Honouring Kenya's heroes while citizens struggle to exercise their rights

The symbolism of public life is sometimes too eloquent for comfort. Consider a nation gathered to celebrate its heroes. The Head of State presides over a remembrance of those who fought for freedom.

A biography of one such hero is launched amid the solemnities of national commemoration. Speeches are made, memories invoked and sacrifices acknowledged. Yet, beyond the ceremonial space, some citizens are confronting the coercive power of the very State that claims the inheritance of liberators!

What should we make of such a moment? What happens when a society celebrates its liberators while its present institutions reproduce the very injustices against which those liberators struggled? What does this contradiction reveal about all of us who participate in the rituals of national remembrance?

These are not merely questions about the conduct of a president or the propriety of a particular public ceremony. They concern the relationship between history and power; memory, legitimacy, freedom and its unfinished promises. Ultimately, they concern the moral health of a nation.

On Mashujaa Day, October 20, President William Ruto launched The Price of Freedom, the authorised biography of Achieng’ Oneko. Oneko was one of Kenya’s foremost heroes of independence. He gave up nine years of his youth in detention so that Kenya could be free. The Kenyatta State detained him for a further six years because he questioned the direction the country was taking after independence.

The chronicle of his life is more than a welcome addition to the national liberation archives. The launch brought together the national leadership, the Oneko family and those involved in preserving the memory of a generation that confronted colonial excesses and postcolonial misrule. It should have been an uncomplicated occasion to celebrate the life of a man whose political journey was inseparable from the struggle for freedom. Yet the circumstances surrounding the commemoration presented a difficult picture.

In Nairobi, police were confronting citizens protesting against rising petroleum prices. Television images showed journalist Francis Ode being manhandled while covering the demonstrations, despite identifying himself as a journalist. The previous day, the withdrawal of security personnel assigned to Trans Nzoia Governor George Natembeya had raised questions about the relationship between political disagreement and State protection. In Meru, disorder accompanied former governor Kawira Mwangaza’s attempted attendance at local Mashujaa Day celebrations.

These incidents arose in different circumstances. Perhaps they should not be collapsed into a single narrative. Each requires its own evidence, context and accountability. Yet, considered together against the backdrop of a national celebration of freedom, they invite an uncomfortable question about the condition of citizenship in contemporary Kenya.

What does it mean to celebrate freedom fighters in stadia and State lodges while citizens struggle to exercise their freedoms in the streets? What is the relationship between the liberty we commemorate, the liberty we desire and the liberty we permit?

A nation may, of course, celebrate its past while contending with present imperfections. No political community has fully realised every promise of its founding. The difficulty arises, however, when the gap between national ideals and contemporary experience becomes so conspicuous that the ceremony itself begins to illuminate the contradiction it was meant to transcend.

The biography of Achieng’ Oneko thus entered public life at a moment when the meaning of freedom was not merely a matter of historical recollection. Kenya’s freedom was being contested in the streets, in the relationship between citizens and police, and in the difficult space between political authority and dissent.

Oneko’s experience reminds us that freedom was never simply a change in the identity of those occupying State House. It was a struggle over the terms on which Kenyans would live, speak, organise and exercise political agency.

The significance of such a life cannot be confined to the moment of independence. Nor can its meaning be exhausted by a national holiday, a commemorative speech or the unveiling of a biography. To remember Oneko seriously is to confront the historical circumstances that made his struggle necessary. It is also to ask what independence was expected to change, what it actually changed and what remains unresolved.

Colonial authorities claimed the right to govern a population whose political aspirations they did not recognise. Their instruments included coercion, detention and the suppression of dissent. Nationalist resistance challenged not only foreign rule but also the denial of the people’s right to determine their collective future.

Independent Kenya inherited the institutions of the colonial State. Yet independence also carried the promise of transforming the relationship between those institutions and citizens. This is where historical remembrance gains moral weight. The point is not to suggest that colonial Kenya and independent Kenya are identical. Their constitutional arrangements, political circumstances and historical contexts are different. To erase those differences would be to abandon historical understanding for rhetorical convenience.

