Revisiting Kenya’s history and where we went wrong

The founding father of the nation, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta speaks with Mr Oginga Odinga (with his back to the camera) in Kisumu in 1969. Photo/FILE 

By TOM ODHIAMBO tom.odhiambo@uonbi.ac.ke
Posted Friday, November 12 2010 at 16:51

We are caught in a crisis of leadership, trying to shed off ‘bad blood,’ so to speak, in the purging of the corrupt among us, especially public leaders and officials.

 

But we speak of corruption as if it is a new reality; as if it started a few years ago. Historical evidence, though, suggests that corruption has been with us since the day we raised the Kenyan national flag.

Just read recently published Kenyan memoirs and you will see the point — Odinge Odera’s My Journey with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Njenga Karume’s From Charcoal to Gold, Simeon Nyachae’s Walking Through the Corridors of Service or Benjamin Kipkorir’s Descent from Cherang’any Hills: Memoirs of a Reluctant Academic.

All these autobiographies detail how poor leadership robbed Kenya of the potential to develop, but Odinge’s is significant because it narrates of the author’s relationship with a man whose life shaped and continues to shape Kenya’s destiny.

Odinge’s book can be read as a companion to Oginga Odinga’s Not Yet Uhuru because it, in many ways, clarifies a number of issues that Odinga sought to highlight in his own memoirs but which the timing of the publication did not allow, especially the clarification of Odinga’s relationship with the Communist East Europe, China and other African countries such as Egypt and Ghana, and the suggestions that this relationship was informed by a shared ‘ideological’ conviction.

A reading of My Journey with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga will reveal bits and pieces of the struggle for independence and after in this country.

What is significant in Odinge’s book is the revisiting of Kenya’s political history. The problem of leadership that this country perennially suffers from is at the root of our underdevelopment, the book suggests.

Odinge offers an image of a selfless leader who was willing to sacrifice his own ambitions to ensure that Kenya held together when the colonialists departed.

The fact that the Kanu leadership led by Odinga turned down the chance to assume power in 1962 with Kenyatta still in detention should always have remained as a lesson on why the national good is more important than individual pursuits.

Those who had lost land, wealth, relatives and been displaced expected the post-colonial government to redress the iniquities of the colonial system. But residual colonialism and subsequent neo-colonialism thwarted those dreams.

Odinga argues passionately in Not Yet Uhuru, and Odinge similarly reminds us that the fundamental motivation for the anti-colonial struggle was reclamation and or redistribution of land; because land was and remains the most important factor of economic production in Kenya. Indeed this was the bone of contention between Odinga and his colleagues in Kanu.

My Journey with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga reveals a flesh and blood Odinga as opposed to the mythical Jaramogi whose finger or gaze was said to be ominous.

For the first time one reads of a normal politician who often trusted himself too much at the expense of seeking or taking advice.

We also encounter an Odinga who, as opposed to common wisdom, actually knew less of the communist ideology and was less inclined to argue a case for or follow communism.

Odinge’s story presents the reader often with close-up snapshots of a man of the people; a wise elder; a father concerned enough for his son’s (Raila) life as to seek his release by petitioning President Moi; an intransigent individual often driven by a singular wish to lead Kenya — but a wish more informed by Odinga’s anger at the casual betrayal of the dreams of Uhuru by his colleagues.

Odinge’s book, like all types of alternative history will not make some Kenyans happy — he is often too bland in his criticism of many politicians who served under Kenyatta.

But it is this kind of history that we need in Kenya now; a history that points to the possibilities of healing wounds from the past and reconciling Kenyans.

The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi.