WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections ofa Britain’s gulag survivorBy Cucu Wanjiku Mirye

We are all born into the world of humanity at an ordained moment in time and space with a spiritualordained mission yet we are the creators of our destiny. The world I came to was full of turmoil. Myparents and their parents had been uprooted from their own homes to go serve settlers under veryharsh conditions in the white highlands. I was born just before the end of the Second World War inKamara, in Mau Summit. My father, who went to Sudan and afterwards Mozambique, told me thatwhen he returned from World War II, he found a beautiful little girl born in his absence. The shortsojourn between Sudan and Mozambique must have brought my conception. During her pregnancy,my mother felt like she was going to have a baby boy since she felt a boy in her womb. But instead ofthe boy she expected, I showed up. Before I was born, she had had five children, both male andfemale.

The End Of Childhood

With the aftermath of World War II, the battle for Kenya’s independence was now underway. Myuncle Waweru, who was very involved in that battle was captured by the Brits and was sent toManyani concentration camp, a death hole. He once told me that the beginning of the freedom wartook place many years prior in the form of a secret movement. In the early forties, he was one of theorganisers of “rika ria forty”, a very secretive oath taking movement. The movement comprised of

young men and women who had sworn to take back their land which had been stolen by the whitecolonisers.

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He was also a teacher trained by the African Inland Mission in Kijabe but opted to go and teach inGikuyu Independent Schools under the system “Gikuyu Karin`ga”. These schools had their owncurriculum system based on African nationalism, religion, history and agriculture. I attended “KiaiKia Ng`ondu” (nursery school) for two weeks where I learnt the history of my people. I learnt that Iwas an African and a Kikuyu girl. Soon after I started school, the British colonial government closedall the Gikuyu Karing’a schools and arrested and detained everyone who was involved in thateducation system and threw them into concentration camps. I still maintain that the reason theywere closed was that the schools were teaching children how to liberate their minds from slaveryand were developing their dignity as humans. I often wonder why after independence this type ofeducation was not incorporated into the present day education system. We would have been better-oriented African Kenyan citizens for it, with that kind of self-knowledge based education.

From Heil Hitler To Hell

Originally, the area we lived in comprised of people from all parts of the country. There were Luos,Luhyas, Masaai, Kalenjin, some Ugandans, even a man from somewhere in the Coast. Soon after theclosing of the schools, Kikuyu families were isolated from the other tribes. The Gikuyu wereapportioned a separate piece of land to build their houses, far from the other tribes.

My father was an evangelist with the Africa Inland Mission posted in Kamara, before I was born.Because of that privilege, my older siblings got admission to a boarding school in Kijabe. Onemorning, after my mother and the other women had gone to fetch water, many trucks arrived. Therewere boarded trucks and flatbed open trucks lined up for half a mile. The soldiers jumped off thetrucks, ran towards us and started whipping people and herding them towards the trucks. There wasfear and pandemonium as we got onto the trucks. They took us to Molo concentration camp. Myfather had already left that day for his evangelical work hence he was not there when the trucksarrived and for years, we would not know where he was or what had happened to him. My oldersiblings were in school thus they were saved from the fate that begot the rest of us. My immediateolder sister, my younger sister, and my baby infant sister only a few weeks old and I were in thetruck with my mother. I was not yet 12 and already I was a detainee.

Of Auschwitz, Dachau And Molo

The Concentration camps were typically built in a clinical style. It was a field enclosed by meshfences about 10 metres high. On the outside of the camp were a series of razor wires, each about ametre high. On the inside of the fence was another layer of razor wire, about a metre high. After therazor wire was a barbed wire fence, about ten metres high. After the barbed wire were 1-metre highpoles. On those poles, there was a wire interlinking them. At given intervals on the poles weresignboard warnings – if you touch or pass the wire that is towards the fences you will be shot. Therewas a watchtower with an armed soldier and floodlights at intervals. The pit latrines were openroofed and near the watchtower so the guards would monitor us so we would not be tempted to digescape tunnels under the latrines.

There were also U shaped dorms built on the inner perimeter of the fence. At the centre was an openfield, which had two purposes: it was where lorries dropped the incoming detainees and also wherethe head count was conducted on everyone in the camp, including children and the sick. After thehead count, the detainees had to go through another gate to the stores for the food ration of maize

meal and beans. For years, that is all we ate. Maizemeal and beans.

We went every day to get our rations after the headcount. If one missed going through they wouldnot eat that day. The adults were sent to labour while the children were left at the camp. Manypeople and even more children died from disease and malnourishment. I was so traumatised that Iwas constantly sick and frequently hospitalised.

When I had the opportunity to watch the 1987 British television film – Escape From Sobibór – aboutthe German concentration camps during WWII, I could not see the difference of those Germancamps and the British concentration camps in Kenya.

We stayed in Molo for more than a year then one day we were hauled in trucks and we were movedto an even worse concentration camp in Gilgil town. It was situated where the present police stationis. We were there for another year or so.

More deaths occurred. The body count of children grew. More torture, more punishment, more menand women died. Death was constant. It was every day and it was all around. It had become our newnormal. My baby sister learned to walk in a concentration camp. My mother did what she could tokeep us alive, but it was often no more than a narrow escape from an ever-present death.

The African Inland Mission Eldama Ravine had informed the Kijabe headquarters of our detentionand the mission sent a search party to look for its evangelists and their families. They finallyreceived word that we were in Gilgil. They made the necessary interventions so that we could bereleased into their care. We began what was known as a screening process. The screening wasdesigned to repatriate people to their homelands. We were on the move again, from one screeningpost to another, ending in Shura, Kiambu, now just a village before the Kikuyu bypass. From there,we were transported to the Kijabe mission station.

We Are Together Again, Just Praising The Lord

The missionaries and colonial government were two arms of one body. Education of the African wasdesigned to prepare Africans to serve the white man. My father told me he was lured to ThogotoChurch Missionary Society School as a young man. There were promises of education and more.When he finished at Thogoto, he was sent to Jinn School by the Thogoto (Scottish) missionaries(where the site of the now Mary Leakey School for Girls is) in Lower Kabete to learn how to bakeand work in a kitchen. He had no choice. You got what you were informed you got. After completinghis course, my father went on to the African Inland Mission in Kijabe, in order to continue hiseducation. It was the Kijabe missionaries who had posted the newly trained evangelist to theHemphill estate in Mau Summit. His task was to evangelise and to serve his master.

My father was a head chef at the Hemphill estate which must have been thousands of acres, a sub-county. There were well over 100 homesteads of workers each with wives and children. He and hisfellow workers used to bake a lot of bread, cakes and other wheat items, especially at Christmastime. You cannot believe how much milk, butter, cream, wheat, hay and meat used to be sent toBritain. Whey (mathaci/machache) from milk was taken to the farm workers every evening. Therewere over 100 homesteads of workers each with children. I would collect about 2 litres of wheyevery evening when it was my turn to collect it. We liked it – it was very nice with ugali. At this pointin time of course, those days were a distant memory of another lifetime. The Concentration campexperience had ended that.

We were released on Christmas day in 1954. Those who met us settled us and generously gave beds,bedding, clothes, food and utensils to my mother and her four little girls including my baby sister

who was now just under three years old. We were happy to find our older siblings alive and together.We were almost complete but not quite.

We still did not know where our father was. We were worried because when the coloniser took menaway, they rarely ever came back. Our mother settled us as much as she could, but it was not easy. Afew months after our arrival in Kijabe, my mother was called by the head of the mission station andwas told that they have found out which concentration camp her husband was taken. What remainedwas to fill documents so that he could be handed over to the mission since they had sent him toevangelise at the A W Hemphill estate. Our father was home by Christmas 1955. He never spoke ofwhere he had been or his experiences.

Someni Vijana, Muongeze Pia Bidii

In Kijabe, the family was together and we all went back to school. I joined class one at Kijabeprimary school in 1955. That gap of not going to school had created a hunger and a purposestudying hard through the twelve years of that British system. The system comprised of four yearsbefore common entrance examinations, another 4 years before the Kenya African Primary EducationCertificate, another four years before the Cambridge school certificate, two years for the highercertificate and then, for those lucky and rich enough, college or vocational training. Then it wasteaching or nursing. We walked to school barefoot, carrying a stone slate mounted on a woodenframe, with a special pen. One had to have a special permit to wear shoes and even with the permit;shoes were too rare, too expensive and too precious to wear to school.

We sat on long wooden benches and stored our lunch in a corner of the stone classroom. Theeducation system was designed to eliminate young Africans. The grading system involved a forcedcurve grading which meant that in the years where students had passed well, their marks wereregraded so fewer would progress. I did not repeat a grade and always got one of the few passesavailable. We had experienced so many traumas that we held on to one another with a true feeling ofbelonging and worked extra hard.

Free At Last…

I remember the time Kenya got her independence. I was so happy. Whenever I see the clip of theBritish flag being brought down and the Kenyan flag being hoisted, I still well up with tears of joy. Itwas overwhelming. This is a whole story on its own, but I can tell you, it was like reaching thePromised Land. I remembered the camps, the children who died, the men and women who werekilled and starved and tortured to give us Uhuru.

My greatest moment was when independence was declared as it abolished forced curve grading,shoe licences and the need to get a pass to visit my sister, who lived far away. I had had the chanceto visit her in Murang’a, during colonial times after obtaining a special passbook in order to see her.We even needed a passbook to leave the Kijabe mission station even if it was to go to the nearestshops in Kimende town, 8 km away.

My parents both lived to see independence and to see their grandchildren. My mother passed awayin her eighties around 1979 but our father stayed on until he was one hundred and seven in 2003.All of his contemporaries and younger siblings had long left the world of humanity before he did.

To My Grandchildren

My country is perfect. It is all right. There is nothing wrong with it. My country is beautiful, it isresourceful. It is only occupied by people who are brainwashed by a foreign colonial ideology.

When I see the ethnic conflict in the present, it makes me sad because of the knowledge that this isa devil planted in our country by the coloniser with the aim of making Africans hate one another forpower and material gain. Then it was the white coloniser, today it is our brothers who have occupiedthe role of the coloniser. Do not be surprised by our people who still send our country’s resources tothe west to fulfil the desire of that demon whose power Kenyans are yet to overcome to date. Why?Because the Kenyan society has avoided addressing the psychological effects of colonisation.

The poorest families in our land are those whose parents fought in the war of independence or thosewho had no opportunity to take on senior offices or political positions. Jua Kali inventions in our landare thrown out of the window so that we can import instead of encouraging and nurturing our younginventors. Did the coloniser bewitch us? How can you steal national wealth and give it to the veryentity that diminishes your existence as a human? Many of our leaders and administrators have beento the west and seen how they treat blackness, like trash! Until we begin believing in God, who is theInnovator, the all-Knowing and respect our ancestry, we shall remain where we are – food for theenemy. Lazima tuheshimu our Africanism, Our Creator and our ancestors who left us soil, forest andunsurpassable wildlife. For those who empty the national coffers and send it to your evil mastercoloniser, for Kenya to remain in a pathetic economic state of affairs, this is your warning: You willdie leaving an evil legacy to your lineage. Truthfully, it is sad that I live in a beautiful Kenya with thiskind of mentality.

I wish we would realise our worth as Africans, which is not less than other races on the planet. Myprayer and desire is that we would wake up and claim the glory of who we are. We have bottled thisevil in our hearts long enough. It needs to be addressed in a therapeutic manner, recapitulation.

My children, realise that you are Africans. Not less than any other human being on the planet. Whatmy fellow Kenyans are missing is respect for themselves as themselves. Know that you are awonderful creation with great abilities. That whatever you desire will be yours, as long as you createit in loving kindness to benefit all humanity. Rise up Kenyans who love this nation of ours, God willbless your efforts.

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WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections ofa Britain’s gulag survivorBy Cucu Wanjiku Mirye

Won’t You Help To Sing?

The young man grabbed the microphone with relish and held onto it so hard, I thought he wouldbreak it. Then he said,

“Ukikatia dem na umefanya every effort ka gentleman, alafu akatae, and you are in a seniorposition let’s say at work or even you are stronger than her, lazima ujue vile utafungua iyoserver.”

His friends cheered, some of the women in the room laughed. Other young men looked down asthough in shame but said nothing. I saw the tears well up in one woman’s eyes, before she quicklythrew her head back and blinked rapidly, violently trying to push them back.

I was moderating a Gender Forum at the University of Nairobi, Lower Kabete campus. The year was2018. This year. The month. May. We had just celebrated Mother’s Day – a day that brings so muchpain to so many women in a country where rapists can walk away from their children, but womenmust pay for life, with life, the physical evidence of their violation. The young man who was speakingcomes from a long line of rape apologists. But he is not even aware of this. His history class did notteach him that rape has been a form of subjugation used to break nations, men and horses sincecolonization, slavery and before. He is only following his master’s footsteps blindly, playing a recordthat has been played repeatedly in time and space and that was used against his own people. Theyoung man punched the air triumphantly as he sat down. “Comrades, TIBIM!” “Boychild POWER!!”

Old Pirate Ship They Rob I…

This is the country I live in. A country where might is right and if you are the victim, it is because

you did not “jipanga, mtu wangu.” I am a child of conflicting definitions. My mother spent threeharrowing years in British concentration camps and gulags in Kenya between the ages of 10-13. Shedoes not talk about that time but whenever we put on a movie about the Second World War, shetenses and her body becomes rigid. She was a victim of colonial crimes because she came from theRift Valley and her parents were registered as Kikuyu.

Read Also: WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections of a Britain’s gulag survivor

My father was raised in the Central Kenyan county of Nyeri. His father was a teacher. A harsh coldforbidding man by every description that I have ever heard. His food was never cooked in the samepot or served with that of his wife and children.

My father died when I was too young to know him, a light skinned silhouette of a shadow, neverquite there, never quite not. Those who knew him or his family of origin would often comment onhow I took his shade, in the right light and with the right make up, I could pass for mixed race. That,apparently makes me beautiful. As a child, I always worried. My mother had often told me how,when she was growing up, if you were a clever, studious or beautiful girl, you were in constantdanger of being raped. She and her sisters never walked alone. Until I met my paternalgrandmother, I always wondered if my father was the offspring of “British style civilization”.

My mother is the beautiful one. Even in her seventies, you can see why she and her sisters receiveda special pass from the colonial District Commissioner exempting them from cutting their hair likeother natives. The District Commissioner, no less! They also got a pass to allow them to wear shoeson Sundays! Somehow, this was a privilege only given to natives on merit. I love shoes and I long toown many many shoes. I grow then cut my hair every 8 years, shaving locks that usually grow downto my waist. Perhaps, it is my residual, subconscious defiance, to a long gone violation that webelieve ceased to exist. But has it?

