There is no right day to do a wrong thing. Yet, Kenyatta Day, as we previously knew today’s Mashujaa Day, is about the worst moment for Kenya Police to violently engage peaceful dissenters.
For, this day celebrates the spirit and detail of dissent in colonial Kenya. Conversely, it reminds us to stand up against bad governance and misrule, at all times. Those of us who have come from the back of beyond recall how the nation celebrated her heroes on the national day that was Kenyatta Day. We reminded ourselves of the now all-but-forgotten heroes of independence.
We walked down memory lane to recall the activities that peaked into the arrest of Jomo Kenyatta, Ramogi Achieng Oneko, Paul Ngei, Fred Kubai, Kungu Karumba and Bildad Kaggia. Their story was told so repeatedly that we got to know it almost the way you would know someone who lives with you in the same house. We lived with this story that our current leaders would want to wish away. It is instructive that the presidential address in Kwale last Sunday, for example, blindsided the Operation Jock Stock story of 1952. This is now the tradition. I would doubt that it is a factor of knowledge gaps in the State House.
They have their own wise men there, who should know Kenya’s history. In helping His Excellency, the President to craft his national day address, these wise people would remember that national days are about rededication to both historical and historic moments, and the spirit that informed the moments.
As part of that, they would also call attention to the grotesqueness of armed State apparatus throwing teargas at dissenting Kenyan youth. For, while President Ruto was leading the nation in Mashujaa Day activities in Kwale, some other Kenyans elected to have a parade of their own, in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park. They gathered to protest against the creeping draconian style of the Kenya Kwanza regime. They complained about what, to them, is a betrayal of the aspirations of Kenyans for self-determination and the struggle for independence in a gone age.
Today’s Mashujaa Day was previously named for President Jomo Kenyatta. Its significance was however much wider, Kenyatta only being the metaphor of the struggle. The name in no way belittled the contribution of other efforts to the cocktail of activities that eventually brought Kenya’s Uhuru in 1963.
At the start of 1952, Oneko and Peter Mbiyu Koinange carried to London a freedom petition signed in the ink of the blood of Kenyan patriots. The signatories pricked their fingers to draw the blood that made thumbprint marks on the document that called for the return of stolen lands and for independence. The dissent and agitation symbolised by these blood signatures peaked in October, following a series of nationalist rallies across the colony. On 20 October, the Kapenguria Six were rounded up, at the start of what would be nine years of forced imprisonment. The British unleashed heavy brutality against the African people of Kenya, in what was known as Operation Jock Stock.
Later, in April 1954, Operation Anvil would take this violence to a new high, especially in Nairobi and Central Province. Colonial brutality in Kenya has often been referred to as the African Gulag, for its cruel use of labour, imprisonment and detention.
About 320,000 Africans were detained in about 50 detention camps. In response, about 30,000 Africans fled into the forests to wage a war of resistance. Hundreds of thousands of others contributed to the resistance effort in other ways. Those in the forest even had their own Parliament, called the African Parliament. These are the heroes at the core of Mashujaa Day. The details and significance of their sacrifice get steadily forgotten by new generations at the centre stage of governance. This seems to be a factor of deliberate policy in ruling circles. President Ruto is on record as questioning the usefulness of history, even in our education.
When we see the Kenya Police in the streets on Mashujaa Day, doing to Kenyan youth the same things the colony did to their grandparents, we begin appreciating the place of history. Kenya’s story should be compulsory in our school system.
But that said, the irony of the government unleashing brutal force upon citizens on our heroes' day ought to be obvious. The heroes of independence must turn in their graves to see Parliament captured by the Executive, the Judiciary under pressure to surrender, and Citizen dissent demonised and brutally crushed. And all these by an African regime.
Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke
