Statecraft & Independence
Landmark
Mekatilili wa Menza
c. 1860 – 1924
Led the Giriama resistance to British rule in 1913
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Why they are here
An elderly woman of the coast who organised the Giriama against the British in 1913 — decades before the independence movement — and was made a national heroine long afterwards.
Mekatilili wa Menza was a Giriama woman from Mutsara wa Tsatsu in the coastal hinterland, a widow and by then in her fifties, with no formal standing in a political system run by male elders.
The British administration in 1913 was demanding that the Giriama supply young men as labour for plantations and for the carrier corps, that they pay hut tax, and that they abandon the sacred forest settlement of Kaya Fungo. Mekatilili began speaking against it at public gatherings, travelling from homestead to homestead, using the kifudu funeral dance — a women's dance that could draw a crowd without looking like a political meeting — to assemble people and argue.
She revived the oath-taking that bound the community against collaboration, and the administration found it could not recruit. She is said to have challenged the district officer directly: he demanded her people's sons, and she picked up a hen and its chicks and asked him to take a chick from her, which he could not do for the hen defending them.
The British arrested her and deported her to Kisii, hundreds of kilometres away in the far west. She escaped, walked back across the country, and resumed. The Giriama rising of 1913 to 1914 was put down with considerable force — Kaya Fungo was destroyed and a heavy fine imposed — and she was deported again before being allowed home in 1919.
She died around 1924 and was largely absent from the official record for decades. She is now a national heroine in Kenya, and the case is regularly made that hers was the first organised resistance to colonial rule on the Kenyan coast.
The British administration in 1913 was demanding that the Giriama supply young men as labour for plantations and for the carrier corps, that they pay hut tax, and that they abandon the sacred forest settlement of Kaya Fungo. Mekatilili began speaking against it at public gatherings, travelling from homestead to homestead, using the kifudu funeral dance — a women's dance that could draw a crowd without looking like a political meeting — to assemble people and argue.
She revived the oath-taking that bound the community against collaboration, and the administration found it could not recruit. She is said to have challenged the district officer directly: he demanded her people's sons, and she picked up a hen and its chicks and asked him to take a chick from her, which he could not do for the hen defending them.
The British arrested her and deported her to Kisii, hundreds of kilometres away in the far west. She escaped, walked back across the country, and resumed. The Giriama rising of 1913 to 1914 was put down with considerable force — Kaya Fungo was destroyed and a heavy fine imposed — and she was deported again before being allowed home in 1919.
She died around 1924 and was largely absent from the official record for decades. She is now a national heroine in Kenya, and the case is regularly made that hers was the first organised resistance to colonial rule on the Kenyan coast.
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