When independence was won and our founding father, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, took his place as prime minister, all those who suffered colonial atrocities in Britain’s Gulag as Caroline Elkins would title her Pulitzer prize-winning book, expecting retribution and perhaps restitution for the colonial damages, Kenyatta would deliver a speech to the white settlers in equal measure to the one Nelson Mandela would give 30 years later, preaching forgiveness. The settlers, before that meeting expecting to be at the receiving end of the wrath of the new independent government, for the first time see a humanized individual, and shout out his praise in that hall, ‘Harambee!’ Kenyatta had before then been broadcasted all over Europe as the head and orchestrator of the savage acts of the Mau Mau, most prominently being the hacked child who became subject to the Nobel Prize-winning poet, Derek Walcott in his ‘A Far Cry from Africa’. He’d further be described by the colonial governor, Lord Baring, as the bearer of an intimidating gaze. This image was now sanitized for the masses, as he’d be cordially attending European living room through an hour-long interview on the BBC. 

Since independence, it feels like the political class has been juggling between the preservation of this image upheld for the international observers, fogging whatever is happening at home, and Kenyans have had to come to terms with that reality. Kenyan writers have been grappling with these conflicting realities. To Kenyans, expecting some proportionate response to colonial collaborators, Kenyatta dismissively said, ‘We have all fought for Uhuru, let us now build the nation.’ 

That could sum up as the contradiction in the meritocracy of our system. This affirms what Ahmed Mohidin, author of African Socialism in Two Countries, said, ‘independence was granted on the basis of continuation of the system and not its destruction.’ 

I presume the status quo, the scales untipped is what bred that docility of the Kenyan spirit since the inception of the nation-state. In the early 2000s, while for the first time the air was euphoric with song of finally replacing the Moi regime, enforcer of the neoliberal standard adjustment programmes of the 1980s, the chorus, ‘Bila Moi, yote yawezekana. Without Moi, everything is possible,’ echoed in every corner of the country, the writer Michela Wrong still wrote of Kenya being this aspirational nation. Where the self-help section of their bookshops enjoys a disproportionately larger space compared to anything else. It was a muted populace. Its politics only acknowledged in lip service at newspaper vendors, the cries masked through humour; whether it’s about the new corruption scandal; the Goldenberg scandal of 1993 and the 2006 Anglo leasing scandal, it was never to the extent of calling for accountability from its political class. That was the order of things. What was apparent was the mass emasculation of its populace as it went about vocalizing discontent. What else was to be reaped in a society where fear was sowed; where its most important sounding boards, its writers had a long history of censorship and political imprisonment? Its first political prisoner was the Sauti ya Dhiki poet, Abdulatif Abdallah for his criticism of the Kenyatta regime, and most famously being Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Writers were still being imprisoned in the decade when the dubbed bad boy of East African literature, Taban Lo Liyong, was calling out the region’s literary barrenness. 

So, the recent historic protests have been a surprising turn of events in terms of their organization despite their lack of figureheads. Political analyst, Maryanne Nduati, describes it as a kind of euphoric violence filling the air that arises from letting out a long-restrained simmering discontent. That too from an often-dismissed generation; a generation described as severed from the national consciousness. The generationally changing education system has ensured that lack of continuity in stewardship. It’s rather radical. Those things worthy of being passed on can only be passed over, and all that remains is what these same young protesters say by themselves that informs their politics of this endemic system they find themselves in. It pays to listen to what informs the mass movement, and even better to listen to what they say is informing them; which is the political nature of the compulsory literatures examined in their national exams. They pride themselves as that generation that grew up reading Longhorn publishers’ books.