From The Bottomless Pit…

I was born after Flower Power and Love had given way to bell bottoms and brief skirts. When Ishowed up, Black Panther was a movement, not a movie and the country I was born to was sopowerful, so endowed, so focused that countries such as Singapore and Malaysia benchmarkedthemselves against mine. Their presidents and politicians took long trips to come find out how theycould trade with us and how we could assist them to develop. What they, and we, had notcontemplated was that what we had on paper, we did not believe in our hearts. That we are worthyof our own resources.

The crisis in our country is not a crisis of action, it is a crisis of the mind. Having been born tocolonized minds that never quite undid their own colonization, it was inevitable that the values of thecolonizer would become the values of the colonized in a twisted form of generational Post TraumaticStress Disorder. After all, their most dominant reference of power and leadership is looting, stealing,extrajudicial killings, and amassing by whatever means necessary as witnessed in the killings,displacements, lootings and rape in 1993, 1997, 2008, 2017. Atrocities are followed each time by anapology and a handshake. As though a hug can resurrect the dead, or heal the wounded, or restorethe property and dignity of once self-reliant IDPs told to lie low like an envelope.

The bizarre thing is that we seem to make the same mistake over and over, not understanding whatCarter G. Woodson unwittingly wrote of the mindset that operates as the Kenyan voter’s does, whenhe penned, in the Miseducation of the Negro,

“When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have

to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. Youdo not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is noback door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.”― Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro

Maybe that book should be on the compulsory reading list for primary schools.

Have No Fear Of Atomic Energy…

My mother was Christian by choice, her parents’ “choice”. The choice had been very simple. TheBible or the Bullet. One of her aunts, my great aunt Wanjiru, had chosen the bullet version. Everyoneknew the consequences of the wrong choice.

My mother grew up in Kijabe, a little mission town nestled in the folds of the East African Rift Valleyescarpment. Until the 1990s, the sale or consumption of cigarettes and alcohol were strictlyprohibited and you could be expelled from your home in the village if you beat your wife. Mumworked for a series of church organizations. I saw her bum pinched by men in collars, I heard herprepositioned for sexual favors and casually informed that her “thing” would rot if she did not give itup. To this day, I have a healthy distrust of any man of the cloth. Mum is a constant seeker. Sheintroduced my brother and I to the Qu’ran when I was 12. We read all the books by Eric von Danikenwe could get our hands on and we regularly discussed the color of God’s skin. In all the bible storybooks, Sunday school sketches and bible study books, he was always white. Jesus was always blondor a light brunette even though he came from the Middle East, and the holy spirit was a white dove.Suspiciously, the devil was black and red.

I constantly questioned the Bible. Why would God discriminate against some of the people when hecreated all of them? Why would the apostle Paul tell Timothy never to take care of young widows asthey would soon get married. Obviously I had both a vested interest in the treatment of widows bythe church. Why would God allow one people to enslave another on the basis of colour? Mum, havinggrown in the Bible Belt, warned me not to ask these questions outside of our home.

“People will judge you and they can be vicious if you question the Bible. They will say you arequestioning God.”

In my naïve youth, I would retort, “Mum, how can questioning the Bible question God?” But I wasobedient in this one way. One day though, in frustration, my 13 year old self turned to mygrandfather, my hero and an evangelist during the colonial times. I said,”Guka, why did you agree tosell out when you knew their god was meaner and crueler than your god?” He looked at me withthose big black soft pools of sadness that looked out to the world from behind curtain length lashesand said softly, “Because, Mami, there is a level of beating you can be beaten and it will break youlike a horse. And you will do your master’s bidding.”

Years later I read Frederick Douglas and a discourse dubbed the 1712 Willie Lynch letter to theVirginia slave owner. I cried like a baby. My grandfather had been strung up and whipped in front ofmy grandmother and my mother, aunties and uncles. As the story goes, the young white soldierordered the black “gatti” home guards, who were beating him to get a bigger bullwhip. Mygrandmother in distress, broke free of the gatti who was holding her, ran up to the white soldier andgrabbed him by the throat and screamed in her broken English,

“Beat him!! I kill you!! They kill me!! We die!!”

Startled by the wild look in her eye and the clearly suicidal act by this diminutive woman who daredto touch him, he choked and spluttered an order to cut my grandfather down from the tree he was

strung up.

While We Stand Aside And Look…

I must have been in my early teens when I had the very first experience of celebrating thieves in thechurch. We were at our local church in the village where we had gone for a special service incelebration of the Passover. In the middle of the service, a well-known public figure walked in,loudly, noisily, with a small entourage of young men in sunglasses. The congregants murmured,“Thief”, “Grabber”, “Overlord of thieves”, as our local “Master Thief” walked into church. The mainpastor, not to be confused with the more lower ranked preacher, hastened to the lectern at the frontof the church, grabbed the microphone from the preacher and announced,

“Could all our regular attendees who are seated in the front of the church please move to theback of the church to allow for our important guest to sit at the front.”

There was a little shuffling but no one moved. The pastor repeated, “Could all those seated at thefront of the church, move towards the back of the church now, so our honorable guest can sit at thefront.” The congregants began to arise and move.

One old lady obstinately refusing to move, said loudly, “I am not moving for a thief. Tell him to go tothe altar and confess where my cow went.” The congregants burst into laughter. The pastor hastilywhispered to the preacher who was standing next to him. The preacher and one of the altar boyswalked quickly towards the old woman, our newly discovered Rosa Parks and stood over her, oneholding each of her forearms, ostensibly to assist her to stand up. She acquiesced and raised herself,grumbling. As she walked past him on the aisle, she said loudly, “Bring back my cow.” He smiledcondescendingly and wafted past her, his arrogance apparent in his gait.

When the “guest” sat down, the preacher announced that we would not be reading the passage fromthe Gospel of John 2:13-17 as earlier planned. Instead, we would be reading from John 3:16. Jesuswhipping merchants at the temple did not please the “guest”. God’s redemptive Son was safer. I wasnot sure for whom it was safer – the pastor or the thief. After the sermon, the “guest” was asked toaddress the congregation. He immediately launched into a monologue on his greatness, followed bythe removal of a large wad of money which he handed to the pastor – towards a project of thepastor’s choice. Pre-Lutheran indulgences for sin at work in post-colonial Kenya. Praise god!

None But Ourselves Can Free Our Mind…

In the late 1980s, the government of Kenya announced that it was moving from the 7-4-2 system ofeducation, to the 8-4-4 system of education. I was in that pioneering class. One day we werestudying Kenya’s colonial history, as interpreted by Malkiat Singh, a prolific writer and publisher ofschool books. The next day, the books were replaced by the study of early man. While the earliesthuman remains were found in Africa, all indications of early man in Europe included fire, wheels,hunting tools, fur coats, things their African contemporaries did not seem to have mastered. Evenamongst our monkey-like ancestors, there was a marked difference in development and “civilization”levels.

The history lessons continued in that vein into high school. Cromwell was examinable. Kismayo wasnot. Auschwitz was an exact figure. Hola was an “indeterminable number of rebellious natives”. Iknew more about World War II coming out of high school than I knew about the war forindependence [I call it a war, but you will note that even that is downgraded to an “uprising” or a“rebellion” as though a people fighting for over 10 years for their country’s liberation at the officialcost to the colonial government, of a whopping UK Pounds 55 million in 1950s money, can be

equated to a school riot].

Is it a wonder then, that I would empathize with the Jews held in Sobibór and not with the Kenyansmassacred in Manyani, whipped and beaten for hours and hours until, screaming and cowering, withflesh torn open by bullwhips and hanging off their bones, they died for a country that does notremember their names?

