Mama Charity Ngilu: A Great Woman Unbowed

Mama Charity Ngilu’s spirit of political rebellion soars over Ukambani with bemused contempt for the hypocrisy with which her tormentors and saboteurs mourn her premature political death. It is no secret that Ngilu is a new breed of Kamba politicians who has rubbed the old demagogues of Kamba politics the wrong way. For decades, since independence, Kamba politicians have bred and nurtured a culture whose sole agenda is to impoverish the majority in the society for easier political subjugation. It is in this class that we had the likes of Paul Ngei, Mulu Mutisya, George Ndoto and now Kalonzo Musyoka. Talk of social empowerment of the masses and you’ll get spit at, right on your face, by the same persons you seek to empower and who have been brainwashed by the Kamba’s ruling elite. It is this class that Ngilu is trying to fight and in so doing, exposing herself to hatred and ridicule from her opponents who hold the masses at their mercy.

I hold in high esteem those who believe in things beyond their stomachs, and have the courage to speak the truth even at the risk of losing friendships, opportunities and even their freedom or worse. Those who dispense with the hypocritical silence that enables many to eat with the powerful folks they privately despise, or even oppose find great favour in my estimation. And in this league lies Charity Ngilu, a woman who has been labeled crazy and disrespectful of men in the Kamba community.  When Ngilu voices her democratic political opinion and rightfully points out that Kalonzo is an anti reformer and lacks the qualities of a Kamba ‘messiah’ everybody condemns her for being selfish and a traitor. Many remember to forget the fact that when Ngilu stood for president in 1997, Kalonzo and his cronies stood by the then president Moi, without posing to think that she was their kinsmen. Why then, do the same people brand her a traitor for supporting Raila?

To challenge a conservative culture that despises and exploits women is to act out one’s beliefs without certainty about outcome. To do so in a society without the democratic institutional protection of one’s freedom is supremely courageous. And even so in a society that thinks that by propelling their son to the house on the hill, they will have solved all their problems. We forget that as the number two community in the country, basing on the fact that one of our own holds the second highest office in the country, we’ve not gained much, save for the boreholes that have been sunk by Ngilu amid political witch hunt from her detractors. Then again Ngilu would not have it otherwise. Everything about her speaks of a sincere commitment to her beliefs, regardless of the painful consequences. One marvels at a society that want to miss an opportunity to elect her the Kamba presidential flag bearer, even as one understands the reasons why my fellow Kambas are not ready to do the right thing.

Ngilu can be described by her Kamba male chauvinists as a woman “too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control.” This is a perfect description of a woman who would soon inspire millions of intelligent men and women alike, she who believes in something beyond herself; she who stubbornly refuse to sell her soul or betray the voiceless masses from whom she was raised as a genuine beacon of hope.

Ukambani and indeed Kenya in general needs more women who are too educated to be deceived or intimidated by the insecure men in their lives; too strong in their beliefs and self-confidence to play flower girls and ornaments to the rich and powerful; and too stubborn to yield to a culture that desires to control their thoughts and actions. Ukambani needs crazy citizens - men and women – who, like Ngilu, are free from fear of fellow mortal beings; who claim their right to think and to speak the truth to power; who refuse to be exploited by those who pretend to lead them.

My Exile to the Village

Dear Otero:

July 17^th of every year always casts a dark cloud in my life. This is a day that marks a memorial of the death of a great friend and mentor, Mwalimu Daniel Munyoki. Very little is known of the late Mwalimu Munyoki outside the small village of Kamusiliu where I was born some quarter of a century ago, but he played a crucial role in my life. This Sunday marked the fifth anniversary of his death. As usual, nothing much was done, not even laying wreath on the grave, as a memorial of the greatest intellectual to have ever lived in my village.

You must be wondering why I have gone into reminiscing over the life of a little known teacher in a village that boasts of having produced great people like ambassadors, presidential assistants among other notable high ranking officials in our country. It is worth your information that the likes of the ambassadors, P.As and lawyers like me mingle and identify themselves with the highly placed people in the society, but the late Mwalimu Munyoki associated himself with the poor and the down trodden in my society. He was a mwalimu to all regardless of the social class. To me he was an icon and a legend.

The fifth anniversary of his death coincided with my flight to the village of my birth. During my long and tiring journey to the village, I had some mysterious revelation that reminded me of a dream I had as standard four pupil at Kamusiliu Primary School.  This is a dream that has always reminded me the life and times of the great Mwalimu Munyoki and leaves me asking, did we really know who Mwalimu Munyoki was? This is the question that formed the basis of that dream long ago. In my dream I had met Munyoki, smartly dressed and carrying a black leather briefcase. He was drunk and a little bit incoherent, but he called out to me, “Gregory, who do people in this village say I am? Look here Gregory,” he said thrusting his briefcase to me, “This is my thesis”. I didn’t, at the time have an idea what a thesis was but I pretended to have understood what he was telling me. Munyoki made me sit under a shade and started narrating to me a story of the life of a man I couldn’t understand.

No one knew his real name, he told me, and they just called him Munyoki-a name he had been given by the villagers some days upon his arrival in the village. Very little was known of him but the villagers adopted him as one of their own. The young trailed behind him, always wanting to hear his numerous and captivating tales. During the day he would be found seated among the older folks of the village drinking the traditional brew, and at the small shanty where he lived at the edge of the village, children overcrowded, evening after evening, listening to him speak about the great history of our country, pausing only for a moment to sip his drink. He was ever drank; in the mornings, during the day and in the evenings. And so, they had given him the name Munyoki; a name he so much liked.

Many years were to pass by before the villagers came to discover who this Munyoki was. He had told them a version of his story that he had been displaced during the war, which war no one bothered to ask, and thus had found himself in the village, a village far way from the civilization of this country. A village where the local dailies never got a chance to penetrate and if they so did, it was only when a trader came from the big town which of course was quite rare. Thus the village provided a perfect haven and a hideout for the socially displaced persons; those people the civilized society had chosen to reject could find a home in this village. Munyoki was such a person. He was a professor who had fallen out with the system in the civilized world and thus he had to flee from his pursuers in the city. 

