Still Proud to be Kenyan.

So what began as whispers in bedrooms, at street corners, and in university hostels had now grown into fully fledged public conversations that were challenging the status quo. The people who were party to these conversations were querying everything under the sun within the Kenyan borders. Gradually, the whispers of those earlier unseen got louder with each additional conversation that joined this amorphous grid of people talking. And with every opinion raised outside official channels, the official accounts of our history among other state positions diminished in stature.  Those who were there but were left out of the history books began coming out of the woodworks to tell their stories. They were distancing themselves from and denouncing the official accounts saying that they were fabrications based on official hearsay. Apparently, our school history curricula were accounts written by intellectuals as politicians recounted their romanticized version of what took place. This was propaganda par excellence that is only today coming under attack on a wide scale. We are only learning that politicians hijacked the independence train after it docked on the uhuru station and have been riding it to date. But no more! The secret is coming out and with the advent of Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and MySpace in this age, information has become viral and it will not be long now until everybody is in on any one of the thousands of conversations simultaneously taking place.

The recurrent theme in most of these conversations is that the writing of our history needs to have another side to the coin other than the president’s. Soon enough, students with the benefit of this alternative information at their fingertips will give teachers a tough time answering what they themselves were never taught in school. There will be a need for a total overhaul of the curricula to reflect the true dialectics of history that we were never privy to. Watching Hillary Ng’weno’s documentary series ‘Makers of a nation’ should serve as a preview for those who will rewrite the curricula. It has exposed all those elements that define humanity in its coverage. It was not edited to make it clean-cut, picture perfect, and full of hero worship jargon like we were used to. On the contrary, it has laid bare all the angles that we could never see before. It has shown that these “leaders” were liars, thieves, selfish, corrupt, and conniving bastards at their best. Basically, they were just men among who were fewer men who had integrity. The few good men unfortunately never got far. Ng’weno’s account is one that has been lost to many and which needs to be taught to this new generation. It has all the cards laid bare on the table such that the rainbow is no longer as pretty. The illusion is over and the reality harsh.

But today, people will not sit back and watch this documentary as the source of all truth but rather as just one way to look at things. Society today has embraced the concept of “a google a day keeps ignorance away” and so this documentary will be just one among many sources of information to be interrogated. It will be incorporated into the ongoing conversations. Having questioned the version of history that was peddled to us for a long time, I had my ear out scanning the channels and soon enough I caught on to the whispers signal. I tuned in and became part of the undertone conversations. I have since kept tabs on these whispers both off and online and have been part of their journey to becoming open conversations. Hopefully I will be instrumental in their becoming movements. In these conversations, I have accepted ideas, rejected people, insulted personalities, acknowledged struggles, agreed to disagree, and changed my mind. In short, I participated. Throughout all these, my friends who don’t quite get it have on numerous occasions asked me why the hell I am so preoccupied with this stuff. My only answer to them has been the mind-blowing excerpts of what is actually being said in these different forums.

Earlier this month, I was at the Storymoja Hay Festival to experience all the various forms of art being exhibited there. There was music, poetry, storytelling, discussions, debates, pictures, drawings, movies, books and every other thing that constitutes art. Each was happening in its own tent at different times over the three days the event lasted. That Saturday afternoon at the Can-do tent is where I last engaged in yet another conversation. This was an interesting debate where the topic to be interrogated was ‘Assassinations in Kenya’. Listed as moderators were PLO Lumumba and Parselelo Kantai and on getting there the room was packed…

I waited with the rest as the organizers frantically ran about trying to locate our renowned moderators but they were nowhere to be found. There was however this guy who decided to start us off. He introduced himself as an author but whose name I am at pains trying to remember. At first he had difficulty finding his words and articulating the subject at hand and that prompted a few people to walk out of the tent. They were frustrated that they did not get to see Kantai or hear a big speech by PLO. Lost to them though was the fact that conversations craft their own agenda, set their own pace, follow their own rhythm and that no one big speech could substitute for collective thought on the issue. If PLO had come and started giving us a speech, I would have walked out. Those of us who understood this remained and our author guy got us started by posing a question. He asked us whether those who were assassinated and to whom we had since designated the tag “heroes” really deserved that title. He especially took issue with the late J. M. Kariuki whom he termed a hypocrite because whereas in public he claimed to speak for the poor squatters, in private he had amassed thousands of acres of land. By virtue of owning that land, he was himself responsible for creating the squatter problem in the country. He said that the late JM was merely opium for the masses; he was no hero and since we all die, death whether by assassination or accident does not make us heroes…