Sometimes I think that the documentary continuum of the chronicled attempts of various Kenyan communities and leaders to articulate self determination according to their experience is all purely circumstantial.Why?
Because there seem to be no particular programmatic resolve, as it were, not visible organisational consensus that would contextualise the efforts of Kinjeketile, Samoei, Waiyaki, Kimathi, Olonana, Singh and so on. Even the outward rationale for their heroic deeds seem as divergent and disorganised as the four winds. Certainly, those folk never met each other. They never, under a tree, sat and had a 'consultative forum' replete with powerpoint presentations of 'focus group' desiderata, and 'stakeholder views' and 'expert opinions' so as to resolve at plenary to resist colonialism and all threats to their self determination.
What changes my mind about it is that the sum total, the culmination, if you will, of their discrete efforts was the last true effort to have the Black African have a say in how he is governed, and to declare personal and communal sovereignty in the exercise of all they considered to be their God-given rights. The ancient prophesies of a snake that would traverse their land, spawning pestilence, alienation, subjugation and poverty are, in all their myriad versions, an injunction against surrendering, even for a moment, what God gave to the Black person: his land, his body, his mind, his soul, his right to decide and his liberty. I disagree therefore that notions of personal and communal sovereignty did not exist in Africa prior to colonialism, just as i disagree with the assertion that we were lawless,godless benighted creatures. Different, may be. Without a doubt, we were a people, entitled to have a voice and a choice in the fellowship of human races. When, for utterly selfish reasons, it behove the imperialists to disregard our voice, it really was too bad. What was unforgivably atrocious was for our own flesh and blood to imagine and purport that the convenience of not hearing that burdensome voice was the 'fruit of Uhuru'. What remains repulsively branded on the brow of all post independence leadership is the perpetuation of that denial, that historical amnesia, the moral analgesia that resolutely refuses to acknowledge the suppresssion of self expression as the cause of all our dissonance, disconnect and trauma. Whilst time heals all wounds, it can do nothing about a stifling, festering, raw ulcer that is forcefully suffocated in the most insalubrious moral and institutional recess.
I will grant that all the voices have not died. They live in our shared history. They have been ably transmitted to us from our fathers, and to them from theirs, ad infinitum. Therefore, as I have had occasion to say before, in independent Kenya, we have fourth and fifth generation squatters. We have the great grandchildren of mau mau languishing in deprivation, 'Orphans at the Windswept Crossroads', whose forebears disappeared without a trace, or were castrated, raped and maimed.Today therefore, the Nandi Agreement of 1905, and the pain with which it was extracted, lives in us. The resultant marginalisation, disenfranchisement, displacement and alienation gnaws at the belly of little children yet uncomprehending of their dire straits. The persecution of Waiyaki and his ilk has translated into the most harrowing historical scourge yet on the face of this country, spanning 1952 and the Operation Anvil, Hola and Lari, Burnt Forest, Murang'a and Kwekwe.The travails of Olonana and the Enosupikia conflagrations are close sausal and historical counterparts.If we are unequal today, if we are vicious, if we are man-eat-man, it is not because african tribes used to raid each other in the context of healthy economic and political interaction. It is because the men who turned their backs on Waiyaki's unmarked grave, on the Maasai and the Nandi Agreement, and all other devices by which the Kipsigiis, Maasai, Coastal, Gikuyu and other communities lost their land, identity and sovereignty.
It is because today's economic and political system perpetuates and legitimises those brutal and cynical devices. It is because every time a tea estate is granted a 99 year lease by a county council, the raw abscess occasioned at the killing of Samoei is poked afresh. It is because every time we allow an 'investor' to build a zoo inside a National Park merely because he is white, we capture Olonana once more, expose his nethers to the jeering gaze of outcasts, bind his legs and hands and prostate him once more before Empire. And every time a young man is killed for being a Gikuyu in dreadlocks, we go back to the harrowing pain of Hola and other dark nights. And who will deny that we do this every so often? Who will say that we actually consider these acts to be in the public interest, in pursuant to our sovereignty, and for the benefit of all?
Who sanitised us, then? Who gave us the right to imagine that our duty to vindicate our forefathers is spent, is discharged, is somehow void? Who told us that title deeds are useful, that democracy is good, that the state is intact if we all conspire to ignore the putrid stench that make us afraid to look each other in the eye and talk about the rot as it is? And why do we imagine that the White Man has anything to do with any of it? Who told us that we can proceed to gleefully typecast each other in keeping with colonial stereotypes?
I am reading a copy of the Nandi Hills Declaration, by then member of parliament for Tinderet, Jean Marie Seroney, written on the 27th of July, 1969. What is interesting is that all those issues we redundantly claim to be 'Contentious Constitutional Issues', and 'Issues to be addressed by the TJRC' and 'Historical Injustices' and so forth, were as succintly enunciated in his Declaration as though we are feeling it today. Consider the following, and allow me to paraphrase.
1. "Our land belongs to us as ordained by God. Any one person, or cooperative, or company using it must know that he is only a tenant, and not the owner thereof."
That was the foundation of the much abused trust doctrine by which the Constitution vests all land in county councils to hold in trust for the residents of a given locality, and which gave birth to the trust Lands Act. Whether we live by its mandate and injunctions is another matter altogether.
2."The use of trespass laws to restrict the movement of Nandi Hills residents is unlawful".
3. "The Police are mandated to protect people's lives and property and to prevent the commission of crimes. A police officer must know that he has failed as a person and as a public servant if people take flight on seeing him, or he arrests and detains anyone without warrant without lawful cause, or searches people's houses and property with neither warrant nor lawful cause, or abuses his powers of arrest, persecutes innocent citizens, or is ignorant of both the law or his powers thereunder."
4. "It is not proper or valid for the government to include people who are not squatters in the allocation of land meant for the squatters."
5. "All legitimate laws throughout the world derive from the will of the people, therefore laws applicable or affecting the people of Nandi must accord with their wishes."
6. "The people of Nandi have never stopped agitating and desiring the return of their land from which they were forcefully evicted in 1905, and now that we are independent, want to be restored thereunto."
For his troubles, Seroney was thrown into the slammer and kept there without trial. Naturally, everything he said was treated with the contempt it deserved.
Now, I demand of each of us, breathing and reading this today, whether those are not some of the issues we have been hearing siku nenda, siku rudi all our lives.
What have we gained as a country, as a people, from sweeping these grievances under a carpet? We all know what is under that carpet any way. Clearly, we have always known it all, all along.
Seroney spoke 65 years after the eviction of the Nandi from their land, after Samoei, the leader of the resistance, was killed. I write this exactly 40 years after Seroney spoke.Clearly therefore, in those degrees of separation lie our shared knowledge; it is not a question of whether we know what ails us, rather, it is one of knowing when we will have the courage, honesty and integrity to deal with them and see it painfully through.
There is no need for the hypocrisy of disdaining our only real heritage just because it was first espoused by men and women in skins. As we know it, the half-naked primitive has sustained his eternal voice, which now pokes our consciences and consciousness everywhere, and is the unacknowledged presence in our State House, Parliament, Boardrooms, schools , streets and places of worship. Their curse, that we should suffer as long as we defy them, has caused us untold pain and suffering, and cost us lives and pride as a people.
With our present mind, where we want to reopen the never closed talk-shop, it is entirely feasible that 40 years hence, another, yet unborn child of this country will be asking the same question: WHEN, KENYA?
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