Why restrict heroism to the activities of self-seeking politicians?

A British writer ordains that they also serve even those who merely “stand and stare”. So do members of the mass whom E.E. Cummings, the cynical American poet, once dismissed as “anyone”.

That is why, in Kenya, it is difficult to forbid mass rallies even on the pain of death. For the question is: If you did, what would happen to the institution of competitive elective politics?

If candidates had not frequently addressed public meetings, many of the individuals whom we nowadays celebrate as heroes and heroines of the struggles both against colonialism and against single-party Nyayoism would have remained completely unknown to posterity. I ask because it is often through such mass rallies that the public latches onto its future leaders.

Few Kenyans would ever have heard of the individuals who suffered and even perished during the protracted fights both against British colonialism and for the multi-party system. I don’t doubt the need to recognise many of them and even to offer those still alive a token of recognition both nominally and, in special cases, even in material terms.

Nevertheless, the universally accepted definition of a hero and a heroine – namely, as a person who has publicly demonstrated exceptional nobility, originality, courage and self-sacrifice, either in thought or in action or in both – does not seem to tally with the way that official Kenya handles the issue every year.

But, as an underdeveloped country, a national equivalent of the world’s Nobel institution would be one way of inspiring thought and invigorating technological inventiveness.

Had we, in the late 1960s, encouraged and publicly invested resources in Morris Tito Gachamba when this young Nyerian announced an initiative to create a flying machine, Kenya might now be a power to reckon with in the manufacture of and trade in such machines.

We might now have passed the stage of such earth-bound fliers as aeroplanes and be thinking even of colonising Mars and zooming in the direction of Jupiter.

But utter absence of encouragement from our elite and government to think in such terms seems to be part of the definition of underdevelopment.

To Kenya’s elite, to dare mentally in that direction seems like forbidden thought.

POLITICAL STRUGGLES

That is why, to our national minds, heroism appears synonymous merely with politics in the narrowest definition of that term.

To our official mind, you are a hero or heroine merely if you participated in certain political struggles before and after independence.

Yet, even independence is important only if it enables you to exploit your natural as well as techno-scientific potentials to create national economic and intellectual wealth freely. That is why, to my mind, only a person who has demonstrated exceptional ability in thought and exceptional courage in action should be called a hero or a heroine.

Yet, in Kenya, we perennially restrict our idea of heroism to the activities of the self-seeking politicians that Taban lo Liyong dismissed as Eating Chiefs.

If possession of more and more consumer goods is the only thought of all members of our educated elite, how does any one of them qualify as a hero or a heroine?

If members of that thought-class dominate all decision-making councils in our system of government, it is no wonder that they never think of investing in such long-term ideas as to make Kenya the first country to create a machine that can commercially transport human tourists to the moon, even to Mars, and back.

Had we encouraged and deliberately invested public resources in Morris Gachamba, might we not now be approaching Jupiter and walking on an equal footing with the United States of America, perhaps even importing to it such flying machines as glide “high there” like “morning’s minion” in what the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “The windhover”?

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