A solemn letter from Mageta Island

Last year I promised you I would return to the Lake region. My destination this time was Mageta Island on Lake Victoria.

This island, small as it is, holds a special place in my family, just like the jungles of south East Asia and specifically Burma - now Myanmar.

For Burma, it’s my uncles who faced the Japanese and helped the British Empire turn the tide of WWII. They came home. Some of their comrades never returned. I found three graves of Kenyans at a Rangoon cemetery in Myanmar commonwealth graves - Wambugu Samuel Kamau, Munyao Nzou and Ondiek Okoth. Did they meet my uncles? Are their families aware?

What of Mageta Island? My father-in-law was incarcerated there from 1956 to 1958 after time at Manyani, another concentration camp, or better a gulag. Both places were hostile; Manyani, like Mageta, is hot and away from civilization. It seems the choice of detention camps was well thought out.

Many of those taken to Manyani could not swim. What of heat and malaria? After visiting Mageta, I felt the choice as a detention centre was inspired by Alcatraz. Seen the movie?

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The trip to Mageta takes about one hour by a wooden boat designed by naval architects at Usenge and other beaches. The boat is then fitted with a marine engine, a confluence of modern technology and traditional boat-building technology. Such boats are the 'matatus' and charge about Sh150 to Mageta and its two ports.

Loaded into the boats included motorbikes, cement, maize flour and other supplies from the mainland. Some passengers like me donned a life jacket. Others, possibly out of familiarity, did not.

The local language left me off the conversations as the boat sailed in the calm waters. A small uninhabited island on our right towards Mageta broke my silence: “Who is the owner of that island? Can I get it?”

"It’s owned by the government but you can get a lease,” a slim middle-aged man responded to me. You can talk to the governor, he added. "I will," and the conversation ended. The island is in Siaya and the governor was my schoolmate, albeit older.

The next question was where the Mau Mau detention camp is located. “I will take you,” my newly found friend volunteered.

Soon we got to the first port. Some alighted as locals washed their utensils and clothes, while some kids played in the water. We found an anchored boat, Mikach dala.

Along the shore, we sailed to the next port. My friend led me through some mud-walled houses, with plenty of omena (sardines) drying in the sun and some white birds (kook or okoge) stealing it. We got into an open field with no buildings except evidence that some buildings once stood there.

“Here is the detention centre,” my friend Willis Ochieng told me. I later found out he is a former MCA. “Where is it?” I asked.

Only the foundation remains. It was a big disappointment. Traveling almost 500km and waiting for a year, to find nothing! We walked around and under a huge tree, we found some stones. The cells were here, he showed me - I believed out of faith.

A solar power station, a library and a dispensary now dominated what was once a thriving concentration camp. How I would have loved to see the cells where detainees lived. Who destroyed the cells? Was it the government? Colonial or ours? Could it be settlers who immigrated to Mageta after independence? Did they get building materials from there?

The camp seems to have been once fenced off. A few zebu cows grazed by. Two tiny mabati houses remain on the other side of the solar farm. I was told they were part of a project to eliminate tsetse flies (maugo). Was tsetse fly and its bite another reason for choosing this island as a gulag?

I did not give up. I asked Ochieng if we could get someone on the island with some knowledge of the Mau Mau camp. After a few calls, he led me to a retired teacher, Mzee Thomas Oswera aged 89. He had a list of pioneers who settled on Mageta Island after uhuru and a class list of 1969 pioneer students of Mageta primary school. He talked in the local language as Ochieng translated.

He recalled seeing the detainees at Oyamo Island near Usenge. They even shared cigarettes with them. The detainees were later taken to Mageta. He knew they were mostly from central Kenya though he remembered a Musyoka. With his age mates they would visit Mageta Island to play football with Wazungu. He remembered one mzungu, Martin 'Kamongo' (because he loved eating mudfish?)

Why let such a historical site vanish, yet it could turn around the economic fortunes of Mageta? Lots of tourists would love to see the original camp. Researchers and film-makers too. One hopes the county of Siaya has such a plan.

Our next destination was Mageta town, with lots of semi-permanent buildings. We stopped by a nameless hotel for fish and ugali. I could tell the difference between ugali cooked by Atieno and Ciku. I learned that fish is eaten with one hand, not both like a hamburger. Soda there is sold in half a litre, and bottled water and beer come from Uganda.

At Mageta town and many parts of the lake region, most doors have a curtain, the door is kept open because of heat. And why are kids sent to search for firewood on the island?

Well fed, it was time to go. I took a motorbike to catch up with the boat at the next port where Mikach Dala was parked. Mageta Island has no cars. I arrived before the boat.

I picked some purplish flowers (obinju) by the shore and threw them into the lake. It was my tribute to men who unwillingly made this island their home for two years. Long gone, I would have loved to hear their story. After 66 years, I found where my father-in-law suffered for two years. I carried some stones from the camp as souvenirs too.

As the boat sailed back to Usenge, I wondered why Mageta camp and the trenches that encircled concentration camps around central Kenya during the emergency are not national monuments. I wondered why the house where the Kapenguria Six lived is well preserved and not the other symbols of the freedom struggle. Where can I get a list of all detainees during Mau Mau emergency? Know any of them alive?