Why Muliro and Marx monuments get a lukewarm reception

On March 17, 2017, several academics and cultural leaders finalised talks to build a statue in honour of Masinde Muliro in Kitale town. This was meant to mark the 25th anniversary of Muliro’s death. He died on August 14, 1992.

Though Muliro was a freedom fighter and a national politician, one wonders why his anniversary is being organised by humble academics and not the political leadership.

Historically, it is not Muliro alone who is a victim of enforced oblivion. Petty bourgeoisie nationalism and political opportunism has struggled to make the world forget great leaders like Muliro, Makhan Singh, Chege Kibachia, Arap Manyei, Pio Gama Pinto, Ambu Patel, Elijah Masinde of Dini ya Msambwa, Ramogi Achieng Oneko, Paul Ngei and Joseph Murumbi.

This is why a researcher like Zarina Patel, in her book Unquiet, has to be appreciated for insisting on facts on Kenya’s history. Muliro believed in equality, gender inclusivity, peace, freedom from colonial oppression, zero-negative-ethnicity, equal access to land and economic opportunities as well as rule of law. These are these virtues of political liberalism that led to his strange death.

It has been a similar experience in Europe. The city of Trier in eastern Germany received a statue of Karl-Marx from the Chinese government to mark the 200th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx. He died on March 14, 1883.

Deutsch Welle, the online German newspaper, reported that Marx’s statue in Trier was received with mixed feelings. For one, China is not a model for democracy and human rights. Secondly, as one of the fathers of Marxism and Leninism, Karl Marx is a controversial figure whose writings served as the basis for a whole state form that turned into dictatorships. However, the sweeping generalisation that Karl Mark was a fountain of dictatorship is mistaken.

We always think of revolutions when Karl Marx is mentioned, but the truth is he had huge passion for romance and un-winded life. Karl Marx was born in a middle class life, enjoying privileges of being son of a lawyer and having a mother who was a university professor of mathematics. He read classics like Shakespeare’s King Lear at 17. At 23, he wrote poems. It was during this time that Marx wrote the love drama Oulauem. It was both farcical and tragical, a mixed drama.

This trait cuts across all the great warriors. They are always full of compassionate love more than military violence. Napoleon’s love for Josephine is such a testimony.

Marx was also gifted with the power of language acquisition. He mastered five languages early — French, English, Deutsch, Greek and Jewish. This is why he was able to write his famous book, Das Kapital in a foreign language and not his mother tongue, Yiddish.

Marx was brutishly a selfish lover. This is evinced in the love letters exchanged between him and Jenyy. His sense of passion for romance is also displayed through his efforts to write more than 1,000 pages of history of the famous European affinities 10 years before moving to London as a political asylum seeker.

Romance aside, Marx was also a mathematics scholar.

Reading The Marx He knew by John spargo, you notice Karl Marx was average in terms of intelligence but very hard working and book loving, fond of eating fish and comfortable with colour black. Black was his favourite colour. He was jovial and full of jokes, always smoking and taking whisky tots, but ever broke to the extent that he was financially at the mercy of his friend Friedrich Engels.

Marx was a poor planner at domestic level. Had it not been for the prudence of his house girl Helen Demuth, when it came to management of domestic finances, starvation would had killed him 10 years before his actual death. However, despite the domestic challenges he was a crowd puller, an astute unionist, an eloquent speaker, emotionally empathetic, playful, very sociable and warm in companionship.

In Marx and Engels through the Eyes of Contemporaries, written by an anonymous author and published by progressive publishers of Moscow, there is an interesting story that Karl Marx was reckless socially. One time when he was walking through the slums of northern London, he foolishly jumped into violent duel between a drunkard peasant and his wife. The peasant left his wife alone and began beating up Marx in a full rage. The peasant left Marx unconscious.

Masinde Muliro, as student of political science in South Africa, studied Karl Marx to a great extent. The values of equality and freedom that Muliro cherished were only overtones of Marxist consciousness. Even though a virtue of equality is the centre-piece of practical political liberalism heartily enticed in the modern world as evinced in the political culture of devolution and multy-partism in Kenya, still some intellectuals have the guts to condemn Marx and his followers. They are wrong.

The writer lives and works in Lodwar