In remembering JM, let us build Kenya to be a better place for all

Portrait of JM, as Josiah Mwangi Kariuki. [File, Standard]

On 2 March 1975, JM, as Josiah Mwangi Kariuki was popularly known, was assassinated. In the 10 years from 1964, all the individuals who the Kenyatta regime or its expectant successor(s), believed, could be centres of an alternative leadership to them came to be assassinated. Among these were Mau Mau General Baimungi (1964), Pio Gama Pinto (1965), Tom Mboya (1969), Ronald Ngala (1972), and JM Kariuki (1975).

JM and Pinto had been Mau Mau freedom fighters and detainees. On their respective releases, they both brought into the arena of Kenyan political activity in Independent Kenya a critical composite of thought and action - the aims of the Freedom Struggle accompanied by the continued voicing of the demands of the Mau Mau ex-detainees for their implementation.

The 1963 Kenyatta Government was expected to fulfil those demands. But within the year, Kenyatta and his Government made clear that those promises were not in its programme, and worse, that it did not see itself as the representative of those who had fought and suffered for freedom.

They did not make JM a Cabinet Minister. For 20 years, he remained at the Assistant Minister level. It was Kenyatta's policy that no Mau Mau leader was to be privy to Cabinet secrets. Naturally, because the Cabinet was doing the exact opposite of what the Mau Mau had fought for.

In the succeeding years, the regime kept misreading JM. He saw through their pretensions to be nationalists on National Days, while they were only Loyalists. He saw through their pretensions to be Kenya's decision-makers, when they were only promoted Home Guards. They judged him by the measure of their own greed. They thought a person they had 'allowed' to become rich had, of course, given up the freedom objects. They thought a rich Kikuyu could not speak up for the rights of all other Kenyans. Since he was rich, they thought he had joined them.

They misread his politics too. Because in 1963-1965, he had not been a part of the powerful progressive Backbenchers Committee, nor, in 1966, joined Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and his new party, the Kenya People's Union (KPU), they thought his national popularity was dependent on them, the regime. They overlooked that he had held his seat since 1963 through three general elections, consistently with the largest majority in the House. They, further, did not credit his international political bases. His book, Mau Mau Detainee (London, Oxford University Press, 1963), partly written in former District Officer John Nottingham's house in Nyeri, and partly abroad, had given him powerful patrons in England.

After the 1974 General Election, the regime, in distrust, dropped him even as an Assistant Minister. They did not understand his continuing adherence to his practice, first in the camps, and now out of the camps, to speak up for the rights of others. JM's advocacy for the landless and those who had to remain poor by reason of the rapacity of a few, was a daily and unanswerable condemnation of the Kenyatta regime.

He was no longer a threat to Kenyatta as the president. But he would be a contender against those who saw themselves as Kenyatta's successor, or as the power behind the next throne. Three years later, Kenyatta himself died, and those who took power, had no competitor, formal or informal, like JM, to challenge them.

Today, Kenyatta Day has been written out of history. JM Day, however, continues to be voluntarily honoured. This is because the matters he spoke for were the true aims of the struggle for freedom, and the persons he spoke for, were indeed intended to be the biggest beneficiaries of freedom from colonialism. This is still a matter of relevance.Instead, benefits had been usurped by a coterie, which he refused to join, and this small group had made itself a government against its own people. Basil Davidson, one of Africa's most outstanding political workers and writers, wrote in Let Freedom Come (Boston, Little Brown, 1978, p.307): "The cases of J.M. Kariuki and Shikuku and Sironey illustrate this point, as indeed had that of Pinto, an earlier victim of political gangsterism in Kenya. Such men knew very well that the nation could not be built against the multitude, even if they had yet to discover how to build it with the multitude."

With the new 2010 Constitution, we have the tools to build Kenya with the multitude that is ourselves.