Death of the Kenya Dream?

Written for The East African (Nairobi)
July 31, 2006
By Parselelo Kantai (posted here with the author’s permission)

AT THE LAUNCH OF LOTTE HUGHES’s book, Moving the Maasai, Professor Bethwel Ogot stood up and declared the Kenyan project dead.

Ogot, the father of Kenyan history and Africa’s most celebrated historian, has spent most of his career writing Kenya into being. When he started out over 50 years ago, Africans were said to have no history. They lived in a continuous unconscious present, a land of perpetual childhood.

He challenged this racist assumption, traced the origins of many of the disparate peoples that occupied the Kenyan geographical space, forged links with the nationalists of the Independence era, promulgated and defended the project that was the Kenyan nation state.

And now here he was in the twilight of his career, presiding over a slice of imported sub-nationalist history.

Ogot’s sentiments reflect something that most Kenyans – especially those marginalised by, and in, the past – know but are afraid to talk about: that the idea of Kenya is a political fiction that will not bear close scrutiny. In fact, the official version of Kenya as born of a heroic armed struggle against colonialism is a narrative that automatically excludes them.

Them: at the top of that list is, in fact, the Mau Mau themselves – the armed strugglers. As Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson shows, the Mau Mau were losers in both war and peace: ‘Kenyatta had been asked about Mau Mau. His answer had been unequivocal: ‘We shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya- Mau Mau was a disease, which was eradicated and must never be remembered again.’

Independent Kenya was founded on a pact of forgetting the past – the spirit of Harambee. To achieve this, histories both collective and personal had to be swept under the national carpet; questions about how notorious collaborators, torturers from the Emergency era, had come to the centre of power were suppressed.

The drama of forging the nation was a single narrative in the continuous present tense – the narrative of Development. Any invocation of the past brought instant punishment, as the late Bildad Kaggia discovered.

Kaggia was the assistant minister for education and the MP for Kandara in then Fort Hall district. In September 1963, he wrote to the minister of agriculture, lands and settlement, Jackson Angaine, inquiring about the restoration of lands confiscated from the Mau Mau, “the freedom fighters who were then known as terrorists”.

In response, Angaine warned him against disrupting the ongoing government land resettlement programme: “Any attempt to disrupt the present consolidated areas- would lead to agricultural chaos, a grave setback to the economy and be in direct contravention of the spirit of Harambee whereby past differences are to be forgotten.” Kaggia, freedom fighter and detained with Kenyatta at Kapenguria, was persistent. It cost him his job – he was forced to resign over the issue – and earned him a lifelong tag of Public Enemy.

Nationalism was meant to be a transformative project. Like the missionary’s civilising mission before it, it would shake the tribe out of the nascent citizen, feed him on a diet of English and Kiswahili, wean him from poverty and disease. Successful, it would have been glorious vindication of the founding ethos, the national need for amnesia.

It was not successful. In fact, after a few earnest gestures, the nationalists themselves began to actively sabotage their own project. Broke when they inherited the state, they needed to eat. To do so, they formed networks of sub-nationalist privilege that operated on the principle that the tribe – and therefore the tribal patron at the centre – was the unstated vehicle of distribution of public resources. Nationalism became a byword for private accumulation.

ANY CONVERSATION of the past is therefore deeply uncomfortable. It is the closed realm in which the personal stories of an ageing political elite are too closely entwined with a public, collective history. Opening it up would force the wenye nchi into an accounting process that they would no doubt rather avoid (wenye nchi means they who own the country, as against wananchi, people of the country, ie, citizens).

Time is on their side, and history returns the second time as farce. It was perhaps a mark of how mysterious these histories had become – how thick the blanket of national amnesia that covered the past – that, soon after NARC came to power, the public was treated to a series of historical faux pas.

One of NARC’s first orders of business was the search for Dedan Kimathi’s grave – in order to exhume the Mau Mau leader’s remains and give him a hero’s burial. The writer Andia Kisia had a year before written a story with an alarmingly similar scenario. Called A Likely Story, she describes the search for Kimathi’s grave. It ends in farce. While digging around the Kamiti Prison grounds, it slowly becomes clear that nobody can actually remember where Kimathi was buried.

Fact proved as strange as fiction. In the event, a highly political event graced by Cabinet ministers, nobody could remember where he was buried. His bones have never been recovered.

Then a man was brought in from Ethiopia and presented to the public as the disappeared Mau Mau hero, General Stanley Mathenge. That act in itself, taking a survivor out the national closet – with all his pent-up secrets, his 50 years of anonymity – seemed to confirm that NARC’s victory over 40 years of Kanu rule was the key to opening up the past.

It was not to be. After a few nervous days in which he was presented to the public and then to his family (who tearfully embraced him) “General Mathenge” couldn’t take it any more. He revealed that he was actually Lemma Ayanu, an Ethiopian peasant farmer.