The point, rather, is to recognise that the question of arbitrary power does not disappear merely because the flag has changed, the national anthem is sung in a different political setting or the custodians of authority are drawn from the formerly colonised population. The difference between the independence government and colonial rule risks being one of degree rather than style and substance!

It is always useful to remember that the Kenyan State that emerged from the liberation struggle inherited more than offices, buildings and sundry instruments of government. It inherited the obligation to justify its authority differently from the regime it replaced. The struggle for freedom, therefore, cannot be regarded as a historical account permanently closed at independence and remembered only through symbolic performances once or twice a year.

Moreover, there is something especially revealing about the spectacle of a sitting president launching the biography of a man associated with resistance to authority. There is nothing inherently improper about such an arrangement, regardless of who the president is. A president such as William Ruto can honour a nationalist like Oneko, whose political convictions differ significantly from his own. Maybe there is nothing wrong with that.

Likewise, a family may welcome presidential recognition of its relatives. Families must be allowed to remember their dead without having their motives appropriated by political commentators. Publishers and families may also regard the presence of the Head of State as an astute opportunity to introduce an important historical life to a wider audience.

A ceremony may therefore serve legitimate purposes, even when the political circumstances surrounding it are contested. Yet, do public ceremonies do more than honour their immediate subjects? Do they create associations? Do they place people, institutions and ideas within a common symbolic orbit?

When a president launches the biography of a freedom fighter, the ceremony may suggest continuity between the liberation struggle and the current government. The presidency presents itself as a custodian of the national story, while the historical figure lends the occasion the authority of sacrifice and courage. But what happens when the conduct of the present State becomes the subject of criticism precisely because citizens believe their freedoms are being compromised?

The danger is that the prestige of the historical struggle may be transferred to the present government without a corresponding examination of whether the conduct of the ruler and his administration meets the standards that gave the struggle its legitimacy. Political power can, in this way, inherit the glory of resistance without necessarily inheriting its discipline!

The past becomes a source of legitimacy rather than a source of obligation. The freedom fighter is celebrated for confronting an unjust authority, but the implications of that courage are stillborn when it comes to the present authority!

Is this a conscious, self-gratifying strategy, or is it a dark spot in the leader’s psyche? Is it hypocrisy on President Ruto’s part, or is his private conscience undisturbed? Whatever the case, the public meaning of a ceremony cannot be confined to the intentions of its organisers. It must also be considered in the light of the political circumstances in which it occurs.

The question is not whether President Ruto is entitled to honour Oneko. It is whether his decision to honour this great Kenyan invites a meaningful reckoning with the values Oneko represented.

All societies have complicated relationships with their heroes. The dead hero is often easier to celebrate than the living. A dead freedom fighter cannot organise a demonstration, challenge a government policy, expose an abuse of authority or demand an explanation from a sitting president. The historical figure can be commemorated, quoted and placed on a national pedestal without presenting the immediate political inconvenience that a living dissenter might pose.

In death, the radical may become respectable. The troublesome critic may become a national treasure. We have seen, following the death of Raila Odinga, how a person once regarded as “a threat to public order” can be transformed into an emblem of patriotism.

Such remembrance carries the risk of domestication. A life that once disturbed the established order can be reduced to a reassuring story about national unity, stripped of the conflicts that made it historically significant. The hero is celebrated, but the unsettling questions he raised are ignored.

The ceremony then becomes a form of political comfort. It allows the nation to feel that it has honoured its history without necessarily confronting the obligations that history imposes on the present. The paradox is that the more enthusiastically a society celebrates its freedom fighters, the more important it becomes to ask what, precisely, it is celebrating.

