Pictured directly above and peering directly at you is the young Kenyan (Kikuyu tribe) character named Mwangi who was played by actor Edwin Mahinda in the 1987 film, The Kitchen Toto.
I originally watched this film some months ago on Netflix. I recently checked back at Netflix and discovred that the movie is no longer available for steam. It maybe be available on NetFlix dvd, I don’t know because my Netflix is an online (streaming) subscription. However, if the Netflix does have it on DVD then they have it exclusively because this movie is not available anywhere, that I know of, on dvd.
Toto or mtoto is the Swahili word for child. In The Kitchen Toto young Mwangi’s father (played by actor Nathan Dambuza Mdledle), a Christian leader of some type, is killed by a group of Mau Mau freedom fighters because he would not direct his Kenyan flock of Christ-worshipers to take a secret oath to fight, or die, for and with the Mau Mau freedom fighters.
It appears that the initial mission, after oath, that a new recruit faced was (at least in this movie) to kill at least one white British man.
In any event, Mwangi’s father unceasingly refused to encourage (he specifically preached against joining the May Mau and taking their secret oath) the members of his Church to join the Mau Mau freedom fighters. The Mau Mau freedom fighters began to view Mwangi’s father as a traitor (he seemed to approve of the white British colonial rule) and decided to kill him.
Young Mwangi had a number of siblings (he himself is the eldest) and his mother (played by actress Ann Wanjuga), now that her husband had been slain, can no longer financially support her family. The mother then asks a local (and ranking) British Policeman by the name of John Graham (played by actor Bob Peck) to take her son into his home as a kitchen boy.
The Policeman Graham agrees to employ the young Kenyan child as a kitchen toto and affords him room and board, as well. Mwangi’s provides his wages/stipend to his mother to help with his siblings.
As far as British Policemen who’ve taken over your homeland go, Graham is down to earth and appears to be somewhat fair and balanced and is able to competently empathize with many of the native Kenyans. He seems to be a combination, or hybrid, of good & bad, or virtuous & evil (although I’m not sure that I believe in ‘evil’ as it is commonly defined). Its probably true that all humans are a combination of ethical & sinful (not sure that I believe in ‘sinful’ as it is traditionally defined) but most of us are not in an appointed position to egregiously inflict vile wickedness upon relatively large demographics such as the British did in Colonial and Protectorial Africa.
If it can be said British Policeman John Graham is not that bad of a guy (although certainly somewhat bad) then it ought to be said that his young white son Edward Graham (played by Ronald Pirie), about the same age as black Mwangi, is exceedingly awful if not outright abominable.
Young Edward goes to great lengths to use & abuse young Mwangi and at one point, to avoid nominal punishment from his parents, leaves Mwangi to die, tied to a tree, (no less than just after Mwangi has just saved Edward from a jungle snake poised to bite) in the Kakamega tropical rainforest.
Speaking of tropical rainforests I should add here that skeptics and opponents of Obama’s 1961 Coast Province General Hospital, Mombasa, British Protectorate of Kenya birth certificate have indicated that tropical forests or rainforests do not exist in Kenya. One such skeptic goes by the handle GreatKim and at other times by MikTaerg. Time after time their hypotheses (which they seem to like to present as theories and often even as facts) have been discredited, e.g, the official spellings of Merry/Marry/Mary Othigo and Helton/Heltan Maganga.
Some time ago I came to the fact-based-conclusion that most skeptics (some known as Obots) are predominately white Americans (some have finally come out as libertarians and conservatives such as attorney Loren Collins in Atlanta, Georgia has done) who have never set foot on the Dark Continent and who genuinely dislike black Americans and are really and truly not, nor ever have been, Obama supporters (e.g., attorney Loren Collins has stated, in seemingly racist vernacular, that he is a conservative and a libertarian and that he has never supported Obama).
In any event, some months ago I took a couple snapshots of the rolling credits from the film The Kitchen Toto (1987) and am now providing the same for review directly below:
As you can see from the snapshots above the movie (released in 1987) was filmed entirely in Kenya, specifically in the Kakamega Forest. The entire movie was filmed in the tropical forest. The film’s authentic rainforest backdrop is stunning, sublime and majestic.