In perhaps an even more comical display of national amnesia, he was dispatched to the national laboratory and DNA-tested, then swiftly sent back to Ethiopia. The results were never publicly released, a little detail that betrayed the fact that the soul of the new regime was still as paranoid as the old one. And as if to emphasise that NARC was largely a collection of the same old wenye nchi in populist disguise, the promised exercise of opening up the past through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was quietly dropped.

But still. The fact that at least three books touching on Kenya’s colonial experience have been launched in Kenya in the space of 18 months would seem to suggest a limited admission of the need for a national conversation on the past. The launch in Nairobi of Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, The British Gulag by Caroline Elkins and Moving the Maasai by Lotte Hughes would not have been possible under either Kenyatta’s or Moi’s Kanu.

All these books are loaded with the seeds to plant Kenya’s fraught and tragic histories firmly in the present. They are, each one of them, highly successful experiments in a kind of forensic investigative history. They name names, they profile victims, they point accusing fingers.

In my heated imagination, I envisioned the wenye nchi scampering around for places to hide, hastily launching cover-ups, Commissions of Inquiry. Instead, the expected swords turned to ploughshares, only furrowing the ground of a dormant nationalist imagination. Among the invited guests to her book launch, Caroline Elkins had included the vice-president and the First Lady, both of whom declared the books tremendously useful, in the way that you would describe returned museum artefacts.

What had happened?

Two things, it seems to me. First, the nationalist moment has passed; the fervour with which the past could be used to flay the skins of the saboteurs of nationalism no longer exists. The past has lain under the carpet for so long, it seems to have rotted away and died. In its place is a growing sub-nationalist culture, in which the survivors of colonial injustice seek to point their victimhood in a more profitable direction: British courts and British society, both of which are writhing in the guilt of their imperial past, and which can be forced to pay for past sins.

Both the Mau Mau survivors and the Maasai activists are planning on making claims against the British government. In Andia Kisia’s A Likely Story, historical documents are missing. The protagonist, a man driven to frenzy by his search for the truth, soon discovers why. There is an official who is eating them. He catches him at it.

A similarly Kafkaesque culture of denial, disappearing and forgetting – as Maasai activists discovered when then lands minister Amos Kimunya told them to come back in 900 years if they wanted to reclaim their stolen lands in Laikipia – simply means that confronting the Kenyan state within the bounds of litigation and democracy is an exercise in futility. The Kenyan state only reacts to the vocabulary of mass mobilisation and violence. The Maasai discovered this quickly, when they demonstrated in 2004, attempting to reclaim Laikipia.

The second thing that happened is this: the books, all of them, are pointed in another direction. Their vitriol and indignation is part of an essentially British conversation about its colonial past. On the right of that conversation are those claiming the intrinsic good of Empire – its bequeathing of modernity to erstwhile savages. On the right are the likes of Hughes, Anderson and the American Elkins, who have uncovered British colonial frauds and crimes – the colonial swindle of the Maasai that paved way for British settlement in the White Highlands; the concentration camps and hangings that silenced the Mau Mau during the Emergency. Crimes that shatter the strangely enduring myth of “Empire as a good thing”, making British imperialism look like Nazi Germany.

In between right and left is, however, where the games begin – the contested territory of agency. Who speaks for the “subject races”, yesterday’s “savage natives”, today’s victim claimants? It is, as the writer Michela Wrong recently commented, ironical that the attacks on colonial infidelities and atrocities – on the white administrators who presided over the colonial project in Kenya and elsewhere – are coming from white Westerners:

We are white Westerners, which means that however we may empathise, however vicariously angry we may grow as we pore over old documents, ours remains an essentially intellectual interest. It wasn’t our ancestors who found their paths barred by prejudice, their lives shaped by laws and taxes devised by Africa’s uninvited guests.

It is a question fraught with Africa’s post-colonial contradictions. The collapse of the nationalist enterprise devalued such former prestige projects as research and, as said earlier, effectively silenced its more intrepid practitioners: the men and women detained and sent into exile for asking the most basic questions. The vacuum left has been filled by researchers in Western universities.

Their interest – in the subjects and the subject matter – may be intellectual, but that should not be confused with a benign interest. The territories they now possess are today in their way as valuable as imperialism’s most prized overseas possessions at the height of colonialism. And that doesn’t just refer to funding opportunities. By occupying this intellectual territory, Western academics in African studies departments are also managing perceptions – perceptions of what Africa is and how it can be engaged with.

People who import their histories are doomed by the failure of their own imaginations. Constantly acted upon, they will struggle with a lack of self-belief, and play out whatever roles are assigned to them without ever quite understanding their place in the world. This is the true meaning of “Third World”, the writer VS Naipaul’s “half-made places” that have failed to imagine themselves into an existence beyond the assignations of their former conquerors. The repossession of this territory is the new frontier for the African intellectual.

(c) Parselelo Kantai