I don’t know whether what Mwalimu Munyoki was telling me was true or was a fictitious episode in a past life, but when time came for me to flee to the village, this tale came to my mind. Time had come for me to identify with my people and have a taste of the abject conditions they live in. I might as well be called the village lawyer because this is where I will be operating from. My interaction with Mwalimu Munyoki will come in handy as I try to understand and fit in a society that has been neglected for decades!

The poor and the hungry this country cannot be fooled

Dear Otero; 

On Monday, May 16 2011, Dr Mulera a Ugandan consultant pediatrician and neonatologist living and working in Canada wrote a column in the Daily Monitor, a leading newspaper in Uganda, which left me surprised at how similar our fate is to that of our brothers across the border. Dr. Mulera’s article, ‘Dregs and wretches of this country cannot be silenced’ outlined the attitude of the ruling class in Uganda toward its citizens. This followed a senior Ugandan government official’s description of the demonstrators in the streets of Kampala as ‘the dregs of society, the stone and rock hurlers, the great unwashed of the slums’  

According to Dr. Mulera, when a government views humans as dregs and abandoned wretches, it has no qualms about setting upon these sub-humans with clubs and truncheons and tear gas and bullets as though they were dangerous beasts in the wild. This is what happened when the Ugandan soldiers descended upon some innocent and broke citizens of their country with clubs and ‘kibokos’ in the streets of Kampala. Their only offence; walking to work!

The  events of this year’s ‘Saba Saba’ day anniversary left me thinking if my good friend and mentor, Dr, Mulera, had Kenya too in mind when he posited that ‘these so-called dregs of the land have children for whom they desire better lives and opportunities than they have had’. The scenes of this day were similar to the scenes in Kampala some few months ago. We may not have been called dregs and wretches or the great unwashed of the slums but the zeal with which the police tear gassed demonstrators in the streets of Nairobi left me convinced that it was a matter of time before the government came out in the open to insult us.

The cause of the ‘Saba Saba riots was simple, the increased cost of basic foodstuffs. Our ordinary demonstrators were asking for an ordinary thing; reduce the price of unga to a manageable level. There was nothing wrong with this; they wanted the government to do something about the raising cost of living and the price of unga, just like that of any other foodstuff, having gone up again and again since this government took over.

The police action exposed us as the poor and the hungry people in this country, a people who can be fooled and trampled upon to satisfy the whims of our great politicians. Time and again we have been reduced to scratch the dry earth to feed ourselves and sustain the insatiable whims of our leaders. We have been paying taxes, without exemption, since the birth of this country and have never been heard to complain, or walk with pomp to the offices of the tax payer to show whoever cares to see that we have met out legal obligation.  

But the poor have their voices too, the poor have their power, the starving poor have an inalienable right to demonstrate and overthrow the government! They have brains with which they see and analyze the internal and external factors that have relegated them to nothingness in a land they presume to be theirs as much as it is their rulers’

When I see the unemployed and under-employed citizens taking to the streets in spite of the guaranteed beatings and tear gas by the police, I am as humbled as I am saddened. Humbled because there is no reason why I should not be among the ‘abandoned wretches’ were it not that I had an opportunity to go to school at the right time to prepare myself for gainful employment in the world beyond the slums of Kibera.

Saddened because their cries are directed at men without ears, people who view the majority of citizens as extras in the long running show called ‘The Kenya We Want.’ Those who dare to demand their rights and freedoms, and a place at the dining table, must be treated as intruders who must be kept off the stage with clubs and tear gas even when they have committed no crime.

Our leaders can pretend that they do not feel the pain of the poor, the hungry and great unwashed of the slums. How can they, when they never have to worry about their next meals or their children’s hospital bills. No wonder they cannot see why these people are going on and on about the stratospheric prices of food and fuel. 

They may wish them away. They may beat them, gas them and even kill some of them. But here is an inconvenient truth. The poor, the hungry and abandoned wretches are here, they are poor, they cannot be fooled and they are not going to go away!

Gone, but not forgotten

Dear Otero;

I have taken time off the politics of this country to relive my love life. I have always asked myself what my chances have been with this thing called love. I won’t dwell on my ability to love, or on the love I have for my mother Lucia, or my father, Daniel Kasela. I won’t in any way question the love I have for my siblings, Fred, Justus or Grace or even my grandma. But I still have issues with my love life and the people I have rubbed shoulders with in the name of love, a love that we all believe transcends parental love.

My first encounter with this kind of love came about some years ago, eight years ago to be exact. Back then, when I come to think of it, it wasn’t really hard to fall in love since I, and many of my peers, never knew how it felt to be in love. We just joined in the bandwagon and proclaimed ourselves to be seriously in love! All you needed back then was a fine tongue and a conviction that you were mature enough to win a girl to occasionally steal kisses at. All my relationships at, and before, that time were purely platonic. I can’t remember a single time when I got intimate with any of those I claimed to be in love with.

So when I got to campus two years later, I was grappling with a discovery that love extended beyond those platonic kisses and hugs behind the church during ‘keshas’. I discovered that to win a woman who was considerably mature and at her natural threshold of losing her virginity was quite a tall order.  However I came to realize that I was gifted with a natural charm, a gift that coupled with my theories about relationships came in handy. This is what led me to this one lady I would live to remember. She is the lady who taught me that the best one can get out of love is a broken heart.

I can’t quite well remember how we met but I can vividly recall the place of our meeting. It was at the registration arena at the university where we had gathered as new students for some sort of orientation. Afterwards I began to pursue her, in my imaginations and dreams.  It was about two months later that I picked enough courage to approach her about my feelings. I didn’t get the shock of being rejected but still I didn’t get the relief that comes with being accepted.

When I sit back and recall that period in my love life, I am left wondering what I could have done to fully and correctly understand womenfolk. What followed was a string of false hope, and love. It was a period when I felt loved but still unwanted. There existed a large vacuum in my heart and could feel the emptiness it brought. I never understood any bit of it until that night I got myself drunk enough at Columbano Bar and confronted myself in front of a large mirror at the washrooms. I stood before the large mirrors and spoke to myself…”you still don’t understand it boy, do you? Throw the emptiness in your arms out into that space we breath; maybe birds will feel the air thinning as they fly deeper into themselves…” I sobered up and went home that night and wrote, ‘Parting is just but, nothing’ in my diary.

