaina's location, leaving Lari undefended. The Mau Mau attack they so dreaded had come at last.
In five or six separate gangs, each numbering a hundred or more persons, the Mau Mau descended upon their targets. Their heads swathed to disguise their identities, armed with pangas, swords, spears, knives and axes, and with some carrying burning torches, they swarmed over the unprotected homesteads. They carried with them ropes which they tied around the huts to prevent the occupants from opening the doors before they set the thatch alight. As the occupants struggled to clumber through the windows to escape, they were cut down. Most of those caught in the attack were women and children, but they were shown no mercy by the attackers, who seemed intent on killing every person in the homesteads. Shots rang out as some victims found their own weapons and made an effort to defend themselves and their families. But it was a hopeless cause. The Home Guard patrol reached Lari just as the attack was coming to an end. They gave chase to some of the attackers but they were too late to save the victims. By 10 p.m. some 120 bodies lay dead or grievously injured in the smouldering ruins of fifteen homesteads. The killers had disappeared into the night. In their wake, there was chaos, terror, shock, anger and indescribable grief.
The first press reports (two days later) spread fear and horror throughout the Kikuyu communities of central Kenya. Where the events in Nyeri on Christmas Eve of 1952 had singled out leading male elders, the attack upon women and children at Lari was on a far larger scale and appeared less discriminate. No other attack during the emergency would have the tremendous impact on public opinion that came in the aftermath of Lari. The attack may have seemed an indiscriminate slaughter of collaborators but was far from random in its violence. All of the victims were the families of local chiefs, ex-chiefs, headmen, councillors, and prominent Home Guard. The male heads of these households were the leading members of Lari's loyalist community, and all were known as outspoken opponents of Mau Mau. Lesser members of the Home Guard, and those who were perceived as clients of wealthier men, were left alone.
The principle victim in the attack at Lari was the community's senior statesman, Luka Wakahangara. At more than sixty years of age, Luka had continued to manage the affairs of his mbari after retiring from government office. An elder in the Catholic church, his extended family pursued a wide variety of business interests and dominated landholding on some of the most prominent farms in Lari. As chief, and as the elder principally responsible for arranging the resettlement of the Tigoni people at Lari, Luka had profited from his association with the government. His murder was Mau Mau's punishment. More than 200 attackers had descended upon his homestead, killing several of his wives, many of his grandchildren and other relatives. Luka, his younger brother and one of his sons had fought bravely to defend the family. Armed with his shotgun, Luka had managed to break out of his hut to reach the cover of a lorry, parked in the compound. From there the old man had opened fire on his assailants, but had been quickly overpowered.. Luka's youngest wife was the only adult survivor in the Wakahangara homestead..
Several families of other prominent members of the Home Guard were also targeted. One of Lari's oldest elders, Kie Kirembe, was among the dead. Like Luka, he died trying to defend his family. Four of Kie's sons were members of the Lari Home Guard. The family of Machune Kiranga, another headman and Home Guard patrol commander, were also slaughtered. The same fate befell the families of Arthur Waweru, Nganga Njehia and Mbugua Munya. Prominent members of the African District Council were also among the victims. Councillor Isaka Kagoru was killed with his family, as were Ndonga Kariuki and Kimani Wambui. From the fifteen homesteads attacked, spread over an area of some 30 square miles, the final death toll was seventy-four. Another fifty victims were wounded.
There was nothing random about these attacks. The victims had been selected with care, their homesteads identified and singled out. The raid had been well planned and its perpetrators were well equipped. Neighbours were left unmolested as the gangs went about their business. The motive in the choice of victims seemed all too obvious: the male head of each household attacked was a government servant. All were Christian, and all were Catholic families who had come to Lari from Tigoni in 1939. In one way or another, they had all been clients of either Luka or Makimei, or both..
Loyalists at Lari at first sought vengeance, not comfort. They turned their anger and grief into violent reprisal. The Home Guard patrol returning from Wainaina's location saw members of the gangs making their escape and gave chase. Through the night there was sporadic shooting and skirmishes as the loyalists engaged what they thought to be groups of the attackers. Anyone abroad in Lari that night was taken as fair game. Other Home Guard units were soon also in pursuit of the attackers. They were joined before midnight by Home Guard from neighbouring locations, by police from Uplands and Limuru, and by members of the KPR. In their fear and anguish, the survivors were convinced that other Lari residents must have been among the attackers: how could hundreds have disappeared into the night if they had not taken shelter in the homes of Mau Mau supporters within Lari itself?
What followed between 10 p.m. and dawn the next morning is not easy to describe precisely, for there was never any official enquiry into the aftermath of the Lari attacks. All the same, there is no doubt that a second massacre took place at Lari that night. It was perpetrated by the Home Guard, later joined by other elements of the security services, who took revenge on any persons in the location they could lay their hands on whom they suspected of Mau Mau sympathies. By the time the Lancashire Fusiliers arrived in Lari the next morning, to assist in the 'mopping-up operations', the Home Guard, police and KPR had exacted their bitter revenge. Some 200 bodies then awaited identification at the local mortuary--more than twice the number known to have been killed in the homesteads initially attacked. Many other bodies were left in the bush, and some would not be collected until four days later. The only contemporary European account of this second massacre, provided by the Irish lawyer Peter Evans, estimated the combined total dead from both massacres at more than 400. . .
Moreover, at around the same time as the attack on Lari another Mau Mau gang had seriously embarrassed the security forces at Naivasha, where they mounted a brave and well-planned assault upon the local police post. The Naivasha raid was organized by the thirty-three-year-old Mbaria Kaniu, a Mau Mau leader who operated mainly in the Kinangop. The purpose of the raid was to aquire weapons and ammunition from the armoury at the police barracks. It was staggeringly successful. . .
Histories Of The Hanged
David Anderson, 2005.
Topic: Lari Massarce - Very vivid account on what happened (Read 3191 times)