The thoughts I have shared above on my parent’s youth and their experiences of the Colonial times, the MauMau war and their participation in it, is just one of many accounts experienced by a lot of heroes in our country. I have written a recollection of my parent’s experiences as handed down to me and my siblings. Majority of parents in their age group experienced similar circumstances in their respective villages, districts and provinces.
A handful of freedom fighters who ended up holding political offices in independent Kenya got a platform to tell their heroic experiences to the nation. The nation paid attention and even wrote about them because of their name recognition and the political offices they held. Parents like mine and many others like them never held political office, and those who did, it was in their local villages and small towns, where their influence and heroic past was not known beyond their village limits.
After freedom was won, my parents and others like them rolled up their sleeves and went to work to rebuild their shattered lives, regroup and settle their families and develop their brand new independent country. They never looked for accolades, but kept the hope for some compensation from their government for all they had lost and suffered, but that remained unfulfilled to this date. They watched in horror as the dreaded Home Guards and other white man’s loyalists who terrorized them throughout the MauMau movement took prominent positions in the newly formed government, including cabinet ministers, leading very privileged lives. Those were people who never fought for the freedom of the country; but instead they had betrayed the MauMau to the white colonists, they tortured and killed the MauMau almost with pleasure, they raped their wives and daughters, destroyed their homes and took their property. Those were now the faces gracing television screens and pages of our national newspapers. Their children filled the government jobs because they had an education, while the MauMau children barely went to school as their mostly absent parents fought the war for independence.
But to us, the post independence generation, every prominent person we saw in government, we assumed they were “heroes” of independence, and they must have fought harder than our parents, earning themselves the positions of power they held, unlike our struggling parents. We therefore got comfortable with the stories of freedom that were told by the handful of legitimate heroes who had their accounts recorded on tape or printed in various newspapers, magazines and books.
My parents and numerous others like them never told their story to anybody outside of their families, yet they held firsthand unadulterated accounts of their experiences. The heroes who have passed on, shared their stories with their children. These are the stories we need to be telling. My parent’s story is just one in a million. Other heroes of independence poured their hearts out to their children just like my father did for us. Lets not keep these experiences buried. It will be an injustice to our hero parents, some who died without anybody knowing the part they played in the fight for our country’s independence.
Consider this for a moment: As our MauMau parents planned and executed their plan to drive out the colonial oppressors, they were betrayed by some of their neighbors and even some in their own families who decided to work with the white oppressors for personal gain. When freedom was won, MauMau were again betrayed by their government that did not recognize or compensate them for their sacrifice in fighting for the freedom of the country and instead, the MauMau watched helplessly as their betrayers who had worked with the colonists to oppress and kill them, were rewarded handsomely. And now us, their children: With our continued silence, we will be betraying our MauMau parents by allowing their heroic fight for the country’s independence fade into the horizon with the exit of that great generation from this life, without teaching our children and the coming generations who the MauMau really were and how they snatched our country’s independence from a powerful enemy who was not willing to let go. This will be the greatest tragedy of all and it should not happen on our watch.