I could not, at that time, comprehend what really came over me at the washrooms. Perhaps it was the effect of the beer, but, looking at it much later, I came to realize that something was working me up in my sub-consciousness, something that enabled me to gather the remaining bits of my love and move on without necessarily having to wait for my walking papers to be signed. For once I was gone, but not forgotten. That experience had laid a foundation block for something else, some strong bond of love that I could only compare with the way I felt toward my siblings.

The Kenya we live in today

Dear Otero,

You might be wondering why I have taken the pain to narrate this episode of that one Friday evening. This is because of the truth that dawned on me that evening that made me discover the Kenya we live in.! The evening had seemed to drag along slowly, as we sat glued to our seats, and listening to the narrator. I looked at my watch; it was just a little past seven P.M. I had a whole Friday evening ahead of me. Looking around in the pub, we had been joined by new patrons who almost immediately fell to the spell of the narration. I emptied my half empty bottle and staggered toward the lavatories to empty my bladder which was burning with liquor contents. I didn’t want to miss any part of the story which to me seemed no only interesting but genuine. If all of us had one day sat and thought objectively like our narrator here, some of the things that had happened to us as a nation in the recent past would never have happened. For once some things which had occurred in the recent past began to crystallize in my mind just like snow on the tip of Mt. Kenya. Truth was finally dawning on me that the Kenya we lived in today was not the Kenya we had wanted at independence!

When I staggered back to the drinking hall, more patrons had poured in and sat attentively listening to the narrator unfold those events we all knew about but none of us had bothered to think about. I quietly staggered towards our table and sank silently on my chair. The waiter had already replaced my empty bottle with a fresh one. I took a long draught and shifted my attention to the narrator.

“I can vividly recall the events that preceded the constitutional referendum. Remember those days, gentlemen? When the whole nation was bracing up for the first ever constitutional referendum in the history of our country? Yes, gentlemen, every one was happy that the whole process which had began years ago and stalled severally, was now about to materialize. For years we had waited and hoped that one day we shall have a new constitution and when we were a step away to having it, you all know what happened. Our know –it- all politicians came in and distorted the true context of the draft constitution. Gentlemen, the campaigns leading to the referendum made me despise politicians. For once I wished I had a gun for I would have massacred the entire clique of the politicians. Honestly, why would a sane man lie to the masses about the contents of the draft constitution just because it didn’t suit his ego? Why not let Wanjiku as we were called decide on it? The issue of tribe came in again –that the draft document was meant to oppress a certain tribe while oppressing another. Pure nonsense it was. And we Kenyans were duped once again. I happened to listen to my village folk’s debate about the constitution one day. Gentlemen I did shed tears at the level of apathy among my people! You know what they told me? That their MP and their beloved son had already read and interpreted the document for them and hence they would go with the position he took! You look perplexed gentlemen, wasn’t it true in your areas too? But that’s the Kenya we live in!

The post referendum era was the most interesting of all. Having convinced the apathetic Mwananchi to reject the draft constitution, it was now time to lay foundation for the 2007 general elections! The mention of 2007 gentlemen leaves an indelible mark in our hearts. This was the period when we completely forgot that we were Kenyans and fortified ourselves as tribes first. Gentlemen, never would I have thought that Kenyans could turn against each other with such vengeance as we did in late 2007 and in the early days of 2008! But looking at our development since independence, it was possible to foresee it if only we had taken time to learn from our painful history.

We rose against each other merely because our politicians were not satisfied with the outcome of the elections. We joined in the calls for mass actions, barricaded highways, burnt and looted property, and as if that was not enough we took the call for ethnic cleansing…we had to remove ‘madoadoa’ from our midst. Innocent people were killed, while those behind it locked themselves at the comfort of their mansions with their families away from the burning streets and watched from their televisions as we shouted ‘Haki yetu! Haki yetu!’ and continued to burn down a country we so much loved and adored. It took only two months to reduce everything we had built since independence into ashes. Kenya was burning. And in the silence of the night, our children wept and sang painfully to a prayer of distress…

…Father, our Kenya needs you now,
Father we need you to come down.
Father Kenyans have lost their ground
Father if we ever need you it’s surely now!

Brothers, remember those nights that we couldn’t sit together as one, drink and chat? When we sat in the darkness of our rooms and waited with pangas and knives for our neighbors to attack us? Can anyone tell me why we got to this? How could one look at his own brother and cut him down? How could one stand and watch as his supporters burnt innocent children and women in a church? Just because someone somewhere thought he had won in the election when he hadn’t actually won? Or because one lost in an election he had actually won? We had done our duty, which was to vote, why then would I be misled by some other person to cut down my neighbor, I had lived with for decades, a neighbor I could wake at any hour of the night to borrow salt and cooking oil…we were stupid and blind ourselves. I say if we ever find ourselves in this situation again, let’s rise against the principals and not our fellow brothers who we see and meet daily.

At last the battle of who had won and who had lost came to a ceasefire and I tell you brothers, we were the greatest losers. Those of us who ganged up and fought in the streets became the greatest losers. And when our beloved politicians saw that we were now tired of slaughtering ourselves, they signed the National Accord to share power among themselves while we who burnt and killed each other got an extra burden of sustaining a bloated government thanks to our stupidity. It was all about power, gentlemen, whom from among you benefited from that bloated cabinet? No one!

The grand coalition government brought with it the wrangles of 2003 and for once I thought that a coalition government was unworkable in our kind of politics, where our politicians lacked self discipline. But that was basically expected. We had, as usual recycled the same elements that had been at the helm of our previous regimes which we had all labeled as autocratic, corrupt and non-reformative. So the end result is that we had the same autocrats, the same corrupt oriented leaders and those opposed to change in our government.

…true gentlemen; we cannot altogether brand the Grand coalition government a total failure. The greatest shortcoming as I saw it from my own perspective is that it couldn’t fight such vices like corruption because it was the same corrupt individuals who headed it and so each fought tooth and nail to protect his own skin…you make me laugh, but its quite important that you have brought this issue up, the social contract between the people and the government was breached right from the beginning. We voted for change, a change we all hoped and waited for, but now the kind of change we got was not really the one we had wanted. We saw a change in the cost of living, where the basic foodstuffs shot up in price and in so doing exposed most of us to starvation and for once the Kenya we thought we knew became a stranger to us! That gentlemen, was the change we fought and shed blood for!

