Maathai made real courage fashionable

At the zenith of their gory orgy in the late 1980s, Kenya’s then ruling party, Kanu, and its strongmen, cared little for the outright scandalous way they executed state power.

They killed and maimed many, destroyed private property and looted the national coffers with demonic abandon, while espousing platitudes about faith in God, family values, morality, love, justice, peace, unity and freedom for all.

They rigged elections massively and laid the economy bare. Nothing was sacred. They created the impression that they were unstoppable.

Corruption and terror became the centrepiece of their mode of governance. Alternative thought was criminalised and ruthlessly silenced through murder, torture, detention, dispossession or exile.

Kanu was not just a promise unfulfilled; it was a curse that had to be exorcised. But who would bell the cat?

We are indebted to Prof Wangari Maathai for bringing down the great wall of fear that had kept many in bondage, when she, a woman alone, challenged the Kanu vultures that were scheming to grab Nairobi’s prime Uhuru Park.

Though there had been many clandestine voices of opposition to the regime, this was the first time President Moi and his male chauvinist Kanu juggernaut were successfully taken head-on, in public, by civil society, and by a woman. They were stoppable after all!

The battle for Uhuru Park was a stinging indictment of our complacency. It prosecuted our banal acceptance of social, political and economic evils.

As a consequence, many were moved by the example to work against the forces that undermined our precious values.

The symbolic struggle challenged Kenyans to put righteousness, conscience, public morality and gender issues before social and political expediency.

It helped shape the values that culminated in the “unbwogable” revolution that saw the total rejection of Moism in 2002.

Though today we have gone back to a life, nay, existence of servitude, in 2002, Kenyans were no pushovers; they openly demanded high standards and drew bottom lines below which they would not live.

Thus, in a way, by standing up and telling President Moi that Uhuru Park was out of bounds for his avaricious greed and recklessness, Prof Maathai inspired many to press forward.

She made courage fashionable, more so, because she was a lone woman victorious against a cabal of male chauvinists.

Like others, I crawled out of the woodwork and wrote the play, Voice of the People, as my attribute to Prof Maathai. It won the 1991 Nairobi Theatre Academy’s Original Play Writing Competition.

But, despite the established practice of staging winning scripts, the French Cultural Centre in Nairobi (the sponsors of the award), declined to produce it.

However, the pain is not that it took 17 years for the play to be staged and published; the pain is that Voice of the People has not lost its relevance or timeliness. I feel like I was writing the play today, 20 years later.

As I shed tears for Prof Maathai’s untimely exit, I moan the fact that we ignored her message that it will take much more than soap and water and even blood and tears to clean the mess.