Kenya - A Land of Opportunities Galore
The more I think about Kenya, the more I think how badly we have performed in terms of making Kenya a nation. Especially, in the fractious times we live in the world of the 21st Century.
To put things in context, all we have to do is to be honest about our history as a country. To start with, we hardly know each other except through the eyes of our colonial master who not only gave us a language of expression, i.e., the English language, but also a religion imported from Rome in order to bind us together without having to carry the moral issues of that religion, i.e., Christianity.
Let us start with history. The Brits came here around 1860 on a lie - to discover the "dark continent". Some of the first explorers to East Africa had names like David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, Johann Ludwig Krapf and Lord knows what other spies were sent to scout the land by good old Queen Victoria.
I still have been unable to comprehend why it took the Brits 300 years to realise that East Africa had an absolutely beautiful climate, fertile lands and gifted people way beyond the hunter gatherers living around the Cape of Good Hope. Remember, the first mzungu to reach that rocky cape did so in 1487 and they were trying to get to India the land of heavenly bliss and business opportunities. And he was a Portuguese - Bartholomew Dias.
Then another Portuguese, Vasco da Gama, discovered in 1494 that there was a nice place around Mombasa where they could build a fort and call it Fort Jesus - as if the Son of God needed a fort against African savages. But no matter. Some 380 years later, the Brits rediscovered it and realized what Vasco da Gama had missed - a land way beyond their wildest dreams. Far better than India, their then favourite destination.
Welcome Her Majesty's Reign
Queen Victoria was Queen of England between 1837 and 1901 and was the longest ruling monarch (64 years) since Britain became a nation on its own terms in 1066. The current queen, Elizabeth of Windsor, has been queen since 1952 and is the current record holder at 66 years a
feat unlikely to ever be surpassed by any king or queen. Interestingly, she became queen in Kenya at Treetops Hotel in February 1952 the same year a state of emergency was declared in Kenya.
For England itself, the next 800 years were a real mess for the "nook shotten isles", i.e., England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. If you really want to know about that turbulent history just read William Shakespeare's "Complete Works" which describes, in literary terms, a lot of the turbulence in England. A good book covering a total of 1,344 pages that he wrote before he passed on in 1616 at the ripe old age of 52 years. It is estimated that his works have sold more than 4 billion copies only surpassed by the Bible.
But, back to England. When, after a civil rebellion led by one Oliver Cromwell, Britain realized that it could not survive as a nation, it did the only tested and tried solution: Allow its citizens to migrate and discover new lands. Or force a few of them into penal colonies like Australia and Tasmania. And, of course, one of the first migration destinations is the current US of A where a bunch of adventurous men landed in 1607 in search of a better life away from the restrictions and tyranny of the King of England. The rest, like they say, is history. That is some 410 years ago.
Coming back to Africa, we have been around our foster mother's apron strings for just over 120 years including a measly 42 as a "colony and protectorate" (1920-1963). Coincidentally, that is the same number as our so-called "communities". And, not so loudly told, was how we were managed: some brutally colonized, others mercifully protected and some simply ignored as being incapable of either - that is our Northern Frontier District in case you forgot.
If you pause to think about it, we Kenyans should be a little bit more appreciative of our achievements. Especially against Britain. It took America about 170 years to get independence from Britain and that after a bloody war. That was in 1776. It took India 200 years to get rid of Britain. That was in 1948 after the unconventional war introduced by a strange liberator from South Africa called Mahatma Gandhi.
For us, it was only 68 years if you take it that we actually became a true colony in 1895 the year they started building the Kenya-Uganda railway.
Quo Vadis?
As we head for our eleventh election since independence, I can sense a palpable sense of desperation among some of our communities: that it is taking them too long for them to get a chance to rule. Too long? I ask. It is barely 55 years since independence and according to some political reasoning, we should have had 11 presidents by now each doing a statutory 5 years. Another way of saying 11 tribes should have "eaten" by now. Instead, only two have eaten: one for 24 years continuously and another one shared by 3 over a total of 31 years.
So where do we go from here?
In the 1990s, at the height of agitation for multiparty democracy in this country, I wrote an opinion piece for a local newspaper. The gist of the piece was that Kenyans were talking about Kenya as if it was a goat to be slaughtered and distributed around so that each community could get its own piece. It was not a viable proposition then and it is still not viable today.
The tragedy of our people is lack of leadership and vision. If, for instance, every one of the 42 communities was to get its five years at the house on the hill, that would require a total of 210 years. Since 55 are already gone, that leaves them with 155 years to share out among themselves. Since there are 40 "unrewarded" communities, they would still require 200 years. So why don't we change the constitution and make a provision for each tribe to have its five years of glory and leave them to ballot about how they would go about choosing who would be the next one. We can do it right away so there would be no doubt about whose turn it will be.
Is this a viable option? I leave it to the reader to think about how new communities will start emerging from the woodwork - we already have two new ones. In short, unless we can change our mindset about who we are, we are doomed to walk backwards into our dark past.
I end with a statement I heard from Dr Wayne Dyer, an American mentor-speaker: "If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change". Let us hope we can get a leadership in Kenya that will help us to change how we look at ourselves so that we can see
a country not peoples. And also realise the huge potential we have as a country.
J H Kimura,
16th June 2017
In retrospect, three years later, I think I was right about our native peoples but wrong about the real source of our problems. This has become clearer after I spent a week after Christmas in 2019 with my entire clan at a place called Ajabu House on the western shores of Lake Naivasha.
It is a beautiful place especially in the early morning. It was built by a British aristocrat named JB Hopcraft after he got 16,000 acres of land in 1930. In case you do not know, Kenya had been designated as a winter retreat for British aristocrats after the first world war.
If you want to know more about their escapades read Juliet Barnes “Ghosts of Happy Valley” and Winnifred Waibochi’s “This Place Nyeri”. One is a foreign researcher of the true history of Kenya’s white tribe while the other is a Kenyan octogenarian who has told the same story though Kenyan eyes. To round it off you can read a beautiful rendition by Elspeth Huxley “The Red Strangers” written when the occupation was at its peak and banned the year it was published: 1939.
Curiously, all three writers are women. Where are our men?