I took the first snap of Dedan Kimathi after his arrest

Sometimes when he sits under the trees in his compound, the memories come flooding back. In the still slides he is a young man again, gangly and quick and is hurrying up a dusty road, his tiny Kodak camera slung over his shoulder. He wants to see his old friend – the one with whom he shares a middle name.

It’s been years since they last saw each other although they have been friends for long. At the end of the show, the slides invariably end the same way: he clicks on the camera button when, suddenly, a hard blow to the back sends him flailing to the ground.

On the morning of October 21, 1956, Tiras Kimathi Murage hurried to Kahiagaini centre in Tetu, Nyeri County. A huge crowd had already gathered at the Kahigaini homeguard post. They were there to see Dedan Kimathi, the leader of the militant Mau Mau freedom movement, who had been shot and wounded earlier that day as he tcrawled out of the nearby forest to look for food.

Murage pushed his way past the onlookers.

“Ngarana (namesake)!” Kimathi perked up as soon as he saw Murage. The two men talked for a few minutes. Kimathi was wearing a heavy leopard hide, with matching headgear. Murage, in the grip of the moment, lifted his camera and asked Karundo Mugo, the guard standing over Kimathi, to prop the prisoner to a sitting position.

“Kimathi smiled and I clicked the button. I got maybe two pictures, and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, being kicked,” recounts Murage, now 87. He had been attacked by a White police officer. The policeman, pink with rage, lifted his gun and struck Murage repeatedly with the butt, then turned the business end of his weapon and would have fired had another officer not shouted at him to hold fire.

“That was the last I saw of my camera,” Murage says. “But one of the morning papers carried the photo, and I knew it was the one because no other photographer was there when I arrived.”

In later years other pictures of the captured Kimathi would become more popular and widely shared, but in retrospect, none would carry more personal weight than the fated, single-shot from a friend’s camera. Because even as the confetti of history swirled around that momentous October day, a sub-plot was underway. For Dedan Kimathi, betrayed and alone and on the run for days, ­­­it must have been comforting to see one of the few people whose friendship he had always counted on.

We are sitting under a shedding tree on Murage’s spacious lawn. His home, well shaded by ancient trees, overlooks Ihururu town. Murage, a retired forester, loves it this way, the quiet among the trees. The gate bears the initials “TK”. I was directed to Murage’s home by Anthony Maina, an assistant curator at the National Museums of Kenya-Nyeri office.

The friendship between the two Kimathis dated back to the peaceful days before the militant struggle for independence, when Kimathi was a part-time teacher at Ihururu Primary School where Murage was a pupil.

“He taught us mathematics,” says Murage. “A kind man, we looked up to him.”

LONG-TERM FRIENDSHIP

Later, after abandoning the idea of becoming a cleric, as he had wanted earlier, Murage worked on a dairy farm with Kimathi in Nyeri before finding work as a forester. The two kept in touch, albeit sporadically. By the early ’50s, the course for self-determination by Africans had taken a new turn and urgency, and the Mau Mau militant group was shaping up.

Tiras Murage was working in the Forestry Department in Embu when the State of Emergency was declared by the British colonial government in 1952. The office was destroyed and he was moved to Kabage Forest in Ihururu.

“While there I received a letter and, upon opening it, realised it was from my former teacher Kimathi.” In it, Dedan Kimathi, then the unquestioned leader of the Mau Mau, asked his old pupil to dispatch stationery and postage stamps to aid the war effort, signing off ominously, “burn after reading”. Such requests persisted during the freedom struggle and Tiras Kimathi would happily help his friend.

The Kodak camera Murage carried on the day Dedan Kimathi was captured was a gift from a friendly White man he had worked with in Embu.

“We used it during meetings that needed recording,” he says.

After Murage moved back home to Ihururu, he would take pictures on weekends for a small fee. “I had taken a few other pictures with it, but it is a long time ago now,” he says.

Murage’s living room bears the marks of his forestry career and also his brief tenure as a photographer. There are framed pictures taken with dignitaries, one while planting a tree at President Jomo Kenyatta’s home in Gatundu, a young Uhuru Kenyatta looking on. There are black-and-white pictures from long ago among wooden carvings and trinkets. Now and then he pulls one down and the memories come back. Especially the day he saw Kimathi for the last time.

The wound inflicted by the white police officer’s gun took long to heal and Murage still walks with a noticeable limp. He pulls up his trouser to reveal an angry scar running up his left leg. But such is life and besides, “it was good to see my friend for the last time. I mean, he never came back, you know,” he says with a distant look.

Murage spends most of his time looking after his wife, who has been ailing for several years. Though she cannot talk, she brightens up when Murage walks up to her.

“That day in 1956 Kimathi said, ‘The White man will go, the land will revert to us,’” the old man recalls as he walks me to the gate. Behind us, Muhoya Hill rises like a steeple, looming over Ihururu town down the road.