I saw the pictures of the Jews, read their stories, crammed dates and numbers and figures. I knowmore about Hitler and Goebbels than of Tom Askwith and the euphemistically named SwynnertonPlan, or how many Kenyan lives the Embakasi airport cost. I can speak with greater authority of theexperiences of Ann Frank, a little Jewish girl who died in a German concentration camp, than ofWanjiku Mirye, a little Kikuyu girl who survived Molo and Gilgil concentration camps – and who ismy own mother. Is it a wonder that I and millions of post-independence children including themillennials we birth, identify with a people other than our own or those like us? We don’t knowourselves. We are not the authors of our own stories. Yet.

We’ve Got To Fulfill The Book…

It matters that we know our history. It is important to know that Kenyans lived in close proximityand intermingled villages, tribe being of no consequence. It is important to know that colonialadministration used sequestration and segregation as a form of subjugation. It is vital to know thatrape and tribalism and segregation were part of a Final Plan To Quell The Mau Mau and people wererewarded to turn in on their fellow Kenyans. It is important because that knowledge informs thepernicious aftermath of the vexatious tribal narrative perpetrated by politicians, the press and thepulpit in an unholy triumvirate.

Maybe, if that young man at the University of Nairobi had read this history, had met my mother, hadheard of the concentration camps and the enforced villages and the gatti…maybe if he had met mygrandfather and listened to him tell his story of the day my grandmother choked a white man, maybehe would not be so hasty to advocate for the “justifiable” rape he so gleefully spoke of. Maybe hecould be part of the writing of a new book. Our book. The Book Of Us By Us To Us.

Maybe we could change our destiny as Kenyans and not just play to a narrative that is not ours byright. Maybe Redemption would cease to be a disjointed broken song that begins with “mkoloni” and“tulipigania uhuru” as a refrain to drown cries of “Thief”, when we discover Goldenberg andChickengate and NYS scandals.

Maybe Redemption would not only be a red covered hymnbook of English 1950s hymns.

Redemption would be our song. In our words. Lugha yetu. Sauti yetu. Rangi yetu. Sisi wote.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their societyby interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

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WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections ofa Britain’s gulag survivorBy Cucu Wanjiku Mirye

Ask any child of the 80s what, “Polisi wa kae kama raia” means or why August is called the “ Blackmonth” and the question evokes a chain of memories buried deep in our psyches. The children of the80s try to forget but we remember.

I started my remembering again after I took my 26-year-old nephew on a trip down my memoryroad. Didi is the firstborn of my eldest brother John. He is a true blood millennial, born in 1991, afterthe fall of the Berlin Wall, the Falklands War, the failed assassination of Ronald Reagan and theassassination of Indira Gandhi.

He was born after the release of ANC’s Nelson Mandela, the end of apartheid, the victory ofMuseveni’s NRM in Uganda and Sam Njuoma SWAPO in an independent Namibia.

After Said Barre was overthrown in Somalia, the SPLA civil war in Sudan, Jonas Savimbi’s CIAbacked war against the Marxist government in Angola, the rise and fall of Samuel Doe in Liberia,

After the assassination of Walter Rodney, Captain Thomas Sankara and the plane crash that killed

Samora Machel in South Africa.

After the murder of Dr. Robert Ouko, the mysterious death of Bishop Alexander Muge, and thehanging of Senior Private Hezekiah Ochuka.

After the Wagalla massacre, the devastating Ethiopian famine that killed half a million people, theTiananmen Square massacre in Beijing and the unaccounted extermination of young lives to theAIDS virus.

After the July Saba Saba riots, the repealing of the Section 2A of the constitution that made Kenya amultiparty state that promised a future of dignity, liberty and prosperity in a democratic society.

We stood on Menelik Road facing the house where my innocence was lost. Menelik II was theemperor of Ethiopia who repelled an Italian invasion in the great battle of Adowa, a fact I learnedyears later in a history lesson in high school. There was a high drab wall surrounding the maisonettecompound. We could only see the upper part of the house, the rain gutter that peeled and crackedpaint under the mouldy black tiled roof. There was a kiosk and vegetable stand right outside whatused to be the main access gate now completely sealed. The road was dotted with potholes andmarked by high walls. The neighbourhood had changed like the rest of Nairobi. Closed, neglectedand cold.

Nairobi of my childhood was a green city in the sun. In the 80s, one had to go to the militarybarracks or the prisons to find high walls. I conjured up a picture of Menelik Road in the 80s. Redand purple blooms of Bounganvillea hedges, bamboo fences, gated homes with manicured cypressfences, see-through gates, mbwa kali signs where white foreigners lived, mature Jacaranda trees andchildren taking turns riding a single BMX bicycle. At the closed end of Menelik Road was KilimaniPrimary school run by a Goan man known as Mr. Fonseca, fondly known as Fonyi.

The first time I saw President Moi in the flesh was at this school. The President had stopped outsidethe school gates on the road named after Kenya’s first African lawyer Argwings Kodhek who died ina suspect road accident in 1969. The entire school assembled by the roadside to greet the Presidentwho had built a reputation for making surprise public stops to interact with adoring ‘ordinarywananchi’. I do not remember what Moi said but he distributed boxes of tiny biscuits afterwards,leaving us elated and in awe of Presidential power.

Menelik Road fed into Ngong Road from where the KBS buses run on time and the trafficcongregated at Adams Arcade shopping centre. Adams Arcade had a timeless design that hasendured the onslaught of Nairobi’s mall culture and a history dating back to the 40s. The openverandahs with large walkways, a post office, butcher shop, a bakery, basement bar are stillcontemporary. The iconic artistic cement slide we darted up and down as kids remains stuck instone. The star attraction of the arcade was the Metropole cinema. I only ever watched a film theretwice as the movies were adult rated but we still showed up at Adams every opportunity to droolover the movie posters and envy lucky movie goers. Adams Arcade is named after its enterprisingfounder Abdul Habib Adam who acquired the piece of land as payment on debt owed by the colonialgovernment and then went ahead to design East Africa’s first shopping complex even though he wasnot a trained architect. On the lower level now occupied by Java coffee house was Tumbo’s bar.

Metropole cinema closed down alongside a host of cinema halls in Nairobi some years after the ’82coup and little did we know that our privileged middle-class bubble was about to burst. My pre-teenworldview was manufactured by a father who kept up the fiction to save his children from thetrauma of real world events happening around us. It was an alternative universe, much like Italiandirector and actor Roberto Benigni’s critically acclaimed film “La vita e bella” (Life is Beautiful). In

the film, Benigni plays the role of a Jewish Italian bookshop owner, Guido who embarks on theimaginative game of positivity to shield his young preteen son from the horrors of the Naziconcentration camp while under captivity. Like Guido, I had a father who coped under duress ofdisruptive post ’82 years by choosing silence or humour because they were the most powerful waysa father could cry during hard times.

I lost my innocence of a predictable and certain world in 1982 on the first day of August. I was 8years old. My elder brother returned from a party on the 31st July and had turned on his portabletransistor radio to catch the 6 am news. That Sunday morning, the hesitant voice of radio veteranLeonard Mambo Mbotela on VOK’s national service announced that the government of Daniel ArapMoi had been overthrown. On the national broadcaster, an unfamiliar voice pronounced afterwards,

“You are hereby informed that everybody is requested to stay at home. They should be nomovement in town. The government has been taken over by the military. There should be nomovement of persons and vehicles. The police should now assume their roles as civilians untilfurther notice,”

For the next three days, there was a protracted firefight between the Kenya Airforce soldierscheered on by University of Nairobi students against the elite General Service Unity and the Kenyaarmy led by General Mahmoud Muhammed. The city of Nairobi shut down, looters broke into shopsand the head of state was nowhere to be seen or heard until days later when he appeared on TVlooking thoroughly shaken. The poorly organized coup was crushed in 3 days but for the next threeweeks, we stayed marooned indoors listening to the radio playing martial music under a dawn todusk curfew. At the end of the month of August ’82, 100 soldiers and about 200 civilians had diedand President Moi was primed to crush any threat to his hold on power.

