Pan-African Forums: ActivismBy The Elephant

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Pan-African Forums: ActivismBy The Elephant

“Scholars are inheritors of Prophethood”Prophet Muhammad PBUH

To fully contextualise and grasp the gravity of this saying of the Prophet Muhammad PBUH requiresknowledge of not just the role of prophethood in society but also of the nature of society. At both thelevel of Max Weber’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, society consists of large groups underpinnedby a set of beliefs that organise the membership’s affairs. This is irrespective of the fact that one isorganic and the other legal-rational.

This underpinning corpus of beliefs that serves as the groups’ existential truth, criterion of measureand all-encompassing narrative of and about existence, is the lens through which the internal andexternal universe at both individual and group level is perceived and therefore ordered. It is thisstory that is articulated by prophets and oracles of yore, and the scholars and intellectuals of thepresent day.

It is by this measure that the scholars are inheritors of prophethood. From this saying, by analysis ofthe function of prophets, we can extract the role of scholars in society.

All through history prophets have oscillated between one extreme end, the highest level of politicalleadership — what Plato called “the Philosopher King”, the ruler of his utopian city Kallipolis whopossesses wisdom and simplicity — and the other extreme end, the highest level of political activism— what the 19th century termed as Radical Activism, individuals who called for total societal change,engineering complete upheaval of the status quo.

Both the Philosopher King and the Radical are enabled by one thing — Knowledge.

What knowledge?

Knowledge of truth.

What truth? Which truth?

Empirical? The truth about the inner workings of nature? No.

The truth about the existential, teleological and relational nature of man. In short, a coherent set ofbeliefs that tell us where we came from and where we are going, why we are here and how weshould relate to one another.

The most cogent and convincing story told, that comprehensively answers this question, willcalibrate all social interaction, order and direct us all.

It is for this reason that British colonialism of the African continent began with a story. A Storyabout the salvation of souls, a promise of a beautiful place of endless bliss and, over and above that,complete absolution. Successful “Christianisation” was a sine qua non for absolute subjugation andslavery of the natives. The advance guard of imperialism was the Church Missionary Society.

In fact, the need for this “story” and its power over peoples was common imperialist knowledge.Penelope Carson’s book The East India Company and Religion 1698-1858, records an incident inwhich 17th century churchman and orientalist Humphrey Prideaux, who was later to become Dean ofNorwich, castigated The East India Company for neglecting the propagation of Christianity in India,pointing to the success of the Dutch East India Company, arguing that their Dutch counterpartsthrived due to proselytisation of Christianity where they expanded.

Where native elites intervened to bar the entry of missionaries in places such as Japan, the peoplesof these lands remained free of European colonisation for centuries.

The answer to the question of existence, manifested in the instinctive questions we all ask — Wheredid we came from? Where we are going? Why are we here? How we should relate to one another? —has all-encompassing power over a community and society, and herein lies the power of the scholar.

Knowledge has only one purpose: to elevate the human condition, to drive away barbarism and raiseus to civilisation. For knowledge is the only attribute that differentiates us from the rest of creation.

Why not make the case for free will here too? For free will is a factor of knowledge. Free will andself-awareness are implied and are necessary predicators for knowledge.

There was never any need for a tree of knowledge in the heavens where angels reside, as angelshave no free will. Neither was there any need for one in the realm of beasts, for beasts have nointellect. Only man has the unique ability to value knowledge, for only he has both intellect and freewill.

Given that the purpose of knowledge is to lead us to our Xanadu, it follows that those amongst uswith the wherewithal for knowledge have a teleological duty to the knowledge and an essential dutyto their kind to take the mantle of intellectual leadership together with all the risks and rewards itportends.

This knowledge of purpose enables the scholar to direct the society from its empirical state towardsits normative ideal. This direction is not frictionless. It ensures a never-ending struggle between theinterests anchored in the status quo and those rising from the promise of change. American scholarand activist Noam Chomsky captures this function well in this quote from his essay TheResponsibility of Intellectuals: “With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still

other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments,to analyse actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”

Failure to rise to this duty can be legitimately termed betrayal of calling, betrayal of self.

In the past, where humanity was organised at village and tribal level, it would have been sufficient tospeak to individual scholarly duty, but in today’s complex social order, we must communicate thesame argument to the organisations in our society that consist of knowledge workers and whosepurpose is knowledge or a derivative of knowledge.

This would consist of universities and religious organisations and their affiliate unions andassociates. To this end we will cite the most well-known or stereotypical examples of individuals andorganisations that have endeavoured to live up to the demands of this vital function, or calling.

The unity of individual scholarship and activism is perfectly epitomised by the world-renownedScholar Noam Chomsky mentioned earlier, as this summarised excerpt from Who is NoamChomsky?” perfectly illustrates:

Chomsky joined protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1962, speaking on thesubject at small gatherings in churches and homes.

He also became involved in left-wing activism. Chomsky refused to pay half his taxes, publiclysupported students who refused the draft, and was arrested while participating in an anti-warteach-in outside the Pentagon. During this time, Chomsky co-founded the anti-war collectiveRESIST with Mitchell Goodman, Denise Levertov, William Sloane Coffin, and DwightMacdonald. Although he questioned the objectives of the 1968 student protests, Chomsky gavemany lectures to student activist groups and, with his colleague Louis Kampf, ranundergraduate courses on politics at MIT independently of the conservative-dominated politicalscience department.

Because of his anti-war activism, Chomsky was arrested on multiple occasions and included onPresident Richard Nixon’s master list of political opponents. Chomsky was aware of thepotential repercussions of his civil disobedience and his wife began studying for her owndoctorate in linguistics to support the family in the event of Chomsky’s imprisonment orjoblessness.

Locally Dr David Ndii has struggled immensely and very successfully to live up to Noam Chomsky’sThe Responsibility of Intellectuals, explaining the economic reality and the Government of Kenya’spolicies/plans to the public in terms understandable by all. He began in the most widely readnewspaper Daily Nation and now writes economic analyses and open letters to the rulers on thepopular online political journal The Elephant, often successfully compelling the government torespond, albeit with more propaganda and red herring.

His sister-in-arms Dr Wandia Njoya has waged an equivalent struggle in the domain of educationand culture. Patrick Gathara and Rasna Warah, whose timely pieces questioned the reasons for theKenya government incursion into Somalia as part of America’s global imperialist Wars of Terror,triggered a vital conversation at the most appropriate time and place, where the powers that bewould have preferred none.

Two critical parts remain for our native scholars and intellectuals (“native” continentally-speaking).First is crystallising their ideas into philosophies that can animate the public and move it to action,“action” being the work of bringing the ideas to life in social order and government policy.

Second is inculcating in a group of their students their philosophy, and organising them to carry it tothe public space. The scholar or intellectual is a social actor just as is the politician, only at adifferent stage of the work of social organising. The scholar or intellectual produces the ideas thatthe politician or activist organises the public around. If a politician is “Philosophy in Action”, thescholar then is the “Action of Philosophy”. That the group for the politician is termed a politicalparty is moot; the currency for both actors is public opinion and neither scholars nor politicians canbe effective without the support of groups. We may term the group around a scholar as followers ordisciples for purposes of differentiation.

It is hard to imagine, but Noam Chomsky was once a student. Chomsky began his studies at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. Chomsky states in many interviews that he found little use for his classesuntil he met Zellig S. Harris, an American scholar touted for discovering structural linguistics(breaking language down into distinct parts or levels). Chomsky was moved by what he felt languagecould reveal about society. Harris was moved by Chomsky’s great potential and did much to advancethe young man’s undergraduate studies, with Chomsky receiving his B.A. and M.A. in non-traditionalmodes of study.

Noam Chomsky is categorical that, outside of his father, Zellig S. Harris is most responsible for hisintellectual direction, political thought and activism.

From scholar-activists to organisation activism

For examples of organisations that have transcended the limited group interests of theirmembership to actively engage social issues that affect all, we may look to the teacher’s unions inLatin America which are actually social movements that have played critical roles at national andsub-national levels.

The paper Promoting education quality: the role of teachers’ unions in Latin America from theUNESCO Digital Library reports that in Brazil, during the 1988 constitution-writing process,teachers’ unions worked with academic, student and national trade confederations to advocateminimum funding for education. They succeeded in obtaining a constitutional provision establishingthat 18 per cent of federal and 25 per cent of state and municipal taxes must go toward education.

Given the crisis we face today is fundamentally a crisis of ideas — or more specifically the lackthereof — to galvanize society, we need our scholars to tell us a new story, or to tell us an old storyin a new way.

The Canadian scholar and psychologist, Dr Jordan B. Peterson, serves as an apt example of telling“an old story in a new way”. He reframed the Christian story for an atheistic age, infusing new lifeinto the West’s Cultural Right. After years of losing ground to the liberal social values of the Left,conservatism has found its footing.

Sheikh Taqiuddin An-Nabhani, the Palestinian jurist and founder of political party Hizb ut-Tahrir,reframed Islam as a System for “the Age of Systems”, giving Muslims a way to perceive the complexnew global order through the lens of their beliefs. And in so doing, giving Muslims new faith in theirway of life and re-energising them to work to find their way forward to re-establishing the Islamicorder they had lost.

This spark is what we need. As individuals, and as humanity.

For us in Africa, the 1885 Berlin Conference order is in the terminal stages of decay, just like itsSykes-Picot equivalent in the Middle East. Talk of secession is everywhere in Africa. Even thepresumably stable territories like Kenya have not been exempt. Secession, which is the fracture of

states, suffers conditions similar to “entropy”, which is the dissipation and dispersion of particleswithin an entity. Secession creates new problems beyond the potential for an infinite recurrence offurther secession. Darfur’s struggle to secede from South Sudan, after South Sudan seceded fromSudan on 9 July 2011, after Sudan seceded from Egypt on 1 January 1956, is a perfect modernexample in Africa. Somalia need not be elaborated.

Superficial measures such as renaming countries are no different from adopting some costume as anational dress in search of a new post-colonial identity. They are named in top-down tyrannicalinitiatives and “un-named” after the death of the baptising despot.

Convergence of nations into new blocks has failed to resolve any of the problems humanity faces,even at the highest level of political awareness, with the blocks beginning to BrExit and GrExit evenbefore they are fully formed.

Democracy is imploding as the multiple centres of thought — democracy’s vaunted raison d’être,“Pluralism” — mature into the centres of gravity of powerful hurricanes of political movements,many currently spinning across America leaving death and destruction in their wake, andthreatening to tear America, the paragon of Democracy, into a thousand pieces.

Yet we cannot dial the clock back to our tribal ways as Mungiki the Kikuyu tribal cult that rose in thecentral highlands of Kenya proved. Our tribal enclaves have been completely shattered byimperialism’s modern-day manifestation — liberalism — never to exist again. There is no tribal safehaven to return to for any of us.

Never in the history of humanity has there been such plenty sitting side-by-side with such greatneed. Capitalism promised humanity that the free market would solve all its problems. Freedom as adoctrine would lead all of humanity to happiness, plenty and fulfilment. This paradise would followabsolute “freedom of markets”, “freedom of capital”, “freedom of thought and speech”.

