THE THOUGHTFUL MUSEUM Remembering and Disremembering in Africa

THE THOUGHTFUL MUSEUM

Remembering and Disremembering in AfricaKEN WALIBORA WALIAULA

Abstract In remembering the attainment of political emancipation, post-independence African coun-tries have learned to narrate the official national narrative and to forget other stories. Commemora-tion of the nation’s past almost always goes hand in hand with officially decreed national amnesia.Therefore, the story of the nation has to be narrated and remembered by forgetting certain aspectsof the colonial past. By implication the dual act of remembering and forgetting sets the pattern forhow the postcolonial African nation narrates itself in the postcolonial moment. Focusing on Kenya asan example, this paper argues that the national commemoration of political emancipation from colo-nial rule tends to silence narratives of opposition and political incarceration that emerge in the post-colonial moment. The outcome is a remembering-and-forgetting battle that has implications for howdiverse individuals conceive of themselves collectively as a nation and how they forge or fail to forgea coherent collective memory.

I am impelled to begin this paper on memory byextracting something from my own memory,complete with its imperfections and shiftingnature. In the summer of 2007, I visited Barakivillage in Western Kenya where I was born butwhere I wasn’t bred. My father had built one ofthe first permanent houses in the area in theearly 1960s, complete with concrete floor, solidconcrete walls, and glass windows and doors. Iam told that is where I was born, the lastbornchild in a family of five children. Like countlesschildren in my time, I was born at home withthe help of indigenous midwives. When myfather moved to Trans Nzoia District in theRift Valley Province, where I discovered thereality of my existence, he moved with mymother and all of us kids, except my third-bornbrother, his best and brightest son, Wamukotawho I never really knew or saw.Wamukota diedwhile I was still a toddler. I have never even seena picture of him. Like permanent houses, pic-tures were a rarity in those days. My memory of

my gifted brother, therefore, rests heavily onmy parents’ and my siblings’ accounts and theunmarked grave beside my father’s permanenthouse at Baraki village, which I visited fromtime to time all my life. My father’s youngerbrother occupied the house ever since our fam-ily’s departure in the late 1960s. Each time Ireturned to my cradle (my father’s house), Inoticed that it had lost its luster; its glass win-dows and doors had been replaced with woodenones, its floor had cracks here and there; but ithad not lost its glory, its heroic status and itsawe, its affective and symbolic significance inmy mind and in my heart. At any rate, my latebrother’s memory is implicated in my memoryof my birthplace. Up until now the memory ofmy birthplace, or what I might call my Gardenof Eden, is bound up with the permanent housethat my father built and the grave where mybrotherWamukota was interred.

In 2007 I was more eager than ever beforeto see my father’s house and my brother’s grave,

Ken Walibora Waliaula ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of African languages and literature at theUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison.

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veritable emblems of where I came from. Myfather had died a year earlier and was interred inTrans Nzoia District, in the Rift Valley Prov-ince. I had returned to Kenya from the UnitedStates for the first time since attending his bur-ial. His death had triggered memories of hislegacy, of the things he did and did not do, ofwhere he had been to and where he had begunhis life’s journey, and where all of us kids hadalso begun our life’s journeys. I wanted to returnto the site of the memory of my father’s rootsand my own roots, the site of my father’s houseand my brother’s grave. To my utter shock andchagrin, I found the permanent house gone. Itwasn’t permanent after all. I was struck by thebarbarity of the sudden erasure of my father’s

memory, only a year after his death. The over-grown grave where my brother’s remains layunmarked did not make matters any better.Bukusu conventional wisdom had exerted itsmight. When a man died, his house, Likubili,(the house of the dead), was brought down withhim, within one year.1

I did not only grieve for the erasure of thememory of my father and the memory of abrother I did not know, I immediately formed adeep longing for answers to questions surround-ing memory. It is intriguing that the conventionof Bukusu culture that validated the erasure ofmaterial emblems of remembrance for the deadalso sanctioned remembrance through allowingsurvivors to name children after the dead.

Photos 1–2: Above: Mombasa, Old Town, Kenya. Right: Fort Jesus, Mombasa. All photos by Ken Walibora Waliaula.

