We now have to argue ourselves and our compatriots into the idea of Kenya; to persuade ourselves of, and to think about, more deeply and with more clarity than we have ever had to summon before, the merits of this nebulous entity that we call home. 

We now have to fight for it; the honeymoon, such as it was, is over.  Before we do that, we had better know what we are talking about.  It is important to remember that no identity is fixed, no way of being oneself immortalised in stone.  Every morning, when we wake up, each one of us has to remember who we are, and act accordingly, gathering our recollection of self from memories, and dreams, from half-forgotten quarrels and recollections of things overheard, from our yearnings and loves and dislikes. We piece these little shards of reflected, refracted and remembered things together again every morning, to become ourselves.

In my professional life, I am most often perceived as a Black Woman.  This is the mantle I don, whether I will it or not, when I walk out of my house and onto a Toronto street.  The fault lines that I hide are comprehensively covered up by my skin: the myriad ways in which I pretend that it is not true, that Africans have an abiding contempt for African-Americans (I once had a Nigerian taxi-driver  in Washington D.C. tell me, talking of slavery and the Diaspora, that we "sold the ones we didn't want-it was good for our societies,"); that it is not true that Africans think we have a lock on ‘African-ness"-that we think we are the original Black, we are Mandingo and Shaka Zulu and Othello  and we are the soul-spring of humanity (I mean the other Lucy), and you had better cherish our rhythms and traditions or we will simply ridicule you back into our version of ‘authenticity'; that  it is not true that it I find it easier to talk to a white American academic than to a compatriot who cannot read, because Rousseau is important to me and so is Karsh and Van Gogh; it is not true that I and my interestingly-accomplished friends from the Kenyan, and larger African Diaspora secretly think that we are the favoured tenth of which W.E.B. Dubois spoke; and that it is completely untrue  that it works for us to come from dysfunctional  and poverty-ridden societies, because we are the obvious choice to (for a profit) interpret and explain and expound on our vexingly incomprehensible and violent African people to a morbidly interested West; it is merely by chance that my friends in Toronto are all white, and very smart, and very well-known. Or that they are all well-paid and well-behaved Oreo-cookie/coconut-type people like me (this epithet doesn't work so well here as I like real coconuts exceedingly well, and even I think Oreos with milk are outstanding.) None of us can be called poor, although we are virtuously not wealthy, either.

 I attempt to inhabit these circles of power in my life as if I am just a passerby, an innocent bystander, and most times, I even believe it myself.   I didn't set up these structures of power, and, although they seem to work for me, I have by no means endorsed them. The closed doors of racism that squeezed open for one brief instant to admit me were not of my crafting, I remark to myself often.  It is possible to pretend, if you are me. 

 I have to pretend all that, and I do it extraordinarily well: I perform ‘Professor Mwangi' with skill- even if I say so myself-- all the while knowing that I am massaging my own identity, that I am crafting the most plausible "cosmopolitan African" that I can, to maintain myself in my enviable position in the western economy and global marketplace.  I am an intriguingly-inflected academic (because I am a woman, and an African, and I don't comb my hair, and I tell my colleagues off for their racist behaviour all the time) who wields post-colonial theory with some verve, and to good effect.  I am able to deploy French post-structuralists  and German rationalists and Danish agonists because I have worked hard to acquire these abilities, and I deserve my nothing-to-do-with-being-Kikuyu reward right here on this rapidly-warming earth.  

I have Canadian-speaking dollars to spend in Nairobi. 

For many years, it did not occur to me that it might be important that I was from Central Province, that perhaps it was not an accident that I did so well in school; that my fortune in having, for a mother, one of the most extraordinary human-beings it has been my privilege to know was pre-arranged by historical injustice-none of this seemed important to me, because it did not seem to me that I had been given any Kikuyu-flavoured breaks or Kikuyu-tinged advantages.  I firmly believed that I had fought for all of it: that it was mine on merit-the whole shebang. 

It was definitely me, by my lonesome, swotting for those O-levels; I was absolutely all by myself when I gave that job-talk at another ritzy U.S. university; I remember eating beans for months at a time because I was so broke when I was a student in Montreal that I had to make a choice between food and electricity (githeri is still githeri even when you buy it in American supermarkets); nobody has subsidised my thoughts when I am able to hold my own in a room full of Ivy-League academics; I was factually and verifiably solitary when I was struggling to write that PhD dissertation-I did it all by myself, in a context in which nobody even wanted to try to spell "Agikuyu."   I merely happen to be from where I am from, and I just merely happen to own those damning syllables of my name:  I am an accidental Mkikuyu.

I weave this sort of story for myself-I tell myself these lullabies.  And so do all other even partially successful Kikuyus, of which there are many around the world (which is something to celebrate another day), who will not admit that to be a Kikuyu is to inhabit a loaded and favoured category.