But as the Bible famously says, “as it was in the beginning so is it in the end.” Freedom of ownershipwas first enshrined in the Magna Carta, the 1215 AD agreement between King John of England andhis Barons, the land owning aristocracy. Freedom of religion, was promulgated in 1648 from theTreaty of Westphalia, as the right of the Kings and Princes of Europe to choose the religions for theirnations and therefore their subjects. The now sacrosanct “Universal Suffrage” born of the FrenchRevolutions of 1789 and 1848 was a “right to vote” for “white men”. Universal Suffrage being forwhite men had the net effect of establishing a “political universe” in which only white men are theonly legitimate citizens.

That summarised the beginning of “our cherished freedoms”.

History shouts loud and clear that freedom, in all its configurations, from the beginning was and isonly for the powerful ruling elites, yesterday the Barons and Princes, today the capitalists andselected politicians, or as Marx termed them, the Bourgeoisie. As for the working class, the poormasses, in the words of Marx, freedom for them was, is and continues to be, the freedom to choose“to work” or “to starve”.

Yet the story the “angry genius” Karl Marx himself told, that promised equality by negation of ourmost basic human instincts — our instinct to possess, our instinctive need to believe and to be, andthat has gained great resurgence powered by the dramatic failure of Capitalism in recent times —also failed humanity epically.

It is incumbent upon those gifted with ability and knowledge, and those vested with the leadership oforganisations that consist of agents of knowledge, to transcend their group interests and work for

society’s overall well-being.

The need has never been greater.

An outcome of the homogeneity imperialism imposed upon us all is that we are all immersed in thesame operating system, secular capitalism. For this reason, we find ourselves in the samepredicament of crisis, literally globally.

We need a powerful new story, or an old story told in a powerful new way.

A story that will remind us of our common humanity, harmonise our relations with each other andthe rest of creation and reveal to us a common destiny, that can unify our sense of purpose.

We need scholars at the universal and local level, to crystallise a story, an idea into an isotope thatwill fuse with our imaginations and trigger a chain reaction that will galvanize radical change.

The situation is critical, the need urgent.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their societyby interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

Pan-African Forums: ActivismBy The Elephant

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their societyby interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

Pan-African Forums: ActivismBy The Elephant

On the thirtieth anniversary of the massive pro-democracy Saba Saba day ( 7th July) demonstrationsin Kenya, Tuesday’s People’s March began in the very places where state violence is still laid bare:Mathare, Kayole, Dandora, Kibera, and other informal settlements in Nairobi. From as early as 7AMthat grey cold-season morning, human rights defenders at the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC)and allies from the community began preparing for their march. They lined posters and bannersalong the front of the centre. They raised up large flags, one in each hand, and spun, watching thefabric billow. They tested loudspeakers. They sang and danced to protest music together.

Thirty years ago, hundreds of demonstrators flooded the city centre, led by a coalition of pro-democracy political leaders, to demand multi-party democracy and the end of authoritarian ruleunder President Daniel arap Moi. On Tuesday, grassroots human rights defenders organised aPeople’s March—a leaderless event that was, on principle, neither branded and sponsored by anyorganisation, nor “approved” beforehand by authorities—to demand a set of basic human rightsnecessary to live a dignified life.

Ironically, in 1990, the first Saba Saba demonstration under Moi’s dictatorship was able to at leastget within the vicinity of the Kamukunji grounds, though it was eventually met with lethal policeforce. This time in 2020, before demonstrators were able to even leave Mathare, Dandora, Kibera,Kayole, and other meeting places, clots of police officers had already begun blocking their passageand arresting leading organisers. Only minutes after demonstrators at the Mathare Social JusticeCentre began singing, police shot tear gas at them.

After the inaugural plumes of tear gas cleared from the front of MSJC, Mama Victor walked up tome, gave me a long embrace, looked to where the police were gathered, and abruptly said, “I’mgoing there to take tea.”

Mama Victor has a face like calm waters, smooth and serene like one of Picasso’s monumentalwomen. Like the other members of the Network of Mothers and Widows of Victims and Survivorswho had gathered at MSJC to participate in the march, she wore a white gown over her clothes, likethose for baptisms. Written on the front of all of the gowns were the names of loved ones killed bypolice. She clenched in her hand the poster she had intended to march with: a large photograph of ayoung man, with the words “Victor Okoth Obondo. 1994-2017.”

Three years ago, Mama Victor lost both of her sons on the same day. It was August 9, 2017, whenpost-election unrest led to violent police crackdowns in informal settlements across the country.Victor, 22, and Bernard, 25—the son of her deceased sister, whom she raised as her own—were ontheir way home to Mathare when they were caught up in protests contesting election results. Policeshot live bullets. Bernard was shot in the head and died instantly; Victor was shot in the stomachand died before he reached the hospital.

At the time, Mama Victor’s shock and grief was forced into the confines of a politically chargedelection. Victor and Bernard’s burials had to be rushed, but, in her account to journalist Isaac OtidiAmuke, she says she was “fortunate” to even have that. Other mothers, grandmothers, widows, andrelatives, are often denied the “privilege to mourn,” as people can be arrested for even holding vigilfor those killed by police.

“In the beginning, I would just wake up, see the photo of my sons, and cry,” she says. But as theonce-searing pain subsided with time, she realized that it was only people like her who could sit withother mothers of victims and “share the pain we feel.” So she and a few other core members formedthe Network of Mothers and Widows of Victims and Survivors.

Photo. Anthony Tei Mutua

The word “activist,” and the cynicism around it, often obscures the fact that some like Mama Victornever chose to be activists. Rather, it was the decision of some police officers sent to control “riots”on August 9, 2017 to pull the trigger—and Mama Victor’s refusal to accept impunity as ananswer—that has landed her here. Taking tea in front of police officers on Saba Saba day.

Right off of the main road where over a dozen police officers were gathered, behind a kiosk sellingmedicinal herbs, was a breakfast kibanda. Mama Victor sat down on the mbao-bench to take chaiand chapati. On the bench next to her, she set down the poster of Victor and another poster ofYassin Moyo, the 13-year-old boy who was shot in Kiamaiko on March 30 by police enforcing curfew,while he stood on the balcony of his family’s house.

Almost immediately, two policeman approach Mama Victor. They ask her what she is doing, and shesays drily that she is taking tea. One orders her to get up and leave. “I can’t,” she says, “because Iam taking tea.” They say no “gatherings” are allowed here—referring to the protest songs that hadjust been silenced by tear gas—and once again she says she is not gathering anything, she is justtaking tea.

The humiliating interrogation continues. One officer asks her why she is wearing white, to which sheresponds that those are her clothes. He sees her facemask, draped loose on her neck, and with hiswooden baton, prods at the human rights logo printed on it: “What is this?” Even with his stickpointed at her neck, Mama Victor didn’t let her chin drop. She raises her voice and reaffirms thatshe is not doing anything wrong by wearing her own clothes and drinking tea. She takes two cupsand pours the hot, milky tea from one cup into the other, in a long, white cascade, to cool it.

Mama Victor is not naive about dealing with the police. As a human rights defender at MSJC, shecollects evidence to document police brutality in Mathare, which means that, like other grassrootsorganizers unprotected by international institutions, in the past, she has received threats fromanonymous callers and been followed for days by strange men. If she talks back to police, it is notbecause she believes she is untouchable.

One police officer orders Mama Victor to remove the white robe and throw away the posters ofVictor and Yassin. A crowd gathers around this image of a thousand words: a policeman with hisstick, standing above a woman seated on a wooden bench, trying to take her breakfast. Mama Victorrefuses to throw away the posters and, her shouts reaching a fever pitch, she points to the poster ofVictor on the bench next to her and asks the wrenching, simple question: “Can I not even take teahere with my child?”

Despite the fact that the state has already heaped layers of violence on this woman—murdering hersons, denying her justice, leaving her to solve her own children’s murders, plus the baselinesystemic neglect that Mathare and other informal settlements suffer—the state has denied MamaVictor the dignity of even appearing before the Kenyan public by choking the Saba Saba daydemonstration before it started.

They cannot, however, strip away the eternal truth that she is—and always will be—Mama Victor.Victor Okoth Obondo, frozen forever in that crouch, his arm resting on his knee, with a cool, easysmile. Her baby.

Mama Victor grabs the poster and, breaking into a flow of Dholuo, speaks straight to Victor. “Victor,you were so handsome, everyone said. You were kind, hard-working. We shouldn’t have come toNairobi. Perhaps if we were home….” Another woman in the back begins to wail, and the police slink

away.

—

In The Appearance of Black Lives Matter, visual activist Nicholas Mirzoeff writes that for Blackpeople in 2014’s BLM protests to show up in the way they did was for them to “appear as Black in away that is not codified by white supremacy.” To “appear,” he writes, is to confront state power thatsays, “Move along, nothing to see here,” and to demand to be seen. To “appear” is to be grievable,worth grieving, and to force others to look.

All of the grassroots human rights defenders and allies who weren’t already arrested by 10AM andfurtively hopped onto matatus into town, knowing that scores of police would be waiting for themthere too, understood this. They rejected the idea that a demonstration could possibly be firstapproved by the government, and they claimed—as victims of structural violence themselves—theirright to “appear.”

Human rights defenders on Tuesday’s Saba Saba day, knew that Kenya’s comfortable class is notignorant of plight of the poor but, rather, chooses to ignore it. Like Black civil rights activists of theU.S. in the 1960s, they knew that the most powerful message would have to be communicatedthrough the medium of their own bodies: kneeling together, unfazed and fists up, within a storm oftear gas, or proclaiming “Whatever happens, I am not afraid” while being dragged by officers intothe boot of a car.

It worked. Photographs and videos from Tuesday show the full, militarized force of the stateconcentrated onto the unarmed, vulnerable bodies of the city’s poorest, bodies which already bearthe violence of living in districts with no water, going to bed hungry, loving people who weremurdered by serial killer cops.

Mama Victor says that, when she reached the city centre, she was followed closely by several policeofficers—so closely that other organizers arranged for a cab to take her directly home. That is howmuch the state fears a middle-aged woman wearing white and holding a poster of her son, whosesmile can never fade anymore. Even though the state had stripped Mama Victor of every otheropportunity to express her grief and demand justice, the one they could not take away—her own self,the mother of two men they killed—is indeed the most powerful.

At first, this particular kind of protest seems like a paradox: how can leaning into one’s vulnerabilitypossibly be an expression of power? But if you think about it a bit more, it makes intuitive sense. In awidely shared video from Tuesday afternoon, MSJC co-founder Juliet Wanjiru Wanjira is corneredbetween two parked cars, surrounded by several armed police officers attempting to arrest her.Without flinching, she says she will not cooperate and asks them, “Why are you arresting me?”

One officer asks back, “Why are you protesting?”

“Because you’re killing us!”

“Who is killing you?”

“You! Police!” The officer begins to walk away, and she continues: “You are killing us in ourcommunities! Poor communities!” Both Wanjira and Mama Victor display no fear, and they lean intoher identity as the victims of police violence in the face of police themselves.

Photo. Anthony Tei Mutua

The police leave Wanjira alone. She turns to those around her, throws her fist in the air, and shouts,“When we lose our fear, they lose their power!” Her courage doesn’t come from the security ofprivilege, but rather defiance even in the face of her own vulnerability, as someone who faces thereal risk of being disappeared or executed, a tragic fate that has met many other Kenyan humanrights defenders.