114 The Thoughtful Museum: Remembering and Disremembering in Africa

Unsurprisingly, some children of my relativesborn after my father’s death have come to bearhis name, in sync with this Bukusu culturalpractice. In fact, the naming system among theBukusu tends to be predicated upon commemo-ration or perpetuation of the memory of thedead. In that sense, therefore, my father did notdie. His name, Buyela, given him in honor ofhis deceased great-grandfather, would live on inthose named after him who will also be sohonored after they pass on. But the survival of aperson’s name and the memory concomitantwith it is not guaranteed. As Wepukhukulu(1992) has stated, doing ‘‘good’’ during one’s lifeis a prerogative for being named after. Thisimplies that the memory of people known tohave grossly violated social norms is consignedto oblivion. In this logic, there are individuals

whose stories should be forgotten while the sto-ries of others are to be remembered.

It may well be that remembrance of thedead in Bukusu culture is less oriented towardthe tangible materiality of mementos, monu-ments, houses, and other physical edifices andmore to the transference of names of the deadupon the living. Bukusu ways of knowing andremembering may thus be quite at variance withthe Western obsession with inanimate struc-tures as memory sites or symbols. Bukusu cul-ture invests children with the privilege of beingthe means of remembrance—veritable memorysites of the treasured and cherished dead.Granted, there is among this people the com-munal commemoration of the dead in KukhalaKimikoye, a ceremony performed 40 days afterburial. But I want to suggest that this ceremony

Ken Walibora Waliaula 115

in memorial terms pales into insignificance whencompared to the investment of the memory ofthe dead in the children born after their death.

The practice of using children as memorysites, however, goes above and beyond the nam-ing system, which ensures the perpetuation ofthe memory of the dead. Names are also criticalmarkers of important historical events, seasons,and a whole gamut of socio-cultural and politi-cal, psychological, and metaphysical realities.The names are inscribed on the children to helpthe community remember these realities andevents. For instance children born near the timeof Kenya’s independence were invariably calledMajimbo (the Swahili term for Federalism) tosuggest the regional blocks and political postur-ing of Kenyan politics at the time. Childrenborn when the ‘‘motor-car’’ first appeared inBukusu-land were called Mutoka. As is abun-dantly clear here, the Bukusu are not averseto adopting and adapting names from othercultures.

Shakespeare’s female character Juliet inRomeo and Juliet reprimands her love Romeofor his intention to disavow his family name,Montague, by asking him and answering her-self: ‘‘What’s in a name? That which we call arose ⁄ By any other name would smell as sweet.’’Juliet’s rebuttal suggests a diminution of thesignificance of names beyond being mere labelsof identity. Yet it could well be said that in lightof the inextricable connection between namesand memory among the Bukusu, the question‘‘What’s in a name?’’ would be answered by‘‘almost everything’’ if not ‘‘everything.’’ How-ever, as already hinted, it is imperative to con-clude that the structure and strictures of Bukusuculture exhibit a level of contradiction that atonce allows for both forgetting and remember-ing individuals. The desire to commemorate isintertwined with the quest for dis-remember-ing—as was the case with my father’s house.

My father’s name as a facet of his memory liveson because others have been named after him;but his house as another facet of his memory isdemolished, forgotten. I hasten to add that thephysical demolition of my father’s house hassimilarities with the failure of a bad person tohave someone else carry on his or her name afterdeath. The former is a physical erasure and thelatter is an intangible one, yet they are both, in asense, instances of collective forgetting.

That this account of my father’s and mybrother’s memory—of how they are remem-bered and forgotten—tends towards the per-sonal does not necessarily occlude thecommunal. I think that it is now common ifcontested knowledge that the personal oftengoes beyond, beneath, and above the singularityof individual experience. Jameson suggestedthat the story of an individual in what he con-tentiously calls the ThirdWorld is often also thestory of the nation, and an allegory of the nation(1986). The more I think about personal mem-ory, in other words, the more I find it intrudingon communal, institutional, national, continen-tal, and even global memory. I am prompted totry to make sense at all levels of the conundrumof who or what gets remembered, how and why?Who and what gets forgotten? How is remem-bering also a form of forgetting, as Roach hassuggested (1996)? With particular reference tomy native Kenya, this paper focuses on the poli-tics of collective commemoration, remem-brance, and amnesia.

In remembering the attainment of politicalemancipation, post-independence African coun-tries have learned to narrate the official nationalnarrative and to forget other stories. Commem-oration of the nation’s past, with its attendantrecall and reconstruction of memories of hero-ism and sacrifice along the path to ‘‘destinationemancipation,’’ almost always goes hand inhand with officially decreed national amnesia.


CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL

The call at independence by Kenya’s foundingfather and president Jomo Kenyatta, ‘‘Tut-asamehe lakini hatutasahau’’ (‘‘We will forgivebut not forget’’) tends to run against the grain ofthe official endorsement of selective amnesia asa necessary ingredient in the task of remember-ing and narrating the bloody past of the antico-lonial struggle and the not-too-distant past ofthe national history. Yet in reality the story ofthe nation has to be narrated and rememberedby forgetting certain aspects of the colonial past.By implication the dual act of remembering andforgetting sets the pattern for how the postcolo-nial African nation narrates itself in the postco-lonial moment. This paper argues that thenational commemoration of political emancipa-tion from colonial rule tends to silence or elidenarratives of political suppression, repression,and incarceration that emerge in the post-colonial moment. These outlawed alternativetales—of which narratives of political incarcera-tion are an instance—are therefore locked in afierce battle for attention and supremacy withthe official national narrative. This narrating,remembering, and forgetting battle has impli-cation for how individual Kenyans conceive ofthemselves as a nation and how they forge orfail to forge a coherent collective memory. Inthis sense national commemorative practiceslend themselves toward contradiction in thesame way as the personal narrative of myfather’s and my brother’s memories.

The modern Kenya nation was born in1963 after a bloody struggle with British colo-nial rule. Elderkin has described the Mau Mauinsurgency and the British colonial counterin-surgency as constituting the bloodiest conflictbetween colonial and anticolonial forces of alltime (2005). She argues that the exact numberof those who perished in the conflict couldperhaps never be known but she proposesthat perhaps hundreds of thousands died.

Thousands more were incarcerated in the mostodious and oppressive detention camps acrossthe country in Lamu, Naivasha, Kisumu, Lod-war, Athi River, Manyani and other places. Thecasuality rate in the indigenous Kenyan popula-tion was disproportionately higher than that ofthe colonial forces. Anderson has stated that theMau Mau war of independence was both a waragainst colonial rule and a sort of civil war inwhich the guerrillas attacked perceived Africanenemies, real and imagined. The colonial forces,meanwhile, contained countless African soldierswho killed their fellow Africans with impunity(2005). Probably no one has captured the spiritof the times more eloquently than Ngugi waThiong’o in his childhood memoir Dreams in aTime of War: The Story of a Child Survivor(2010). Ngugi writes:

It was clear that the constant daytime and

nighttime raids and mass incarcerations were

breaking up families, taking away or

incarcerating breadwinners, and diminishing

parental care. People lived under double fear: of

government operations by day and Mau Mau

guerrilla activities by night, the difference being

that while the guerrillas were fighting for land

and freedom, the colonial state was fighting to

sustain foreign occupation and protect the

prerogatives and wealth of European settlers

(2010, 206).

The ‘‘double fear’’ that Ngugi alludes too ishis way of knowing and remembering the real-ity of his lived experience of this vicious war ofindependence. From Ngugi’s life narrative wecan plumb the unpredictability of the times.There were enemies both inside and outside theGikuyu community. As Anderson asserts, aclass of civilian collaborators sided with thecolonial machinery and betrayed their fellowAfricans. Anderson’s conclusion that the war was



something neither side would want to remem-ber with pride raised questions about the man-ner of the commemoration as the burgeoningKenya nation forged a collectivememory of thewar.

But it is to Ngugi’s fictionalizing of theMau Mau war that we want turn to demon-strate the conundrum of the memory of Kenya’swar of independence. As Ngugi wa Thiong’ohas illustrated powerfully in his novel A Grain ofWheat (1967), 2 set in Kenya after the war, therewere more questions than answers regardingthe cataclysmic past that preceded Kenya’sindependence. It is interesting that the antici-pated climax of Ngugi’s novel is the celebrationof Uhuru, independence, which ends up beingan anticlimax. General R, a militant freedom

fighter or terrorist, depending on how youwant to view him, embraces a certain philoso-phy of reward and punishment contingent uponwhether an individual was for or against thestruggle. He states: ‘‘We must revere our heroesand punish traitors and collaborators with thecolonial enemy.’’ One could read in General R’sassertion a desire to lionize heroes, to erect lit-eral and symbolic monuments in their memoryon the one hand, and to banish the villains tooblivion and obscurity on the other. It calls tomind the Bukusu naming system by whichthose who are deemed to have performed gooddeeds like my father are etched securely in thecollective memory by being named after whenthey die, while ‘‘villains’’ die along with their

Photo 3: Kenyatta Street, Kitale.


names, and therefore, their memory. Nonethe-less, General R’s simplistic division betweenheroes deserving of remembrance and traitorsdeserving damnation and erasure from memoryappears compelling until one examines closelythe role of each individual.

