From: BENSON MAISORI date Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 3:28 AM

For those of us who do not know how it came about may be we need to shed some light on the so called Kenyatta Day.

On 20th October, 1952 a few men who were accused of belonging to Mau Mau were rounded up by the colonial regime and sent to detention at Manyani detention camp. The victims included Jomo Kenyatta, Kung’u Karumba, Paul Ngei, Achieng Oneko, Fred Kubai and Bildad Kagia. They came to be known as the Kapenguria six.

I find this historical events significant not because some men were arrested and detained for engaging in a struggle to liberate our country from the colonial chains, but because history gives us a sense of belonging and appreciating the values that hold us together as a people with common history and destiny. This standpoint therefore calls for historical facts to be put across to us, so that we may be fair in rewarding and punishing those values that either kept us together then or those that pulled us apart. That is the second reason history exists. To tell us who we are, why we are here, and more so who is responsible for why we are what we are. It is then incumbent upon us to decide who we should reward and who we should punish.

The Mau Mau war was fought for two reasons. One, to bring back the land that had been alienated from the black man, and two, to recapture the freedom that had been taken away from the indigenous people.

We shall recall that around 1928, the Kikuyu community had sent Johnstone Kamau ( Later Jomo Kenyatta) to London, to take complaints to the royal crown, on matters of land by the subjects of the Monarch. Kenyatta instead joined the para military training college in London, and served as para military officer, until 1945, when he heard that Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Moziah Garvey, Julius Nyerere, among other luminaries, were meeting in Manchester to espouse and propound the concept of Panfricanism. He remembered that, that is what he had been sent to do, and therefore crossed over and joined the luminaries in their meeting. In 1946 he came back to Thogoto and the rest is history for you.

But one thing I have always admitted is that Kenyatta was a man who was at the place at the right time, and something always happened just by his mere presence. For example, in 1946, when he came back, Kenya African Union(KAU), and the members of the a forty group, transformed into the radical Mau Mau, triggering an unprecedented political force that grabbed global headlines in the world press. People like Franz Fanon died regretting why he never met Dedan Kimathi and help him fight in the forest. Kenyans must, however, be told the fact that Jomo Kenyatta denounced Mau Mau as a retrogressive group that did not stand for what he believed in. His lawyer, Professor Thurgood, cemented this view in the court abroad and locally. That was partly the reason Kenyatta was so angry with the Mau Mau fighters that, even after independence, he sought to punish them by denying them the chance to recover their lost land. The debate continues to date.

Now other people like Paul Ngei surely, theirs is even more hilarious. Actually Ngei had no role in Mau Mau, nor in the struggle for Kenya’s liberation. It is believed he was a pick pocket and so, when the swoop was carried out, the colonialists thought he could fit in that camp. He became a liberation hero in the process, and Kenyatta loved him, and rewarded him dearly after independence. For Achieng Oneko, it was a case of a man caught in the wrong/right place at the wrong time. After all, it was emergency time, anything at sight was being apprehended. Otherwise Oneko had played no role in the struggle for independence. Not even in his homeland, Kavirondo, where the struggle was hot.

The point I am driving home is that our country has fallen in the habit of rewarding the wrong people, and punishing the right ones. Why, for example, did we have to name 20th October as Kenyatta Day and not Kimathi Day? We all know what Kimathi stood for. It is best captured in the immortal dictum, ‘I had better die on my feet standing than live on my knees for fear of colonial rule!’ Yet to date as a country, we do not know where his remains were buried! The least we could demand from the Britons is not actually compensation for their having destroyed our cultural values, but that the remains of our hero-Dedan Wachiuru Kimathi be located and given a decent send off.

And this is my plea to those crafting for us a new constitution. We must now confront these lies we have been told for over decades. We must change the name of the 20th October holiday. We must change the name of that University called Kenyatta or Jomo Kenyatta and Moi or even Lord Egerton. First we must ask ourselves whether it is necessary to name those institutions after people’s names, then ask ourselves whether those are the right people to name. If it is a must, then Kenyatta University should be named Tom Mboya University. Moi University should be named Kimathi University, and Egerton University should be named Pio Gama Pinto or even Mekatalili University, and Jomo Kenyatta University should be named Koitalel Arap Samoie or Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University.

Coming down to other areas, like street naming in the city centre for example, why do we have a street like Mama Ngina when there is no street named after J.M Kariuki?

I submit that this Kenyatta Day should teach us a few lessons, and more so serve as a reminder to us that we need to get our history right, and interrogate the popular views that we have all along been told. We must reward the correct people and identify our heroes right.
I submit that the people we have rewarded as heroes in the country are the thieves who stole such rights from those who deserved it. It is time we gave back those titles to those who rightfully deserved!