When I look at some of the events in our country today, I sometime ask myself whether our politicians are conscious of what they are really doing. Talk of none issues and you talk of our leaders. When Koffi Annan mediated the National Accord that brought in the grand coalition government, every politician was in full praise of the man who had created jobs for them. Now look at this, when the same Annan said that the perpetrators of the post-election violence should face trial at the Hague, every politician turned against the man…let Annan know that Kenya is a sovereign state and should be left alone to deal with her own problems. I’m left wondering, where was our sovereignty when we fought and killed each other? Why did the same politicians accept Annan to mediate the power-sharing deal?”

Otero, when I looked around at my fellow listeners, every one was glued on his seat, a beer in hand and looking straight at the narrator. Everybody seemed to conceptualize the turns our country had taken to its present. Our narrator rose from his seat and staggered toward the lavatories. The pub came back to life. Everybody was speaking at once and from the noise I could catch a few words “…these politicians have taken enough for us to notice… we have been used for long…never again shall we allow these buggers to take us for a ride!” And when the narrator staggered back to the pub, everyone fell silent. He stared at his audience with drunken eyes and slumped onto his chair. We all stared at him.

“The Kenya we live in is the Kenya we don’t want, and the Kenya we want is the one we have no idea about!” he said and paused. Just then my phone rang. It was my girlfriend. I looked at my watch, it was almost eleven. I cursed at how fast time flies, and gulped down the remaining beer. I staggered out of the pub; it was time to meet with my girlfriend!

And as I drove home that Friday night, the full sense of what I had sat through in the pub came to me in full force. For long we had cried and blamed the colonialists for the problems in the country, but I now came to realize the Kenya I lived in was very different from the one the Colonialists left behind. We had failed to learn from our past and this history kept following us into the present. The events of the post-election violence had marked the climax of what we had been building all along. Tribalism had taken the better part of us and I could now clearly understand the Kenya I lived in, it was a land of tribalism, a land where ethnicity was a sacred thing, a land where for anything to move, it had to base on a tribal line. We called ourselves Kenyans but deep inside we were a tribe first trying to rush to a road of nationalism. A road that will never be built because the engineers are the same proponents of tribal politics!

Letter to a Kibera Friend

Dear Otero,

The events of that Friday evening in that pub will forever remain entrenched in my mind. The narrator spoke with a conviction I have never seen. I sat there glued on my chair as the story unfolded before me.
A long pause had followed in the pub. I tried to sip my beer, but half way stopped and put the bottle down on the table. I looked around at my fellow guzzlers. I was not alone. Unopened bottles and glasses full of beer stood untouched all around. Of course everybody had been listening to the story. Our narrator, a Tusker Malt in his hand sat reflectively, gaping pensively at the ceiling. The mood of the silence must have affected him as well. He took a long draught from the bottle and put the beer back on the table. As if prearranged, we all followed suit and sat staring at him anxiously like school kids waiting for the teacher to announce the results of a test. And his voice when he spoke seemed to have been affected by the attentive silence.

“Our problems in Kenya can be traced way back to the period of our second liberation,” he said and paused again. “That was the period gentlemen, if you can still recall, when tired of the dictatorial regime in place, we had agitated for reforms to pave way for participatory democracy. Gentlemen, those were the years when our hard won freedom was suppressed by our very own brothers, a period when we cried and thought it better to go back to colonialism. Who would have thought that Africans could turn against each other? Forget our collective march to independence chanting our cries of Uhuru? You mention it…greed, selfishness, that was it gentlemen. The problem as we came to realize much later, was that as we marched to independence, hoping to equally benefit from the departure of our colonial masters, we forgot and, or failed to notice that some of us had hidden motives…self interests. There were those who wanted to consolidate power firmly to themselves and were not ready to relinquish it to anyone else…the proverbial house of shelter where people barricaded themselves in and from there threw stones through the window to those who attempted to take shelter in it…yes, you are right brother, in our march to independence our political leaders were yapping for that new seat of authority- the presidency. That was the coveted prize and it was a game of wits. As the saying goes, not all monkeys could swing at a go and thus it was upon the cleverest monkey to outwit the rest and take the first shot at the swig. And so gentlemen, no sooner had the instruments of power passed on to black hands and the Union Jack lowered for the last than our leaders began bickering and fighting over the prize. This, my brothers prompted some to break away from the mainstream party and form other parties which they could use as vehicle to get to power…yes my friend, the era of multiparty politics had just began. But do you think that this was sustainable? Yes…no? No, no, it wasn’t sustainable. No post-independence leader could allow his grip to power to be threatened by some few ungrateful egrets…but come to think of it, same song, and same space as they fought for independence…why then were the differences? You forget gentlemen, the nature of our African leaders. They forget so easily…for why would Kenyatta detain Odinga, or Ngei, or any of those who languished in Kapenguria with him? You are right brother, what was of importance was to take control of the state and once this was firmly in control, the rest of those who joined you in the struggle could afford to be forgotten. And so gentlemen as a result Kenya was declared a de facto one party state all in the name of unity and nation building. This meant that the dissents either agree with the mother party or quit altogether. The reasoning was simple; we cannot eat political ideologies. We needed to create a nation where the youth and the future generations will find solace. There were those forces from outside the continent which wanted to see us continuing to be divided because, that way, their interests would be served better. And as one of the proponents of one party state said, there were those forces at home which because of minor differences in strategy and ideology made it impossible for us to co-operate. And with such reasoning advanced to a people who had suffered so much under colonialism, who, among the masses could object to Kenya being a de facto one party state?

Those were the times, gentlemen, the period of great oppression and distress in our nation. We cried and chanted mapambano, amid political assassinations and at last, twenty eight years after our independence, our cry was heard. Multiparty democracy was restored and in 1992 we all marched forward and sang the song of change.

