From childhood I knew Kenyatta as a nationalist liberator of Kenyans whom the Kikuyu also called
king’i wa
andy
airy
(the
king of black people).
Indeed I grew up hero-worshipping Kenyatta as the Moses of black people who would rescue Africans from the Egypt of white colonialism and deliver them to the Promised Land of freedom and independence. To many Africans, the name Kenyatta was synonymous with the word freedom.
Later in life, after meeting Jaramogi Oginga Odinga I learnt that for playing contradictory roles in history, Kenyatta had more than one personality.
When fighting for independence, Kenyatta was a freedom fighter and a hero of Africans everywhere. When he became President and turned his back against freedom and democracy, he became a king, dictator for life and an anti-hero of downtrodden Kenyans.
During the struggle for freedom, Kenyatta was my personal hero who symbolised all the good that I valued. To hear him and other freedom fighters like Mboya, Odinga and Kaggia speak, at the tender age of 12 and 13 years, I would travel 30 kilometres from our forest village Rugongo to Nakuru town barefoot.
But when Kenyatta became President, instead of creating democracy and promoting freedom, he championed one party, one man rule.
Indeed, the person who had symbolised everything good that I dreamt of, Kenyatta became a traitor of freedom and democracy.
Yes, the person whose freedom had become the dream of my life became my detainer and arch enemy of my personal freedom. As a champion of dictatorship, he also became the enemy of the nation, freedom and democracy.
After independence, it was tragic that instead of Kenyatta creating democracy for Kenya, he terrorised Kenyans with dictatorship.
Indeed, I could hardly believe when Kenyatta’s government carted me away into indefinite detention without trial in the same prisons of Kamiti, Manyani and Hola where Kenyatta and his comrades had been detained, tortured and killed by colonial tyrants in the name of white supremacy.
My first shock at Kenyatta rule was when he abandoned the Mau Mau who had fought and died in his name and country and subjected his closest friends like Achieng Oneko to the same detention where he had languished under colonial tyranny. As a friend of detention, Kenyatta had become the worst enemy of freedom.
However, President Kenyatta was not all evil. Once he saved me from death when he dismissed a false claim by some of his sharks that I had hidden guns in our home compound.
Later, I also learnt from Njoroge Mungai that Kenyatta had refused to make Kenya a de jure one-party state, arguing that de facto one-party rule was enough for his generation, which had no right to impose political tyranny on their children.
But Kenyatta’s one-party dictatorship had not only undermined the spirit of freedom, it had also sabotaged and substituted the best in humans with the worst in them.
Worst of all, under detention, our freedom was never a right. It was a privilege that President Kenyatta and later President Moi could take away at will. Once detained, a person never knew when his freedom would be given back. The President had authority to keep a detainee in prison forever.
Worse, when in detention, courts could not be resorted to for freedom because they were themselves emasculated into kangaroo courts that could never release anyone that the President wanted in prison.
Whimsically, it was always Presidents who pardoned detainees for sins uncommitted and released them, not to exercise justice, but display self-serving magnanimity.
Other than for self-glory, Presidential magnanimity was also exercised to subject political enemies and critics to total surrender and prostration of politicians that the President knew personally.
As for most unknown detainees, their release would be pleaded for by people who knew the President personally or from outside pressure. But when detainees grew completely hopeless, they prayed for the President’s death to rescue them from the hell of detention.
In 1978, Kenyatta’s death became the liberator of detainees, not because detainees wished Kenyatta dead, but because Kenyatta had made his death the only key that could open the doors of detention.
Indeed the despair of detention had driven detainees to such low levels that many times they caught themselves unwillingly praying for the demise of detainers and tormentors whom they rightly believed had put them into detention to die from torture.
Apart from detention, Kenyatta made himself an enemy of freedom by abandoning Kenyans in the desert when he died before he landed them in the Promised Land into which he secretly entered with his family and close friends.
Nor did it assist freedom when Kenyatta government became an exterminator of political enemies and critics through political assassinations.
Like Solomon who was considered a great philosopher king but left Rehoboam his dictator son to succeed him at great expense to the people who had begged him to give them better leadership but refused, Kenyatta also bequeathed power and kingship to Presidents Daniel arap Moi who became a greater dictator than him, while those who came after Moi – Mwai Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta – continue to compromise freedom with their failure to eradicate negative ethnicity whose worst expression was post-election violence of 2007-08.
And though tyranny was not confined to Kenya, it defied belief to see Presidents Kenyatta and Moi justify their dictatorship with African culture and deification of Presidency, a horror that persists to date.
Ultimately, Kenyatta’s lasting legacy is not that he fought for independence and was even detained for it – which was great – but that, tragically, he later betrayed his fellow freedom fighters like the Mau Mau, Kaggia, Odinga and Achieng Oneko, and subverted the very freedom and democracy that he fought and sacrificed so much for.