Instead, I tell myself that I am just an innately competitive person-a personal trait I deplore, when I remember to-and that I just happen to have been extraordinarily lucky at the sorts of endeavours and projects to which I set my mind, because they tend to work. It is mere good fortune that I have all sorts of connections and contacts: I am a lucky person.  I just happen to be from the Central Province,  ahem!, actually from Nairobi,--my name just happens to be Wambui Mwangi, and it is sheer and flabbergastingly  a remarkable surprise that I have recently found out that my father once worked at the highest levels of Kenyan government.   It is all a coincidence-I had nothing to do with it.  Obviously not.  How could I have? I was not a conspirator in my birth; I did not collude with others here not named to add one more oppressive Kikuyu to the Kenyan mix.  I just woke up one day, and found myself here, in this skin and with this name of mine. I had one of those mothers who tell their daughters to shut up and just get on with it, get up and go fight life for your place in it, so I did.  Or I thought I had.

As we begin to gird our loins for the long haul, because we Kenyans have unleashed a force we cannot control, and we are in dire peril, let us take a minute to examine ourselves.   We are in danger here, but we also have an unprecedented historical opportunity to recreate ourselves in better ways.   As we take stock and look around us, and figure out new pathways to each other and to ourselves--in between dodging Mungiki, and the Nairobi Taliban, and figuring out how to navigate our towns and cities and farms anew, and how to craft new forms of speaking to one another--  one of the most important factors in the equation of our future is going to be the capacity of we Kikuyus to question ourselves.   I would suggest that it behoves others of different ethnic persuasions to do this too, but in these Kikuyu-battering times, I hesitate to offer this idea-I can feel my mind stuttering over this thought.  We are not in a position to demand this of other people, we Kikuyu; we have some logs to remove from our very own eye.

I say "we" with a sense of astonishment: this is not an identity I have ever cultivated.  This is not an identity that puts more ugali in my sufuria in the normal course of my life, and I own it now only because other people all around me are dying from it, as if it is an incurable disease spread through fire and the sharp edge of a panga.  It is very, very contagious, but I have my ways around it-I have exit and escape options.   I'm sure the Canadians will give me shelter if I beg for it, if I abandon my friends and family, as I might have to, one day.   I could even get away with claiming to be an Ethiopian-I would be safe as long as nobody asks me for an I.D-I have had this thought more than once in the last week alone.

 Still, I cannot deny that I am a Kikuyu when that is the reason that many people are dead and homeless; I cannot disavow this violently-granted place in our society when friends from other ethnic groups are finally speaking their truths.  My Luo and Kalenjin and Maasai friends are angry about many things I did not know about, and they are angrier still at having to explain them to me now, that it has taken all this for me to even ask the question.  It is an emotion I can understand-I feel that way about white people a lot of the time.  Oh yes, I have had these very thoughts myself:  about oblivious white liberals, who want to hold hands and just get along.  I have said those very sentences myself-the ones that begin with an indignant "it is not my job to educate you...."

I know well that mixture of contempt and exasperation, that fury-laden lament. How strange, to recognise those echoes, to come up against a mirror like that.  We live and learn.

***

We live, and learn, and grieve some more, and face each new day in ‘fear and sickness and trembling unto death.'  I do not know how much more of this I can bear: how many deaths, how many new tragedies, how many new instances of the unimaginable moral bankruptcy of our leaders I can force myself to accept as part of Kenya, as part of myself.  I simply do not know if I can stand another day of this unfolding nightmare.

Yet, through all this, I am aware that there is something here to be fought for, I am aware of a clarion call to stand up and be counted.  There is, in Kenya, something struggling for a space, something groping for a chance to speak, like a phoenix waiting to be born from amongst the ashes of our homes, like wildflowers on the graves of our dead.   So I will throw my lot in with those people fighting for justice and reconciliation, wherever I find them and whatever their names and places of ancestral attachment   I will raise my voice in defence of the truth, and I will offer what I can in the cause of a better tomorrow.  I will speak with all the honesty and power I can muster, despite my innate cowardice, which I also discover afresh each day.  

Each day my fear is waiting for me to put it on and walk into Nairobi dressed in it.

I will wish, with all the power of my longing, with my fiercest desiring, with all my dreaming and my dreadlocked stubbornness and will, for our voices to be heard.  I am an accidental Mkikuyu, but I will fight for the Kenyan corner with everything I have.  I am happy, for whole seconds at a time on any given day, to be among a throng of fellow-minded Kenyans, who have decided that we will not give up.  We fight, every day here in Kenya, for a remembrance of our better selves, and for a new way towards the Kenyan mosaic. 

Join this fight, and let us build Kenya anew.  Let us move forward, with principle and passion.  Let us translate our horror into healing, our terror into a new truth; let us show what we mean by The Kenya We Want.  I am banking on us, with all the credit I have accumulated in my soul.  Let us make ourselves heard: speak with all of your voices and strength.  Say: we are GenerationKenya.