You all remember that period, don’t you? Yes, exactly as you say. It was the period that saw the birth of new political parties in Kenya. For the first time since independence our democratic space had been widened. For quite a long time, people had been used to the only party…the Baba na Mama party, yes, you recall? You were part of it, weren’t you? That was the founding party as it was called by many and everyone…in fact for you to be considered a true patriot; you had to be aligned to the party in one way or the other. The party had been in existence for so long that people used to call it just “the party”. And so gentlemen, with the emergence of multi parties, the existence of the party was threatened and so brothers; everything had to be done to consolidate power within the confines of the party.

It was a period of great hopes and dreams, dreams of a new nation. Politicians having been given the license to make noise went full blast. This was a period that people could afford to dream, dream of new things to come. KANU had been in power for so long and people felt that it had lost its significance to the politics of the time. There was this great wave of political euphoria and for once everyone that the veteran president would lose in the election. But you know very well that in Africa leaders don’t lose elections, whether you vote for them or not…and so it happened, the professor of politics? You mention it, my brother he was a professor indeed and above all, the architect of Nyayoism and a darling of the people. He taught and preached peace, love and unity to us, the core values of the Nyayo philosophy. KANU was national party and not a tribal one…it was the driving force behind the Kenya African nationalism. The architects of multi parties missed a mark the moment they established their parties within tribal lines. Parties were formed to safeguard the interests of a given community.

And so gentlemen, those of you who still think that the Kenya we live in is a product of colonialism ought to think deep. I’d rather think that the birth of the Kenya you and I live in today was the inception of multiparty politics…no, no I’m not a proponent of a one party system…no, all what I mean is that by agitating for multi party democracy we thought that we were fighting autocracy, little did we know that we had opened the floodgates for a more complex problem; the problem of ethnicity. Our politicians were politically immature for multipartism. Instead of forming parties based on ideologies, they opted to form tribal strongholds for themselves, and what did this breed? Ethnic cleansing. That was the period that saw the skirmishes in the Rift valley…yes, look at it from this point of view, Rift valley was a KANU stronghold with the Kalenjins forming the bulk of the majority. They had, since independence, peacefully co existed with their Kikuyu brothers, reason being that they were all in KANU and so when the DP was formed the two broke ranks as the Kikuyu were regarded as rebels. This meant that they had to go! And so the era of tribal politics had began in Kenya. Tribalism became a paramount factor in our politics, a fact that is prevalent up to this day.

Gentlemen, what is the matter? Your glasses are empty. Hey waiter, bring us more liquor. Lets drink gentlemen, yes, Tusker the true spirit of the nation! Liquor is the only common factor that remained in us. We had nothing left to show of our national hood. We all called ourselves Kenyans by citizenship but deep within ourselves we were a tribe first. We in fact joined in the call for ethnic purity and formed tribal strongholds to safeguard our interests as a tribe.

We all know what happened next. Then period after 1992…exactly, the call for our second liberation. Liberation from what? Autocracy? Ethnicity? What? I don’t know…the call for constitutional reforms, Katiba mpya…that is it gentlemen. I don’t want to talk about the constitution because what we heard in 1992 is in fact what we were told in 1997, 2002 and in 2007! The process of giving Kenyans a new law was politicized and stalled as it became a campaign tool. As a result we had to wait for ten more years before the prospects of having a new constitution and hence the so called second liberation became imminent!

The year 2002 found us still engrossed in the fantasy of having a new nation. Everybody felt that we needed change. Change of guard, change of politicians and change in everything. We felt that we needed to erase our past, forget that our nation had been in existence for the last thirty nine years. And so everyone took up the call, our politicians included. Everybody wanted change…fresh ideas, dynamism. Perhaps sensing the danger, overnight our politicians became young and smelt change. Change, like rest hung loosely in the air. Those who had played a leading role in our national politics in the past decades, all still wanted to be young. After all it was a period of change! Once a snake undergoes ecdysiast, does it stop from remaining old? Anyway you know it better. Politicians who had been at the helm of our politics suddenly underwent ecdysiast and became glittering young. Can you imagine that my area MP who is older than the republic itself suddenly became young and could even afford a few words in distorted sheng?

Anyway what followed was a series of fake manifestos and once again we fell prey to political lies. Remember them? Yes, those ones…a new constitution within the first hundred days, zero tolerance to corruption and what did you say? A coalition government…oh yes, the NARC dream. Gentlemen, you still recall those days? When each passing day was a new chapter in our lives? Everyone had hope, yes, hope in the new state of affairs and so we blindly recycled the same old people in the name of the new dream and soon we were under the very same politicians who had led our country down the slopes of inflation, bad governance, corruption and so on…old wine in new wineskins, correct. We all waited in anticipation, still hoping and dreaming. We still had faith even when things seemed to go wrong…apathetic? Maybe, I don’t know, but it might be true to some extent. The euphoria of change had driven every one of us blind and full of hope.

Me? Yes, gentlemen, me too. I had actually harbored high hopes in the new nation. Let me see, or rather count…they had promised us restoration of democracy, all what we wanted as a nation reborn. They promised to revive the economy which was in shambles. There was this promise to create 500,000 jobs a year…the youth enterprise fund, zero tolerance to corruption, the era of Nchi ya kitu kidogo was coming to an end…of course, gentlemen ethnicity was to be crushed, yeah, the NARC dream comprised all tribes in all regions…Nyanza, Rift valley, Western, Coast, Central, Eastern and even the North…all of them were part of the dream! It was the first time since the march to independence that we came together, politically, not as a tribe but as a nation. The NARC dream was a juicy morsel we couldn’t to spit from our mouths…correct, good fortune had placed it in our mouths and none of us was stupid enough to spit it out. For once I thought we had collectively shed our tribal politics and embraced the true spirit of nationalism until gentlemen, until the events that led to the post election violence in 2008.

