I see the DRC flag here today among many other flags and I want to say something about this that will connect to the spirit of Kimathi. I came across a Somali song the other day from 1961 when the great Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. The song is called Heesta Lumumba and it was written by the late great Somali musician and songwriter Abdullahi Qarshe and the chorus of that song goes something like this:
“Lumuumba ma noola mana dhimanee/
Labada midna ha u malayninayee/
Muqiisa la waaye mooyaanee/
Inuu maqanyahay ha moodinayee.
Which translates to:
Lumumba is neither dead nor alive/
Don’t believe either of them/
It’s only his presence that has come to be lacking/
Don’t believe that he is absent.”
Immediately I heard these words my mind instantly thought about our own great liberator and shujaa and martyr, Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi. Like Lumumba, like Sankara, like Cabral, like Pinto, like all the martyrs of our cause – the cause of liberation – Kimathi is not absent. His spirit and all that he stood for remain immortal and eternal.
But what I want to ask is, how much of Kimathi’s spirit lives within us? How does it speak to our present and recent past?
One: Does his organisational spirit live within us? When I look back at the “reject finance bill” protests of last year, I always get emotional for a number of reasons. Of course we lost many of our beloved comrades whose memory we should honour forever. But we had the numbers, we had the courage, we had the zeal, we had the energy, we had so much going for us. But how organised were we? Although some people might use certain metrics to claim that the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) failed, the truth is that the “Mau Mau” were successful. And the reason why they had the impact that they had, the reason why they could out manoeuvre the colonisers the way they did was because of their organisational skills and because of the strong leadership that they had. Kimathi was based in Nyandarua where the headquarters of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army was but he had established a solid, elaborate and formidable network of field secretaries and couriers who kept him in contact with the KLFA leadership in Nairobi, the front-line commanders, the village detachments and the Kenya Parliament. There were many moving parts and we know the role the likes of Pio Gama Pinto played in securing arms and so on. In short there was clear organisation and structure. Again I ask dear comrades, how organised were we last year during the protests and how organised are we today?
Two: Does Kimathi’s spirit of unity and solidarity live within us? What we’ve come to know today is that the Kenya Land and Freedom Army and the war of independence that they launched was a multi-ethnic, multi-racial and nationalist project. It wasn’t just “watu wa mlima” who were involved in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army as some would claim. The war of independence was primarily one for Land and Freedom, and anyone who believed in this cause, was welcome to participate in it. Which leads me to my third question.
Three: Does Kimathi’s ideological spirit live within us? Unity is a meaningless word without ideology. We can sing “solidarity forever” in every event, function or protest that we meet at but that collocation becomes a mere platitude if we don’t have a shared understanding, a shared consciousness and a shared ideology. To paraphrase Cabral: ideological deficiency within national liberation movements constitutes one of the greatest weakness in our struggle against imperialism. The struggle for liberation therefore is above all else a struggle for ideological clarity. And Kimathi and the Kenya Land and Freedom Army had a clear ideological stance that fought imperialism which at the time was in the form of colonialism. “Our real fight is not against the white colour but against the system carried on by the white rulers.” This is a direct quote from Kimathi which you can find in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army Charter published in October 1953. The system Kimathi fought against didn’t die with colonialism – it evolved! The same foreign powers that hanged Kimathi now strangle our economy with debt. The IMF and World Bank have replaced the colonial office. The multinational corporations have replaced the settler farmers. And the homeguards have been replaced by the Government of Kenya (GoK). And this is where a divide became evident within the movement that took part in the reject finance bill protests last year. A good number of the protestors were reformists. They wanted to fight corruption but not really capitalism, to fight the bill but not the imperialism behind it, to fight the symptoms and not the systems. And that’s why opportunists like Jimmy Wanjigi, who are beneficiaries of the same system that we rose against took advantage and became leading and even trusted voices. This is where the Kenya Left comes in. We have so many struggles going on simultaneously and independently in the country. The coffee farmers, the doctors, teachers, uber drivers and so on and so forth. How hard are we working to raise these people’s consciousness? How hard are we working to reclaim our trade unions? How hard are we working to answer that famous or infamous question that Lenin posed over a century ago: What is to be done? Will we, to paraphrase Issa Shivji, continue conversing or will we finally unite and answer the questions of what to do and how to do it?
Four: Does Kimathi’s spirit of non-compromise live within us? We’ve had many traitors in the struggle. We’ve had individuals who’ve betrayed the struggle and joined the other side. We all know how the Kenya Land and Freedom Army dealt with home guards and traitors. We all know the content of the letters that Kimathi sent to the collaborator chiefs and headmen. Let me givea disclaimer here: I am not saying we should tie people to a pole and execute them. But why are we still platforming some of these individuals, why are we tolerating them and why are we not relegating them to where they belong – the dustbin of history?
In the beginning I said the spirit of Kimathi will remain immortal and eternal with or without us. We all know that famous quote by Frantz Fanon: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” Kimathi and his generation fulfilled their mission and that is why they will remain immortal. Will we rise to meet their immortal spirit? Will we be worthy of it? Will we transform it from memory into movement, from history into action, from past into future?
Aluta Continua! The struggle continues! But only if WE continue with it!
Asanteni sana, and long live Kimathi!