The men who led the military revolution that never was were in their 20s drawn from low rankingAir force personnel and the public universities. There were sons of the working poor who died fortheir revolutionary ideals. The leader of the coup was 29-year old Senior Private Hezekiah Ochuka ofthe Kenya People’s Redemption Council.

Nairobi went through drastic changes after the failed coup attempt and a new kind of silence fellover our house. My parents never discussed politics in our presence. I was never certain what myfather, who worked for the Ministry of Health, thought of the president. Media was governmentcontrolled and the news for public consumption feted the benevolence of our great leader, Baba Moi.Oblivious of the ongoings, we had no idea how quickly the country was slipping into repression. Wewatched as the adults stood aside and cheered like frogs placed in a pot of cool water complacentlyadjusting to the rising temperature until they boiled to death.

Night watchmen started to appear in the Kilimani neighbourhood – typical men from the pastoralistcommunities, the brave warriors to stand guard at night because house break-ins had reportedlyincreased. The bamboo fences disappeared replaced by cement block walls. Burglar proofing onwindows became a standard house feature. The wooden gates replaced by solid metal ones withsmall access doors that one had to hunch over to get through. We started to notice ‘chokoras’roaming through the neighbourhoods scavenging through growing roadside garbage piles that hadgone uncollected for months.

The political and economic changes of the 80s and the 90s were disruptive to the lives of hundredsof thousands of government workers and their families who suddenly slipped overnight from themiddle classes, no longer able to afford the privilege of security. In just a few years, there wasmassive flight of former civil servants from Kilimani and Woodley for Eastlands and villages acrossthe country. I became part of the generation defined by what cartoonist Gaddo characterized as the

Nyayo error.

The education system changed from 7-4-2-3 to 8-4-4. We became Moi’s guinea pigs, trained in theethics of loyalty and patriotism. Moi’s hold on the country affairs was iron-fisted and totalitarian. Aschildren, we totally succumbed to the Kool-Aid of the Nyayoism, programmed by the elaborate statepropaganda machine, the original Cambridge Analytica. Living under the grip of Moi’s mediahegemony had us parroting Nyayoism propaganda slogans.

The free school milk deprogrammed critical thought. Moi benevolence was God inspired and weknew this because TV cameras followed him to church every Sunday. Competing mass choirsemerged in droves singing in chorus in praise of the Great Leader. We memorized the ‘Nyimbo ZaKitamaduni” raising our voices in complete reverence as we sung the words to Mwalimu ThomasWesonga choral hit song, “Tawala Kenya, Tawala, Rais Moi”, wagging a single finger in the air andunconsciously endorsing the one-party state of affairs indoctrinated with the Nyayo philosophy ofPeace, Love and Unity. During the morning assembly, we recited the loyalty pledge with pride.

I pledge my loyalty to the president and the nation of Kenya. My readiness and duty to defend theflag of our republic. My devotion to the words of our national anthem. My life and strength in thetask of our nation’s building. In the living spirit embodied in our national motto – Harambee! Andperpetuated in the Nyayo philosophy of peace, love and unity.

Moi was the wise leader, the visionary, a man of God and the sole reason Kenya was an island ofpeace in a sea of conflict. There was civil war in Uganda, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, Rwandaand Burundi. Any version of events or literature contrary to the official narrative earned one asubversive and dissident tag and the consequences that came with the label. As we sang and dancedto patriotic songs in praise of the great leader and the beautiful life he accorded his subjects, ourparents bore the brunt of the dismantling social pillars of society.

“The forces of neo-liberalism are on the march, dismantling the historically guaranteed socialprovisions provided by the welfare state, defining profit-making and market freedoms as the essenceof democracy, while diminishing civil liberties” (Henri Giroux, 2004).

The government under pressure from the IMF adopted the Structural Adjustment Programmes(SAPs) designed to create rapid and sustainable economic growth but instead, they ushered inunprecedented loss of jobs and income equalities uprooting thousands of families and theirdependants from the security of government social services. The state surrendered the economy tomarket forces, prioritising paying off foreign debt over social services. The social systems collapsedovernight as funding was choked, passing public institutions and services into private hands in thename of efficiency. Cost sharing became mandatory and the inequality grew overnight. The publiceducation standards plummeted. The intellectuals were hounded, undermined, exiled, detained,subdued and turned into puppets.

Peter Oloo Aringo, the then Minister for Education captured the sentiment of the times when hepublicly announced in biblical and Shakespearean rhetoric during a Nairobi university graduationceremony that Moi was the Prince of Peace.

Unemployment increased as formal employment opportunities shrunk and the jua kali sectormushroomed. Public bus system broke down descending into a matatu culture of urgency andtrickery. Potholes started to become familiar, a thing and public facilities sunk into a permanentdecrepit state. Freedom of movement and association was curtailed as police officers turned rogue.Beards became profiled as marks of dissidence or Marxist in leaning, as dangerous as a young manin Kenya’s ghettos spotting dreadlocks during in the later day Mungiki crackdown. The politics

became a contest of loyalty to the big man and a new cast of uneducated but loyal court jesters filledthe ranks of important state positions. After ’82, Moi ran a tight ship silencing protest effectively,with the perpetual dread of the shadowy Special Branch hanging over the population.

The white man is very clever. He came quietly with his religion. We were amused at hisfoolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longeract like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

Chinua Achebe, – Things Fall Apart

Fear and loathing of one’s helplessness is what defined the brand of enforced ‘silence’ of the Moiyears. I had little idea that I had inherited my parents’ traumas growing up in an autocraticpatronage system. Even during my boldest moments of protest as a university student in the fight forsecond liberation in the late 1990s, I knew my boundaries. I knew when to reserve comment, speakin code, choose my word carefully and keep my political opinions to myself in public. Stronger,braver and important men had disappeared. I had no illusion what the state was capable of.

The only other thing that rivaled the dread of Moi state repression machinery was a mysterious virusthat hunted young lives like Tekayo the cannibal character in Grace Ogot’s “ Land WithoutThunder”. On January 15 1985, the Standard newspaper carried a headline “Killer sex disease inKenya”. HIV AIDS virus compounded by a broken public health system devastated my generationand it became the single biggest contributor of orphaned children. The safe sex and abstinencecampaigns coincided with the rise of evangelical churches capitalizing on the despondency thatdefined the times. By 1988, AIDS had taken on a religious dimension as the curse of our generation.Reinhardt Bonnke, a German preacher arrived to great pomp and razzmatazz to save the souls ofAfricans and packed stadiums preaching the gospel of healing and miracles. Tens of thousandsgathered at his mega-crusade including senior government officials, swept away by the frenzy ofspiritual warfare against the demonic forces unleashed on the “Dark” continent.

In traditional Anglican, Catholic and Presbyterian churches, a band of bold men spoke softly andfirmly, using their pulpits to preach the gospel of redemption from an oppressive status quo. Therewas Bishop David Gitari, Alexander Muge, Henry Okullu and Reverend Timothy Njoya. Two yearslater in 1990 Bishop Muge was dead and Timothy Njoya had been severely beaten in public by stateagents outside the parliament buildings.