You ask what happened to the NARC dream. Well, the dream never materialized. Since it was just an ordinary dream, the dreamers woke up to the reality as soon as the coalition government was formed…gentlemen, you are no longer drinking. Is Tusker out of stock here? Sure, sure the bar owner must have signed an agreement…you call it a memorandum of understanding with the brewers that Tusker will forever remain plentiful here…the M.O.U. yes you mention the M.O.U, that gentlemen, was the beast that shattered the NARC dream. There was this gentlemen’s agreement; of course that’s why it was called the NARC dream. Why else would I, in my normal senses, agree to sell you a bull I do not have just because my daughter is ripening and can fetch some good dowry once she marries? Of course she might even decide to become a nun! In fact gentlemen, the M.O.U contained a power sharing formula and the parties went ahead to allocate these portfolios in advance. The dreaming part of it is that none of the allocated offices were in our constitution and the agreement place was rush the constitution through parliament to create these office to suit themselves…just like it happened in 2008. Gentlemen, it was all about power. The proposed constitution was not meant to restore sovereignty to the people but to create room to the political class to wield more power! A constitution by politicians for politicians! You all know the position; the constitution was not delivered within the first hundred days as promised. Those who know better, a constitution is not a bottle of beer that you can guzzle down your throat in one gulp!

Sins of Our Fathers

Dear Otero,

Last Friday I managed to take some time off my rather busy schedule and enjoy some evening at a pub in one of our out-of-reach up market estates.  And as I sat there that chilly evening, trying to absorb the last heat of the day and the hustles and bustles of our day to day life, I began to feel the full impact of our history, the history of my land and people. What did our past have to do with our present? But you see, I have always hated history since my high school days and had in fact devised ways of dodging history classes all through my schooling. The reason why I despised the subject that gave us legitimacy is that I hated to hear how Adam and Eve had disobeyed God leading to their expulsion from Eden and thus the beginning of our sorrows as mankind. I hated to hear how my community had migrated from Eastern Congo through Mt. Kilimanjaro to the present Mbooni hills and scattered eastwards toward Kapiti and Athi plains. I hated the thought that that my ancestors armed with bows and arrows had given elephants and buffalo a priority and had forgotten that such animals some day would come to extinction or some authority somewhere would have a say over such animals. I hated to imagine that instead they should have remained in the Congo and mine gold or still remain around Mt. Kilimanjaro and grow coffee and other wonderful cash crops. Instead they had opted to come to Ukambani and settle in Masaku, Kitui, Mwingi and such other places like Kyuso. Those were my ancestors. And so I hated that history.

I hated the history of the origin of my country. I hated to hear how the British came to Kenya. How they had deprived our people of their land, of how they had disintegrated our communities into small holdings for easier subjugation. I hated the thought how of our forefathers had been forced to work in European farms and how they had been segregated. I thought such thoughts of the colonial atrocities and couldn’t stand to hear how our people had to gang up and go to the forests to fight for the restoration of our land and the blood that had to be shed for us to be granted self rule and independence.

I hated to hear of the events of our early years of independence, of how our leaders full of hatred had turned against each other and slaughtered one another. I hated to hear of the collapse of our economy, and the birth of corruption in our country. I hated to hear of the tribal clashes predominant in our independent nation, the Molo clashes, the Wagalla massacre and the army aggression in the war against the shifta, and such other social crimes that occurred deep into our independence. I hated that history, of anything that reminded me of the past, a past that we all knew about but failed to draw lessons from. I hated it because it revealed to me the selfish and avaricious nature of our past leaders. I hated the fact that this history had found its way into our present. That’s why, to me, any history session was an insult. Thus that’s why I found it quite odd for me to sit through an historical tale of our present in a pub.

A pub is one of the very few places that one can expect to sit and hear of anything constructive, let alone enjoy a normal conversation.  But in Kenya, you know that can be. Go anywhere in Nairobi, mostly in the evenings when the working class has just finished their office work and the so called Mututho Hours hit the clock. Most of them will converge at the more relaxed parts of the city. It is there you’ll find them seated around a table with black cushioned seats and the table littered with all manner of drinks ranging from Tusker malt to Bond 7. It is here you will catch on with the latest commentaries, be it social or political or even economical. Unlike in the past when people used to sit and talk about football, how Chelsea thrashed Manchester United in the F.A Community Shield Final or why Arsene Wenger sold Adebayor to Manchaster City etc etc, it is now a bit different and may be more philosophical! You sit and listen to the great politics  of  our time; why the perpetrators of the post election violence should be tried at the Hague or why and how the maize that was meant for the starving Kenyans just disappeared from the cereal boards and so on an so forth.  You either speak or you listen.

It was there this Friday evening that I sat through an interesting tale of our political history that almost made me change my misconception of history as a subject. Maybe it was probably the venue or the art of the narration employed by the narrator. The narrator, one of those of our few spirited brothers who given a fair chance could transform the state of our nation into something better was speaking to a group, presumably his visitors at a table adjacent to ours but loud enough for everyone to hear. Soon, all the conversations in the pub died slowly leaving him as the sole speaker. Perhaps noting how enthusiastic the subject had become to his listeners, the narrator raised his voice for all to hear. A little tipsy he probably was, but he sounded quite serious and his voice slightly wrought with emotion. I took a gulp of my cold Pilsner and cocked my ears in anticipation and soon I was able to gather the subject of the story. He was speaking about what he thought to be the genesis of the recent problems in the country.

“…no gentlemen, no,” he was saying. “That argument lacks merit and, in fact it has been advanced, time and again to the effect that our problems today are as a direct result of colonialism. In fact gentlemen, the truth of the matter is that the Kenya we live in today is as a direct result of our own actions prior to and after independence. You say that? Oh no! I had also thought about it until…brothers, until the events that shook the country after the general elections. I had not personally thought otherwise about this concept until I had witnessed the violence that followed the general elections we had. Come to think of it gentlemen, as you say, our struggle for independence, how was it different from the aftermath of the general elections in early days of 2008? No…no brother, what happened after the election was very different from the events preceding our independence. Let me tell you gentlemen, the war for independence was against a common enemy. Our independence heroes were fighting for a common cause. We needed our country back from the imperialists, we needed our land back and we wanted a taste of the power that the colonialists wielded in their hands, the power that the colonialists had taught us…of course gentlemen, Kenya at the advent of colonialism was a vast of land where most communities lived and carried out their activities without a centralized authority.