Those with a lived experience of state violence have the most powerful things to say to thegovernment. Indeed, even if they marched silently in town, their bodies would speak volumes.Perhaps that is what the state fears most—people who see not only their own scars but also seeclearly who inflicted them. Perhaps that is why police coordinated so thoroughly to blockdemonstrators from even stepping foot on the road to the city centre.

This completely counters how certain newspapers reported the day’s events: that the Saba Sabademonstrations were shut down, somehow failed, or didn’t happen at all. Ultimately, the entirecountry witnessed the physical violence that police officers inflicted on peaceful protestors. But,more than that, they witnessed how this violence was doled out on people who already bore stateviolence within their own bodies.

People like Mama Victor, a living testament to the bloodied hands of the state. Her survival isresistance. Her dogged commitment to documenting extrajudicial killings is resistance. Her sittingdown to take tea with her son in front of those who killed him—that, above all, is resistance.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their societyby interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

Pan-African Forums: ActivismBy The Elephant

This Tuesday the 7th of July 2020 marks the 30th anniversary of the infamous and bloody Saba SabaDay (seventh day of the seventh month) upheavals that are still etched in the memory of the manyKenyans old enough to vividly recall those heady days of the struggle for the second liberation. Itwas a day of infamy, as President Daniel arap Moi, now deceased, unleashed his security apparatuson hapless, innocent Kenyans, killing and maiming many of them for daring to call for a return tomultipartyism.

Three days prior, on 4 July 4 1990, Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia, former Kanu governmentcabinet ministers who had fallen out with Moi (both now deceased), and Raila Odinga—who had justreturned from self-exile in Oslo, Norway—had been arrested on the orders of President Moi. The 4th

of July is America’s Independence Day. Kenyan political analysts have always wondered whether itwas mere coincidence or a conspiracy between Moi and the American government to have the trio

arrested on the very day America would be celebrating its much vaunted independence day. Did theAmerican government have something to do with their arrests? “Why would the Americans, whowere friends of the three, allow Moi to detain them on their big day”, Augustine Njeru Kathangu, oneof the architects of Saba Saba, has always wondered.

The Saba Saba demonstrations heralded the beginning of week-long urban riots that came tosymbolise the determination of Kenyans to maintain their demands for an increased democratic andpolitical space that had been throttled by a dictatorial Moi and a despotic Kanu party. The mountingpressure brought to bear on Moi was such that he was forced to quickly constitute a Kanu ReviewCommittee (referred to as the Committee), which immediately started its work on 25 July 25 1990.

The formation of the Committee by the beleaguered President was, ostensibly, to seek Kenyans’views on the current state of the country’s politics. But the truth of the matter was that Moi wastrying to buy time as he figured out how he was going to acquiesce to plural politics without losingface. Chaired by the then Vice President George Saitoti, the Committee was peppered with Kanuloyalists such as Nicholas Biwott, Peter Oloo Aringo, Shariff Nasir, Elijah Mwangale and MwaiKibaki, among others.

The Committee visited nine towns during the month of August: Eldoret, Embu, Garissa, Nairobi,Kakamega, Kisumu, Mombasa, Nakuru and Nyeri. It visited Nairobi twice; on July 25 and on 23 and24 August1990. Among the more bizarre recommendations that the Committee made was “thatKenya should continue in its tradition of one-party democracy. That all leaders in every sphere of lifeparticularly religious leaders, politicians, lawyers, journalists and other professionals, should ceasetheir confrontational stance and adopt a positive attitude towards issues in order to build a morepeaceful and prosperous Kenya”.

With these sorts of recommendations, a contemptuous Moi and dyed-in-the-wool Kanu partymandarins, it was obvious that Kenyans’ agitation for a return to multiparty politics was destined tocontinue to be bloody and confrontational.

“Moi’s Kanu dictatorship was not ready for changes, but the people had smelt an opportunity andthey were willing to push ahead with political reforms”, said Kathangu. A former army man and adevout Catholic who never misses the morning mass wherever it might find him, Kathangu had beenplanning for the Saba Saba day for two months together with four other people,

“We started planning for the Saba Saba from May”, recalled Kathangu. “I had an office at MusaHouse on the third floor, on Landhies Road, where we would meet and plan how we were to mobilisefor the big day”. Kathangu’s four other compatriots were: Edward Oyugi, a former KenyattaUniversity don and detainee; Ngotho Kariuki, a tax consultant, university don and ex-detainee;George Anyona, the political firebrand, former MP and ex-detainee; and Kariuki Kathitu, a universitydon.

Of the five, Kathitu is the least known of those who were associated not only with the planning ofthat first Saba Saba, but also, more generally, with the second liberation of the 1990s. “Raila joinedus much later. Raila is my friend, but I’ve always referred to him as a witness to the Saba Sabamovement. He was much more involved with the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy movementformed in 1991, than Saba Saba, which his father Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and others such as JamesOrengo, Martin Shikuku and Salim Bamahriz, helped form”.

“Matiba joined us later after he had read the public mood correctly, but also after falling out withMoi publicly”, said Kathangu. “Matiba had had an interesting special relationship with Moi. Theyhad been great friends. When Matiba was the Permanent Secretary for Education, he used to coach

Vice President Moi in the evenings, on the proper usage of the English language, mostly on thespoken English. So they knew each other well. Moi had been Matiba’s good student. But when Moibecame the president in 1978, his man in Murang’a was Julius Kiano. Matiba’s entry into politics andhis routing out of Moi’s man in Mbiri constituency was always going to create a problem betweenthe two.”

Kathangu told me that it was Matiba who recruited Rubia. “Rubia was initially not in the movementfor change, but his friend who was an area mate—they both came from the larger Murang’a—invitedhim along and that’s how Rubia, who had also been facing political frustrations from Moi, joined theopposition. Matiba came looking for us after he was disgraced by Moi. Matiba was a man who oncehe made up his mind, it was difficult to persuade him otherwise”.

Matiba’s falling out with Moi was triggered by Moi’s open rigging of the Mlolongo (queue voting)elections in 1988 in his Kiharu (former Mbiri) constituency. “Matiba’s queue was the longest for allto see, yet Moi decided it was the shortest so that he could prop up his friend Kiano who Matiba hadbeaten hands down. Matiba hit the roof, he had captured his entire election process on the video. Itwas clearly evident Moi was rigging Matiba openly. And that was the beginning of the politicalproblems between Moi and Matiba.”

Boisterous and oftentimes overconfident, Matiba went ahead together with Rubia to declare thereturn of multiparty politics in Kenya without the agreement of Kathangu and his friends. “He hadjumped the gun, that’s not how we had planned to do it, but hey, since Matiba had already let the catout of the bag, we went along, we didn’t deny them, neither did we deny that that is what we allalong been planning to do”, observed Kathangu. “It was one of the first of the mistakes that Matibawould make as we fought for the second liberation”.

Although taken aback by Matiba’s pronouncements, Kathangu and his friends still went ahead tomobilise for Saba Saba day. “Our intentions were to mobilise people to congregate on the sacredgrounds of Kamukunji. We’d coordinated and mobilised people from different parts of the country totravel to Kamukunji. People were to come from Githurai, Limuru, Kisumu, Mombasa, Murang’a,Nakuru and the other major towns in the country.”

To start off the day, and as a curtain raiser, the organisers planned football matches at theKamukunji Grounds in the morning. “The matches were to be supervised by Kathitu and they were tohelp attract and assemble people at the grounds. At around 1p.m. Anyona and I drove into thegrounds to see for ourselves what was going on. When the people saw us—they had been waiting onthe wings around Gikomba Market, in Majengo and Shauri Moyo estates—they started moving intothe grounds.” The organisers had hired buses to ferry people from upcountry and those buses hadarrived in the morning.

“A police officer who later I came to learn was called Cheruiyot—I can’t remember his firstname—and who had also camped at Kamukunji Grounds, apparently spotted us entering theground”, reminisced Kathangu. “Once he saw us and once the people saw us enter the grounds andfollowed us, Cheruiyot called for extra support and soon combat police came. They beat peoplemercilessly with their batons and killed many youths with their live bullets”. As the police beatpeople in Kamukunji Grounds, word got around in parts of the country that mayhem had broken outin Nairobi and consequently, there were riots in Githurai, Limuru, Kisumu and Mombasa”. Kathanguobserved that Moi ordered the arrest of more than 3,000 youths for the simple reason that they hadsupported the political changes being called for by opposition leaders.

Senior Counsel Paul Muite recalls the events of the day vividly: “My friend, the Americanambassador to Malawi George Trail, had come to see me in my office at Electricity House in the city

centre. He was from the US on his way to Malawi. Trail had been the No. 2 at the US embassy inNairobi and we had become friends. Mohamed Ibrahim, a lawyer and today a judge of the HighCourt of Kenya had also passed by to see me on a legal matter. I’d planned after finishing with thetwo, I head to Karen Country Club to play golf. So I asked them we leave early to beat the lunch hourtraffic jam”. He was going play golf with F.T. Nyamu, a Nyeri tycoon who later became the MP forTetu constituency.

“It is at the club that my wife called me to tell me Matiba and Rubia had been carted away by thepolice”, said Muite. “In those days if police took you away, you knew you were headed for detention.After I parted with Ibrahim, the police, who had seen me leave my office with him [Moi had alwaysstationed police to watch Muite’s sixth-floor office at the lifts area and on the ground floor], followedhim and asked him to tell them where I had gone. Ibrahim didn’t know I’d gone to play golf. WhenIbrahim told them he didn’t know my whereabouts, they didn’t believe him”. The police haddetention orders with them and as they were talking to Ibrahim, they placed the detention orderbook on the table and he saw that the first detention sheet was signed and had Paul Muite’s name.The other order was not signed and didn’t have any name. “What the police did was fill the orderwith Ibrahim’s name and that’s how Ibrahim was detained on the spot by the police”.

Moi also ordered the arrest of Gitobu Imanyara and John Khaminwa, who together with Ibrahimbecame the most prominent lawyers to be detained Moi during the crackdown on the Saba Sabamovement. Gibson Kamau Kuria, who had been detained in 1986, went to hide at the Americanembassy which then was under Smith Hempstone’s watch. Muite, who had all along ben staying athis house in Karen, escaped the crackdown, all because the police didn’t think he was “hiding” in hisown house. “Hempstone piled pressure on Moi to release the lawyers, Imanyara, Khaminwa andIbrahim and Muite, but Moi was in a dilemma, his government didn’t know where Muite was, so howwas he going to also release him?”, said Muite.

It is then that Moi pleaded with Muite to come out of hiding and meet him at State House with anapology for inciting the Saba Saba day riots. “Moi blamed me for the riots and had asked me to writehim an apology letter. I didn’t but I still went to meet him”.

The Saba Saba movement gave momentum to the first multiparty political rally held at the hallowedKamukunji Grounds on 16 November 1991by the opposition leaders of the fledgling and nascentForum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD), So determined were FORD leaders that they toldMoi they were going to hold the meeting “with or without a licence”. Aware of the mountingpressure, internally and externally, Moi grudgingly allowed the meeting to go ahead.