I don’t want to spoil the movie for potential viewers so I’m not going to issue a round review of the movie but I will add the following thoughts in closing:
1. British Policeman John Graham’s wife, Janet Graham (played by actress Phyllis Logan) wasn’t a very nice woman (John probably agreed with me because he was having an affair with another woman – a young blond character named Mary McKinnon – played by actress Kirsten Hughes) in this film. His wife, among other atrocities, cruelly and unjustly docked young Mwangi’s wages/stipend. As my friend and fellow Patriot, Bruce Steadman, once said regarding another individual, after she “…violated so many ‘laws of man’ was summarily executed…”
2. I give the film a rating of eight.five (8.5) stars out of ten (10). The film, while not a true story, was rendered as a factual & accurate representation of colonial Kenya circa 1950. The white British seemed to believe that they had the right to enslave the Africans (not slavery per se at that point but essentially the same as slavery). For me this serves as a reminder that not all judicial laws are ethical & just and just because we choose not to follow such laws does not make us less righteous, less equitable or less principled. Charles Edward Lincoln III puts it most excellent and most eloquent when coherently describing his legal history as he’s “never been convicted of…any crime of moral turpitude…”
3. If I had been born a Kenyan in colonial & protectorial Kenya I believe that I would have taken the Mau Mau secret oath.
4. There are many individuals today (e.g., Barack Obama) who advocate the eradication of the Caucasian white race by implementation of bio-demolition through the opening-up-wide of immigration gates in Europe, North America and even Russia to Africans and South/Central Americas and others. Their justification: (1) The British near-roundly eradicated the entire indigenous populations of what are now the countries of Australia, the United States of America and much of South Africa (2) 500 of years of Europe pouring into Africa to loot, pillage, pilfer and spread Christianity and destroy native African cultures.
While I can intellectually empathize with what I’ve written in the above in #4 I cannot intellectually advocate it.
The same can be said for the violent, bloodthirsty, homicidal and hateful political ideology (religion) known as Islam. Many individuals today (e.g., Barack Obama) advocate the spread & expansion, at an accelerating & swift speed, of Islam into all of Europe, the United States of America and even Russia and involuntary & compulsory proselytization of all inhabitants. Their justification: Christians applied the same sort of bloody involuntary & compulsory proselytization throughout all of Europe for more than 1000 years and then throughout Africa and North, South & Central American for another 500 years.
Again, I can intellectually empathize (even more so because I haven’t been a Christian for a good 14 years now) with what I’ve written in the preceding paragraph but I cannot intellectually advocate it. I will, however, state here for the record, that up until relatively recently Christians were more of a violent, bloodthirsty, homicidal and hateful political ideology (religion) than Islam has ever been (and probably ever will be). North Americans tend to forget (or maybe its more like 1984’s doublespeak where you know the truth yet paradoxically say untruths and really and truly believe those untruths) that Christians have murder millions in their bloody & malignant quest to Christianize the Earth. Christians have murdered (burned alive on the stake, beheaded, quartered, drowned and hacked to death) millions of individuals who have refused involuntary & compulsory proselytization as well as those who have been sentenced to death (Christian Law) for adultery and blasphemy.
After learning what the Christians have done for the better part of the last 2000 years I don’t understand how anyone today can intellectually advocate Islam. I see the spread of Islam into the occidental world as nothing more than a callow get-back game (i.e., revenge) in an adult format.
Please, if you have time, take 1 hour and 36 minutes of your life to watch The Kitchen Toto film and please exercise your free speech in the comments section below. There are no stipulations of political correctness on this blog. Speak your mind, give us your thoughts, both objective and subjective. Share your ideas, hunches, inklings or your expertise. Please provide recommendation and corrections if you spot errors in fact within the blog report. Lastly, remember that posting a comment is much like casting a vote, so please do so.
Quote from Lucas’ Post:
My NetFlix account allows both Streaming and DVD options for viewing. I just checked and found that, unfortunately, ‘The Kitchen Toto’ is NOT currently available in either Streaming or DVD format.
I checked on Amazon and found that some used, original format VHS tapes of the film are available. This probably explains why it not not available in DVD format on NetFlix.
A Google search for the phrase and word – [“The Kitchen Toto” download] showed some ‘download’ options available for the film, but I have no experience with any of these sites and don’t know if any of them are trustworthy.
The following is a link to the original 1988 New York Times review of the film:
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=940DE3D71431F93BA35754C0A96E948260
I found the below-linked related article of particular interest:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/michael-buerk/the-mau-mau-were-vile-but_b_1682886.html
‘The Mau Mau Were Vile, but So Was the British Response to Them’
The Huffington Post / UK Edition
Michael Buerk
7/20/2012
Excerpt:
It’s one of the great ironies of history that the last line of defence for the greatest empire the world has ever known proved to be the Patagonian Toothfish. It’s an ugly and endangered denizen of the South Atlantic that the British government relied on, in vain as it turned out, to protect our imperial reputation.
Faced with the prospect of being sued over atrocities said to have been committed in the last days of Empire, the Foreign Office turned to an obscure judgement over fishing licences around the island of South Georgia, to try to prove that responsibility for the acts of colonial governments passed to the new government at independence, rather than staying with the former Imperial power. It was shameful and the judge rightly threw it out.