The colonial factor was the introduction of a centralized authority with use of excessive force. An authority exercised by those entitled to it, a form of authority where the minority ruled over the majority. And when the time came, we all rose against the colonial system and demanded self rule. Let the African rule herself and sort out or worse still create more problems for her. We blindly fought against the colonialists without pausing to think about the consequences of our actions…yes brother; we mixed politics with armed struggle…what was later branded as violence. We let our politicians collaborate with the Mau Mau freedom movement. These two groups differed in context and in ideologies. While Dedan Kimathi and the rest of the Mau Mau fought against the British for the return of the lost land, which was of course justifiable, our politicians led by Kenyatta and the famous Kapenguria six struggled for political power. See the difference? To them…yeah, the politicians, it didn’t matter whether the land was returned or not. What was important to them is that the colonialists’ relinquish their political power to them. I’m beginning to think that they were ready, had the colonial governor agreed to step down in favor of one of them, to work out a power sharing formula which would incorporate those Africans agitating for power into the grand coalition. Mau Mau fought for the peasants, it is they who needed the land badly, for the other faction it was the promotion of an elite class, those who could buy land if they wanted to, but for the poor peasants in Mt. Kenya who had to solely rely on the land, they had to fight. But it was difficult, given the opposing forces. As a result a lot of innocent blood was shed in the forest, the blood of a people liberating their land, a people who wanted the British out the country without further ado. To them, I think, the Lancaster conferences before independence were non essential. First things first, let the white man go and we can negotiate when he is already in England…betrayal? Yes, I agree with you gentlemen. Our overzealous heroes were betrayed by their colleagues agitating for political independence. While Dedan Kimathi was leading a pack of intrepid fighters in terrorizing the white settlers, Kenyatta with his group were busy negotiating with the colonialists on how to hand over power or probably working out a power sharing formula. Had he agreed to join the fighters? Gentlemen, history tells us that in 1951, Kenyatta denounced violence and the Mau Mau. That was before the state of emergency was declared the following year and Kenyatta arrested…yeah, yeah, I find it rather odd too, that the Mau Mau fought for his release after he had denounced them. But those were the fighters, and as I already had said, their main cause of resorting to armed struggle was to take out the white settlers from the country. These were the same soldiers who had served in the King African Rifles during the world war. They had been short changed shortly after the war and the promise to give them land abandoned…yes that’s why they ganged up against the colonialists, using the same knowledge acquired from their masters during the world war, they had waged guerilla warfare in Mt. Kenya region.

The funny part of it all, gentlemen, and you will agree with me that those who benefited most from Uhuru were not the liberators but the collaborators. While Kenyatta and his colleagues got away with the instruments of the power they had agitated for, our intrepid fighters came from the bush to find no land for them. Those who served as home guards and police officers continued to serve in similar capacities in the independent Kenya. If I may ask you gentlemen, was it fair for our Uhuru leaders to neglect and abandon those who pinched the colonialists most? Yes…I agree with you, Kenyatta with his cronies should at least have invited those who fought in the liberation to serve in the new African administration…oh yes, you’ve mentioned the point. All what our political leaders wanted was a grip on the power and once it was secure in their hands, the rest could be forgotten. Hey madam, add us some more rounds here…I mean leta kama tulivyo!

Now let me see…yes, as I earlier on said…or rather put it to you, our political problems are not as a result of the departing colonialist. We were the architects of our own miseries. Our leaders bred a culture that has time and again been used, a culture of using the common mwananchi for their own political interests…but we still harbor a great share of the blame as wananchi. When we chose to mix politics with armed struggle and violence, we gave our politicians a leeway to trample on us. Democracy you say? Democracy, my friend, is only invoked in our country when a politician wants to achieve his goals, and if he fails, he calls on his political supporters for mass action and the Mapambano song goes up in the air. It is time to burn and kill all those who did not join in the struggle for the realization of his political dream…

I don’t know how you will take on this, but I’d rather personally believe that those of you who have taken a keen interest to critically asses the development of this nation; you will agree with me that our children or rather ourselves have only had a grip of the political development of the country. I am of the opinion that we lack a concrete constitutional development. Right from the beginning our country evolved into a political state and not into a constitutional state. Our history is full of politics coupled with armed struggle. I repeat the rapid progress of our nation from a nation full of dreams and promise at independence to a state of hopelessness that we now live was caused by our disregard of constitutional development and seek political development instead. Politics have outlived our dream for a new constitution. You know gentlemen the constitution involves each and every one of us but politics is for those few who have chosen the path of politicking. Politics, a social vice that takes us back to the history of our troubled past...”

To be continued…

Rollercoaster ride with my ancestor

Dear Otero,

I shall never forget a dream I had last night. This was what I dreamt about. I saw the beautiful land of my father, the land that had once belonged to my ancestors who left it to my great grandfathers. The title of the land had passed on, down generations until my father took possession. It was such a wonderful land, as it was way back during creation and when my great ancestors received it from the great one- Mulungu, Ngai mumbi wa itu na nthi. Its wide, well ordered plains and high forests spread far away from the villages, and on all the sides the land was the same as it had always been from as far as when it was uncultivated. The streams zigzagged lazily through the high forests flowing towards the big river and onto the great ocean.

I saw young children run helter-skelter in the green fields, chasing after butterflies, laughter painted all over their young and overzealous faces. I saw pregnant women plucking red berries from the gardens and singing merrily, as their husbands hurriedly waded through the streams from grazing fields, which scattered beyond the hills, far way into the great Kapiti plains.  Evening brought with it sounds of cattle coming back home to be milked. The sun was setting in that beautiful land. Life was full of mirth, laughing and loving, in my father’s land. How lively and lithe and light life was over the whole land?

As the evening descended over the whole land paving way to the great darkness, the moon lit the great sky to give it a silver appearance. One would have easily thought it to be daytime with the sun changing from golden to silver, the light that gave my younger day’s glamour, moving from one village to another with my peers looking for what I couldn’t possibly explain.

The daytime was full of life, in my father’s land, and the night time full of reflections. Lessons from our history had to be learnt. The young boys would sit at the feet of the elderly men in the villages, listening to the story unfold, of how our ancestors moved from their former land to the present land we now lived in and cultivated. My great ancestors in their own wisdom had sought to give us a fuller life and for this reason, they had fought for the land, to protect it and maintain its purity to the present. It was in this form that the land was handed it over to my father. So by all means us, as, the young Turks of our community had to sit and be taught the history of our land to enable us to protect and keep its sanctity.

