Dedan Kimathi

Dedan Kimathi Waciuri was born in Thegenge, in the Kikuyu highlands of British Kenya, on the thirty-first of October 1920. He took his education at the Tumutumu Church of Scotland Mission School through his late teens. He worked as a teacher, a Royal Air Force private during the Second World War (briefly), a clerk, and a livestock-trade dealer through the 1940s.

He joined the Kenya African Union in 1947 and the Kikuyu Central Association underground in 1950. In October 1952 — at the formal declaration of the Mau Mau Emergency by the British colonial governor Sir Evelyn Baring — Kimathi led the principal Mau Mau forest army into the Aberdare mountains and the slopes of Mount Kenya. He commanded the combined Mau Mau forces from approximately 1953 onward.

The Mau Mau Uprising was, by the British colonial-archive figures subsequently declassified, the most violently suppressed of any British colonial counterinsurgency in twentieth-century African history. Approximately one and a half million Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru were detained in colonial camps; the violence was systematized in the Hola Massacre of March 1959. The colonial Emergency directly killed approximately twenty thousand Kenyans (the British official count; subsequent scholarship places the figure substantially higher).

Kimathi was captured by British colonial forces on the twenty-first of October 1956 — Kenyatta Day, every year subsequently. He was tried for unlawful possession of a firearm and hanged at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison on the eighteenth of February 1957, age thirty-six. His body was buried in an unmarked mass grave on the prison grounds. The exact location was not made public for the rest of the twentieth century.

His statue was erected in central Nairobi in 2007.

He is honored here as the Field Marshal who commanded Kenyan armed resistance.