Bildad Kaggia

Bildad Mwaganu Kaggia was born in Dagoretti, in the Kikuyu reserve outside Nairobi, on the eighth of June 1922. He took his secondary education at the Government African School at Kambui and joined the East African Pioneer Corps as a clerk during the Second World War. He served with the Pioneer Corps in Italy and the United Kingdom from 1941 to 1946.

He returned to Kenya in 1946 with the political radicalization that the wartime contact with European and Indian socialist movements had produced. He founded the Dini ya Roho Mtakatifu — the Holy Spirit Church — in 1947 as an independent Kikuyu Christian movement; he served as its general secretary through the late 1940s.

He joined the Kenya African Union in 1950 and entered the underground Mau Mau Central Committee in Nairobi. He was one of the principal organizational architects of Mau Mau's urban political wing alongside Fred Kubai, Eliud Mathu, and Achieng' Oneko.

In October 1952 — at the declaration of the British colonial Emergency — Kaggia was arrested with Jomo Kenyatta, Achieng' Oneko, Paul Ngei, Kungu Karumba, and Fred Kubai. The six were tried at Kapenguria in northwestern Kenya in 1952-53 on charges of leading Mau Mau. They were convicted and sentenced to seven years' hard labor each. The Kapenguria Trial established the seven-year political detentions that produced the founding generation of independent Kenyan politics.

Kaggia was released from detention in 1961 alongside Kenyatta and was elected to Parliament in 1963. He served as Assistant Minister of Education in the first Kenyatta government but resigned in 1964 over Kenyatta's accommodation with the colonial-era land-tenure structure and with British settler interests.

He spent the remainder of his life in opposition, in retirement, and as the voice of the unfulfilled radical promises of Kenyan independence.

He died at his home in Murang'a District on the seventh of March 2005, age eighty-two.

He is honored here as the Kapenguria Six defendant who never accepted the compromise.