On 26 January 1965, in the caves and forests of Mount Kenya – the very battlegrounds where they bled for uhuru, the Kenyan "independent" government murdered one of the last unbreakable Mau Mau generals: Field Marshal Baimungi Marete (also known as Simon Marete or Baimunge), alongside General Chui.
This wasn't British bullets. This was Jomo Kenyatta's regime pulling the trigger on the very warriors who made his presidency possible.
Baimungi wasn't some footnote.
After Dedan Kimathi's capture in 1956, he rose as a top commander in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), leading Meru units that refused to bow.
Field Marshal Musa Mwariama surrendered to Kenyatta's government earlier, but Baimungi and his men stayed in the forests, demanding real land – not the crumbs of "willing buyer, willing seller" that let white settlers and Home Guards keep the stolen farms.
He met Kenyatta in 1963.
He warned him. He demanded positions and land for the fighters who sacrificed everything.
Kenyatta's answer? Bullets.
The killing was cold-blooded.
Government troops ambushed him while he was having breakfast in his command cave at A-Kaibi or Nkando ya Nkoma in Mt Kenya forest.
They gunned him down like a dog.
His body was dragged out, paraded publicly at Kinoru Stadium in Meru for three days as a warning to any remaining forest fighters: "This is what happens if you demand what you bled for."
Jomo Kenyatta even once called Mau Mau "terrorists" and refused to lift the ban that has been placed on MauMau by the British. It was Kibaki who lifted the ban in 2003.
Kenyatta's Minister for Lands Jackson Angaine (a man with his own shady past) and the police apparatus inherited from the British, declared the remaining Mau Mau "outlaws" and hunted them.
Kenyatta's government feared the real revolutionaries more than the whote man.
Baimungi died because he exposed the lie: Independence without land is slavery with a Black face.
Mau Mau fighters like Baimungi had endured hell.
They lived through British concentration camps, castration, rape with broken bottles, mass hangings (over 1,000), villages burned, families slaughtered. Over 20,000 African fighters dead in the forests and reserves fighting for Kenya.
Baimungi and Chui represented the uncompromised spirit – the ones who wouldn't shake hands with the enemy or their local puppets.
Kenyatta's regime hunted them like the British did. Same methods, Black faces in charge. Brutal betrayal.
The police who carried out the ambush. The politicians authorized it. The Meru collaborators sold intel. The entire post-independence elite prioritized stability with the settlers over justice.
Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi hanged by British. General Baimungi gunned down by Kenyatta.
The pattern is clear. Revolutionaries were eliminated so compradors could rule.