Is it the acquisition of national sovereignty? Is it the courage to resist injustice? Is it the right of citizens to challenge authority? Is it the promise that public power must be exercised with restraint and accountability? If the answers are reduced to national pride, ceremonial grandeur and the invocation of distinguished names, remembrance risks becoming detached from the political substance of the struggle. The freedom fighter becomes nothing more than an ornament of the State. He no longer represents a standard against which the State should be judged.

For the author of a biography, these questions are not entirely abstract. A biography is an act of historical interpretation. It brings a life into public view, reconstructs circumstances and invites readers to consider their significance. The author must exercise judgement over evidence, memory, testimony and competing interpretations. But once published, the book enters a world the author cannot control.

Families have their own memories. Publishers have commercial and institutional interests. Governments may seek to recognise historical figures. Readers draw lessons that may differ from those intended by the author. Public ceremonies place the work within political contexts that may be beyond the author’s choosing.

This is part of a book’s life. It does not automatically compromise the author’s work. Yet can the author reasonably ask whether a particular occasion gives the work a symbolic meaning that sits uneasily with its substance? In the case of The Price of Freedom, President Ruto’s decision to launch the biography alongside the Oneko family created a public association between the contemporary presidency and the memory of a man whose life was bound up with the struggle against colonial authority.

As the author, I was not part of this event. I make no claim that my absence changed anything. Nor has it altered the political circumstances or demonstrated any superior moral courage on my part. I do not presume to judge the motives of the Oneko family, the publishers or those who attended. Each party had a right to its own considerations, relationships and responsibilities.

But my absence reflected a personal discomfort with the symbolism of the occasion. I struggled with the prospect of seeing a work about the price of freedom incorporated into a public celebration at a time when the exercise of freedom in Kenya today is itself the subject of troubling questions. The president insults those who dare to question him. Media houses are attacked by hired goons. Their sin is telling the truth as it is.

The issue was not the president’s right to participate in the commemoration of a nationalist. It was the contradiction I perceived between the values embodied in the book and the public circumstances surrounding its launch. There is an important difference. An author does not own every interpretation of a book, nor does authorship confer a monopoly over the moral meaning of a historical figure. But an author remains entitled to consider the associations in which their work is placed and to decide whether they are comfortable participating in them.

That is not a claim to moral superiority, despite the author’s ownership of moral rights. It is an acknowledgement that intellectual work is not always separable from the conscience of the person who produces it. The difficulty is to maintain that distinction without turning personal discomfort into a verdict against everyone else.

Perhaps the most honest response is to acknowledge that we all negotiate the tensions between principle and participation differently. Some may attend a ceremony in the hope of advancing historical recognition. Others may participate while remaining critical of the government. Still others may decide that their presence would communicate an endorsement they cannot offer.

The question is not necessarily which individual emerges morally vindicated. It is whether we can discuss the contradiction honestly without reducing one another to caricatures.

This brings us to the larger question of complicity. Public life is sustained by countless acts of participation. We attend ceremonies, accept honours, sit on committees, join delegations, appear on platforms and lend our names to institutions. Such participation is often necessary and entirely legitimate. No society can function if every public association is treated as an absolute test of ideological purity.

Yet participation is not always neutral. A ceremony can confer legitimacy. An endorsement can reassure an audience. A distinguished name can help an institution present itself in a favourable light. A historical figure can be invoked to suggest continuity between the moral authority of the past and the political authority of the present. The challenge is to determine when participation advances a worthwhile purpose and when it risks obscuring a contradiction that deserves attention.

There can be no universal formula, of course. Yet do intellectuals, publishers and public figures have a responsibility to consider the meanings their participation may convey? That responsibility does not require them to withdraw from every imperfect institution. It does, however, require them to resist the assumption that ceremonial inclusion is always politically inconsequential.

In all this, a mature political community should be capable of celebrating freedom fighters while also permitting citizens to criticise the government on the same day. Indeed, the two activities ought not to be contradictory. The right to dissent is among the very things that make the memory of Oneko worth preserving. If we can honour the dead only when the living are silent, we have misunderstood the inheritance of freedom.