Harry Thuku was a young telephone operator in Nairobi who had read enough to understand what was being done to his people. In 1921 he founded the Young Kikuyu Association, one of the first organised African political movements in Kenya. He protested against the kipande, the humiliating identity card Africans were forced to carry, against low wages and land theft. The British arrested him in March 1922. Thousands gathered outside the Nairobi police station to demand his release. Police opened fire, killing between 21 and 150 people in one of the first massacres of colonial Kenya.