Okello Oculi
3 November 2008
opinion
In 1980 a little known publishing company, TransAfrica, issued a book that turned out to be a "best seller" in Kenya. It was titled "The Kenyatta Succession"; coming out three years after the death in office of independent Kenya's founder-president, Jomo Kenyatta referred to in veneration as "Mzee" (or 'Grand Old Man', in Kiswahili).
It was a pioneer work by two of Kenya's top journalists ever, Joseph Karimi and Philip Ochieng, in sketching out at close range a narrative of an emerging culture of establishing a network of power anchored in the loyalties of elites drawn from the Gikuyu, Embu and Meru ethnic groups. Members of this network were sworn into loyalties by being made to drink blood while swearing oaths of allegiance. Their associational acronym "GEMA" would resound in Kenya's politics and public administration from the early 1960s and feed into the acrimonious rhetoric that would precede the post-election violence that began on 30th December, 2007 and ran its atavistic course up to mid-February, 2008..
In its search for the subordination of all groups and institutions in Kenya, GEMA is reported to have opted for the strategy of whittling down structures of the ruling party, the Kenya African National Union, Kanu; placing its members at the leadership of key government ministries and agencies, and using political power to transfer wealth into the hands of its members. From quoted memoranda circulated at meetings of the group (referred to by the authors as "the Family"), there were repeated calls for brutal termination of members who betrayed it by leaking out its "secrets"; and outsiders who stood in the way of moves to realize stated goals of the group. With regards to dealing with Kanu, for example, the Family ensured that elections were not held at both local and national branches of the party from 1966 (when a national conference at Limuru, a town outside the capital Nairobi, was used to kick of Oginga Odinga, the country's and the party's vice-president, and his socialist allies), till Kenyatta's death in 1978. In parliament opposition voices were silenced with the use of tools ranging from carrots to arrests inside its premises, thereby, flouting a tradition borrowed from Britain of members being immune from punishment, including prosecution, for utterances made in speeches made inside parliament.
GEMA is said to have been behind the assassination of Tom Mboya, a Luo politician who Michael Blundell, a leading white settler politician, described as a clever and charismatic politician whose organizational ability was fed by vast funds supplied to him by the American agency the CIA. Mboya was said to have been seen by GEMA as a most formidable threat to the group's plans for having one of their own, Njoroge Mungai, Kenya's then Foreign Minister and Kenyatta's nephew, succeed Kenyatta after the old man's death. Another most popular challenger, Josiah M. Kariuki, one-time fellow detainee with Kenyatta and later his personal secretary, was also assassinated in early March 1975. These deaths, however, left Vice-President Daniel arap Moi, as the next logical target. Moi, from the Kalenjin ethnic group, was an ally of Mwai Kibaki. Both Kibaki and Kariuki were Kikuyu but were from outside the core of the Family who were drawn from families from Kiambu district. Moi and Kibaki had a powerful ally in Charles Njonjo, Kenyatta's Attorney General, to wage a sustained and successful war against GEMA for Moi's succession to Kenyatta.
The merit of this narrative is in what it reveals, namely: marathon runs by two opposing camps to build power over post-colonial Kenya. It is s if the marathon campaign that Barrack Obama has conducted for the American presidency was in his ancestral stars in Kenya. This proposition may sound flighty but it is not altogether unlikely that in his student days as Obama sought to know about his historical roots he would have missed the narrative of the fate of Tom Mboya who, after all, organized the famous student migration from Kenya to the United States of America in which Obama's father was an actor. Moreover, an earlier and more dramatic marathon in Kenya's history had seen Africans fighting the Mau Mau war against British imperial troops and their local European invaders and grabbers of valuable agricultural land and political power. Marathon political drama was as Kenyan as "nyama choma".
These twin narratives of struggles for power would have been exhilarating fuel for a young brilliant imagination steeped in a highly charged emotional search for his roots. That this historical stream would flow into the river of the more immediate marathon of a historic African-American civil rights struggle, would be most normal. In this regard, the charge by the McCaine camp that Obama has a history of supporting terrorism may merely be a euphemism for referring to both the American civil rights struggle and the Kenyan struggle to route out European racist colonial dictatorship. The McCain camp would be expected to be tongue-tied against naming these social struggles openly, while counting on the power of historical association in the hearts and minds of his supporters to make the linkage. Herein lies the first meaning for Africa of Obama's presidential marathon election campaign; the location and legitimation in the American political imagination of Africa's history of the run for freedom and human dignity. America did not colonize Africa abroad on the African continent, but undertook the continentalization of the enslavement and colonization of sons and daughters of Africa on the landmass of North America. Obama may not have been a direct victim of the worst of the trauma that both phenomena inflicted but now serves the historic role of forcing America to give back denied dignity to black peoples from the two histories of human conflicts. The hunger for his success that flows in black peoples from Dakar to Nairobi, from Papua New Guinea to Peru on both lips of the Pacific Ocean, from Nova Scotia to African immigrants now in Norway, gives testimony to a long awaited aspect of the call for "reparations" that was most recently heard at the Human Rights Conference most fittingly convened by the United Nations in Durban, South Africa after the fall of apartheid.
The narrative of the marathon struggle for power in Kenyatta's Kenya, also interacts with Obama's marathon election campaign at the level of two missed opportunities for Kenya and Africa. The first missed opportunity was over the narrow preoccupation with groups of individuals jostling for power through succeeding "Mzee". A much richer drama was taking next door in Tanzania where President Mwalimu Nyerere's ruling TANU (later "Chama Cha Mapinduzi"), creatively sought to marry competitive democratic elections with a situation in which a political party was so universally popular that its candidates were declared winners (as" returned unopposed")in individual constituencies without ballots being cast. This strenuous and disinterested search for political openness, legitimacy and exercise of choice by the people over their representatives in parliament, would, after Mwalimu Nyerere's retirement and subsequent death, win for Tanzania an example of political stability that is exceptional in Africa. But while Nyerere labored to build a nation and ingeniously engineer a Tanzanian variant of democracy, Mzee Kenyatta had apparently chosen a wish he was once quoted to have expressed to a British newspaper, The Sunday Times, namely: his wish to create an aristocracy in Kenya. The narrative by Karimi and Ochieng suggests that that aristocracy was to be anchored in GEMA. It was one "bound to violence". It was one destined to exclude Obama's father and his son from ever dreaming of occupying a presidency. Commentators have blamed the violence that erupted following the 30th December, 2007 elections in Kenya to both the culture and theme of assassinations that characterized the marathon for power under Kenyatta's rule; as well as a return to GEMA's strategy of monopolizing power and the economic fruits that flowed from it during the 2002 to 2005 regime of Mwai Kibaki - himself a past victim of Kenyatta's regime.
Oculi is Executive Director of Africa Vision 525 Initiative
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Daily Trust. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