Ngugi’s fictional narrative demonstratesand problematizes the stability of the politicsand ethics of remembrance and heroism. At thevery core of this enigma is the ambiguous natureof guilt and innocence. Who was or were thetrue heroes of the struggle? Who is guiltless tothe point of deserving to stand on a highermoral ground and to be the first to cast a stoneat traitors and sellouts?

It is difficult to move fromNgugi’s fictionalworld to the real Kenyan world that Kenyattahelped create, because in any case Kenyatta is acharacter in both. In factNgugi’s image ofKeny-atta in the novel is cast in heroic terms as thefamous Kenyan writer etches a glorious monu-ment of Kenyatta in his readers’ minds. If thevexing and vexed question of separating blamefrom praise or guilt from innocence also appliesto Kenyatta in the novel, then it is only implicit.The difficulty of separating guilt from innocenceconfronts us when it comes to separating the realfrom the fictional Kenyatta. But for heuristicpurposes let us assume there was indeed a differ-ence between them, and for a moment, focus onthe shape that commemoration and collectivememory would take. What would Kenya—un-der the guidance of iconic former political pris-oner Jomo Kenyatta as first prime minister andthen president—remember from the past?Whatremembrance would Kenyatta initiate? Whatsongs would be sung? For whom will monu-ments be constructed? After whom will roads,soccer stadiums, primary and secondary schools,middle level colleges and universities be called?In short, what kind of collective memory wouldKenyatta’s regime create for Kenyans? What

kind of social imaginary of the colonial pastwould it conceive and construct?

In commemorating Kenya’s struggle forindependence, the Kenyatta government declaredthree public holidays: Jamhuri Day (RepublicDay, remembering when Kenya officiallybecame a republic in December 12, 1964); Uh-uru Day (Independence Day, memorializingwhen independence was attained in June 1,1963) and Kenyatta Day (remembering whenthe colonial government arrested Kenyatta ontreason charges in October 20, 1952). It seemsthe spirit that governed the formation ofthese commemorative occasions was one of col-lective pride and collective euphoria for the sac-rifices many made in order that Uhuru, theunachievable, would be achieved. It is, however,instructive that only Kenyatta Day was bothnamed for one individual and devoted to hisremembrance, his role in the struggle, whileJamhuri Day and Uhuru Day ostensibly markedthe collective watershed moments in Kenya’sbirth as a modern nation. The commemorationof Uhuru and Jamhuri almost goes without say-ing. It appears quite impertinent and perverse toask why the attainment of independence andthe status of a republic would be worthy ofremembrance. But how did Kenyatta stand outas one in whom the nation would invest itsmemory of colonial counterinsurgency? Howwould the independence struggle be reduced toKenyatta’s trial and incarceration? How comeKenyatta would be the one through whom knownand unknown other ‘‘heroes’’ would have to beremembered in the nation’s collective memory?

Knowingly or unknowingly, Kenyatta Dayas a day of remembrance elevated Kenyattaabove the status of ‘‘just a hero’’ so he was thehero. Kenyatta had returned to Kenya in 1946after staying in England for 15 years, duringwhich he wrote Facing Mt. Kenya on Kikuyufolklore, taught Kikuyu at the university, and



married Edna Clarke, a British governess.Kenyatta’s arrest in October 20, 1952 coincidedwith the arrest of five other nationalists, FredKubai, Paul Ngei, Achieng Oneko, BildadKaggia, and Kungu Karumba. One could saythese five heroes, together with Kenyatta, haveremained etched in the Kenyan national psycheand memory as the ‘‘Kapenguria six’’—Kapeng-uria, in the Rift Valley Province, being the sceneof their historic treason trial. Kenyatta wouldsoon be found guilty of the offense of ‘‘manag-ing the Mau Mau rebellion’’ and was sentencedto seven years imprisonment with hard labor.

Whether or not the colonists made Kenyat-ta a hero in the Kenyan social imagination byimprisoning him, it is evident that the devotionof a day to the memory of his incarcerationaugmented his place in Kenya’s collective mem-ory. In other words, by creating the commemo-rative Kenyatta Day in his honor, the regimepre-empted the presence of what Vered Vinist-zky-Seroussi and Chana Teeger have called‘‘cacophonous commemoration.’’ Cacophonouscommemoration, they argue, is a situationwhereby many individuals or events are memo-rialized simultaneously, and is characterized bythe diminution of ‘‘the size, importance andmagnitude of the elephant, recognizing it butonly as one part of a much larger, busier picture’’(Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger 2010). The anal-ogy of the elephant in the picture is apt in appre-hending the place Kenyatta was made to inhabitin the social imagination. Kenyatta could beenseen in this sense as the elephant in the picturethat deserves to stand alone, absolutely unsuitedfor a crowded, busier picture with its tendencyto push individuals toward anonymity. Therewas no room for other heroes who would dimin-ish the potency of Kenyatta’s heroic memory.

Yet in creating this centripetal system ofnational remembrance, the state was implicitlyfacilitating the forgetting of other heroes, the

other members of the Kapenguria Six, by dint ofdiminishing their importance or deleting italtogether. They could only remember them-selves or be remembered by others throughKenyatta and by Kenyatta for Kenyatta andbecause of Kenyatta. ‘‘By him’’ in that Kenyattawould elect to name a nondescript street orneighborhood after them in the capital Nairobior better still some small town somewhere.‘‘Token remembrance’’ occurred in naming ofstreets after the likes ofNgei, Karumba, AndrewNgumba, Kimathi, Argwings Kodhek, OgindaOdinga, Ronald Ngala, Mbiyu Koinange, Mas-inde Muliro, and so on. (One glaring omissionis the women after whom anything significant isnamed, in Kenyatta’s and post-Kenyatta regi-mes—apart from, say, the Stella Awinja Hallat the University of Nairobi.) But even whilegranting such independence or nationalist ‘‘her-oes’’ an opportunity for remembrance, Kenyat-ta’s own name on buildings, streets, sportsstadiums, schools, airports, and so on would suf-fuse the national memorial and architecturallandscape without parallel. The biggest and bestspots were reserved for him: Jomo KenyattaInternational Airport, Nairobi; Kenyatta Inter-national Conference Center, Nairobi; KenyattaAvenue, Nairobi; Kenyatta Avenue, Mombasa;and Kenyatta Street, Kitale; Kenyatta NationalHospital, Kenyatta University College, Kenyat-ta Stadium, Machakos; Kenyatta Stadium, Ki-sumu; Kenyatta Stadium, Kitale, and so on.

Ultimately the memory of Kenyatta as thechief architect andMzee Baba wa Taifa (found-ing father of the Kenyan nation), the doyen of aKenyan essence and imminence, was firmlyestablished, almost by decree. As Fentress andWickham suggest, this was the intended com-mon denominator imposed by the governmentto shape the nature of collective national mem-ory (1992). The hero worship of Kenyatta waswhat the government wanted inculcated in the



minds of the generation then and in the genera-tions after. It was reflected in the patrioticsongs that artists composed in the scramble tooutdo one another in their apotheosizing of thesingularity of Kenyatta’s remembrance andmemorialization. Doubts were cast upon yourpatriotism, if you did not sing songs in praise ofthe Baba wa Taifa.

But always concurrent with and in conflictwith this pervasive state-instigated collectivememory of Kenyatta as hero and saint wasanother narrative that fed on bitter individualand collective experiences. We shall call this theunofficial and unauthorized collective memory,whose perpetuation was the task-narrative ofso-called dissidents. Coming from another

source other than the government, this will toremember (which also contains the desire to for-get such things as the government’s grandioseclaims of achievement and legitimacy) contestsKeithWilson’s proposition that the governmentis the sole shaper and molder of national collec-tive memory (1996). It is common knowledgethat the Kenyatta regime set the pattern in post-independence Kenya of vicious crackdown onpolitical opposition and government critics.These are lessons he had learned from the ‘‘colo-nial autocrat,’’ in Achille Mbembe’s terms. It isironic, as Malawian poet Jack Mapanje has sta-ted, that in the postcolonial aftermath in mostparts of Africa, the victim (like Kenyatta) quicklytransmogrified into the victimizer. At least

Photo 4: Kenyatta Stadium, Kitale.


three key potential threats to his supremacy inthe arena of national memory and possible pres-idency were assassinated: Tom Mboya in 1969,Katana Ngala in 1972, and J. M. Kariuki in1975. Where there was no outright silencing ofcritique through assassination, the prison wallsserved as a veritable tool. Kenyatta—the formerpolitical prisoner—himself imprisoned anddetained without trial countless others on polit-ical grounds during his 14-year term in office.Those who survived incarceration wrote theirexperiences, which have been an integral part ofKenya’s literary canon and corpus. Their works,collectively, are a monument to Kenyatta themonster, not the angel that the official narrativeconstructs. Their narratives of incarcerationpaint an image of Kenyatta that is unpalatable tothe state since it runs counter to the official nar-rative and official collective memory it isintended to engender.

It is interesting that even Ngugi wouldtransform himself from Kenyattta’s praisesinger to his implacable critic. In his classic1967 novel AGrain of Wheat, Ngugi calls almosteach and every one of his characters intoquestion, except the irreprehensible Kenyattawhose heroism and exalted commemoration heleaves unsullied. But it was only a matter of timebefore Ngugi would witness the transformationof his hero into a villain. The Kenyatta regimedetained Ngugi without trial in 1977 for his artand activism. Ngugi’s meditation on his deten-tion in Detained exemplifies the flip side ofKenyatta’s memorialization. Ngugi forges aremembrance of Kenyatta as a typical colonialLazarus, resurrecting and reincarnating viciousattributes of colonial atrocity and tyrannyin post-independence Kenya. Ngugi accusesKenyatta of conniving with the comprador classto deprive and dispossess the toiling masses ofpeasants. Invoking the memory of J. M. Kar-iuki, assassinated during the heyday of the

Kenyatta regime, Ngugi quotes the Mau Mauhero as saying that Kenyatta had facilitatedthe creation of ‘‘a Kenya with ten millionairesand ten million paupers.’’ Ngugi’s invocationof Kariuki’s memory recalls the unofficialand unauthorized commemoration of Kariuki’sassassination every March 2 by riotous Univer-sity of Nairobi students who would battle policeand stone innocent motorists in the process.This unauthorized commemoration went onalmost throughout the Kenyatta regime. Thequestion to ask here is: Why don’t universitystudents commemorate Kariuki’s death any-more? Has this counter-hegemonic commemo-ration lost its saliency because of collectiveamnesia? Or has the memory of Kariuki’s brutalmurder receded into oblivion?

It is significant that Kariuki wrote the firstMauMaumemoir,MauMauDetainee, in 1962,memorializing his substantial role in the strug-gle for independence. OtherMauMaumemoirswould soon follow, including Kenyatta’s ownSuffering without Bitterness (1968), whichextolled the virtues of forgiveness and forgettingthe past. If these memoirs intended to forge anabiding individual and collective memory, thereis no doubt that they did not have the reach andforce of Kenyatta Day in deifying an individual.At any rate, theseMauMaumemoirs were writ-ten fundamentally for a European audience—anaudience driven by exoticizing curiosity aboutthe Mau Mau movement, as the editor of Kar-iuki’s memoir, Margaret Perham, revealedunwittingly—and not purely for commemora-tive purposes. The European audience hadheard any number of wild rumors about MauMau savagery and barbarity. Were the MauMau cannibals? Did they use menstrual bloodfor performing oaths? Were they irreligious?The memoirs were written for this Westernaudience to counter or confirm these myths,or—as Marshall Cough has aptly suggested in



his magisterial textMauMauMemoirs—to san-itize the movement. But by and large, the copiesof these memoirs in Kenya have been few andfar between and are known for gathering duston the shelves or being entirely missing ratherthan being read widely. They don’t, as theyshould, form an integral part of the accessoriesof the collective memory of the MauMau expe-rience. Kenyatta’s dominance in the nationalmemory would remain both unsurpassed andintact with or without his twomemoirs.

But when Kenyatta proposed the idea offorgetting the past, he seems to have beenimplicitly suggesting forgetting the Mau Mauera. The nation needed to remember his incar-ceration but attention on him would effectively

overshadow the Mau Mau phenomenon in thesocial imagination. The memory of Mau Maubrought terror to the individual and collectivepsyche of the British settlers who had fallen inlove with the land and who were terrifiedthat there would be reprisals when Kenyattaascended to power. But as future events wouldshow, there was reluctance and resistance onKenyatta’s part to allow or initiate remembranceof shameful aspects of national history. It is nowonder that in Kenyatta’s reign some of themost central figures in the anti-colonial war—such as Dedan Kimathi whom the colonialforces executed—receded into oblivion. Keny-atta’s actions and attitude defined national offi-cial memory.

Photo 5: Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Son Mukoma, reading in Madison, Wisconsin.


