Many things happened to Africa in the month of February and interestingly Kimathi University College has set aside a week of reflection on one of them; the killing and impact of Dedan Kimathi.
In February 1885, exactly 125 years ago, representatives of white powers concluded their meeting at Berlin after agreeing on procedures for grabbing and ruling territories in Africa.
Believing Africans were naturally inferior and deserving to be deprived of freedom, Europeans subsequently established colonies, Kenya being one.
In February 1957, Britons hanged Kimathi for daring to challenge them.
In February 1961 came news that imperial forces had killed Patrice Lumumba in Congo. And in February 1990, apartheid South Africa released Nelson Mandela from prison.
Kimathi and Mandela were two anti-colonial activists who believed that the way to end oppression was to give colonialists a taste of their own violent medicine.
Kimathi was kind of a brash youth and political activist who reportedly told KAU leader Jomo Kenyatta publicly at Kaloleni that people were “ready.”
Wiping tears, a moved Kenyatta then remarked that the tree of liberty is watered by blood and not water.
With the declaration of the State of Emergency and the detention of political leaders in October 1952, Kimathi helped to organise other people and he became the symbolic leader of the Mau Mau fighters in the forest.
By the time he was executed on February 18, 1957, Mau Mau had forced Britons to look for an exit.
They started grooming supposedly pliant Africans to inherit the colonial state and at the same time they mounted an intellectual campaign to discredit the Mau Mau in the eyes of African school children and university students.
This was through distortions of reality in school textbooks.
In such British portrayals, Kimathi was always an evil that was best forgotten at Kamiti.
Since Kimathi remains in Kamiti, Britons appear to have won
African anti-colonialists saw things differently.
The Mau Mau War and Kimathi became evidence of the failure of colonialism.
The two were symbolic of what Africans needed to do to liberate themselves.
Mau Mau was thus transformed into a force of universal liberation against colonial atrocities and Kimathi into a leading anti-colonial liberator.
To Africans, particularly those in southern Africa, Kimathi was an inspiration.
Kimathi, so Nelson Mandela of South Africa confessed in 1990, was a hero of liberation because he and other Mau Mau leaders like General China had shown the South Africans how to liberate themselves.
The paradox of Kimathi, however, is that he is also a symbol of continuing external influence in Kenya because he remains a political prisoner at Kamiti.
Almost 50 years after attaining independence, Kenya appears to be in a mental prison because the symbol of its liberation remains in “prison.”
This reality seemingly encourages imperial powers, baptised “donors” and “development partners”, to become domineering.
The tragedy, as in colonial days, is that some Kenyans welcome such browbeating by donors.
It is appropriate to remember Kimathi as a liberator in the month that he was hanged.
He was no saint but, particularly in death, he has become a source of inspiration to many people struggling to be liberated.
A symbol of violent anti-colonialism, he was loathed and feared by some and still revered by many.
In this regard, Kimathi University College is to be commended for setting time, a Dedan Kimathi Week, to examine Kimathi’s contribution to liberation in Africa.
