Bildad Kaggia

Bildad Mwaganu Kaggia was born in 1921 at Dagoretti, near Nairobi, into a Kikuyu family whose roots lay in Murang'a District. Denied a place at Alliance High School only for want of school fees, he took a clerical post with the colonial administration, then served in the British army during the Second World War, rising to become the first African company quarter-sergeant in a unit rehabilitating captured African soldiers. Travel abroad and correspondence study in journalism and politics sharpened a conviction that would define his life: that Kenya belonged to Kenyans.

Returning home, Kaggia became one of the most radical voices of the independence struggle. He founded vernacular newspapers such as Inoora ria Gikuyu to carry the nationalist message, organised militant labour, and sat on the Mau Mau Central Committee, refusing the caution of more moderate men.

On 20 October 1952, in the colonial sweep known as Operation Jock Scott, Kaggia was arrested alongside Jomo Kenyatta, Fred Kubai, Kung'u Karumba, Paul Ngei and Achieng Oneko. Tried at Kapenguria on charges of managing Mau Mau, the six were convicted and sentenced to hard labour. Kaggia endured the harsh detention camps of Lokitaung and Lodwar, and was the last of the Kapenguria Six to be freed, in 1961.

In independent Kenya he won the Kandara seat in 1963 and served in Kenyatta's cabinet, but his insistence on land for the landless squatters and former freedom fighters, and his refusal of self-enrichment, set him against the new establishment. Purged, imprisoned again, and marginalised, he lived and died a man of principle. Bildad Kaggia is honored as a conscience of Kenya's freedom — one who risked everything for liberty and asked nothing for himself.