Kenyans were itching for a second liberation, to free themselves from the political stranglehold thathad culminated in the sham 1988 mlolongo elections. Buoyed by the winds of change sweepingthrough eastern Europe—the advent of glasnost (openness and transparency) and perestroika(restructuring), the disintegration of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the collapseof the Berlin Wall in 1989—Kenyans seized the moment to challenge Moi and his brutal Kanu party,the supposedly baba na mama (father and mother) of all Kenyans as Kanu party stalwarts liked toput it

On the third anniversary of Saba Saba in July 1993, pro-democracy and reformist clergyman TimothyNjoya observed at the All Saints Cathedral in Nairobi that, “If we can have Moi Day as a national dayto thank Moi for the contributions he made to himself, we can also have Saba Saba declared anational day to mark the contribution the martyrs of multiparty movement made to the Kenyancivilisation”. Twenty-seven years after Njoya made that remark, is it time to again reconsider hisproposition?

How has Kenya faired 30 years after Moi sent the paramilitary General Service Unit (GSU) tobrutally quell a people’s desire to congregate at the Kamukunji Grounds in the sprawling Eastlandsarea, home to the Fanonian wretched of the earth?

Going down memory lane to recapture those heady days, I spoke to Gacheke Gachihi, a founder-member of Bunge la Mwananchi (the people’s parliament), founder of the Mathare Social JusticeCentre (MSJC) and above all, a long-time member of that urban underclass of Huruma which borethe brunt of state brutality. Gacheke is a child of the Saba Saba protests and the reformist politicalforces that came to define the upheavals of that time. Originally from Molo, he came to the city as achild and was swept up in the political agitation that was taking place in the urban slums.

“Although I was only 12, I was very much aware of what was happening politically”, said Gacheke. “Iknew there was something wrong with the country’s politics, because I’d just come from an areathat had suffered political violence and was palpable with political fears, tensions and greatsuspicions”. Now 42, Gacheke observes that his home area of Molo was a theatre of ethnic violencefrom where many people were internally displaced. “There was a lot of genocidal talk then”.

I asked Gacheke, whether the country had learned anything from the Saba Saba day and what thoselike him—activists who were initiated into politics by the tumultuous 1990s and the runs-ins with thestate’s organs of violence—thought of the anniversary. “The anniversary comes at a time when thecountry is polarised by the politics of succession of 2022. If Saba Saba was agitating for increasedpolitical space in 1990, in 2020 Saba Saba should be reminding us Kenyans of the necessity tovigilantly protect the freedoms that have been gained over the years, fought through blood and greatsacrifice”.

Gacheke said that in the 1990s, the youths fought hard to be heard, to exist and to hopefully breakthe barriers of ethnic consciousness and balkanisation. Now it looks like we’re slipping back intothose bad, black days of Moi and Moism. “The youth of this country has never been able to acttogether, to forge a united front and capture political power and help change the trajectory ofpolitics”. The youth caught in the vicious web of disillusionment and dispossession, neverthelesscontinue to be easy prey for politicians whose only agenda is to perpetuate their hold on power. It isa paradox of politics that today’s champions of political agitation were yesterday’s champions ofpolitical of status quo.

Independent researcher and political analyst Jeremiah Owiti was a political science University ofNairobi (UoN) student in 1990. “Politics then were hot and exciting. Kenyans looked forward topolitical changes that would meaningfully impact their lives. The people were hopeful and optimistic.Not anymore.”, said Owiti. The two biggest political protagonists today—President Uhuru MuigaiKenyatta and William Ruto who now threaten to tear the country apart—were apolitical when thefirst Saba Saba protests took place. Uhuru was barely 30 and Ruto barely 24 years old.

Owiti said Uhuru’s friends cut across the ethnic divide, he is a nominal catholic, while Ruto is afervent revivalist born-again evangelical Christian. “Today, Uhuru, surrounded by Kikuyu sub-nationalists, has become a master [at] evoking tribal emotions and openly calling the Kikuyus to firstmobilise on ethnic bases. Similarly, Ruto has become a master of rhetoric and subterfuge, rallyingthe Kalenjin people to see themselves first as Kalenjin and secondly as Kenyans”.

The behaviour of the two, who were never part of the political reform movement, completely negatesthe cardinal lessons of Saba Saba, said the analyst. “The very essence of the Saba Saba movementwas to fight for political pluralism, not political sub-nationalism as now being espoused by Uhuruand his political-friend-now-turned-nemesis. Their retrogressive brand of politics—whichever wayyou look at it—is a tragic throw-back to the days of Moi-ism and Kanu-ism. The crux of the matter is

that both were tutored by Moi and therefore, they do not know what it is to be a political reformerand what apolitical reforms are all about”.

The analyst said Ruto deems himself a latter-day reformer, anchoring and extolling his reformcredentials on the doing, rather than on the talking: “I am a reformer because I act, I don’t talk”,Ruto likes to remind anybody who cares to listen.

Owiti said Saba Saba epitomises the struggle by Kenyans to free themselves from the shackles of thepolitics of balkanisation, ethnic sub-nationalism and the monolithic politics of us vs them.“Unfortunately even with the promulgation of the new constitution, which was supposed to usher ina new political dispensation, the politics that is being played by both Uhuru and Ruto, champions ofethnic jingoism, does not augur well for the epochal succession politics of 2022”.

The researcher said that, by seeking to congregate at the historical Kamukunji Grounds in 1990, theKenyan people were saying that the constitution was the supreme law of the land and if it did notallow them to assemble, it needed to be overhauled.

The 30th Saba Saba anniversary comes at a time of great political apprehension, with the country inthe throes of an economic meltdown and in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic, and the electionsthat will determine who will be the country’s next president just two years away. The successionpolitics have already split the ruling Jubilee party into two diametrically opposed camps and madePresident Uhuru Kenyatta one of the most unpopular presidents Kenya has ever had.

“All the changes we fought for have been reversed”, observed Kathangu. “We’d hoped for anempowered society—economically, politically and socially. We’d also hoped to have a sustainableeducation system that did not constantly change after every five years. We too had hoped that theland question would be fundamentally addressed. Land is still a big problem in this country andunless and until we solve it, Kenyans will not rest easy”.

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Pan-African Forums: ActivismBy The Elephant

Hands stretch out into the air, flashing the two-finger V-salute as the Toyota pick-up truck, withloudspeakers mounted on its roof, careens over the kerb and back onto the rutted road.

That iconic image of Martin Shikuku, James Orengo, Philip Gachoka and Rumba Kinuthia is etched inthe minds of some 20 million Kenyans who were alive on the fateful day that marked the struggle forpolitical pluralism in the country. The November 16, 1991 picture is a re-enactment of what shouldhave happened on July 7, 1990 – the day known by its Kiswahili translation, Saba Saba, in referenceto the seventh day of the seventh month.

The men perched atop the car had just changed vehicles after police shot at their truck’s tyre in anattempt to stop them from entering the barricaded Kamukunji grounds on the rim of Nairobi River,which was darkened by sewage and grease, and whose smells fused with clouds of tear gas in theair. It had been 16 months since the first attempt to hold a rally at Kamukunji failed.

On the gray cold morning of Saturday, July 7, 1990, reaching Kamukunji had acquired an urgencysymbolising a break in the dam of political repression.

An attempted coup d’état by junior air force officers eight years earlier had floundered and givenDaniel arap Moi, only four years into his presidency, the excuse to turn the screws on all opposition.

Dissent had been brewing in Kenya since Moi began consolidating political power by changing theconstitution to ban multiparty politics and detaining critics (some of whom fled into exile. But thefailed putsch emboldened Moi to take away judges’ security of tenure, and to blatantly rig the 1988elections, which filled Parliament with his lackeys.

The lone government-owned radio and television service ruled the airwaves, alongside “free”newspapers that would not go to press until State House supplied its front-page photograph of Moi,and whose editors regularly fielded calls from the president. In those days, Kenyans relied on the

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)’s Kiswahili Service to learn what was going on in their owncountry.

Five months prior to the planned Saba Saba meeting, Moi’s foreign minister, Robert Ouko, had beenbrutally killed. Ouko’s dismembered body was dumped on a hill in his rural constituency. It waswidely believed that his murder had been planned by people close to Moi.

Kenya was suffocating under the armpits of Moi’s single-party regime. He held the bureaucracy andthe security apparatus in a firm grip; Parliament sang his song; and the judiciary was cowed intosniveling subservience. He had declared debate on multiparty politics stirred by clerics closed evenbefore it began.

Open defiance seemed like the only channel for starting a national conversation.

As its opening gambit, the Moi government declared the Kamukunji meeting illegal, and arrestedKenneth Matiba, Charles Rubia and Raila Odinga, three of the senior politicians who wereorganising it, before subsequently detaining them without trial.

Kenya was suffocating under the armpits of Moi’s single-party regime. He held thebureaucracy and the security apparatus in a firm grip; Parliament sang his song; and thejudiciary was cowed into sniveling subservience.

Other countries confronted with dictatorship in Africa had often gone the way of the muzzle withmilitary coups d’etat; Kenyans put themselves on the line at the risk of permanently separating bodyfrom soul. The men on the pick-up truck were the second-tier leaders, and there was another tierbelow them, and yet another across the length and breadth of the country.

A movement – dubbed “The Second Liberation” – began to form in spite of restrictive laws onassembly and association, grouping people together in organising cells.

Saba Saba had been prefaced by the mysterious appearance of leaflets secretly printed and droppedaround the country, inviting people to the meeting. Relying on a network of football clubs andprivate sector transport workers (matatu touts) travelling across the nation, people were put onbuses to Nairobi for the day of confrontation. It put a match to the tinder that had piled across thecountry and exploded into four days of confrontations between the police and the public. The wall offear had cracked.

When national newspapers and the international media chalked up the tally, there were 39 dead, 69injured, and over 5,000 arrested – with over 1,000 charged with looting and rioting.

Saba Saba was the first serious organised challenge to repression through defiance. It was meant tobe the first of eight public rallies – one in each province – to rally the public for plural politics andopen government. Frantic attempts would subsequently be made to negotiate down demands forfreedom by offering internal reforms in the ruling political party monopoly, KANU, but they wereinsufficient to stem the tide of change.

When national newspapers and the international media chalked up the tally, there were39 dead, 69 injured, and over 5,000 arrested – with over 1,000 charged with looting andrioting.

Sixteen months after Saba Saba, Moi grudgingly capitulated and agreed to term limits and torepealing constitutional bans on multiparty political organising, only to use this as an instrument forfanning ethnic animosity. Within months of the return of political pluralism, some 19 new politicalparties had been registered by dint of the efforts of state operatives, who also engineered a splitinside the opposition Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD) party.

A miscarriage of democracy

Moi retained power for two terms despite securing only a minority of the votes in the 1992 and 1997elections. The spirit of Saba Saba revisited the country in a series of protests on July 7; then August8; September 9 and October 10, 1997 in attempts to demand free and fair elections.

Moi split the movement by offering compromises to share slots in the electoral management agencywith the opposition and repeal laws constraining public assembly. Once again, it seemed that theSaba Saba campaigners had only achieved a Pyrrhic victory.

