Recording Kenya’s 50 years not an easy task

The end of one Kenyan history, the beginning of another?

By the time you read this review, the newspapers may have a headline like the title above.

There are Kenyans who will argue that the celebrations on December 12, marking 50 years of self-rule in Kenya, signify the end of an epoch and the beginning of another.

The cynics will say nothing much has changed and colonialism, not neo-colonialism as the new bunch of political noisemakers in town would rather have you believe, didn’t really go away. What we got in 1963 was flag independence, they will say.

The optimists, however, will argue that there are schools, roads, hospitals, blocks of houses, industries and even this newspaper, to show that we have developed.

I have been waiting for a record of these past 50 years by Kenyan historians, but I haven’t seen a compelling one.

What I have read recently is a collection of essays edited by William Ochieng’. A History of Independent Kenya, 1963 – 2013: A Celebration of Kenya’s Fiftieth Independence Anniversary (2013) promises a lot, but does not deliver much.

STATING THE OBVIOUS

Or I’d rather say that its nine chapters are not nearly enough to cover the 50 years of Kenya’s history that it claims to deal with.

Definitely there are chapters of the book that offer interesting insights into the life of Kenya and Kenyans in the past half a decade.

However, some of the chapters simply seem to restate the obvious — and why is it that historians tend to give very unimaginative titles to their essays?

In some cases, the chapters are too short and only whet the reader’s appetite, but leave one wondering whether history is merely a recording of the past events without much analysis of those events’ intertextuality.

In fact, the two chapters in the book written by Ochieng’ himself, ‘The Kenyatta, Odinga and Mboya Wars: 1963-1969’ and ‘The Mwai Kibaki Era: 2003-2007’ suffer most from the problem of brevity and seeming lack of critical analysis.

These are the obviously weak points of A History of Independent Kenya, 1963 – 2013, apart from the curse of poor editing and its too positivistic blurb, which reads like a government PR write-up.

But the book is worth reading for the simple fact that it is a record of Kenyan history today. History is generally important because it is a reference point for the living.

After 50 years of independence, Kenyans will go to either memory — individual and communal — or history in order to judge if their lives have progressed, stagnated or worsened since the end of colonial rule.

Therefore, although books of history may not be the most read at school or in our homes or offices, they are still quite important in helping us to remember and deal with our past.

I would argue that at the least, four chapters of A History of Independent Kenya, 1963 – 2013 will provoke significant debate for the readers of this book.

COLONIAL LEGACY

These are Robert Maxon’s ‘Independent Kenya’s Colonial Legacy’, Pius Cokumu’s ‘Jomo Kenyatta and the Politics of Transition, 1966-1980,’ Peter Ndege’s ‘Multi-Partyism and the Struggle for Constitutional Change, 1991-2002’ and John Lonsdale’s ‘Kenya’s History from Cambridge by Candlelight.’

This isn’t to say that the other chapters are insignificant. But these four stand out for the way they highlight specific issues in their own narration or in their style.

Maxon reminds us that neo-colonialism is as old as 50 years; Cokumu revisits the processes that led to the consolidation of power and authority around the Executive arm of the government;

Ndege highlights the insidious nature of multiparty politics in Kenya; and Lonsdale, in a requiem to Atieno Odhiambo, suggests that we need to revisit the ‘histories’ that make Kenya and Kenyans, as captured in his closing statement:

“Kenyans do not need to be told that they deserve much better of their governments. All the same, they could do with better, less divisive, historical arguments with which to teach their rulers some much needed civic virtue.”

And it is the question of the relationship between the ruled and the rulers that, I think, books such as A History of Independent Kenya, 1963 – 2013 are written to provoke.

I would say that the dearth of books on Kenyan history, written by Kenyan historians, is a reflection of our unwillingness to honestly look our politicians in the face and tell them that they have responsibilities that come with the offices that they occupy that they can’t shirk.

History is supposed to remind those in power that they shall be judged, in relation to the history that they are making.

DEBT OF HONESTY

But I would add that historians ought to be intellectually honest to their readers.

To that extent, I would have wished to see a revisiting of key issues that have made and may unmake Kenya such as ethnicity, widespread landlessness in Kenya, politics of centralisation of power, state-driven violence over the years, the burgeoning underclass, the complicity of the intellectual class in misrule in Kenya, Kenya’s foreign policy and the lost chance to influence the East African region etc.

Maybe the editor of A History of Independent Kenya, 1963 – 2013 didn’t plan to include these questions in this book.

Yet I would argue that these are urgent issues that will determine the future of the country in the next 50 years.

I’d say that tackling such histories, as Lonsdale advises, would be a fair beginning for Kenya’s next half century.