The Wagalla Massacre; the murders of Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, Robert Ouko, Pio Gama Pinto and Tom Mboya; the rape and slaughter of innocent Kenyans in the 2007-2008 post-election violence; the torture and detention of opposition leaders in the 1980s and 1990.
Our history is replete with shameful and dark periods, when those controlling State instruments and forces of violence lost their humanity, and tolerated extreme acts of cruelty and barbarity that have defined our politics to this day.
A significant number of voters who will cast their ballots under the new Constitution next year, are Kenyans born long after many of these atrocities were committed.
But their parents and grandparents who lived through those tumultuous times never forgot, and have no doubt retold the stories to their children and grandchildren. The injustice was seared deep into their memories, their conscience defined by the lack of closure, and the trauma permanent.
In the case of the Wagalla Massacre, where men, women and children were shot in the back, and many of the wounded left to die of heat and thirst in the desert sun, painful memories have defined how their communities view the State, and their relationship with it.
There are some who even say the assault defined the way governments since then related to this region.
Pandora’s Box
Successive governments glossed over many of the violations listed here. For far too long, they have been taboo, buried in the precincts of Pandora’s Box too politically sensitive to open or touch.
But a nation that does not confront its past and deal with it decisively lays the brickwork for trouble farther on. There are so many bitter memories and too much pain left to fester through generations.
The collective psyche of our nation has remained in suspense over these horrible truths, too fearful to lay bare the depths of depravity to which our leaders, past and present, have sunk.
The hacking to death of innocent travellers on the Naivasha-Nairobi road, and the families who were locked up in their rented houses and burned to cinders during the height of 2008 post-election chaos, are no different from those in the North Rift who fell under the arrows and machetes of militias.
This is a reality, and though time is indeed a healer, its powers work only if justice is seen to prevail. Time has come to find closure, and we have a window of opportunity that is slowly closing.
Past injustices, if not corrected, have a way of resurfacing and biting us many years later. In a sense, tackling these matters may help us as a nation to finally define who or what exactly makes us Kenyan, and set us on the way to truly becoming a united nation.
As things stand, wallowing in politics of tribal division, we are in danger of moving forward, yet actually remaining on the same spot.
The past is never far away. When we rubber-stamped a new Constitution, it was assumed we had left the past behind us and forged forward, and that all was forgiven and we could start anew.
That turned out to be wishful thinking. If anything, the constant wrangling in the Grand Coalition Government is more about our leaders seeking to right what each perceives to be wrongs of the past, than about political principles — they have none.
When wooing investors, Government trumpets Kenya’s peace and tranquility as one of the selling points, yet none other than the Executive is now asking our envoys to lie to their host governments that Kenya will explode and threaten the entire East African region, if the International Criminal Court investigates or summons six men over the post-election violence.
Closing the door
Even worse, one of the accused is among the technocrats helping the Executive to pick the head of the Judiciary that would decide his fate if indeed the UN Security Council votes to defer the cases of the ‘Ocampo Six’ for 12 months.
Who and what should we believe anymore? Are we really safer now? And can we expect a more secure future today compared to five years ago?
Yes, we have a new Constitution that seeks to guarantee respect for human rights by the State as non-negotiable, but words alone are not enough.
When the Executive shelved a Bill seeking to indemnify from prosecution those accused of historical injustices, such as the Wagalla Massacre, he closed the door on any chance the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission had of turning the page on this chapter.
The fight to defer the cases now before the ICC is thus merely an extension of the battle between forces seeking to bring closure to past acts of gross impunity, and those so frightened to confront the truth.