The euphoric victory of the joint opposition candidate, Mwai Kibaki, in the 2002 election when Moiwas retiring imbued the nation with a new sense of optimism and the possibility of citizensreclaiming their power. But this optimism was quickly dashed by regression to some of the old wilyways, including mega corruption scandals.

It took the violent and bloody protests in the aftermath of the 2007 election – a citizens’ revoltagainst loss of confidence in the judiciary and the electoral body – to produce a new constitution in2010. The post-2007 election violence recorded over 1,300 deaths, over 5,000 injuries and rapes, aswell as massive displacement – which invited the attention of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The digitised movement

Many of the people who were at the forefront of the Saba Saba protests have died or have beenaccommodated in the rapacious state. As the state grows more dangerous in deploying deadly forcein a throwback to the dictatorship of yore, the public appears friendless and with few defenders.

Still, the spirit of citizen power that fuelled Saba Saba still roams the land like a vagabond. The pain,angst and trauma of decades of protest have blunted the desire for public-spirited action, onlyinterrupted intermittently by fresh outrages.

The Kenyan state remains colonial in its true nature, ceding nothing even when it offers backhandedhalf measures to stall demands for citizen power. Cycles of reform have delivered piecemeal changein slow, grudging steps that are often also characterised by blowback. Changes to the executive toshare its power with county governments continue to be undermined; Parliament appears to havelost power and public trust; and the judiciary is fighting daily for its independence.

Plural politics and expanded public voice have not resolved many of the problems that make life inKenya a seesaw between hope and despair. Police routinely break up peaceful assemblies and turnthem into riots, complete with clouds of tear gas, truncheons raining down on bodies and bulletscutting through crowds.

Yet, some things have changed. Citizens may still not control the organs of the state –and there isgreat frustration with the government from which they are alienated – but they continue to claimtheir power through an intersection of greater awareness, increased voice and technology.

The Kenyan state remains colonial in its true nature, ceding nothing even when it offers

backhanded half measures to stall demands for citizen power. Cycles of reform havedelivered piecemeal change in slow, grudging steps that are often also characterised byblowback.

Sometimes, these strides can appear insufficient, but citizens have overcome their fear ofdictatorship, and continue to evolve new tactics to make their voices heard even in the potentiallyrepressive context.

Between that seismic Saba Saba event and the passage of a new constitution in August 2010, some17.1 million Kenyan children were born and continue to walk the earth. The children of Saba Saba,progenies of the legacy of struggle, have come of age but they have not always been shielded fromthe scars of the history that birthed their freedom. They are better educated, more expressive andgreatly aided by technology, but they continue to wallow in want, are beset by unemployment andare confronted daily by police brutality.

With 45 million Internet subscriptions, Kenyans are the continent’s second largest social mediausers, after South Africa. Young Kenyans are most active on WhatsApp and Facebook, but it is thefabled Kenyans on Twitter (#KOT) who routinely take down the country’s critics and wage war onperceived moral or ethical wrongs within and across borders.

In April 2020, Deputy President William Ruto blocked US-based Kenyan law scholar Makau Mutuaon Twitter over the latter’s criticism of him. Last year, President Uhuru Kenyatta suspended hissocial media accounts – only a year after deactivating multiple accounts when he came up for airfrom a deluge of criticism that threatened to engulf him online.

Freedom is never given; it is won. The lesson of Saba Saba needs to be preserved through thegenerations because it reproduces the courage of the independence struggle in which ordinarypeople stand up to those who bully them.

It remains to be seen whether mobile phones and computer keyboards will be sufficient to hold thedam.

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Pan-African Forums: ActivismBy The Elephant

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their societyby interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

Pan-African Forums: ActivismBy The Elephant

My inquiry into the status of contemporary Kenyan protest music indignantly began with ahypothesis that this genre has gone mute in recent years. My agitation was fuelled after watching adocumentary on the great artist of the American civil rights movement, Nina Simone hunched overher piano, singing Mississippi Goddam. The song was riveting, bold, defiant and ‘in your face’. Hersong, sung in 1964 at the height of the American Civil rights campaign, was exceedingly bold. Ninawas a rising star and a commercial success, but her musical career took a different tangent after therelease of Mississippi Goddam. The song was banned from the air-waves, supposedly because of thecuss word, ‘goddam’, an unacceptable term for the time. However, that did not stop the song frombecoming the Civil rights’ anthem and receiving more resonance than the popular gospel turnedprotest song, ‘We shall overcome’ mainstreamed by Pete Seegar.

Nina’s song, spoke truth to power, the power of the white supremacist, segregationist intent ondenying African Americans their human rights. In a sense, Nina committed commercial suicide inorder to gain her political voice. The documentary led to my reflection on the role of music inpolitical protest in Kenya, and left me wondering, when did the voice of protest music in Kenya fallsilent?

Immediately after independence, there were “patriotic” songs composed to celebrate the newlyattained uhuru. Musicians created songs reminding Kenyans of the independence struggle and thesacrifices that had resulted in self-rule. They also extolled the virtues of the main actors in this fightbut slowly the music morphed into songs glorifying the first president, Jomo Kenyatta. As PresidentKenyatta consolidated power, the timbre of praise songs rose; the person of the president and theaspiration of the nation became one. It was the beginning of court poetry and a hero-worshipculture.

The first major political shock to the national project was the assassination in 1965 of Pio GamaPinto, the left-leaning journalist, politician, ex-detainee, freedom fighter and confidante of JaramogiOginga Odinga. Pinto was a Specially Elected Member of the House of Representatives and anavowed socialist. His assassination followed the dissolution of KADU (Kenya African DemocraticUnion) that led to Kenya becoming a de facto one-party state.

The next major political event was the formation of Kenya People’s Union (KPU) in 1966 that flung

Kenya back to multi-party dispensation, but which, most importantly, signified the split in theoriginal KANU (Kenya African National Union) and the beginning of the Kenyatta/Oginga-Odingarivalry.

These events fermented the beginning of protest music in Kenya as artists began to respond to thepolitical contestations. The state came down viciously on its critics and opponents, signalling thenarrowing of democratic space. Artists began to speak truth to power.

In 1969, in an act of defiance, Abdilatif Abdulla, a poet and member of KPU, wrote the treatiseKenya: Twendapi? (Kenya, where are we heading to?), which earned him the notoriety of beingKenya’s first post-independence political prisoner (1969-72). It was a bold attempt at speaking truthto power and revealed that the state was prepared to use all means to stifle commentary.

Speaking truth to power is described as a non-violent political tactic employed by dissidents againstthe received wisdom or propaganda of governments they regard as oppressive, authoritarian or an“ideocracy”. Speaking that truth through music has the benefit of being able to inform, educate andmobilise through popular entertainment. The potency of music arises from its ability to mutate intocontemporary popular culture and reach across the barriers of elitism that limit a novelist, an actor,a musician or any other type of artist.

In 1969, in an act of defiance, Abdilatif Abdulla, a poet and member of KPU, wrote thetreatise Kenya: Twendapi? (Kenya, where are we heading to?), which earned him thenotoriety of being Kenya’s first post-independence political prisoner (1969-72). It was abold attempt at speaking truth to power and revealed that the state was prepared to useall means to stifle commentary.

As the Kenyatta government progressively became more repressive, so did the intensity of theprotest music. The manner that the state responded to protest music speaking truth to power offersus a window into understanding the current state of protest music.

Bitter independence waters

As the dream of independence began to fade, Ishmael Nga’nga of the Presbyterian Church of EastAfrica (PCEA) Gathaithi Church choir released a song, Mai ni Maruru (The waters are bitter), whichlikened the deferred dream-fruits of independence to the bitter waters spoken of in the Bible. Theexpected fruits of independence had been replaced by aggrandisement by the political elite. Thoughhis song was couched in biblical and religious symbolism, the powerful heard it. Nga’nga lamentedthat, “Men and women are quarrelling/ over small matters, telling each other/ “I did not wantsomeone like you”/ Because the water is bitter/ When you go to the office seeking assistance/ Youfind an angry officer/ When you try to enter, he tells you he is ‘busy’/ Because the water is bitter.”

Ishmael’s song was banned by the Kenyatta government and the president is said to have retortedthat the fruits of independent could not be equated to the proverbial bitter water that causedconcern to the children of Israel. The state resorted to silencing its critics using the publicbroadcaster that was the only one available at this time. This approach was to become a standardway of ensuring that the voice of protest was not heard.

The culture of political assassinations, mysterious deaths and disappearances of politicians began tobecome commonplace. Argwings Kodhek died in a suspicious accident in January of 1969. A fewmonths later, the charismatic politician Tom Mboya was assassinated. In 1972, Ronald Ngala died ina Christmas Day accident that baffled many. In 1975, the fiery Josiah Mwangi Kariuki (JM), who had

served as Kenyatta’s personal secretary, was murdered. Joseph Kamaru, a personal friend of JM anda popular Benga musician, used his music to protest the killing of the politician. Kamaru’s song wasbanned by the Voice of Kenya (later known as the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation) on June 20, 1975and Kamaru is reported to have been arrested and, along with his collaborators, and whipped by thepresident himself. (This claim is, however, difficult to verify.)

Beyond the use of state machinery to limit access to audiences by shutting down the airwaves,physical threats and actual violence entered the repertoire of tools used by the state to ensure thatcriticism was curtailed. Kamaru is reported to have said that after releasing the song, heexperienced very hard times because the song didn’t go well with the ruling elite and he evenstarted receiving death threats. He said, “I received threats that if I was not careful, my head wouldbe picked from Ngong where Kariuki’s lifeless body was found.”

After President Moi came to power in 1978, Kamaru enjoyed a period of molly-coddling Moi andeven earned himself an official state trip to Japan. Upon his return, he sang the Safari ya Japancollection in which he heaped praises on Moi. This dalliance did not last long. When Kamarusupported multipartyism, he fell out of favour with Moi.

State capture

In 1988, amid the infamous mlolongo queue-voting system championed by Moi, Kamaru released asong, Mahoya ma Bururi (Prayers of the Nation). During this time, the discontent with Moi’s rulehad reached boiling point levels. There was growing opposition to the state after the brutal 1986crackdown on real and perceived dissidents, especially members of the Mwakenya movement.

Kamaru recalls that the song was an instant hit and created a lot of tension countrywide. Hedescribes efforts by Moi to have him stop selling the Gikuyu version of the song. Moi went as far asgiving Kamaru Sh800,000 to make a Kiswahili version of the song. Kamaru jumped at this offer andactually made the Kiswahili version, but was unsuccessful in his attempts to see Moi and to presenthim with his finished “homework”. He concluded that it must have been Moi’s way of trying to gethim not to sell the song.

The state used its economic muscle to appropriate protest music by buying out artists and, in somecases, turning them into total pro-establishment praise-singers. The need for financial success andsurvival was enough incentive to silence voices of critics. When coercion did not work, the state waswilling to “buy out” the artist speaking truth to power. Kamaru’s experience with Moi is instructive.

