I grew up knowing that in Kenya, it was a crime to ask questions. I was bullied in primary school for my “big mouth.” In high school I was blasted for being like my father. At church I was reprimanded repeatedly for literal blasphemy, and I still am, any time I cried out “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

But even as I endured this humiliation, I always knew that the one place to ask questions in Kenya was the university. Yes, I knew that Micere Mugo, ES Atieno Odhiambo, Willy Mutunga, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and many others had suffered for exercising intellectual freedom. I knew that university students had been jailed and killed for demanding democracy and authentic education. I knew that police hated students and would beat us at any chance. 

Very rarely do I speak publicly about my family and my relationship with my father, because I am an intensely jealous daughter. I refuse to share my relationship with my father with the public, because our lives were public already, both due to my father’s career as a church minister but also due to the political positions he took.
 
When I was young, I often used to be asked what it felt like to be a pastor’s child. I would reply that I don’t know, because I only know him as “Dad.” I learned to do that from my mother who constantly refused the label “pastor’s wife.” She argued that that label was used to the disregard the clergy as workers who needed to be treated decently because they too had families. Unlike the posperity gospel churches, the PCEA sometimes treats clergy like TSC treats teachers, posting them at the drop of a hat with little consideration about what the relocation means for their families. So I learned from my mother to protect my relationship with my father.

With the colonial ideology of order, and without a tribal elite to implement it, like the elite handed over to Kenyatta by the colonial government, Moi maintained the colonial and exploitative state by crushing alternative spaces of imagination in the same way his predecessors had done, but with more cruelty. As the saying goes, every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

​(Long read)

I have always had a tortured relationship with Daniel arap Moi, the second president of Kenya. I was in primary school when I first became conscious of him, because of the school milk that we drank. As I became a teenager, I was aware of the world my parents lived in, trying to forge a better Kenya, and Moi using the leadership of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA), to persecute them. 
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But there was still a sense in which I was distanced from the cause of my parents’ struggles. When I was in form 2 or form 3 (I can’t remember), Moi visited our school and I asked him for an autograph, and he was gracious and wrote that he wished me a bright future. The next Monday, our headmistress blasted the entire school about lack of respect for an elderly statesman. But who cared? Not me. 

Boris Johnson’s new mandate in the UK feels increasingly familiar. There is a pattern between governments in Kenya, US and the UK. It’s the politics of the single issue.

From ICC, to MAGA (Make America Great Again) to CBC, to Brexit to huduma namba, and to BBI, all instances unite in politicians are hoodwinking citizens on single issues that camouflage multiple reforms that will destroy social services and suppress citizens’ rights. And these reforms are all linked to the interests of mostly Anglo-Saxon billionaires.

ICC was made the pet issue by Kenya’s current president during his 2013 campaign, and it was on the advice of a British PR company. Muigai’s supporters, especially from the Kikuyu community, were hoodwinked into believing that voting for ICC suspects was voting against imperialism. The irony was that the strategy came from imperialists.

Brexit is the same as MAGA. It is about gutting down environmental protections, protecting zero contract hours for workers, austerity and tax breaks for the 0.1%. The British were told lies that the EU caused all that, and the Remain campaign was too weak in countering those lies. That has meant that the conversation has been so dominated by Brexit, that by the time Labour tried to talk about the real issues, it was too late.

It is now fairly well accepted in public discourse outside Kikuyu-land that the rates of alcoholism and suicide among Kikuyu men are related to the soul pact which the Kikuyu community have signed since 1969 to keep the Kenyattas in power. It is a phenomenon that brings a lot of bitterness in the rest of the country, especially in the communities that have most recently suffered large scale state violence, such as that was witnessed in Kibra and Kisumu in 2017 as Kenyans protested the rigged election of Muigai Kenyatta.
 
The extremely slow realization that the Kikuyu are getting isolated from the rest of Kenya has started to produce a literature in which it is explained that the Kikuyu have acknowledged the mistake they made in supporting Muigai in 2017.

On September 23, Kenyans began their week with sad news that six children had lost their lives at Precious Talents, a private school in the low-income neighborhood of Ngando, Nairobi, following the collapse of one of the school’s poorly constructed buildings. Our belligerent CS Prof George Magoha rushed to the scene, and after inspecting reading a written statement, he fielded questions from the press.

​In response to the first question about the provision of education for children from poor neighborhoods, the CS hinted that the children had died because the parents had chosen not to take their children to the public schools in the area. He said: “It comes to a matter of choice for parents. I am duly advised that the nearest public primary school from here is only two kilometers away. But then we are a democratic country and the role of the government must be restricted to ensuring that the... public primary schools available are safe enough.”

What do you do when you live in a country where the minority are rich but don't work, own the majority of the land, rule the country as a monarch or prime minister despite being unelected, and appoint a mediocre bunch of bureaucrats to run the government?

You become passive aggressive. Or childish. You refuse to directly say what you really think, and attack people who do. You never take responsibility for your position. Instead, you blame the next person for not saying what YOU want to say. Or better still, you offer them a cup of tea and completely evade the topic.  

​This has become the Kenyan character, thanks to very effective lessons from Great Britain. We too are ruled by a royal family which considers Kenya its personal property, maintains power through an election by the minority, and has a government run by bureaucrates who refuse to be held responsible for their actions. To cover up our trauma, we become passive aggressive.