The book I review this month is called Mizizi: A Collection of Essay on Kenya’s History (University of Nairobi Press , 2013). I guess that some of my readers are tired of my constant return to Kenyan history in my reviews. I beg their indulgence because I just can’t see how Kenya can develop, how all the bureaucratic dreams stated in the Kenya Vision 2030 document, all the aspirations of the new Constitution, all the hopes that the devolution of the government, the desire by Kenyans to be individually Kenyan – as in belonging to some community or some other structure of identity first – then collectively Kenyan, can ever be realized if we continue to ignore our History. I write History here with a capital H to signify that what we may call a Kenyan History, as is suggested in the subtitle of Mizizi, must celebrate the other ‘roots’ or histories from the rest of the Kenyan tribe.
But, you may ask, why is history important? When I teach postgraduate students of literature and insist that they would have to read history as a supplement to literature they often look at me askance. And I always insist that history gives literature a reason to exist because fiction contests the pretense to factuality that history wears. But I also add that historians have often relied on creative writers, even if it is only to speak about the language mannerisms of a specific time and group of people. What I mean is this: If you were to write the social history of the Nairobi/Kenyan youth of 2014 in the year 2060, you may have to look at how Sheng, for instance, influenced social behaviour in the Eastlands region of Nairobi.
Well, back to Mizizi. I suggest that Kenyans read this book because of its symbolic insistence that we retrace our roots; that we understand the contested and contesting histories of this country; that we script today’s history by closely examining what happened before and after Kenya became a colony.
Mizizi is a dedication to Godfrey Muriuki, who has been teaching history at the University of Nairobi since 1964. This book, edited by his students and containing essays by many of his students as well, pays tribute to a man who has spent more than 50 years of his life researching, teaching and promoting the study of history. Muriuki is best known for his research in the history of the Kikuyu, which was published in 1974 as A History of the Kikuyu 1500-1900. Muriuki’s contribution to the generation and study of Kenyan history is rightly acknowledged in this book as standing alongside those of Bethwell Ogot, Gideon Were, Atieno Odhiambo, William Ochieng’, Henry Mwanzi, Tabitha Kanogo etc. He is among the pioneer scholars of Kenyan history and archeology who have or are retiring from research and teaching. So, in some sense, this book is a call to the younger generation to reinvigorate the study of history. The essays in this collection address both archeology and history in Kenya. They range from studies such as ‘History of Prehistory in the Lake Victoria Basin, Kenya’ by Mwanzia Kyule and Onyango Abuje to ‘The Politics of Urban Malaria Control in Kenya, 1896-1925’ by Kenneth Ombongi to ‘Social Differentiation in Kenya from 1963-2009’ by Vincent Simiyu. I wish to use Simiyu’s essay as an illustration for my argument that a study of Kenyan history is probably more urgent today than it has ever been before.
What is the history of Kenya but one long chapter on social differentiation? Isn’t this separation of different social categories what our academics, across the social sciences and the humanities,
should be studying? Isn’t this the ghost that haunts Kenya, across the villages, towns, counties and regions? Could this social differentiation be the reason why even this book, which was conceived more than 10 years, has taken so long to be published? What really is the issue in Lamu, Garissa, Mandera, all over the country where there are the so-called clashes over land? What do people mean when they say that ‘settlers’ are behaving as if they own native lands? Wasn’t this the original question that the Mau Mau posed to the mzungu?
An understanding of the history of social differentiation in Kenya would help Kenyans to better understand why practically three quarters of this country is dirty poor. It is the policies of the post-colonial government that has bequeathed this country such inequality that a girl-child – or even a boy-child for that matter – in nine out of ten instances in North Eastern Kenya, huge chunks of the Rift Valley, in several parts of Eastern and Coast provinces has no chance to fairly compete with a child in Nairobi, Central, Nyanza or Western Kenya. Take any of those counties in North Eastern Kenya or enlarge that to counties in Northern Kenya and you will be confronted with a study in systemic marginalization.
If you combine simple alienation by the various governments since independence of northern Kenya and add external factors that severally destabilized Kenya’s economies starting in the 1970s with the collapse of the world market for agricultural produce and later the World Bank induced structural adjustment programs and multiplied by abandonment of these parts by their elites who settled elsewhere then you have a region that would take at the minimum two generations to catch up with the rest of Kenya in attainment of basic progress. Simiyu reminds us of the self- and group-enrichment policies of the postcolonial elite. He argues that the individuals that acquired most wealth in the immediate post-independence period were the one close to what he terms the National Finance Grid. These were the individuals who had access to money from the Agricultural Finance Corporation, Agricultural Development Corporation and the Settlement Trustees. These are the persons and groups that ‘bought’ land from the departing settlers as well as land in the settlement schemes.
So, when today we speak of wealth inequality, mass unemployment and regional disparities in development, we are speaking of a problem whose mizizi are to be found in the decisions of that African elite of the 1960s, the politicians and civil servants, who served their own interests and those of the few individuals and groups nearest to them. The ghosts of today are from the aborted collective dreams of the moment after independence when individual interests trumped the national(ist) project; if at all there was a nationalist project in the anticolonial struggles.
If one were to examine the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) report and its major claim that Kenya is collectively a victim of h i s t o r i c a l injustices – which means that no single Kenyan tribe or race hasn’t suffered victimization, violence and alienation by agents of the state at one time or another in our post-colonial history – then the continued refusal by the government to initiate public conversations on the report and implement some of its core recommendations is a betrayal of our shared national interests.
Our shared national interests would suggest that we reengage with the past, examine how the wishes of the majority were sacrificed for the interests of a few, perform a collective penitence and re-sign the social contract. The use of armed state agents, cooptation of individuals in government and occasional ‘delivery of goodies’ won’t sort out the historical questions in Mount Elgon or Mpeketoni or Kwale or Mandera or Burnt Forest or the al-Shabaab menace or the grinding poverty in the slums or ethnic inequalities etc. The point to note for all of us is that we may force amnesia on many victims of past and today’s injustices but stories of these victimizations stay and travel over time. Often they demand listening to as violence, simply because history records that violence only begets violence, however long the urge for retribution is deferred.
But probably the older generation – the men and women who received Independence on behalf of the rest of us – isn’t interested in History; they prefer their own histories. You see their revisions of History in the several biographies and autobiographies that are crowding the bookshelves. In these hagiographies they celebrate their ‘achievement’, crowing over how they acquired wealth through industry and how they selflessly and patriotically served the country. After reading these self-aggrandizing books, one is left wondering how some of these people, who clearly ‘served’ themselves matunda ya Uhuru before letting the rest of Kenyans know that the fruits were ripe, can imagine that the rest of Kenyans are simple and indolent people who can’t work, save and invest, and therefore need to worship ‘self-made’ Kenyan billionaires.
The Kenyan youth need to fully understand the myths in the little histories of the Kenyan elite and begin to work hard at developing this country more equitably and therefore re-write our History to celebrate all instead of just some. ^
— The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi and is a researcher with Native Intelligence.
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