Daniel Owino Misiani, another musician who had used his art to consistently critique the politicalrepression by the Kenyatta regime, especially the political assassinations, was imprisoned on variousoccasions for his lyrics, which were deemed offensive to the state. He was also threatened withdeportation from Kenya on several occasions because he was born in Shirati, which isadministratively in Tanzania. Kamaru and Owino were unique musicians in that even though theirmusic could be taken off the air by the national broadcaster, they had built a strong ethnic fan base.Their records sold in the thousands and, therefore, their financial independence offered them abetter chance of resisting the state capture of their protest music.

The state used its economic muscle to appropriate protest music by buying out artistsand, in some cases, turning them into total pro-establishment praise-singers. The needfor financial success and survival was enough incentive to silence voices of critics.

The end of the Kenyatta presidency and ushering in of the Moi era gave some respite to the artists.

However, this only lasted till the 1982 coup by the Air Force that was followed by state repression.The fact that university students, lecturers and intellectuals had supported the coup led Moi toclamp down on creatives.

As Moi’s regime became more repressive, and as the economy sank deeper into a black hole,Osumba Rateng’ released the song Baba Otonglo that detailed the economic hardships ordinaryKenyans were facing. In the song, a family is forced to adopt severe austerity measures, which werepresented in a humorous manner, but which were painfully true. Baba Otonglo parodies therigmarole surrounding the presentation of the annual budget in Parliament. Economic policies weresingled out as sinking the ordinary Kenyan deeper and deeper into despair. He sings, “Budget ikohigh, vyakula vimepanda, ukame umezidi, vitu vyote vimepanda” (The budgeted cost of living is waytoo high, price of foodstuff has escalated, the drought has persisted, the cost of everything hasrisen.” The state responded to this song in the usual brutal fashion.

When the song was released, it was considered to have political undertones. The thin-skinnedpoliticians lobbied to have the song pulled off the air. Osumba was visited by police and questioned.He detailed his experience in an interview.‘Four policemen came to my house in Baba Dogo Estate,Nairobi and arrested me. They accused me of criticizing the Government and composing a song thatincited people.” To save his skin, Osumba insisted that the song was just a creative spin at the hardeconomic times. He escaped without charges being preferred against him.

Hip hop, Sheng and angry urban youth

The late 1980s and 90s marked a change in the socio-political landscape in Kenya. Among the mostrelevant change was the liberalisation of the airwaves and the resumption of political contest afterthe re-introduction of multi-party politics. Between 1980 and 2009, the population of Nairobiballooned from 862,000 to about 3.4 million. According to a 2009 UN-Habitat, more than 34 per centof Kenya’s total population lives in urban areas and of this, more than 71 per cent confined toinformal settlements. Informal settlements in Nairobi, and other urban areas, are a consequence offailure of government policies and official indifference. Amnesty International has described theintricacies of the informal settlements in this way, “The experience of slum-dwellers starklyillustrates that people living in poverty not only face deprivation, but are also strapped in povertybecause they are excluded from the rest of the society, denied a say and threatened with violenceand insecurity.’’

Enter, Dandora and other marginalised urban settlements like Mathare, Majengo, Korogocho,Mukuru kwa Njenga and Kibera. Dandora, better known as, ‘D’ by the youthful musicians of this erabecame the code name for the Kenyan equivalent of the projects where Hip hop as protest musicwas born. The life and demographic profile in these inner cities mirrors the hip hop producingghettos of the US. The hip hop story in Kenya is the story of Kalamashaka.

Kamaa, one of the founders of the Kalamashaka trio, describes how the group rose to express thetribulations of urban marginalisation and how the voice of this group and others like it weremarginalised.

Kalamashaka was the most prominent of the pioneer Kenyan hip hop groups using Sheng to rap andinfusing politics in their lyrics.

Kalamashaka began by rapping about the state of their existence in the urban ghettos of Nairobidominated by serious social strife, depressed economies, ethnic tensions, state corruption,institutional failure, infrastructural collapse, crime, violence, police brutality and extrajudicialkillings. Just like their American role-models, they were anti-establishment and explicitly political.

Kalamashaka made a mark in the music scene by their signature tune, ‘Tafsiri Hii’ (Translate This)which, by default, managed to get a lot of air-play when it was first produced. The song was anindictment of the prevailing inequality in Kenya and the disenfranchisement of the youth. Kamaadescribes their lyrics as “gangsta and radical.’’ The use of Sheng, which at that at that time wasstruggling to shed off its identity as a street thug language and gain acceptance as a Kenyan patoiswas revolutionary because it immediately drew a generational as well as class line.

Kalamashaka began by rapping about the state of their existence in informal settlementsdominated by serious social strife, depressed economies, ethnic tensions, statecorruption, institutional failure, infrastructural collapse, crime, violence, police brutalityand extrajudicial killings. Just like their American role models, they were anti-establishment and explicitly political.

The emerging Hip Hop musicians spoke truth to power, describing how the system had failed them.The lyrics were described as “full of rage.’’

Hip hop Sheng was inspired by American Hip-hop music that the establishment had problems withbecause of the explicit lyrics and the apparent glorification of violence. The urban ýouth generation’in the poorer settlements of Nairobi identified with Hip hop emerging from. The music was angryand retributive. Kalamashaka became the face of a movement that morphed into Ukoo Fulani – anangry and disenfranchised urban youth movement. Kalamashaka and Ukoo Fulani began to invokethe name, Mau Mau the liberation movement that remained banned in Kenya till 2002. This sentsignals to the political status quo that the movement was potentially dangerous.

Market forces and political sycophancy

The response to the rising protest music signalled a totally new era in censorship. It was no longerthe state that took it upon itself to ban music; commercial radio stations did this job for the state.Kamaa describes how radio presenters began to shut out these sounds from the air, effectivelydriving them underground. The emergent commercial radio stations that were reliant on state andcorporate goodwill and advertising effectively became agents of shutting down any anti-establishment voice. The use of Sheng was tolerated only to the extent that it allowed commercialinterests to provide marketing information to the youth demographic. Any message that was aimedat raising social conscience was not acceptable.

Denied air time, and obviously not the kind of musicians who would be invited to perform at nationalcelebrations, the economic marginalisation of this genre of music drove the artists deeperunderground while their lyrics became angrier. Denial of air time meant that their voices werelimited because they did not enjoy the base popularity that Owino Misiani or Joseph Kamaru had.

The response to the rising protest music signalled a totally new era in censorship. It wasno longer the state that took it upon itself to ban music; commercial radio stations didthis job for the state. Kamaa describes how radio presenters began to shut out thesesounds from the air, effectively driving them underground.

Commercialisation was the other factor that sunk youthful urban voices deeper into oblivion. EricMusyoka, a producer, recalling his break-up with Kalamashaka, poignantly says, “I learnt thatradical and hard stance does not help.” This marked his transition from a producer of hip-hop tocommercial music. So-called “market forces” conspired to lock out the voices that were not in line

with the status quo.

Just as had happened to Nina Simone, the interests of the commercial oligarchs meant that rawtalent and protest music could not secure time in recording studios. Barred from commercialairwaves and recording studios, protest music became a marginalised genre. Even though therewere some who were speaking about vices such as corruption, only the less controversial numbers,like Eric Wainaina’s Nchi Ya Kitu Kidogo, received acceptance and air time and were played atnational celebrations. Though Eric spoke of the extent to which the cancer of corruption hadmetastasised in Kenya, he was not angry enough. Though he spoke of the fact that ordinary Kenyansare confronted with corruption in every facet of their lives, he did not squarely lay blame for thissorry state on the rulers. So whereas Eric’s voice is broadcast loudly, that of the angry hip hop andreggae musicians, such as Mashifta, Kitu Sewer and Sarabi, are pushed away from the mainstreamand into the underground; effectively muted.

Political sycophancy is also responsible for muting the voices of musicians speaking truth to power.Tom Mboya Angángá, better known as Atommy Sifa, had to flee into exile in Tanzania after he and anondescript musician, Tedeja Kenya, produced a song in which they lampooned Raila Odinga forbeing responsible for the political and socio-economic woes bedevilling Luoland. Though there areno records that indicate that Raila Odinga himself threatened him with repercussions, the oppositionleader’s rabid supporters intimidated Atommy enough for him to fear for his life. Tede received fewbrickbats because, unlike Atommy, he was considered a non-entity and had little following throughhis music. When politics is highly personalised and ethnicised, those perceived to speak truth to theprevalent power are silenced through political patronage. However, when it suits the political class,they will use musicians who sing in ethnic languages to their advantage. For instance, the hip hopgroup Gidi Gidi Maji Maji’s hit song Unbwogable (Unbeatable) became the rallying cry of Raila andother opposition politicians during the 2002 elections that ousted Moi’s KANU party from power.

Musicians, like all professionals, depend on the power of the market to make ends meet andcommercial considerations, as we saw in the case of Kamaru, can silence the truth. In Kenya,musicians face immense struggles because of a poor infrastructure supporting the music business.Piracy and irregular payment of royalties for airplay makes it hard to be a commercial success. Themarket for live performances is low, with foreign artistes in higher demand and commanding betterpay. An artist who hopes to speak truth to power gradually finds him or herself ground out ofoperation by penury. Artists like Owino Misiani and Kamaru could afford to be outspoken becausethey had a strong ethnic fan base that translated to a vibrant market. Their music being bannedfrom the airwaves actually served to popularise their messages among ethnically-polarisedconstituencies. But they are more the exception than the norm.

The language used in protest music can also lead to marginalisation. The modern Kenyan musician,in an attempt to be more cosmopolitan, uses Kiswahili or English. These are not languages ofpolitical discourse in Kenya. Granted they may be used in public rallies, but the real politicaldiscussions happen in mother tongues. This explains why Moi was not comfortable withKamaru’s Mahoya ma Bururi in the Gikuyu language, but was willing to finance the Kiswahiliversion. Moi knew that the same song rendered in Kiswahili would suffer the same fate as GabrielOmolo’s, Lunchtime or Eric Wainaina’s Nchi ya Kitu Kidogo. The passion of political protest onlyworks in the language of the masses, and outside the urban informal settlements, ethnic languageshold sway. Any song rendered in Kiswahili or English carries no threat of insurrection.

Language for protest assumes a deeper complexity in Kenya. Whereas Bob Marley used JamaicanEnglish to sing political protest and Fela Kuti used Pidgin English, which is the language of thedowntrodden in most of West Africa, there is no equivalent language of the masses in Kenya. Forexample, Juliani’s song, Utawala (The administration) speaks of poor governance and impunity, but

the moment he switches to rap and a hip hop style, he limits his audience. Hip hop and rap in Kenyaare associated with crotch-grabbing African American wannabes who do not resonate with theordinary citizens outside of the urban settlements. With time though, as urbanisation increases, andurban populations become a significant electoral demographic, this is likely to change.

The most successful musicians who have been able to speak truth to power are those who have abase, who speak in the language of that base and hence have a strong constituency. Failure tounderstand the true language of the ordinary citizen renders any political content irrelevant orinnocuous. The powerful are not bothered by any message that will self-reduce to a touristy sing-song like Nchi ya Kitu Kidogo because it will never mobilise political response. Even the hugelysuccessful Sauti Sol’s recent song and accompanying video, Tujiangalie, which critiques the currentgovernment’s neglect of ordinary citizens’ concerns, has failed to move the masses, perhaps becausethe band is associated more with feel-good songs than with anti-establishment music.

