Dedan Kimathi’s rebirth in new age

Kenya’s national liberation hero, Dedan Kimathi [File]

Kenya’s national liberation hero, Dedan Kimathi, died on this day, 65 years ago. The surviving members of that generation are few and unknown, thanks to the deliberate neglect orchestrated by subsequent governments. It’s important to note that the freedom movement popularly known as Mau Mau — and I’m using the term carefully — remained proscribed between 1952 to 2002.

Mwalimu Ngugi wa Thiong’o helpfully reminds us to identify people and institutions by names they use. The young men who went into the forest called their movement the Land and Freedom Army. The Brits, Ngugi says, concocted “a mumbo jumbo, Mau Mau,” which is meaningless, to diminish the group’s legitimate objectives, land and freedom.

A rabidly partial colonial British Press fanned the hysteria by focusing on the group targeted attacks on white farmlands as manifestations of what they called “African atavism.”

So many decades on, however, this abstraction of the Mau Mau has gained an interesting twist. The movement has ceased to be situated in a geographic locale, neither is it limited to the ideals of young men who went to the forest to plot the ouster the white man from our midst.

It has become an idea against oppression, in all its shades. And Dedan Kimathi remains its embryonic figure in death, as he was in life.