Columnists

Memoirs of the ‘reluctants’

Macharia-munene

Macharia Munene

Within a few days in December, prominent players in Kenya’s public affairs released their memoirs.

They were Njenga Karume and Ben Kipkorir, men with top connections and access to corridors of political power that is not available to the ordinary.

Still, they described themselves as “reluctant” participants in political leadership for Karume and in academia for Kipkorir.

Translated and written by historian Mutu wa Gethui, Karume’s book has a few problems.

These include over-translating Gikuyu songs into English and not giving the actual Gikuyu words, claims that Governor Malcolm Macdonald offered the premiership to James Gichuru when Kenyatta was in jail, and asserting that William Ruto was in the Cabinet in 2005.

Gethui should have caught such defects.

There are, however, interesting insights on events and people.

He barely touches the surface. He regrets President Mwai Kibaki’s supposed inability to assert himself or to “know how to … use the bakora”.

Given that Karume was minister of defence when violence broke out in 2007-2008, would this be a tacit explanation as to why the security apparatus failed to keep “the peace”?

Karume has a photographic memory of people and events, does not keep a watch or a diary, and still remembers details of peculiar episodes and eccentricities.

He explains how in 1976 he participated in a failed Change the Constitution Movement to remove vice-president Moi from the succession line up.

He also narrates how Kenyatta had reportedly laughed at their cowardice when Charles Njonjo threatened to charge them with treason for imagining Kenyatta’s possible death.

Although he was close to power, he seemingly did not understand the politics of Kenyatta’s potential death.

Pre-dating independence, that politics explained the intensity of the feud between Mboya and Odinga, which sidelined Odinga.

It was responsible for the successful 1968 Change the Constitution chicanery that effectively removed Mboya from presidential contention.

Karume was probably not in the know on such matters, just as he was not in the know regarding the origins of the 1969 oaths, which he considered idiotic.

Kipkorir, a historian, launched his book a day after Karume and he too failed to contextualise the politics of Kenyatta’s death.

His book is full of subdued anger that is at times entertainingly revealing, especially in discussing the creation of the Kenyan elite.

After internalising colonialist propaganda pumped into school pupils in the late 1950s on how the Kikuyu planned to dominate other ethnic groups, Kipkorir demands to know which of his 1959 classmates at Alliance was going to dominate him.

The Mau Mau War, he admits, broke taboos and enabled selected “natives” to be trained to eat using cutlery.

The training was part of preparation for an “emerging elite to acquire some of the airs” that marked many of the new African bosses.

Top appointments, Kipkorir observes, went to those with powerful political connections. He had them.

He started attending State House garden parties that excluded ordinary people in 1975.

Serving in various committees, he ended up as executive director of Kenya Commercial Bank.

He is hostile to the University of Nairobi where, he claims, he wasted 13 years of his life and whose supposed defects helped to make him a “reluctant academic.”

He dismisses the History Departmen t as “steamy and stifling” where “Young Turks, lacking in the finer graces of academics relations,” kept sniping at him. In addition, the students were not interested in learning and the university failed to make him a professor.

Still, he did something positive while at the university.

He was an active cultural promoter who supposedly entrenched the word “Kalenjin” to refer to Nandi speaking peoples.

As the Director of the Institute of African Studies of Nairobi University, he helped to sharpen Moi’s District Focus for Rural Development.

He also started District Cultural profiles.

The two “reluctants”, Karume and Kipkorir, could have strengthened their memoirs by contextualising them. They still make interesting readings.

Prof Munene is a Professor of History and International relations, USIU-Nairobi. [email protected]