So, three frail and elderly Kenyans appeared this week in the High Court, with Britain’s colonial reputation on trial.
They claim to have been tortured – one says he was castrated – during the campaign against the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s.
The Mau Mau, it must be said, were vile. After swearing to magical oaths, they butchered children, they tortured, mutilated and murdered – mostly Africans – who would not join their movement. The Kenyan government now calls them heroes, and has a national day in October to honour them, which is a despicable re-writing of history.
But the British response to the uprising was also brutal, driven by the atavistic fears of the settlers in the so-called White Highlands, commonly regarded as the most snobbish and racist in the Empire.
Tens of thousands of Kenyans were sent to detention camps where many were subjected to torture and extreme violence. Much of this seems to have been covered up. The (Kenyan) Attorney General at the time minuted: “If we’re going to sin, we must sin quietly”.
Even now, the Foreign Office is trying to stop the case, arguing it happened so long ago there isn’t the evidence, or surviving witnesses, for a fair trial.
Unfortunately for them, truckloads of official documents from that era have recently been uncovered. (They had been secretly stored in a government-owned manor house near Milton Keynes.)
Historians who’ve seen some of them say they detail systematic abuses that seem to have been known, and tacitly approved, at the highest level in London.
As a child of empire, and a long-time foreign correspondent in Africa, my first instinct is to say – hang on a minute…this is a continent where two million people have been murdered by their own governments since Independence. A continent where colonialism, for all the faults we see so clearly now, was often a brief interval of peace and efficient government, between long periods of cruel and incompetent dictatorship. Where many Africans are still actually worse off than their parents and grandparents who lived under British rule. Kenya, in particular, is one of the most corrupt countries on earth with more to worry about than a 60-year-old dirty war against murderous terrorists.
……………………………
As a postscript to this report I’d like to add the following and please note that this not directed at any one individual, any particular group or any particular published book.
I’ve read a number of books regarding the slave snatching era in Africa, the colonial era in Africa, and the post-independence era in Africa. (Note: One of the most unique, though not my favorite, of such books was Biko (1978) which is a biography of a black South African named Stephen Bantu Biko (1946-1977) which was written and published by a liberal white South African journalist named Donald Woods one year after Stephen Bantu Biko was tortured to death by South Africa police.)
In any event, excluding the Biko book, what I have learned when reading books, reviews and articles written by whites Americans and white Europeans is the the following:
1. Many whites seem to view black Africans (and lots of dark colored people around the globe) as some sort of different species of animal and sometimes even as pets. For example, many whites seem seem to endorse or support the prior actions of Europe pouring into Africa to loot, pillage, pilfer and spread Christianity and destroy native African cultures on grounds that in doing so they had elevated the African’s living conditions and standards of life and the ethical and moral development or the wild Africans. They built roads and schools and taught the African the concept of European time which was essentially a way to divide the day into paid segments (time is money). Prime examples of African nations in which black native Africans supposedly had is so ‘good’ before winning independence are Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Never in my 33 years of life have I been able to understand the above cited philosophy. Its absolutely ridiculous. A good analogy would be sentencing an innocent man up for crimes that he never committed and then freeing him 40 years after he wins some sort of post conviction relief in Court. In the States defense it is stated that the man didn’t really have it that bad and, to the contrary, for 40 years he feed a well balanced caloric meal three time per day. He was given a warm bed and a shower each day and night as well. Hell, he even had the fine luxury of free soap, shaving cream and razor to himself clean and presentable.
He had access to a decent size library and even had time to read some of classics of which men and women in free world would, these days, not have the free time to read.
This man lived a life of easy luxury for 40 years. And look at him now, he’s on the street, 62 years old working temp labor and renting a small room at a flophouse and eating Ramen noodles an his only entertainment is a small out dated television of which he sometimes catches the several minutes of Conan O’Brian’s late show before he passes out from exhaustion and the fact that he must rise early tomorrow morning to earn his $7.35 per hour (minus tax and money owed to the State).
Just because you teach a slave how to fillet a fish or what a 32nd of an inch is and why measurements are important and give a blanket to him to cover himself with at night and a bucket of water to wash himself in the morning doesn’t exactly give you the RIGHT to control his life, tell him where he can and cannot live, who he can and cannot reproduce with, how he must dress, when he will live and when he will die.
2. Many whites seems to believe the Africans and blacks (and other colors around the globe) are vile and wicked because these Africans have killed their fellow Africans. Take the Mau Mau for example, there is no doubt in my mind that the Mau Mau were freedom fighters. But, accordingly to much that has been written by white Brits and white Americans in the past, the Kenyan Mau Mau fighters were vile men, and certainly not heroes or liberators, because they killed their fellow black African Kenyans.