36 years since the coup of ’82, Kenya remains deeply entrenched in the politics of pilferage anddivision. The wealth and poverty gap is immoral. The country that the late JM Karuiki once decriedas one of “10 millionaires and 10 million beggars” is firmly entrenched. The former Chief JusticeWilly Mutunga bluntly called Kenya a bandit economy run by mafia-style cartels. Grand theft hasbecome the enduring characteristic of the historical state and the common denominator co-joiningsuccessive generations.

On January 20th, 1961, at the Capitol in Washington DC, newly elected President John F. Kennedyinauguration speech ended with a line that would shape a generation in America,

“Ask not what your country can do for you- ask what you can do for your country”.

The leadership of all progressive nations have demanded the same unwavering patriotism of theircitizens and bled the rhetoric of national service to death. However the contrary question is nevertabled,

“Ask what your country has done to you?”

Are we willing to talk of the past human rights abuses, the forgotten events of historical injustice,the systemic traumas that we continue to stuff in the storehouse of national amnesia? How can acountry that is unable to face and deal with its past move forward?

The millennials I meet ask this question in collective wonderment. How did it go so tragically wrongfor a generation that ate the bitter fruits of the Nyayo philosophy? Why did the foot soldiers of thesecond liberation turn into eager oppressors and ethnic bigots driven by an unprecedented level ofgreed? If we are to make any sense of our presence and our future we have to go look back to wherewe lost our way in a Sankofa-esque way. The literal translation of the term Sankofa is,

“ It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind”.

When I name my defining Kenyan traumas, I start with ’82, the year that I first experienced theexistential angst of Kenya’s middle class. I think about the good intentions of my late father, part ofthe silent generation born between 1924 and 1942. He was defined by the Second World War andthe Mau Mau state of emergency. By 1982, he did what any loving father would have done; shieldone’s children from the harsh reality and until they were old enough and equipped to deal with it.My own father died in 1989, the year that Berlin Wall came down and it was the same year that Irealised that life was not beautiful, aware of my mis-education in a postcolonial reality, I began myown personal journey of consciousness and awareness.

In 2002 after the inauguration of Mwai Kibaki, I made the number of those Kenyans described as themost optimistic population in the world. Moi was gone. My generation was unbwogable. We hadsurvived the repressive years 80s and 90s and gotten rid of our collective problem. The impossibledream achieved and a bright future beckoned.

By 2005, Mwai Kibaki had been in power for three years and already the optimism of the year 2002had worn thin. The politics of ethnic hegemony that had taken temporary leave returned with fury. Itcame to a head in disputed 2007 election and I watched my generation fall into line and retreat tothe safety of ethnic bastions. Indeed, there are no atheists in the foxholes. The illusion of nationalunity faded and the same fears that stalked my father to silence had returned.

We had become our parents, silenced, cynical of everything political, distrustful of those who didshare our story and uncertain about what the future held for our children. It might be 2018, yet 36years later Moi’s protégés continue playing by the same rule book of economic mismanagement,rampant corruption, political assassinations, electoral theft and violent suppression of dissent. Theuncertainty that defined the 80s is still here but the unbwogable generation that came of age in2002, is invested in personal cultivated bubbles of security, no longer willing to rattle the status quo.

We have morphed into our parents with children living in bubbles and disinclined to sabotage ourbeautiful lives.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections ofa Britain’s gulag survivorBy Cucu Wanjiku Mirye

For the last few months, students at the university where I teach have been pitted in a standoffagainst we the faculty and administration. From the drama so far, my greatest impression has beenthat I do not recognize my generation.

I do not recognize us because we knew there was a problem long before. Our problems began withthe marketization of the academy, something that researchers – including Ugandan academicMahmood Mamdani – have been talking about for at least two decades. But we still followed the idolof marketization, despite the fact that academics are terrible at business.

Academia, by its very nature, is a profession of idealism – we don’t do the reality of business verywell. But Kenyan universities persisted in the business logic of turning universities into profitinstitutions because we thought that we could do business better than business people (academicsfind it very difficult to admit that there are skills that they are not good at). And the business logicfailed.

We refused to acknowledge the glaring symptoms of that failure that we had already been warned

about: increase in student cynicism, obsession with exams and increase in cheating, deterioration ofsupport services, and a rise in corruption as the inevitable result of outsourced services. Weblindfolded ourselves to the problems with strategic plans and performance management.

Now the students are raising the same issues scholars like Noam Chomsky and Henry Girouxidentified as happening to higher education. And true to script, we their elders are exhibiting thebehaviour of management that they warned us about.

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First, we treat the students as children who don’t understand. Then we doubt their intellectualcompetence and maturity. When they are persistent, we offer explanations that suggest that theproblem is with them: maybe are drunk, incited by politicians, or anxious about exams. Other timeswe say they are inconsistent.

We also moralise. We say that the students have lost traditional respect for elders. We criticize themfor choosing bad methods for voicing discontent, even though the channels for voicing thatdiscontent fail, or do not exist. We say that we have let them take over control, which we must getback. I didn’t even know that academia was about control.

We essentially forget that we are with dealing adults, who are voters and have ID cards. Adults whohappen to be the age of our children. Adults who are saying what some of us, their parents, havesaid before. And in fact, the greatest disappointment of the students has not been our failure to dealwith the issues; it’s been our persistent denial of those issues. The young people can see theelephant in the room, and they know we can see it too because we walk around it. But our responseis to deal not with the elephant, but with the students pointing out the elephant. And these sameactions appear in Mary Serumaga’s rebuttal to the articles in the millennial series in The Elephant.

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The Elephant has made the ground breaking move of hosting the conversations by millennials andborder-millennials. The conversations perform two broad functions. One, they narrate theexperiences of living in the contradiction of being an adult who is socially prevented from achievingadult milestones. Two, they use that experience to theorize what is happening in the world. In theirview, their elders are blind, by choice, to the contradictions between social expectations and the lackof social structures needed to meet those expectations, and that blindness is generational.

The goal of the conversations is not only to define their experience, but also to add to our globalunderstanding of reality in this neoliberal age, and appeal to our sense of human empathy acrossgenerations. If we understand what younger people are dealing with, we would stop makingunrealistic social demands of them, or better still, we would fight for the social structures they needfor those expectations to be achievable.

The most obvious tactic of undermining the voice of the youth is to question the authority by whichthe youth speak. Serumaga does this in two main ways. One is the use of colourful adjectives like“verbal deluge,” “musings of the youth” (as if elders don’t muse),“pouting,” being “glib,” and“childish.” In other words, Serumaga is saying that the pieces are not written by whole humanbeings with legitimate experiences, but by a segment of their being, that is their youthfulness. Andsince youth is temporary, so are the ideas that they are articulating here, and so we cannot take theideas seriously.

The irony of this dismissal was that some of the people Serumaga cites as authoritative, such asSteve Biko and Frantz Fanon, were the same age as the “millennial” writers, if not younger. Biko

was about 24 years old when he wrote the column “Frank Talk,” which would produce hispublication I write what I like. Fanon was around 27 years old when his book Black skin, whitemasks was published.

But the greater irony is beyond these men’s age. They actually wrote from their experience, theirobservations about the oppression around them and the failure of academics to actually study thatreality. One obscene contradiction between academic study and reality cited by Fanon, is whenpsychiatrists studying the dreams of those traumatized by colonialism say that the gun is a “phallicsymbol,” when in fact, it is a reference to the AK47 carried by colonial soldiers to terrorize and killthe colonized. Fanon even has a section in his book entitled “the lived experience of the blackperson,” asserting the authority of the lived experience in academic study.

