Modern Day Kenyan Identity Crisis
Kenyans have become a lazy people. Kenyans do not want to look back and find the connections, and realize that all oppression is connected. Nobody wants to work towards finding out our true history to find out what it actually means to be a Kenyan, what Kenyan nationalism is all about. These are part of the several reasons why we are where we are as a country. First, we do not have a collective voice. Kenyans angry enough to act upon their frustrations in a way that will make change. Everyone seems to be softened by platitudes and hopeless tolerance. Secondly, we do not know our history. History will always reveal truth. We will always see ourselves in our history and the more ignorant we are of it, the more blinded we will be. The first nationalist movements such as the East African Union, Kikuyu Central Association and Kenya African Union will always remindus of how Africans united to fight against colonial oppression and in this struggles we will see what we had lost, what we fought for, and what was (and is) at stake. Through history we see the disillusionment that came with independence; when the Kenyan dream was cut short and Kenyans watched helplessly as their country was dished out to cohorts of the ruling class, and as ethnocentricism started to spread, slowly, like cancer, eating away at our national psyche.
In the 1960s, the time when rifts were being created following disagreements between Jomo Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga; the rain had already started to beat Kenyans. Assassinations such as those of Pio Gama Pinto and Tom Mboya would become frequent and would further throw the country into division and revulsion and Kenya would soon be a country in which only members of a certain class would take pleasure in. Moi’s ascent into power saw the widening of the ethnic and class divide in the country. For years, Kenyans watched in silence while living in the fear of oppression from a government that had failed at affirming their nationalism.
Moi’s government was as oppressive as his predecessor’s. However, as history has taught us, a revolution is always coming. The year 2002 saw Kenyans stand up together, in what would be the second liberation, to oust a leader who had facilitated the wasting of our country. It is a wonder we were still better off than most African states. 2002 saw the awakening of the long dead spirit of nationalism. Even so, it was not long until the festering wounds of ethnocentricism burst violently in 2007/08. Still, Kenyans are a resilient people and in Kibaki’s second term we tried to heal the nation albeit reluctantly.
But history repeats itself and in 2013 we saw the showdown, eerily reminiscent to that in 1966, between Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga. It is a wonder that we still choose to ignore all this, to stay in the moment, to treat things as if they only exist in that time and space. As the Achebe cliché goes – either we do not have a clear picture of who we are, or we need to look back and find when the rain started to beat us.
As an idealist and a firm believer in the connectivity of things, I always get frustrated when I hear people speak of Kenyans’ proclivity to forget things. We move from issues focusing on them individually: a woman giving birth on a hospital floor, a bus crash kills 40 people, a governor slaps a woman representative, VAT on necessities inexplicably increased and terrorists attack a shopping mall and kill Kenyans indiscriminately. But it is not the fact that Kenyans forget too quickly that angers me, but the casual manner by which we talk about it as if we have accepted it as part of our national makeup. The recent politicization of the ICC further highlights the inconsistency of a people who, in a bid to fight impunity a while back, pushed for the Hague with slogans like “Don’t be vague let’s go to the Hague” and today, claim that the ICC is a tool of blatant neocolonialism and that we should cut off ties and side with the AU; yet ICC or not, we need justice for the victims of the PEV, in whatever form it will come. Our nationality seems to be in flux, always riding a wave, not sure of where it stands. Nobody seems to grasp the meaning of being a Kenyan, and I believe that unless we go back and examine our history, we will fail to see the connections and worse still, we will fail to have a clear picture of our nationalism, and where the rain started to beat it.
Ras Mengesha (student of Literature at the University of Nairobi) is a Kenyan writer and poet. He’s currently working on his debut novel and a collection of short stories. For more on his work, visit www.rasmengesha.wordpress.com