Two words: Absolutely ridiculous. I’ll almost embarrassed to admit this but it seems to me that whites are the only demographic, out of all demographics, which have the mental deficiency (for lack an appropriate word) to bulk each racial demographic into some sort of ‘big family’ related brotherhood in which members of the ‘big family’ are not allowed to harm one another.
Yet, paradoxically, whites have absolutely no dilemma, predicament or problem with destroying, killing and washing there hands of their fellow whites. In the United States of America whites are typically cold and bitter (in comparison to other racial demographics) when it comes to family matters, especially once the children are of legal age. Yes, or course there are exceptions to rule. Truth is, at least in North, most whites would pay Veterinarian several hundreds of dollars to fix their dogs aging joints or an infected tooth before they’d help their own brother or sister out with cash assistance (and certainly not cash for a medical bill or a cash-before surgery procedure).
Whites in America talk of hating and wanting to harm their fellow whites each and everyday. Often such hate arises from political differences. Liberals cant understand he conservatives and conservatives cant understand the liberals. Both sides are some ‘evil’ and have ‘nefarious plans’ to harm the other side and each side must stop the other by any means, including, though not limited too: invasive legislation, imprisonment and even physical death. Each side believes that the other are traitors and often that someone must die. Don’t believe me? Just check out the comments at The Birther Report (Birther site) and Obama Conspiracy Theories (Obot site). And the same thing happens online, and in person, in the real world each day. Yahoo comments are rife with such content just as are the breakrooms and cafeterias across America.
Yet when some cute and cuddly darkskinned native in Africa, or some pint sized little 4′ foot 1″ indigenous guy in South America, kills one (or many) of his ‘brothers’ (not really related in an sense other than that whites view them as some sort rare family of Panda Bears which must not harm one another) he is a vicious and vile creation which lives in chaos and is not entitled to rights and there’s no way in hell that such a creature could be a liberating hero, much less one with any idea of what freedom is in the first place.
I witnessed the same thing happen when Obama refused (and continues) to refuse to help his youngest half’-brother, George Obama, escape the life of poverty that he continues to live in the slums of Nairobi. Whites in America hit hard with that one. Obama is a vile and scandalous man because he refuses to give money to his Kenyan half-brother George.
Two words: Absolutely ridiculous. Many whites Americans don’t even consider ‘half-siblings’ as family. Moreover, most white Americans who do have full blooded siblings do not financially help their adult siblings. Its typical in American to hear stories from friends and family about a rich uncle, a rich brother, a rich sister, a rich aunt and the person telling the story lives in a crappy one bedroom apartment and the bills are three months behind.
But when some cute and adorable ‘Panda Bear’ black natives of Africa don’t bail out their half bother George from the slums this somehow becomes the unthinkable and these savage natives must not have any real concept of family or ethics.
NOTE: In all my travels and time spent abroad in black countries like RD and DRC I have never heard, not even once, a single reference to a ‘half -brother’ or ‘half sister’. They simply brothers and sisters. It isn’t until you get around some record-keeping-anal-retentive white American or white European that you start hearing about ‘half-siblings’.
The Mau Mau fought to rid there homeland of the evil whites how invaded and taken over their lands and killed their forefathers and rapped their mothers and attempted to wipe out their culture and way of life.
Yes, the Mau Mau killed many, many and many of their fellow black Kenyans. Those who were killed were the traitors. The Mau Mau offered nearly all black Kenyans everyone a chance to join and free their homeland. If the black Kenyans sided with the evil white invaders they were then killed.
This is no different than what has already happened between whites in American and will happen again.
For example, gun right advocates (I am one of them even though my fellow Republicans wont allow me, a felon, to own a gun…funny how the Constitution gives me the right to a own a gun but strict constructionist and textualism believing Republicans have redefine my constitutional rights) have stated that they wont allow their guns to be confiscated and that if the day comes when men show at their homes to confiscate all guns that on that same day there will be death and blood shed and that they will kill fellow Americans, and die themselves if need be, before they hand over their guns.
Yet when the Mau Mau weed out black Kenyan traitors in order to take back their homeland and way of life and to END SLAVERY they are, according to whites, they are vile and vicious and they are savages who have murdered their fellow Panda Bear brothers and sisters and they have absolutely no concept whatsoever of ethics, morals or freedom.
And, lastly of course, in closing, they obviously had a much better quality of life under British rule when their mothers and sisters were raped and their fathers and blood brothers beaten and worked to death and often shot and summarily executed (immediately executed) for what we Americans call free speech.
Bruce wrote:
Bruce, I’d be very cautious of such websites because most are, as you probably have already suspected, just scams to get you to fill out endless surveys or to give out some sort of personal information.