And I saw the face of my great ancestor; my great grandfather emerged from the clouds and looked down to me. His eyes, filled with wisdom seized me as he spoke to me, “the land, my son”, he said, “Is our heritage. We struggled to purify it and free it from all impediments. The land was pure as it was passed down to your father’s fathers. We protected its sanctity and kept the promise of our land alive.”

And I saw a great cloud descend over my great grandfather. The darkness engulfed the whole land and the silver sky turned grey. I could no longer see the face of the great legend, but I could still hear him speak to me; ‘my son, your fathers were wicked. They fought and shed the blood of their kinsmen over the land. As a result, a curse descended upon the land. The wickedness of your fathers destroyed the sanctity and raped the purity of our land. The land became no longer reproductive and the people and to toil and suffer in their own land. My son, never forget that greed is the destroyer of every good thing that has been made. Our people were greedy and this drove the land into chaos and destruction. My son, wake up and fight for your land. But remember the words of your ancestors; you don’t have to kill and shed blood to liberate your land. We didn’t shed blood to get you the land you now occupy. The land is a blessing and our heritage. My son…” the voice of the great man trailed off.

And I saw the new land of my father, the land that once stood out, tall and proud among the other lands and which now sorrowfully lay in ruins. Its wide forests no longer stood out in the plains. Children no longer sang out merrily, but sat outside weeping and shedding tears of distress, tears of a promise broken and a dream shattered. Pregnant women no longer went out to pick berries and wait for their husbands to herd cows home. Men no longer went out to graze, they instead stood outside the villages, bows and arrows in hand, waiting for their turn to slaughter or be slaughtered. In this great time, there were only two things involved, it was either you slaughter your neighbor or your neighbor slaughtered you. You were a bit lucky if your neighbor slaughtered you first thus sparing you the agony of witnessing your children, your very own, and their mother being roasted alive in your own hut as you helplessly watched. The land was full of hatred. The streams no longer flowed   lazily into rivers, but were now scenes of blood clotted in them. There was such pain in the land of my fathers. Our land had turned from one heaven and pride of everyone into a hell, and a betrayer of our common cause.

And I saw the great sky turn into red. The silver light no longer existed in the sky as the sky only reflected the great misery that had befallen the land. The blood that flowed in our rivers spilt on the banks and dried the great forests that stood all around the villages. Our land was bare. Stories were no longer told by the hearth as brothers turned against their very own with vengeance. It was indeed a sad period that we had least anticipated a situation that was beyond our making. What was left was to learn and devise ways in which to deal with the predicament that had befallen our land. We had to chat a way forward, to try and restore sanctity and sanity back in our land. We needed to purify our land and make it more productive again. The sins of our fathers had brought great pain over the land- a land we all cherished and adored, and painfully loved. This was the end result of loving our land too much…

Clueless about my country

Dear Otero: 

It has been three weeks since I last wrote to you. No, I have not retired my pen. Rather I have spent the last few weeks in deep reflection about Africa in general, and Kenya in particular. What does a writer like me contribute to Africa’s development? Of what relevance are the opinions of a Kenyan Commoner who is trying to understand the politics of a country gone mad? 

Perhaps there is truth in the frequently expressed view that folks like me are clueless about the realities on the ground, and the ground here being the sanctuary of our politicians. A very high ranking officer in the office of the vice president told me as much when we shared a drink sometimes last year. He thought I was out of touch and my political ideologies about the Kenya we live in today were tiresome ramblings that had no place in the modern Kenya. At one time during our drinking he told me that I was living in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s age!

Oh yes, during the days when I was a passionate supporter of the vice president and his political party, many of his courtiers, including this officer, cheered me on as a “well-informed voice of reason,” and a representative of the new face of Kenyan politics! However, their view understandably changed the moment I broke ranks with the vice president and his political party. From then on I knew nothing about Kenyan politics. I became young and inexperienced and couldn’t comment about our politics.  I did not take those comments seriously, of course. Indeed I took great pleasure in telling whoever cared to listen that such comments were a reflection of how much my ideology had hit a raw nerve in certain quarters. Now I am no longer so sure.  

Perhaps these folks were right after all. I don’t think I know my country anymore. First, there is this grand coalition thing called the government that is in shambles. In spite of the evidence to the contrary, everybody, including those opposing it, pretend that they are operating a united government.  Clearly, I am not the only one who sees this. Many folks I have spoken with during my social outings have agreed that we don’t have a government in the strict sense of the word. Ours is a den of politicians with their own political agendas that cannot be used to serve the common Mwananchi. 

This reminds me of an episode sometimes in April. I was standing at my local bus stop waiting to board a Matatu home. The fare to my destination had hiked by more than 100%, as it is the norm in our great city. As a result the place was parked with passengers as they waited for the rush hour to end, hoping that the fare will reduce to a manageable level. Anyway, as we stand there waiting, this man, he was drunk, passes by, stops for a while and stares at us as if we are lost, shakes his head and then says; “you shall know how to vote.” 

We all laughed at him; clearly we thought that he had lost it but our laughter suggested otherwise. It was laughter of a resigned acceptance of substandard social services for the majority even as the political elite we had elected into office were awarding themselves wads of cash to feed their insatiable appetites for ostentatious lifestyles. Here we were, waiting in the darkness of the night for bus fare to go down while our politicians were somewhere squabbling over non issues! 

Whenever people narrated horrifying experiences in IDP camps, under-staffed and under-equipped hospitals and others starving to death, I would point out that the millions of shillings that the Vice President and some ministers had used in the so-called shuttle diplomacy to save the “Ocampo Six” Little wonder then that Kenyan politicians, contemptuous of their fellow citizens, bask in cynical politics. They do not have to do much to get re-elected. I bet by 2012, we would have forgotten the horrors of 2008 and the suffering the current crop of politicians have subjected us to. We will be there, come next year, to recycle these demagogues back into our system and start whining, almost immediately, after the elections that we have been short changed again! 

This cynical politics is typified by an attempt by our politicians to derail the smooth implementation of the new constitution. Look for example at the ongoing debate on the suitability of our new Judicial Officers! Do you think we should let our politicians be the movers of our destiny as Kenyans? I don’t think so and I am looking forward to the day we shall collectively rise as Kenyans of the new generation and say no to sacrilege!