By Barrack Muluka
The tragedy of going to school is that you cannot deny that you sat in the same class with some people, even when the only memorable thing about them is that they lowered the class average in everything, including in the final examination. But such is, in fact, the tragedy of life generally. You cannot run away from history, least of all your own history.
Your history follows you everywhere, like your shadow. That you may be temporarily in the dark does not mean that you do not have a shadow. Soon enough there will be light and with it the shadow of your history springs back into visibility. But, again, such is the beauty of history. Nothing gets lost forever, no matter how well anybody may try to distort it or to hide it. Eventually, the truth must come out. And so Thingamajig who went to school with you and lowered the class average may want to distort history. He may want to deny that he was squarely responsible for the lowered class average. He may even write in Thingamabob Times, discovering flashes of verbal brilliance that were not there when he was lowering the class average. The tragedy is that beyond the prolix and ventilation of sentiment there is nothing else. You begin understanding why the class average did what it did.
Such is the experience I have recently had when my attention was drawn to Thingamajig who had written in Thingamabob Times, complaining that Yours Truly has said he should love to read the story of colonialism in Kenya, as told by Former First Lady, Mama Ngina Kenyatta. The story of colonialism in Kenya is a reality we cannot run away from. It is informed by material facts. Opinion free, the facts are sacrosanct. One is that families in central Kenya responded to colonialism in one of two ways. Mau Mau literature is replete with a galore of examples. You can read it in the writings of scholars like Bruce Berman, Frank Furedi, Tabitha Kanogo, Wunyabari Maloba, Bob Maxon, David Throup, Ben Kipkorir, David Goldsworthy and a whole range of historians. Or you could turn to Ngugi wa Thiong’o in literary works, alongside others like Meja Mwangi, Stephen Ngubia, Mugo wa Gacheru, Micere Mugo, Charles Mangua, Peter Kareithi and others. Then there are biographical writings by people like J.M. Kariuki, Bildad Kagia, General China, Henry Mworia, Gakara wa Wanjau, Maina wa Kinyatti and others.
The facts do not change. There was such a thing as collaboration and resistance in colonial Kenya. Indeed, in colonial history in Africa, we read of African collaborators with colonialism and African resisters against colonialism. There were chiefly families and there were Mau Mau families in Kenya. We cannot deny that. For whatever reason, the chiefly families collaborated with the colonial administration. This was not just in Kenya but throughout Africa. The collaborators in Kenya have gone down in history as the "home guards". Now, we cannot begin engaging in latter day historical revisionism and start lionising home guards.
This is regardless of whatever the perceived short-term gains may appear to be, or conversely, the short-term adversities of not pretending along with everybody else.
In Kenya, the brunt of British colonial brutality was most felt in Central Province. There were more than enough home guard families oppressing the people of central Kenya at the behest of the colonial master. Thingamajig thinks that to say of a family whose patriarch was a colonial chief that their father was a home guard is to libel their heritage. What tragic mischief! Facts are sacred. A colonial chief was a home guard! You cannot run away from that. If your grandfather was a home guard, he was a home guard and that is the story of your family, period.
We may not necessarily judge your own character or performance on the basis of what your grandfather did or did not do, in his home guard capacity. Indeed, you may, yourself, even find that heritage revolting. Or you may have been a home guard child. You may want to give your own rendition of the colonial experience from that much reviled fraternity. In fact, so far the narrative from the chiefly family has been the missing link in the Mau Mau story.
I wish to restate what I have said elsewhere, following Mama Ngina Kenyatta’s disclosure that she would like to write a book on colonialism in Kenya. I cannot wait to read that story, on the basis of the fact that her father was a colonial chief. What was their experience? Perhaps it is time Kenyan scholars reopened the Mau Mau debates. As things stand, the remnants of the survivors of the colonial bullets (matigari ma njirungi) have taken their Mau Mau experience to London. They are taking the British government to court over atrocities suffered under the State of Emergency (1952 – 1960). It will be useful to know who stood where in those critical moments. Infantile whipping up of emotions such as some Thingamajigs are prone to do will not help.
At any rate, nobody can intimidate true scholars from doing what they must do for scholarship and for posterity. As for those who have been privileged to enjoy rare bounty by virtue of occupying state office, directly or by proxy, they must bear with us. We shall not stop putting you under scrutiny and interrogating your actions and motives.
Provided that is true and fair to all concerned, it must be said. But if you cannot take the heat, you should stay out of the kitchen. Meanwhile, those who claim affinity of whatever degree with scholarship would do well to be truthful. We are likely to respect you for the rigour of your arguments and the exactitude of your facts than for whipping up of sentiments and attempted generation of fear. If I were to write like William Shakespeare, I would say, "But I fear nothing, for I always be Caesar."
—The writer is a publishing editor and media consultant