If Kenyan musicians are to regain the chagrin and attention of the establishment, they must speakthe language of the masses. They must break social taboos, like Nina Simone did with MississippiGoddam. She was able to express the anger of the African American in his everyday language. Somust our musicians express the anger welling up because of grand corruption, huge national debts,state wastage and opulence, extrajudicial killings, over-taxation and miscarriage of justice.

The most successful musicians who have been able to speak truth to power are thosewho have a base, who speak in the language of that base and hence have a strongconstituency. Failure to understand the true language of the ordinary citizen renders anypolitical content irrelevant or innocuous. The powerful are not bothered by any messagethat will self-reduce to a touristy sing-song like Nchi ya Kitu Kidogo because it will nevermobilise political response.

One could rightfully argue that protest music in Kenya is muted, not because artists are notproducing it, but because the genre has been effectively driven underground. It’s vibrant in thedigital repositories where the masses have little access.

In addition, the artists themselves have been marginalised by commercial interests keen onmaintaining the status quo, so they struggle against all odds. The state no longer needs strong-armtactics like detention, jail and threats because the media is doing the work of censorship for them.Civil society might support these artists, but as long as access to mass media is outside their grasp,these voices will remain muted.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their societyby interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

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Pan-African Forums: ActivismBy The Elephant

‘As far as Africa is concerned, music cannot be for enjoyment. It has to be for revolution.’’

– Fela Anikulapo Kuti.

On Wednesday January 23 2018, as Zimbabwean and one of Africa’s most celebrated musiciansOliver Mtukudzi took his final bow in Harare aged 66, the floodgates of debate opened. Who was thiscultural colossus? What about his politics cast against the turbulent reality of Zimbabwe? There isglobal consensus that Mtukudzi was a musical giant, but away from the music, nuancedconversations were happening. Was Mtukudzi modeled in the image of Franco Luambo Makiadi, whotowed Mobutu Sese Seko’s line to stay in favour and keep producing music, or was he a Fela Kuti, ano-holds-barred bold anti-establishment figure?

There is little evidence to suggest that Mtukudzi was explicitly either a Franco or Fela replica – atleast politically speaking. His loyal fans insist that he was simply Tuku, a man who handled his musicand politics with a delicate balance as to allow himself the license to keep singing and touring, whileavoiding the tempting trap of complicity by siding with the oppressors. One needs to revisit a littlehistory to understand the obsession with situating a certain generation and caliber of African artists–a classification Mtukudzi belonged – within the prevailing political circumstances in their homecountries.

During the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, musicians such as Hugh Masekela and Miriam

Makeba, alongside writers and poets such as Keorapetse Kgositsile and Dennis Brutus, deployedtheir celebrity status to shape events both at home and abroad, thereby succeeding in drawingglobal attention to the plight of a segregated and oppressed Black population. Makeba, using thepersonal-is-political strategy, insisted that her music was not political, hastening to add – possibly asa caveat – that she only sang about truth. To her listeners across the world, what Makeba calledtruth was equated to her broadcasting the malevolent experiences suffered by Black South Africans,in effect deploying music to camouflage her anti-apartheid campaign. Makeba did not need toannounce her politics from rooftops, because she was living her politics out loud for everyone to seeand hear.

As far as Africa is concerned, music cannot be for enjoyment. It has to be for revolution

When Hugh Masekela, arrived in exile in the United States, he was still confused about what genreof music to pursue. He was mimicking a lot of American jazz before Miles Davis urged him to stick tothe Southern Africa sound he had been experimenting with and take his time before digging hisheels in politically. He benefitted from the counsel of African American musical greats such HarryBelafonte, who persuaded Masekela against returning to South Africa to bury his mother. Belafontefeared that the young Masekela had not built the influence needed to restrain the apartheid regimefrom arresting and imprisoning him. In time, Masekela slowly built the requisite stature, joining thelikes of Makeba in using music to tell their country’s story. Like Makeba, Masekela was not overtlypolitical outside his music, but his compositions did not hide his position.

On his part, the poet Dennis Brutus – like his Nigerian counterpart Christopher Okigbo – went allout. Brutus put his poetry aside for a moment and successfully campaigned for the banning of SouthAfrica from the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan. By the time the announcement of the ban wasmade, Brutus, who had returned home to South Africa, was already serving jail time in RobbenIsland – locked up in a prison cell next to that of Nelson Mandela – for his activities against theapartheid regime. On leaving jail, Brutus fled South Africa, banned from writing and publishing inthe country.

Okigbo seemingly faced with limited choices took up arms to fight alongside his Igbo kin during theBiafra war, an act which resulted in the poet’s death in combat. Okigbo’s passing deeply affected hiscontemporary Chinua Achebe who eulogized him through his ‘Dirge for Okigbo’ resulting in Achebeleaving Nigeria and assuming the role of Biafra’s ambassador at large. Earlier, before the fightinghad taken root, the poet and playwright Wole Soyinka appointed himself mediator between the twowarring sides secretly meeting Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, leader of the breakaway Republicof Biafra. This act saw Soyinka imprisoned for two years by the country’s military dictatorship.Closer home, in 1970s repressive Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiongo was detained following the staging of hisplay ‘Ngaahika Ndeeda’ – Gikuyu for ‘I Will Marry When I Want’ – after the state considered Ngugi’sactions seditious.

Like Makeba and Masekela, Mtukudzi fought a battle of memory. He may not have had a political-heavy discography but he took up the battle identity that ensured that his people would not forgetthemselves, in the process ensuring Africa and the world did not forget his people.

By consciously keeping away from overt political commentary in Zimbabwe, Mtukudzi in a way choseto look beyond Zimbabwe much as he was looking right into his country’s eyes, his life mission beingto make the rest of the world see, feel, touch, smell and taste the best of Zimbabwe’s culture andartistry. To some, this was enough. To others, Tuku’s apolitical nature was akin to neutrality,construed as complicity.

***

On the first Friday night after the passing of Mtukudzi, I made a midnight dash to Sippers, theNairobi Rhumba hideaway, looking to find out who Mtukudzi was and what he represented in theeyes of my interlocutors. Following his long career that stretched decades of performances acrossAfrica and the West, the man known as one of Zimbabwe’s finest exports – according to his daughterSelmour – built a global following.

‘‘He put Zimbabwe on the map,’’ said Selmour, who is also a musician of note. ‘‘He’s the biggestexport from Zimbabwe, and all artists look up to him, to get to his level and surpass it. He set thegold standard.’’

In Kenya, Mtukudzi’s huge following first originated from his popular hit Todii – which is all that asizeable chunk of his fans knew about the man and his music. Mtukudzi also made frequentappearances in the Nairobi concert circuit, earning himself a more discerning followership that wentbeyond Todii. Much as the song is popular with revelers across Africa and beyond, Todii was bornout of one of Mtukudzi’s saddest life experiences. In 1996, four members of Black Spirit, Mtukudzi’sband – including his younger brother Robert Mtukudzi, with whom he started his musical journey –got infected with HIV/AIDS. All the four succumbed to the disease, dying within a two-month windowof each other’s death.

‘‘I wrote Todii to address the HIV/AIDS stigma,’’ Mtukudzi told an interviewer in 2015. ‘‘It was asong meant to help start a difficult conversation, which many people didn’t know how to go about.’’

It is safe to say that Mtukudzi was one of a group of African musicians – alongside the likes ofMasekela – who were adopted by Kenyans as one of their own, invited back time and again forrepresenting something which was at once soothing and liberating, always reminding theiraudiences that Africa was still one. Musically, Kenya has struggled to produce artistic personas ofsuch stature, much as it has had an abundance of gifted musicians –such as the late Ayub Ogada –some of whom have even collaborated musically with these African greats. For various reasons,Kenya’s cultural glue doesn’t hold tight enough. Benga, for instance, a Kenyan sound which wasexported across Africa and beyond during the 1970s, still struggles to pass for the quintessentialKenyan musical experience partly because it is reduced to the ‘ethnic’ categorization, while artistsfrom other African countries who sing in their languages are embraced as transcendent culturalicons. To cure this void, Kenya has found itself perpetually looking outside, to the likes of Mtukudzi.

‘‘My impression of Mtukudzi was heavily influenced by the white neo-liberal view of him,’’ saidOketch, a Kenyan professor of philosophy who spent years living and studying in the West. ‘‘Everysummer, for as long as I remember, Mtukudzi was invited to Chicago, where he sometimesperformed alongside his countryman Thomas Mapfumo. To the white crowd, he was this big dealAfrican performer. That was my earliest introduction to the man – an African revered by the concertgoing Western crowd.’’

For some critics, Mtukudzi fits the criteria of the African export to the West – which in somequarters translates to being a sellout. Nonetheless, Mtukudzi did not limit his performances toWestern capitals. Tuku possibly performed across Africa and in Zimbabwe in particular as much ashe did away from home, building a solid homegrown fanbase.

Mtukudzi and Mapfumo were one time bandmates in their youthful years, playing for the WagonWheel band. Much as they were both influential in the later periods of Zimbabwe’s liberationstruggle, Mapfumo almost always rocked the political boat post-independence in 1980, withMtukudzi taking the middle ground, both within and outside of his music. As a result of their

different approaches to Zimbabwean politics, Mapfumo was exiled in the early 1990s, whileMtukudzi stayed put, giving Zimbabweans something to hold onto musically in times of seriouspolitical tribulations. Mtukudzi christened his music Tuku, drawn from his nickname, while Mapfumodubbed his sound Chimurenga, continuing to be heavily associated with the liberation movement bythe same name. Chimurenga, according to Ntone Edjabe – the Cameroonian DJ, journalist andfounder of the Cape Town based Pan-African gazette, the Chimurenga Chronic – means ‘‘in the spiritof Murenga’’, who was a highly revered Shona liberation hero.

For some critics, Mtukudzi fits the criteria of the African export to the West – which insome quarters translates to being a sellout. Nonetheless, Mtukudzi did not limit hisperformances to Western capitals. Tuku possibly performed across Africa and inZimbabwe in particular as much as he did away from home, building a solid homegrownfanbase.

‘‘He was a Shona who was loved by the Ndebele,’’ said Irene who is a Kenyan consultant with amultinational who has worked in a number of African countries. ‘‘I was once told of how when myfriend’s sister arrived in Zimbabwe from an overseas trip, she came across one of the largest crowdsshe had ever seen in Harare. On asking what the occasion was she was informed it was an OliverMtukudzi concert. That is how much the man was loved in his motherland.’’

In many African countries, political competition gets highly divisive, setting communities againsteach other. Zimbabwe was no exception. Gukurahundi – a Shona term loosely translated to mean‘‘the early rain that washes away the chaff before the spring rains’’ – was a series of massacrescarried out against the Ndebele population by the Zimbabwean army under Robert Mugabe between1983 and 1987. It was believed to have emanated from the rivalry between the two dominantpolitical parties, ZANU led by Mugabe, a Shona, and ZAPU, led by Mugabe’s fellow liberationstalwart Joshua Nkomo, a Ndebele. The killings were intended to quell a supposed impendingrebellion against the Mugabe state, resulting in thousands of deaths. This has remained one of thedarkest patches in Zimbabwe’s history – just like Biafra for Nigeria. Therefore, the acknowledgmentthat Mtukudzi, a Shona, was celebrated in Ndebele land despite the painful historical fissures goes along way in signifying the power of Tuku.