And as Lewis Gordon, the Fanonian expert and existentialist philosopher says in several of his works,asserting the authority of the lived experience is important for black people, because racism deniesthe complexity of our lives. This denial makes the black biography, the lived black experience,central for black people in theorizing, for how can one express one’s humanity with tools ofinstitutions that deny one’s humanity? One has to then appeal to lived experience, which is what the“millennial writers” have done. The writers literally have nothing to use but their experience,because we, their elders, who should be doing a better job of dissecting the neoliberal age and itsimpact on the youth, have denied them access to the spaces where they can institutionally articulatewhat they are dealing with.

And the dismissal of experience becomes more disturbing when one looks at the special attentionthat Serumaga pays to Kingwa Kamencu. Kingwa’s piece captures how racism and neoliberalisminteract with the female African body. Kingwa mentions the millennials as being more comfortablethan their forebears with wearing natural hair and modern fashion with African inspiration.Serumaga refers to these unique gestures as making claims to “a new form of decolonization,” andthen refers to the afro and cornrows of the 60s as evidence that there is nothing new about themillennials’ fashion sense.

The dissonance here is the skipping of whole decades in this rebuttal. Kingwa is talking about ageneration who lived 60 years after the Civil Rights movement. The parents of her generation arenot the people of the Civil Rights movement, but their children, who had a totally differentexperience. If I would cite my own experience, I would confirm that what Kingwa is saying about theshame of the black female body is true.

I grew up being told to either perm or braid my hair. When I converted to dreadlocks in 2000, andlater when I started sporting natural hair, I was asked if I’m Rastafari or when I’m going to comb myhair. I am currently a member of a facebook group of African women, with tens of thousands offollowers, who are finding solidarity in resisting the pressure to straighten our hair with blowdryingor to cover natural hair with weaves. From Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie, one of the mostcelebrated writers of this era, we know that the struggles around black hair are far from over.

In fact, the issue here is not that elders were part of the black pride movement of the 60s; rather,the question is: how did the children of the 80s and 90s become ashamed of their hair, so that theynow deride their children for going back to the sixties? I think Silas Nyanchwani explains the reasonwhy. My generation, born to parents of independence, grew up during the cold war, and werealienated from the people who raised their voices for an African independence that meant more thana black president, a national flag and anthem, because those people, like Patrice Lumumba, ThomasSankara, Micere Mugo and Ngugi wa Thiongo, were killed or exiled by dictators.

And there is a gender dimension in the attention to Kingwa’s article – Kingwa’s is one of the two

woman contributors and one that mentions the woman’s personal space. But Serumaga considersthe article the least authoritative of all, faulting Kingwa for mentioning the broad social phenomenalike structural adjustment programs at the end, unlike the articles of Kobuthi and Okolla which aremore “factual.” Yet the other writers also do evoke their personal experience. They talk about theirparents and their families. Nyanchwani even gives a deeply emotional account of the birth of hisdaughter. So why does Kingwa get so much flack for personal narratives?

And yet, we see this in the academy all the time. We repeatedly alienate the lived experience fromwhat we study. And that’s what the millennials are calling us out on.

Generalization

The other rebuttal of Serumaga is one that we’ve seen before: that the writers are usinggeneralizations about age and history. Serumaga cites several exceptions to the judgements that thewriters make of their parents’ generation, such as Biko and Fanon. This is the familiar and very oddpost-modern refutation of arguments solely on the grounds of generalization.

Pointing to the “generalization” in another’s position usually does not refute that position. We seethis, for example, in the response to Trump’s shithole comment, when some Africans offeredbeautiful pictures of Africa to prove that not all of Africa was as bad as Trump said. Pointing togeneralization did not counter the deeply racist and immoral premise of Trump’s comment.

The generalization retort also misrepresents generalizations as rigid formulas, which they are not. IfI say, for example, that the long rains fall in Kenya in the months of March to May, I am not sayingthat the rains fall at absolutely the same time every year. I am referring to a pattern observed over aperiod of time, not an absolute formula. There will always be exceptions, and those exceptions do notnecessarily refute the rule. And sometimes exceptions confirm the rule, and that is how we start toask whether the change in rainfall patterns could be a sign of global warming or environmentaldegradation.

In other words, the purpose of pointing at exceptions should not be to just do so but to refute thegeneral principle and offer another one. Biko was not, as Serumaga implies, an exception thatproves the rule that the writers were wrong about their parents’ freedom struggle credentials. Andthe point of black consciousness is not that Biko’s predictions about an exploitative black rulingclass were proved right. The point is that we must translate the political struggle for independenceinto concrete social-economic gains, which is precisely what the millennial writers are calling for.

And so citing instances in which Africans fought against colonial rule misses the point. Themillennial writers were not assigning personal responsibility to each and every individual member ofa whole generation; they were referring to general trends that they have observed about the currentdecisions made by people who seem united by their age.

We talk about general trends because if we don’t, we can’t find commonality, and we can’t makedecisions. Without generalizations, we can’t theorize, because theory, by its very nature, is ageneralization. So by condemning generalizations, we are denying the millennials the space totheorize what is happening to them. And that is dangerous because if our youth cannot theorize theircondition, the only option we leave them is to change things through irrational violence.

And the writers are not the ones who began theorizing the millennial challenge as a generationalproblem. It is we, their parents, Gen-X or whatever one wants to call us, who first used thegenerational framework when we said that their behaviour and attitudes were unique to their age.We chose to explain the contradictions which our youth face, many of which we created or at least

know about, as a problem with them. We said that our kids can’t get jobs because they wantunrealistically high salaries and do not want to soil their hands with work. That our children are notgetting married because they’re selfish and care only for instant gratitude. That our children are notworking hard in school because they’re spoiled. The writers are simply responding to the generationframework.

But the millennials are also pointing out that we, their parents, are the proverbial emperor who isnaked. The jobs we’re telling the youth to get are not there for us either. My parents’ generation andmy colleagues have been retrenched and given golden handshakes over the last 20 years, since thestructural adjustment programs began. So we know that good jobs do not exist, and yet we’re tellingthe youth to get them. Our youth know that we witnessed the undermining of social services liketransport, education and healthcare, but we accepted the propaganda of private solutions to publicproblems, and being told that we cannot complain if we do not offer a solution. Our youth have seenthrough the lies in this neoliberal reasoning, and they are not willing to use this reasoning any more.

Serumaga’s article essentially refuses to engage the millennial writers as thinkers in their own right.She diminishes the authority of their voice because they have not conformed to her rules, andtherefore she doesn’t engage the arguments that the writers are actually making. She invites themto “come together to heal, for each generation to show empathy for the others,” when she has shownlittle empathy for them.

And in fact, this is the contradiction that my students and the millennial writers are talking about.We, their parents, do not take them seriously. And after indirectly showing them that we have norespect for their opinion, we patronizingly invite them to dialogue. Our children can see through us.We’re contradicting ourselves. We’re preaching water and drinking wine.

It’s time for our generation to actually treat our young adults like the adults that they are. We haveto end this gate-keeping where we dictate the rules of engagement with our younger adults andallow them no space to manoeuvre. After all, the younger adults are not speaking an entirely newtruth; they are speaking a truth inspired by reality, and by what we, their elders, have taught them.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their societyby interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections ofa Britain’s gulag survivorBy Cucu Wanjiku Mirye

It is 8:30 am on a chilly Saturday morning punctuated with light rain showers. I prompt the driver toreverse the pickup truck into the entry porch. They begin unloading my stuff. A couch, office deskand a chair that I purchased with the proceeds from my first contract. These items remind me of thehurdles I have surmounted in a bid to make a mark in this world.

