Reluctant academic’s ultimate descent from Cherangany Hills

On March 21, 2015, I sat on the back veranda of Dr Benjamin Kipkorir’s house to interview him. I was with my colleague Parselelo Kantai. This was a moment I had been hoping for, for almost a year.

I had wanted to interview Kipkorir as part of a personal attempt to understand the contribution of the first generation of Kenyan intelligentsia to the formation of Kenya: What did this generation do right or wrong, considering that Kenyans still speak of underdevelopment in the country when we had such an educated elite taking over from the mzungu?

Kipkorir asked us not to take long with the interview because, he said, he tended to get tired a lot.

But in the end, like the storyteller that all good historians are, Kipkorir spoke to us on a wide range of topics, from his generation’s anticipation of uhuru whilst at Alliance High School, tribalism, the issue of land, government devolution to remuneration of public servants.

THE LAST CONVERSATION

We didn’t know that this would be the last conversation we would have with a most articulate, self-effacing and amiable gentleman.

This is not a eulogy of Dr Kipkorir. That will be done by his peers, friends, those who knew him better, or his relatives.

This is simply a note of thanks for his honouring us with his last words and to remind the rest of Kenyans why they should read his book, Descent from Cherang’any: Memoirs of a Reluctant Academic (Macmillan Kenya, 2009).

To understand who Kipkorir was, one has to read his memoirs. Kipkorir appears in the book as a child of many worlds, histories and seasons, as Professor Bethwell Ogot — Kipkorir’s teacher at Makerere — aptly notes in the Introduction to the book.

He was a child of the tumultuous encounter between Europe and Africa.

As a child of Christians belonging to the African Inland Mission at Kapsowar, Elgeyo-Marakwet County, Kipkorir came into contact with Christian spirituality, literacy and new cultures.

From there he went to Tambach Government African School — where he was taught by Daniel Toroitich arap Moi, then Alliance High School before admission to Makerere University.

That academic journey is also a journey in the making of a future intellectual. But the journey also mirrors, in many ways, the history of modern Kenya. He is an example of how the colonial system created a new class of Kenyans, selected from all over the country.

This elite group met in schools such as Alliance, Mangu and Maseno. These young men – there were few women – would later become the intellectual, economic and political leaders of independent Kenya. Kipkorir’s later taught history at the University of Nairobi and headed the then Institute of African Studies before serving as the executive chairman of Kenyan Commercial Bank and later as an Ambassador, including to the USA.

But Kipkorir’s generation was also acutely aware of their double – or even triple – heritage. Colonialism had forced on different tribes the idea of a unitary Kenya. To become Kenyan implied suppressing one’s ethnic identity. Kipkorir’s generation had to deal with this ambiguity, especially when the education they got from institutions such as Alliance and Makerere, ironically, urged them to be proud of their cultural heritage, including the new, school-produced one. It is in this spirit that Kipkorir wrote his thesis on the production of the new Kenyan elite at Alliance High School.

If Alliance intended to produce ‘de-tribalised’ Kenyans and believers in the new country called Kenya, the likes of Kipkorir definitely had to live with their double identities – on the one hand attached to one’s people — the tribe — and on the other committed to the new nation, which demanded less fidelity to the tribe.

When we asked him to speak about the nation-state formation in the country, he calmly and eloquently insisted that whatever Kenyans think, Jomo Kenyatta was right in insisting on the colonial borders as marking modern Kenya, when he fought off Somali claims to northern Kenya and the Sultan of Zanzibar’s claims to the 10 mile Coastal strip.

Speaking as a committed nationalist, Kipkorir worried a lot about the unresolved land troubles in the Rift Valley, which he traces to the poor planning on the transfer of the former White Highlands to the new African ‘farmers.’

Kipkorir spoke passionately about the devolution of government, arguing that this was long overdue and should have been implemented after the recommendations of the Hardacre Commission of 1966, which had been appointed by President Jomo Kenyatta “to inquire into local government in Kenya.”

Hardacre report was shelved and the provincial administration was retained simply because it allowed the central government to rule unchallenged.

If there is any lesson to take away from Kipkorir’s life, as presented in his memoirs and from the interview I had with him, it is the belief that Kenya can work, if there are enough committed nationalists.

Throughout his book and in his responses to questions posed to him during the interview, Kipkorir had something positive to say and celebrate about every Kenyan community he spoke about, the individuals he knew and all the governments, from the first republic to the fourth.

He appeared to have an unfailing faith in the goodness of Kenyans, despite the often overwhelming cynicism and negativity that one encounters in public in the country.

He may have felt that his years at university were ‘wasted’, because he faced the daunting task of working at the Institute of African Studies without resources, was limited by the ethnic politics at the university in the 1970s, the bad blood between the university and government in the 1980s and the lost intellectual status of the university afterwards when there were increased admissions.

But one cannot doubt the intellectual integrity of Kipkorir, at least from the writings that he has left posterity.

Dr Kipkorir’s appointment as Kenya’s ambassador to Washington is a subject he was reluctant to talk about, even in his bare-it-all memoirs.

He wrote in the postscript: “The account of my ambassadorial appointment must, and will, be told. It is an account of promise, hope and despair; and occasional triumph and numerous disappointments… I urge the reader to bear with me for a while. The journey that I have travelled has been long but it has not yet ended.”

Sadly, he has now gone to the land from which no man returns.

The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]