Kimathi was buried in an unmarked graveat the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison onthe outskirts of Nairobi, something like theway my brother Wamukota was interred atBaraki village in an unmarked grave. But upuntil now there seems to be no certainty aboutthe exact spot at Kamiti Prison where Kimathiwas interred. Apparently, the colonial dispen-sation reckoned that making Kimathi’s graveknown would perpetuate the memory of aman it considered unworthy of remembrance.In addition, if after independence Kimathi’smemory was associated with the Mau Mauterror that the British abhorred, it is not at allsurprising that dis-remembering him was con-venient and expedient for Kenyatta, who waseager to appease the former colonizers and toassure them that his leadership held no sem-blance of Kimathi-like murderous and venge-ful militancy. Government critics such ashistorian Maina wa Kinyatti, who questionedthe state-instigated amnesia toward Mau Mauheroes like Kimathi, were rewarded withdetention without trial. Kinyatti was laterforced to flee into exile for faulting the gov-ernment’s selective amnesia. It would seemthat remembering such heroes would be quiteexpensive for Kenyatta, since it would meanadequately rewarding them or their familieswith what has now become a hackneyedphrase—Matunda ya Uhuru (Fruits of Inde-pendence). But Kenyatta’s inner circle consist-ing of collaborators and turncoats haddepleted the rewards and made it unnecessaryand undesirable to fondle the sore spots of theMau Mau experience in the national memory.The importance and expediency of forgettingcould not have been more emphatic.

Ngugi’s Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary(1981) wasn’t the first attempt by a victim of theregime to forge counter-hegemonic memory ofthe founding father of the Kenyan nation. In

1969 a young Kenyan poet, Abdilatif Abdalla,had asked the question ‘‘Kenya Twendapi?’’‘‘Kenya:Where are we headed?’’ Hewas arrestedand charged with sedition. During his threeyears in prison he put to work his poetic talent,writing poems to capture his experience and histake on the Kenyan world. One of his crypticpoems, ‘‘Mamba’’ (Crocodile), epitomizes hisconception of Kenyatta’s memory:

Nami nambe, niwe kama waambao

Niupambe, upendeze wasomao

Niufumbe, wafumbuwe wawezao

Kuna mamba, mtoni metakabari

Ajigamba, na kujiona hodari

Yuwaamba, kwamba ‘taishi dahari

Memughuri, ghururi za kipumbavu

Afikiri, hataishiwa na nguvu

Takaburi, hakika ni maangavu

Akumbuke, siku yake itafika

Roho yake, ajuwe itamtoka

Nguvu zake, kikomeche zitafika

Afahamu, mtu hajui la kesho

Hatadumu,angatumia vitisho

Maadamu, lenye mwanzo lina mwisho.

Let me also speak, so I can be like those

who speak

Let me adorn the poem, and make it

appealing to the readers

Let me compose a riddle, that those who

can may untangle [it]

In the river there is a crocodile, highly

conceited

He brags, and regards himself as

unconquerable

He claims, he will live forever

He is a braggart, thumping his chest foolishly

He imagines, his might will not dissipate

For indeed pride, is before a fall

He should remember, when his day comes



He should know, his spirit will leave him

His might, will reach its end

Let him know, no one knows about tomorrow

He will not last forever, even if he uses threats

As what has a beginning, must also have an

end.

Kenyatta is figured in this poem as a fero-cious crocodile ready to devour someone. Inother words, the prison poet creates a lastingmonument to Kenyatta as a vicious and greedytyrant. In any case, the poet himself—as sedi-tion suspect, convict, and then prisoner—hadbeen devoured by Kenyatta’s state apparatus andwas in the belly of the beast, so to speak, at thetime of his writing. That is how the poet wantedKenyatta to be remembered and immortalizedaccording to the internal logic of this poem. Yetin its reference to Kenyatta’s false sense ofimmortality we discern one of the deepest iro-nies of the poem. It is audacious enough toequate Kenyatta with a ravenous crocodile; thesuggestion that he possessed a warped or falsesense of immortality, that he was a mortal manwhose death would inevitably come, was trea-sonable. The poet both anticipates Kenyatta’sdeath and creates the memory of Kenyatta asone who thought he would never die.

