Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission should have given us more, not the expected

By Charles Kanjama

NAIROBI, KENYA: Six years ago, I read a copy of Caroline Elkins’ landmark book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, on the British response to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Elkins is an academic historian who conducted enormous research on the Mau Mau phenomenon, including more than 200 interviews with Mau Mau survivors, as well as home guards and loyalists, settlers and colonial officers.

Her book revealed a systematic and cold-blooded brutality on the feared Mau Mau and their sympathisers by the colonial officers with the approval of the British government and the collaboration of loyalist natives.

The sentiment I confronted most as I read the book was “suppressed rage”, maybe because I had always identified myself with the Mau Mau, occasionally declaring I have Mau Mau blood flowing in my veins. Quietly, I have also affirmed that mixed in these self-same blood vessels with the Mau Mau blood is loyalist blood as well as the blood of the early Christian converts who tried to stay independent, neither loyalist nor rebel, and thus suffered from both sides in the vicious conflict.

Ultimately, the Mau Mau war was a civil war, which left wounds in the psyche of the affected communities that silently festered and partially healed leaving hidden scars behind. The truth remained largely suppressed, justice largely abandoned and reconciliation superficially achieved.  And yet, isn’t this the way of all historical conflicts? Isn’t any attempt to reopen old wounds in reconciliation largely doomed to create new wounds of alienation, to work more injustice in trying to achieve historical justice? Don’t most efforts at historical revisionism end up generating new falsehoods as they seek to rebut ancient ones?

This was the difficult path tread by Caroline Elkins in her book. By focusing single-mindedly on the violent British response, critics accused her of downplaying the equally crude violence used by the Mau Mau in targeting their own people whom they tagged as traitors.

David Anderson’s landmark book, “Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the end of Empire” is thus more ambivalent, more conscious of the elusive nature of truth and justice in the historical and revisionist Mau Mau narratives.

Elkins’ difficult path has been retraced by Kenya’s Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC), which in its six-volume report attempts to set the framework for historical justice in Kenya’s fifty-year independence period. The TJRC Report, in view of the initial challenges faced by the commission in executing its mandate, is rather comprehensive and thus largely satisfactory. It is a report that deserves to be widely disseminated and patiently interrogated, especially since Kenya’s Jubilee year demands some form of historical reckoning as a prerequisite for renewal and re-engagement.

Of course, critics have argued that the TJRC Report has tended to focus on the persons or groups holding instruments of State power and not on others with equally large historical roles. That TJRC has tended to polarise Kenyan history into victims and violators, not recognising the multi-faceted reality. That TJRC has focused on evils and failures, without focusing equally on strengths and progress during Kenya’s 50-year history. Didn’t Kenya’s economic and political development, its institutional stability compared to our neighbours, and its increased potential, deserve greater emphasis by TJRC?

TJRC, for example, rightly recognises that there has been state-driven economic marginalisation. Yet, in a largely capitalist society, shouldn’t there have been greater mention of individual and community-driven economic progress? The TJRC report gives special focus to marginalised and minority groups, women and children. It rightly finds that “women have suffered terrible atrocities just because of their sex and gender.”

But isn’t it also true that men tend to dominate the front lines of conflict, and therefore suffer more direct fatalities and injuries, also because of their sex and gender?

The last paragraph in Elkins’ book reads: “To this day, there has never been any form of official reconciliation in Kenya... Insofar as there has been any successful social rebuilding, the burden has been shouldered by local Christian churches...”  This is the legacy that the TJRC Report is trying to confront. Hence its most important volumes are is its final two volumes, which focus on reconciliation and the implementation mechanism. The TJRC report deserves our continued attention.