Remembering Mzee: The Making and Re-making of “Kenyatta Day,” 1958–2010

Abstract

While a concern with memory, in particular of the Mau Mau rebellion, has a well-established place in Kenya’s historiography, little attention has yet been paid to the postcolonial Kenyan state’s official memory regime, to what Kenya’s citizens have been asked to remember. The following chapter aims to fill this gap. It traces the origins of “Kenyatta Day,” celebrated from 1964 onwards on 20 October each year, and the four successive stories that were told about it by first its proponents, figures associated with the KANU government and the state, and then its critics in parliament and civil society whose attainment of power led to the re-dedication of the day as “Heroes Day” in 2010, when Kenya’s “Second Republic” was inaugurated by a new constitution. In the early hours of the morning of 20 October 1952, British security services in Kenya set in motion the plan codenamed “Operation Jock Scott,” a strategy devised over the course of the previous few days, with the intention of decapitating the so-called Mau Mau movement.1 The rounding-up of around 150 Kenya African Union (KAU) activists would, it was hoped, leave the movement rudderless, allowing security services the opportunity to regain control in the increasingly fraught circumstances of Kenya’s Central Province and Rift Valley. At the top of the list (and by the time of his arrest, apparently aware of what was coming) was the name of Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the KAU, author of Facing Mount Kenya, and future president of independent Kenya.2 So began the Emergency, which was to last eight long years. The roundup was followed by a show trial of Kenyatta and five other men, Fred Kubai, Bildad Kaggia, Paul Ngei, Kungu Karumba and Achieng’ Oneko, ac For an introduction to successive understandings of Mau Mau, see John Lonsdale, “Foreword,” in Mau Mau from Below, ed. Greet Kershaw (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), xvi–xxx.  On Operation Jock Scott, see David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: W.W. Norton, 2005), 62–63. For an introduction to the tense situation in Central Province and the Rift Valley, see Ch.1. See also David Throup, Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau (London: James Currey, 1987); Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Gabrielle Lynch, I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Chs. 1–2. OpenAccess. © 2022 Edward Goodman, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655315-005 cused by the colonial state of “managing” Mau Mau. Kenyatta, according to Ransley Thacker, a former Kenyan High Court Judge and Attorney-General of Fiji, brought out of retirement to preside over the case, was the “master mind” behind Mau Mau, the man who had “let loose upon this land a flood of misery and unhappiness affecting the daily lives of all the races in it, including,” he made clear, “those of your own people.” The KAU’s leader, he insisted, had taken “fullest advantage of the power and influence” which he held, the product, according to Thacker, of his education and long immersion in British society, where he had lived from the early 1930s to the mid-1940s. He had done so, the judge claimed, in order to turn back the “progress that had been made” under colonial tutelage “towards an enlightened civilisation” amongst his people, preying on “the primitive instincts which you know lie deep down in their characters,” plunging these dupes “back to a state which shows little of humanity,” and persuading them “in secret to murder, to burn and to commit evil atrocities which it will take,” the judge gravely intoned, “many years to forget.” Convinced of his guilt, Thacker sentenced Kenyatta, and the other five, to seven years’ hard labour.3 The future president was to remain in detention until August 1961. Over the course of the last 60 years, it has been the movement that Kenyatta was convicted (quite wrongly) of managing that has stood “[a]t the heart of Kenya’s modern history.”4 Mau Mau has been the central concern of those interested in the question of how “a conscious sense of the past, as something meaningfully connected to the present, is sustained and developed within human individuals and human cultures,” the imperative – etched onto the memorial to the self-declared state of Somaliland’s experience of war under General Siad Barre, and described in this volume by Mohamed Haji Ingriis – to “respect and remember.”5 Marshall Clough, for example, has traced “the elusive, chang Judgement of the Crown vs. Jomo Kenyatta et al, [1952], Court of the Resident Magistrate at Kapenguria, 8 April 1953, 97–98. On Kenyatta’s trial, see John Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials: Breaking and Making an African Nationalist,” in The Moral World of the Law, ed. Peter Coss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 196–239; and Anderson, Histories, 65–68. On imaginations of Mau Mau more generally, see John Lonsdale, “Mau Mau’s of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya,” Journal of African History 31, no. 3 (1990): 393–421.  John Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau,” in Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Book Two, ed. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale (Oxford: James Curry, 1992), 467.  Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University, Press 2007), 9. On Somaliland, see Mohamed Haji Ingriis in this volume. On the imperative to remember, and the need to forget, see also David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). On the postcolonial legacy of Mau Mau, see Nicholas K. Githuku,Mau Mau Crucible of War: Statehood, National Identity and the Politics of Postcolonial Kenya (London: Lexington Book, 2016). 78 Edward Goodman