Repression in Kenya
Patrick Marn ham
The news of the arrest and detention of the novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong'0 suggests that Kenya is becoming an increasingly difficult country to govern. Four leading politicians are, like Mr Ngugi, detained without trial under the Public Security Act — the law under which President Kenyatta was himself detained by the colonial authorities before independence. And another potential leader, Oginga Odinga, is effectively banned from any political activity. Exactly why Mr Ngugi, who is associate Professor of Literature at Nairobi University, should have been distinguished by similar treatment is not yet clear, but his last novel and his newest play were both critical of the people who now rule Kenya.
Under the Kenyan constitution parliament is the supreme body, but President Kenyatta has never allowed that consideration to hinder the exercise of his own power. He has, when it suited him, treated parliament with contempt, suspending it at will and even preventing it from discussing the question of the presidential succession, although his own age is now thought to be somewhere around eighty-eight. The story of Kenyan politics since independence in 1963 includes the assassination of the Vice President, Tom Mboya, in 1969, and of two other influential politicians from the coastal province. And in 1975 there was the brutal murder of J. M. Kariuki, the popular leader of the unofficial parliamentary opposition. The last effective act of the
Kenyan parliament was to investigate the circumstances leading to Kariuki's death, and the select committee's report showed that whoever killed him was being shielded by a conspiracy which included the head of the GSU (the security police), the Minister of State in the Office of the President, Peter Koinange, one of Kenyatta's personal bodyguards and General China, a former leader of the Mau Mau. It was to silence MPs who wanted to pursue the questions raised in the Kariuki report that the policy of political detentions was implemented.
After parliament, the University of Nairobi has been the most vocal centre of opposition to the clique of wealthy men and women who surround Kenyatta. On several occasions in recent years there have been quite serious riots at the University, and in publishing two political works in quick succession, Mr Ngugi may have suggested himself to the authorities as a focus of future trouble. Petals of Blood, his novel, is set in Kenya and portrays a country in which commercial greed and political corruption are destroying traditional values. Chinua Achebe painted a rather similar picture of Nigeria in A Man of the People, but he had the advantage of writing about a regime that had already been overthrown, whereas Mr Ngugi's Kenya exists today, It is interesting that for his second offending work, the play, he should have chosen the past as his setting, and depicted the struggle between Kenyan blacks at the time of Mau Mau. The government banned all performances of this work which indicates that the old scars from this terrible conflict are far from healed. One thousand, eight hundred and nineteen Kikuyu, including respected tribal chiefs, were killed by the Mau Mau (as opposed to thirty-two Europeans), and some of the atrocities such as the massacre of over one hundred villagers at Lan i in 1953 have never been forgotten. In the struggle for power that will follow
the rule of Kenyatta this serious division among the Kikuyu, the country's dominant tribe, may be of great importance.
It was not the time for Mr Ngugi to revive these issues since the former members of the Mau Mau seem to be in a particularly bad mood at the moment. *They have never received what they consider to be their just deserts in the way of land and property and they have recently lost one of their few perks, the right to participate in the ivory poaching racket through the 'collectors' permits', which allowed them to be in possession of as much ivory as they wished by the ingenious fiction that they had collected it from dead elephants in the forests during the Mau Mau campaign. It is over twenty years since the Mau Mau campaign ended and most 'collectors' permits' have recently been cancelled in deference to the wishes of conservationists.
At the time of his own trial in 1952 Kenyatta said that the evidence against him had been rigged, but as time passes and the great day of independence recedes he himself seems to have a more urgent need for the repressive laws of the colonial emergency. The shortage of land which fuelled the Mau Mau rebellion is now more acute than it was in 1962, but this time there is no European community to surrender it. Instead much of it has been accumulated by black Kenyans whom Mr Ngugi described as 'the new imperialists'.
During the first part of his rule Kenyatta was widely praised for two achievements: his success at reconciling the various races and tribes of Kenya, and the prosperity which followed. Now it seems as if that prosperity has itself become a cause of division among the people. In dealing with his parliamentary critics Kenyatta has usually managed to suggest that they were merely men of frustrated personal ambition who wanted to achieve power for themselves, but this will be less convincing as a slur against the novelist. There have been suggestions that the police (whose Special Branch is still advised by British officers) intended to accuse Mr Ngugi of Communist sympathies, and they removed a number of his books when they arrested him. So far the possession of books about Communism has not been an offence in Kenya and recollections of the last person to be charged with similar offences, Oginga Odinga, do not increase the credibility of a similar charge against Mr Ngugi.
Mr Odinga was detained for three years and his opposition party was banned on suspicion of political subversion. It happened in 1969, the year that Tom Mboya was assassinated. Looking back now, it is not the revolutionary cause which appears to have suffered a setback then, but the interests of the Luo people, Kenya's second biggest tribe, to which both men belonged.
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