Farewell to personality cults and tribal myth-making

Friday, for ordinary Kenyans, is a moment of freedom. Independence in 1963 allowed ordinary Africans to cross Government Road and enter the hitherto prohibited European areas, but it did not take the oppressive yoke of the colonial state off their necks, nor did it level the playing field of opportunity.

On Friday, the yoke comes off and Kenya begins to dismantle the structures of neo-colonial privilege. Harold MacMillan, then British undersecretary for the colonies and a politician known for his prophetic pronouncements, visited Kenya in 1942 and predicted that there would be a peasant’s uprising within 10 years. He was accurate almost to the day for, by 1952, the colony was under a state of Emergency and disintegrating into a full-blown rebellion.

In 2006, the African Peer Review mechanism made a similar prediction, warning Kenya that its unequal economy, tribalism and defective constitutional order were driving it to a civil war. A look at the history of this country, a history of oppression and disinheritance, shows why the seeds of conflict are still germinating in its soil.

Europeans created their fertile farms by clearing the African bush of Africans. The war years in the late 1930s and early 1940s were boom years for colonial agriculture. As their farms became profitable, the settlers worked more of the land, kicking out their squatters with whom they had co-existed, and more settlers arrived.

Therefore, the more prosperous the country became, the more alienated became the Africans who were basically cultivators, and whose sole source of livelihood and social standing, for hundreds of years, had been tied to land. And the African population was growing.

Politically, being an African in colonial Kenya was a ghastly fate. The state was absolutely dictatorial and treated the African like wildlife: Yes, the state had duty of care, just as it had over the kudu and the giraffe; no, the African was simple-minded and incapable of taking charge of his own affairs.

Some historians have argued that the Mau Mau rebellion was actually a struggle for the control of the economy between the proto-capitalist Kikuyu and the settlers. That may be so. But history has underrated the personal injury that Africans felt at having to suffer the same social standing as a dog — and that too in their own land. The colonialist did not see any influence that the African could possibly exercise in his own government.

Pursuit of happiness

It goes without saying that the colonial state was not put together with the intention of creating an environment for Africans to find an expression of their talents, freedom or the pursuit of happiness. It was created for the purpose of controlling, suppressing and exploiting the African for his labour and his land for its resources.

To the African, the state was aggressive and oppressive. It functioned to empower and enrich a small community of Europeans, mostly at his expense. In liberation terms, the post-colonial state was an abomination. The new elite declared that freedom had come, but freedom for whom?

It had come for the fixers, the oily sycophants and the army of clerks, jobbers, home guards and other collaborators whom the colonial state had used in the exploitation and oppression of the African. For it is to this unholy cabal that the European transferred the colonial state.

The Mau Mau peasants, those who chose to die free, were disinherited a second time. When General Baimungi, among the last fighters in the forest, surrendered to independent Kenya’s government in 1964, he was shot and killed. Many fighters found that while they fought in the forest, their land had been confiscated and given to the home guards.

For them, Independence was not a victory, it was a bitter defeat and a monumental betrayal. It took 40 years for Kenya to build a monument in honour of Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi, the leader of the Mau Mau. The land for which the people had fought was expropriated by their leaders, who “bought” settler farms. Independence, therefore, brought little relief for land hungry peasants.

Politicians and senior civil servants became, and still are, some of the biggest landowners on the continent. The people did not get what they had formed a guerrilla army to fight for; their leaders did. Politically, the state never shed its colonial attitude towards the people.

The police killed without cause, the government jailed without trial. A deformed state, run by a small avaricious elite, unchallenged in its grip on power, robbed Kenya of its wealth and 40 years of its youth; years wasted on personality cults, hare-brained dictatorship and tribal myth-making.

It is a tragedy that this “eating” elite has managed to turn peasant against peasant, conning them that it is the peasants who have stolen each other’s land, creating instability and a climate of occasional murder, arson and rape. The Constitution, which created a state that protected these thieves was the great enemy of the people.

Today, we have killed it. The revolution that Macmillan smelt in the air in 1942, and which has festered for 68 years, is coming to its non-violent fruition. For the first time, the people of Kenya will truly wield power over their own lives, in their own counties. Never again will they be completely at the mercy of the politicians and their friends in Nairobi.

The rights of the citizens are unambiguous. The corrupt judge is breathing his last. The Kenyan nation is about to come to its inheritance; those who “bought” or inherited hundreds of thousands of acres of land will now have to put it to use and give some of it back.