It’s not surprising that we ignore genuine heroes and honour fakes

The late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. President Kenyatta on October 24, 2016 omitted him from the list of national heroes. PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Indeed, displacing Mashujaa Day with the previously celebrated Kenyatta Day and the shelving of Moi Day was an attempt at resolving our conflicted nationalism.
  • Unfortunately, most of our founding fathers saw themselves as custodians of their tribal interests first and leaders of the nation state second.

The decision by President Uhuru Kenyatta to publicly name a number of Kenya’s heroes during last week’s Mashujaa Day in Machakos drew understandable furore after he omitted the names of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, his son Raila Odinga, and other notable stalwarts such as Tom Mboya and Bildad Kaggia.

Whether this was deliberate or not is hard to tell, but what the incident reveals is Kenya’s troubled articulation and imagination of its nationalism.

Indeed, displacing Mashujaa Day with the previously celebrated Kenyatta Day and the shelving of Moi Day was an attempt at resolving our conflicted nationalism.

For close to five decades, our idea of true nationalism was not only defined narrowly as comprising only politicians but was also a discursive strategy in excluding and including others.

As historian Atieno Odhiambo explains, at the heart of the debates of what constituted a nationalist, or which group comprised the nationalists, were poorly concealed claims at controlling the State.

In other words, those deemed to be the true heroes not only had the right to rule but also the divine right to the most succulent portions of the proverbial matunda ya uhuru.

Many have assumed that the Mau Mau have a head start as Kenya’s true heroes.

But there is little historical evidence that the leadership of the Mau Mau had the capacity to imagine the Kenyan State as it is presently constituted and thereby fight for its liberation.

Kenya was a colonial invention, not Mau Mau’s. It is more accurate to locate the Mau Mau campaign, which was crushed several years before Kenya attained independence, as a peasant revolt rather than a national campaign.

As the historian David Anderson documents in his landmark book, Histories of the Hanged, much of the aggression of the Mau Mau was directed at the local population deemed “loyalist” than its imagined enemies, the British occupiers.

The troubling aspect of the Mau Mau narrative is that it is occasionally used as a front to excuse and legitimise some nefarious form of ethnic claims to State largesse.

DUBIOUS CREDENTIALS
Since those who bore arms and braved the forests could not legitimately represent Kenyan nationalism, the founding fathers positioned themselves at the apex of Kenyan nationalists.

Those who participated in the Lancaster conference cast themselves as the “real” nationalists, with the Kapenguria Six occupying an elite status as a kind of “first among equals” in this group.

They had the advantage of being educated. With negotiations on independence hinged more on the readiness of the African elite to assume control than on specific violent agitation, Jomo Kenyatta and his educated colleagues had a clear head start.

Unfortunately, most of our founding fathers saw themselves as custodians of their tribal interests first and leaders of the nation state second.

Worryingly, these newly-proclaimed nationalists selected not to disrupt the colonial economy but instead benefit from it, especially through massive land acquisitions.

It is at this point that the likes of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Bildad Kaggia broke ranks with the “nationalists”.

The publication of Not Yet Uhuru by the former vice-president not only marked the birth of Kenya’s left-wing, socialist politics, but also formed the platform from which a group of Kenyans began to agitate for a more equitable, distributive form of politics.

As historian Daniel Branch explains, while Jomo Kenyatta and, by extension, the politically-inclined Right that still rules Kenya to this day preferred politics of identity where emphasis was on representation their counterparts, the Left, led by Jaramogi Oginga, Bildad Kaggia, and later Raila Odinga, consistently agitated for distributive politics.

Although political power continues to elude them, the passage of the new Constitution in 2010, whose defining feature is devolution, was both a moral and political victory for Kenya’s ideological Left.

Thus, while it seemed odd that President Kenyatta failed to acknowledge their contribution, it draws from a fundamental historical argument.

A cursory look at our history school books at how we name our streets and the statues we erect reveals that we have many times honoured people of dubious nationalistic credentials.

Dr Omanga is head of the Publishing and Media Studies Department at Moi University. [email protected].