I saw Kenyatta twice in my life. Once, in1972, when he visited Kitale, my hometown,myfather carried me on his shoulders above theenthusiastic crowd of awe-struck Kenyans, so Icould catch a glimpse of the father of the nationwho stood waving his flywhisk as his limousineslowly passed by. Then, in 1977, I traveled ina group of school dancers who entertainedKenyatta at State House Nakuru. A year later,on August 22, 1978, the radio announced hisdeath. We abandoned work on the farm thatday. I sat there with my father and mother andrelatives, all of us shell-shocked, glued to the

radio as it played somber mourning music andrepeated over and over what Abdilatif Abdallahad predictedwould happen some day: Kenyattawas dead.Ngugi (1981) andKoigi waWamwere(1996) recall in their prison memoirs how newsof Kenyatta’s death trickled to them while inprison. Kenyatta’s death would be their onlyhope of release from incarceration. Like them,there were those who felt Kenyatta’s regimewould be remembered as a long prison sentenceto which no ordinary Kenyan was exempt. Toothers, Kenyatta’s regimewould be rememberedas the most glorious 14 years—years of leader-shipworthy of imitation by future leaders.

The state-instigated memory of Kenyattaas exemplary statesman conflicted in his lifetimeand continues to conflict—decades after hisdeath—with its nemesis, the unauthorizednarrative of Kenyatta, which casts him as a clas-sic example of how not to govern. These twomodes of remembering and forgetting arereplicated all over Africa, particularly withregard to the forging of memories of the found-ing fathers.3 For instance, in a fascinating arti-cle, Chirambo juxtaposes the official memory ofMalawi’s founding father Hastings KamuzuBanda as an illustrious nationalist with theunofficial memory of Banda as an unyieldingtyrant before whom innocence was guilt andguilt was innocence (2010). In these contendingmemories, individuals and events are necessarilyselective and strategic. Thus, in both Ngugi’smodified image ofKenyatta inDetained andAb-dallah’s poems, there is silence over Kenyatta’spositive achievements, as there is silence overhis negative attributes in the official nationalnarrative. In a sense, both narratives seek toremember and to forget at the same time, likethe people of Baraki village who remember myfather by naming their children after him butforget him by demolishing his permanenthouse. In short, national memory entails laugh-



ing before our tears dry and weeping before ourlaughter dies out. END

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am particularly indebted tomy sister EuniceNambuye Kimaliro ofWorcester University, U.K.,for reading an earlier version of this paper andoffering her timely and crucial input on details of ourfamily history that were somewhat nebulous tome.

NOTES

1. The Bukusu are a subgroup of the largerLuhyia community of Western Kenya, makingup 16 percent of Kenya’s population of well ofover 40 million. The Luhyia are often collec-tively considered as of one of the more than 43different ethnic groups in Kenya. In whole,they constitute 16 different subgroups, includ-ing the Maragoli, Isukha, Idakho, Tachoni,Samia, Tiriki, Wanga, Banyore, Kabras, Kisa,Batsotso, Bakhayo, Marachi, Marama, andNyala. Each Luhya sub-group has somedistinct dialetic and cultural particularities, butcommonalities tend to outweigh differences.

2. The narrative strategy in A Grain of Wheat issomething Ngugi owes to Joseph’s Conrad’sNostromo (1904), as Sewlall (2003) argues. Theoutcome was a milestone in Ngugi’s literaryoutput, as he confirms on his University ofCalifornia Irvine Web page: ‘‘Multi-narrativelines and multi-viewpoints unfolding at differ-ent times and spaces replace the linear temporalunfolding of the plot from a single viewpoint.This does not, however, diminish the signifi-cance of Ngugi’s radical decision in 1977 whenhe proclaimed abandoning English and adopt-ing his native Gikuyu as a principal medium ofartistic expression, a move that has generatedendless debate in critical circles.’’

3. The cult worship of individual national leadersin the collective memory in Africa tendedto have its high-water mark in the periodimmediately following independence. In thesame vein, the ubiquitous image of Nelson

Mandela in South Africa’s collective memory ofstruggle is attributable to the fact that the endof apartheid is fairly recent. It seems, however,that with time, de-individuated remembrancegradually gains supremacy. For example, inKenya, since 2010, days dedicated to the mem-ory of individuals, such as Kenyatta Day andMoi Day, have been scrapped and replacedwith the de-individuated Mashujaa Day thatcommemorates all Kenyan heroes from all eras.In this way Africa would inevitably find itselfwalking the path trod by older nations thatultimately discarded commemoration of indi-viduals and adopted the more collectivizedcommemorations such as Presidents’ Day in theUnited States.

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THE THOUGHTFUL MUSEUM Remembering and Disremembering in Africa