‘‘I credit Mtukudzi with maintaining Zimbabwe’s cultural momentum,’’ Irene said, ‘‘something whicha number of African countries lost post-independence. In that way, he became an invaluable nationalasset, a symbol of resilience, and a Pan-African treasure. If there is one thing we have continuouslybeen reminded of as Africans, it is that you lose momentum, you lose the struggle. By singing aboutlove, life, loss, Mtukudzi reminded us of what being Zimbabwean and living the Zimbabwean andAfrican experience felt like, reinforcing the idea of art as the natural adhesive that holds societiestogether.’’

Mtukudzi gave Zimbabwe what Fela gave to Nigeria – artistic endurance. Tuku was not Zimbabwe’sFela, because Zimbabwe might not have needed a Fela with the presence of a robust liberationmovement that solidly rallied around a beloved Robert Mugabe, before the man turned rogue. Onthe other hand, Nigeria had a series of coup d’etats after independence, resulting in successivemilitary dictatorships that Fela felt obliged to keep resisting. The Fela comparison therefore onlywent as far as Mtukudzi’s artistic staying power, that he was perpetually present, towering in thelives of Zimbabweans from the time of the liberation struggle onwards – metaphorically holding thecountry’s hand through the good, the bad and the ugly.

‘‘Why do we sing, why is there art?’’ Mtukudzi posed during the 2015 interview, grappling with the

question of the role of art and artists, explaining his life’s work. ‘‘Art is to give life and hope to thepeople. Art is for healing broken hearts. Like in Zimbabwe, you don’t sing a song when you havenothing to say.’’

Mtukudzi gave Zimbabwe what Fela gave to Nigeria – artistic endurance. Tuku was notZimbabwe’s Fela, because Zimbabwe might not have needed a Fela with the presence ofa robust liberation movement that solidly rallied around a beloved Robert Mugabe,before the man turned rogue.

***

In Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire – the home of Rhumba – standing up to the strongman, whether anartist or politician, was like buying one’s one-way ticket to prison, or at worse, writing one’sobituary. It therefore took the likes of Papa Wemba – whose cultural contribution is not fullyappreciated by many outside the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) – to use theirartistic influence to start cracking Mobutu’s edifice, covertly. As Mobutu enforced his Zaireanizationprogram, asking the Congolese to denounce Western influence – including fashion and names – PapaWemba led a quiet rebellion by reimagining fashion, starting a sartorial elegance movement whichdid not fall within Mobutu’s categorization of Western clothing, but equally didn’t fit into Africanfashion as imagined by the President.

This created sufficient middle ground occupied by those who wished to defy Mobutu and his politicscovertly, without necessarily going to the streets to battle against military tanks. Fashion thereforebecame a weapon, a place of solace, an assertion of personal and collective defiance, a reclamationof self-dignity. This gave way to the rise of the La Sape (Société des Ambianceurs et desPersonnesd’Élégance, translated as the ‘‘Society of Atmosphere-setters and Elegant People’’) towhich Papa Wemba became the unofficial leader, influenced by fashion trends in Milan and Paris –directly challenging Mobutu’s anti-European sentiment, and by extension challenging his politics. Itwas the perfect illustration of soft power.

Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe – like Mobutu’s Zaire – morphed into a cesspool which ordinarilyresults in artists being pressured to use their art for something bigger. Mtukudzi therefore foundhimself under the spotlight, seeing that his contemporary Thomas Mapfumo who some insist is theclosest Zimbabwe has gotten to having a Fela, both musically and politically had long drawn the lineon the sand and declared all-out war on Mugabe, just as he did with the colonialists before that. YetMtukudzi refused to get directly drawn into the politics of the day, by all indications pulling a PapaWemba-like soft power move – picking to fight on the cultural frontline – because sometimes one hasto pick their battles. There are those who will condemn Tuku for his apolitical stance, just as thereare those who will understand where the man was coming from, because sometimes, under suchstrenuous circumstances, there is only so much one can do.

On that cultural frontline, there was one significant battle that Mtukudzi successfully waged inseeking to preserve the essence of Zimbabwean music. The genesis of Mtukudzi’s pushback, asdocumented in ‘‘Shades of Benga’’ – a seminal work on Kenyan music history by Tabu Osusa’sKetebul Music – started with the appointment of the Kenyan music producer Oluoch Kanindo as theregional representative for the international music label EMI Records. Kanindo became soinstrumental in EMI’s Africa operations to a point of earning the privilege of jet setting across thecontinent, to seal recording and distribution deals.

Thanks to Kanindo’s infiltration of the African market through his Sungura and Kanindo record

labels, both of which exploited the EMI music distribution networks – the Kenyan sound, Benga,became popular in East and Southern Africa, going as far as being one of the more popular soundsamong Zimbabwean freedom fighters. Benga started influencing Zimbabwean music especially inthe late 1970s when Kanindo was in his musical prime as a producer. It was off the back of thismusical invasion that Mtukudzi made a conscious decision to pushback against it, seeking topreserve the Shona and Ndebele traditional sounds, leading to the birth of Tuku. The influence ofBenga was so strong that there are proponents who hold that much as he worked overtime tobecome a Zimbabwean purist, Mtukudzi borrowed elements of his music from Benga. Thismonumental pushback illustrates Tuku’s sense of eternal cultural patriotism.

***

Oliver Mtukudzi was born in September 1952 in Highfield, a Harare township with historicsignificance as one of the founding hotspots of Zimbabwe’s independence movement. As ifpredestined to be a musician, Mtukudzi’s parents had met during a choir competition, passing downthe music bug to their eldest son, Oliver and his younger brother Robert, who became bandmates inMtukudzi’s Black Spirits. In the early 1970s, the two brothers started experimenting with music andlanded in trouble for sneaking out of the house to play at a local beer parlor. It was here thatMtukudzi got a rare opportunity to have his first encounter with an electric guitar, getting in troublewith his parents, who were against their two sons’ pursuit of a career in music.

‘‘I played the guitar so well,’’ Mtukudzi recalled, ‘‘such that the following day, those at the beerparlor reported to my father how talented I was. It was the one time my father hit me, for sneakingout of the house and spending time at the beer parlor in pursuit of music.’’

As fate would have it, the self-taught guitarist who began experimenting, looking for his own uniquesound that had observers saying he didn’t play the guitar right – would land his big break whilesitting right in front of his family home in Highlife. Brighton Matebere, at the time a leadingjournalist with the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, had a love interest on Mtukudzi’s street,and regularly ran into the young Mtukudzi practicing with his guitar outside his family housewhenever he came around to visit his girlfriend. Matebere was impressed by Mtukudzi’s skills andinvited him to perform during his radio show. It was his impressive performance during the radiointerview that resulted in Mtukudzi getting his first recording deal in 1975, never to look back again.Later, in 1977, he joined Wagon Wheel band, alongside Thomas Mapfumo.

‘‘When I left school I did not get a job for at least three years,’’ Mtukudzi revisited the birth of hispolitics, from where he learnt to hide in his music. ‘‘Blacks were not allowed to apply for jobs, butthe colonialists didn’t think of art as a weapon that could be used against them. So they allowed usto sing. It was therefore up to the artist to help the nation heal and grow. We used idioms andproverbs, knowing that Shona speakers would decipher the coded messages we were passing acrosswithout being explicitly political.’’

67 albums later, Mtukudzi still spoke as if he was in search of what to call a career, telling ForbesAfrica in 2016, ‘‘I am yet to decide on a career to take on, because this is not a career for me. I amjust doing me.’’

As debate rages on about Mtukudzi’s legacy, Mtukudzi made things easier by summing it all uphimself in 2015.

‘‘Pakare Paye is my legacy,’’ he said, ‘‘the legacy I am leaving behind for youngsters to getsomewhere where they can showcase what they do best. My generation and I didn’t have similaropportunities.’’

The Pakare Paye Arts Center, meaning ‘that place’, is an expansive piece of real estate whichMtukudzi transformed from a rundown junkyard into a state of the art facility with recording studiosand performance spaces. The center is located in Norton, about 45 kms from Harare. Pakare Payehas become a space for artistic apprentices seeking a soft landing in a country where thegovernment gives little regard to the arts. Yet Pakare Paye remains a reminder of one of Mtukudzi’ssaddest memories, since he originally built it intending for his only son and bandmate, Sam – whodied from a 2010 road accident on his way from the airport – to ran it. Following his son’s passing,Mtukudzi took a two year hiatus from recording music, returning with Sarawoga, meaning ‘‘leftalone’’.

‘‘Sam was more of a friend than a son to me,’’ Mtukudzi reminisced. ‘‘He was somebody whochallenged me, not as a son but as a friend. It made me feel closer to him. He was so talented to apoint where I couldn’t believe how much he could do musically, because he hadn’t had a very longmusic career.’’

For now, the family musical baton rests with Selmour, Mtukudzi’s daughter.

‘‘Some come and say oh, your children are following in your footsteps,’’ Mtukudzi said, as if diffusingpressure off his children who had taken after him. ‘‘That’s not true. I made my own steps, and mychildren make their own steps. God doesn’t duplicate talent. So they can’t be me. They have to bethemselves.’’

Mtukudzi seems to have made peace with himself – as a father, husband, artist and Zimbabwean –having done what he thought he needed to do as a Zimbabwean cultural vanguard. Yet more wasexpected of him by those who felt he should have done something, said something, regarding RobertMugabe’s Zimbabwe. Mtukudzi chose to play cultural politics – and succeeded in safeguardingZimbabwe’s interests on that front both at home and on the global stage – but the political jury isstill out on whether that was enough or whether those who demanded more from the man werejustified.

In an interview with Kenyan actor and playwright John Sibi-Okumu, journalist and DJ Ntone Edjabeof the Chimurenga Chronic explained, responding to a question on the role of culture in raisingpublic consciousness to tackle societal challenges, ‘‘Imagining culture as a tool, as something thatcan be used for anything but itself as an act of living and an articulation of that life is alwaysdangerous, whether for positive or other reasons,’’ Ntone admitted that indeed art and cultureaffects society, but putting a weight of expectations on culture becomes inhibitive. ‘‘…but yes,aspects of culture, music, literature, film… the production of culture, can bring people together.We’ve seen this historically.’’

If art can be left alone for its own sake, should artists, who become influential cultural figures insociety, be left alone, or is that an oxymoron? On his part, novelist Chinua Achebe had no internalcontradictions on what art is, and what function art plays in society and about the place of art andartists in politics.

Imagining culture as a tool, as something that can be used for anything but itself as anact of living and an articulation of that life is always dangerous, whether for positive orother reasons

‘‘Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics in your art’ are not being honest,’’ Achebe saidduring a rare conversation with his African American contemporary James Baldwin. ‘‘If you look verycarefully, you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is.

And what they are saying is not don’t introduce politics. What they are saying is don’t upset thesystem. They are just as political as any of us. It is only that they are on the other side.’’

The jury is still out on Tuku’s politics, but no one will deny that he was master of his craft.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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