I am moving back to my parent’s house at the age of 25 when I should be out there conquering theworld. I feel like a total loser. A disgrace to my entire lineage but deep down I knew I had met myWaterloo.

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I was born in 1991 in Kwale County. Soon after my birth, my family moved to Nyahururu only torelocate back to Kinango, a little-known town in Kwale when I was five. I left like an outsider,laughed at by other kids since I could only speak in my mother tongue but I soon mastered thenational languages.

In 1997, Kenya becomes engulfed in political animosities in the run-up to the general elections.During the campaign period, the former PM Raila Odinga and hordes of politicians held a publicrally at Kinango Secondary School, which was close to our house. My friends and I attended therally, squeezing through the crowd until we stood a few feet from the podium. I do not rememberwhat was said. What I remember was the amount of money one of the politicians contributed to theschool. Ksh. 200,000 in cash! That was the largest amount of money I had seen at the time.

A few days later, news of a militia group called Kaya Bombo spread throughout Kwale. Somethingchanged in the playground. The local kids started taunting kids whose parents were not natives of

the coast region. Before this, we played as children, paying no attention to our origins. Overnight,we had turned into upcountry folk, unwanted in the coast region.

“Nyinyi ni wabara. Mrudi kwenu!”

Some of the locals regarded the Kaya Bombo militia as heroes out to redistribute wealth and landback to its ancestral owners, addressing historical injustices and expelling immigrants believed tohave stolen opportunities meant for locals. Some kids even fought over who would move into ourhouse once we were all slaughtered. It was rumored that the militia members had mystical powers.When they broke into houses at night, they ethnically profiled their hostages by holding out a onebob coin and conducting an accent test. If you said something like silingi or shirigi they would cut offyour head.

Petrified by these stories, we, the children of wabara helped each other learn how to pronounceShilingi in order to pass for locals in event of a gang attack. Back at home, my parents stocked up onfoodstuffs. By 6:45 pm, every evening, we would switch off all the lights, barricade ourselvesindoors, huddled in one room, on the floor, farthest from the windows to avoid getting hit by straybullets as gunshots echoed all night long. The District Officer was our immediate neighbour andfamily friend so we enjoyed the privilege of security of his armed guards.

That year, Likoni police station was ransacked and burned to the ground. Members of the migrantcommunities along Likoni-Kombani-Tiwi-Ukunda-Msambweni stretch lost property. My folkspermanently halted the construction of some property in Ukunda. Once the violence was quelled, weattempted to restore our normal lives, although a few of our family friends moved back upcountryfearing for their lives.

10 years later, in 2007, the political temperatures soared again after the disputed presidentialelection. This time we were prepared. We all moved into my grandparent’s farm in Shimba Hills. Thelicensed firearm holders in the extended family kept their guns close by. The rest of us armedourselves with machetes, clubs, bows, and arrows in a bid to protect our women, children andproperty. This period rekindled the intense fear, suspense and painful memories of the ‘97 Likoniclashes as news of the wanton destruction of property and ethnic killings in the Rift Valley reachedus. Fortunately, most parts of the coast did not experience incidences of election-related violence.

Towards the end of January 2008, a sense of normalcy resumed. I was excited to go back to school atKenyatta High School, in Taita for my final year. However, in class, I became a target of profiling,tormented by my business studies teacher. Every time he walked into class he would call out.

“Mark Maina Mwangi, where are you?”

I would meekly stand up.

“Ohh the mungiki is still here! I will personally make sure you are sent home…”

The insults and threats became a regular affair and I realized that I was paying for the sins of thosebehind the disputed presidential outcome. One evening class, the teacher walked up to my desk,grabbed my exercise book and tore it into pieces. I received a slap on the face and got kicked outof class for a crime I did not commit; writing a love letter.

For weeks I had endured his abuse but he eventually got to me.

What if I was indeed a mungiki and murderer as the teacher claimed?

I was broken. I called my folks that night to let them know I was done with schooling. I could nottake it anymore. The next morning my mother came to school to see me. She gave me two options.To gather my stuff and leave for a new school or stay there and fight for myself like other men. Ichose to stay. A choice I have had to make throughout my life.

In 2010, I joined Kenyatta University to pursue engineering for my undergraduate studies. Before Ibegan pursuing civil engineering, I thought it would be interesting. That we would be learning anddoing things that would revolutionize the world only to end up studying same old concepts withoutany real-world application. In my sophomore year, we started reading stories of young people inthe west, dropping out of campus to start tech companies that turned them into billionairesovernight. We debated the merits of tertiary education with my comrades while contemplatingquitting school for entrepreneurship. In the 2nd semester of my 2nd year at university, I quit campus,pulled together my savings and borrowed some cash to set up my first business. I used up all thecapital to import a couple of Tablet-PCs. I envisioned building an electronics import business empire,raking in millions and never having to work for anyone or need a degree. Unfortunately, I did notconduct an extensive market research. The same week my shipment landed, a giant Telco rolled outa series of cheaper Tablet-PCs. I ran into huge losses and returned to college humbled, spending thenext several months paying off my debts.

But once a hustler always a hustler and in my final year of campus, I was running a constructionconsultancy company on the side. I landed a project and contracted three of my lecturers to do thejob for me. This was a campus life highlight. However, the succeeding contract came with drama.After spending my last coin to undertake the project, the client disappeared without paying a dime.In my naivety, I trusted too much and forgot to sign a contract. Who would want to pull down ayoung man trying to build an empire, right?

I was completely broke and too embarrassed to ask help. At my wits ends, I started writing for onlinemagazines in order to stay afloat. Everything else I touched had turned into dust. During this lowmoment in life, I channelled my frustration into creativity and wrote The Kenya’s Middle-ClassNightmare blog post which went viral receiving over 400,000 reads. Suddenly, I was getting joboffers and speaking engagements from all over the country. I settled on two, one in media and theother in marketing.

As a man who gives his all in everything he does, in a few months, my projects in both companieswere hugely successful. I was working 8am-4pm in one company and 5pm to 11pm in the other fromMonday to Friday and most weekends. I did not have a life outside of work. Nonetheless, my quickrise up the ranks did not sit well with a number of older and senior colleagues. To them, I was notonly an outsider but also someone who was yet to pay his dues like they did over the years. Theybegan frustrating my projects at every turn

My boss became inordinately toxic. Nothing I ever did was right. Shouting, insults, threats andintimidation were his weapons of choice. At first, I took it to the chin, trying to keep level-headed butthe aggression chipped at my soul every single day, leaving me trapped, constantly stressed andwalking on eggshells. I would have either to sell my soul to the devil or return to a life ofuncertainty. I choose the latter. Something else happened to trigger this decision.

One afternoon, I get a call from a lady I went to college with. In a voice devoid of emotion, shesays, “Hi Mark! Do you know your friend is gone? Ebu come to MP Shah Hospital…He just died.”

I dismiss her and get back to work trying to process the news. Minutes later my phone begins to ringincessantly with numbers I do not recognise. I decide to switch it off. This can’t be possible. I talkedto him two days ago and he was responding well to treatment. We had even planned for a road trip

as soon as he was discharged.

At 5:30 pm, I head out to the hospital in Parklands to find his family and former college mates,huddled at a lounge next to the ICU, grieving.

‘This is an elaborate prank. He is okay. He will walk out in any minute now and laugh at how sad weall are.’

The hospital staff lead the gathering of family and friends to a windowless building where thehumming of freezers could be heard from outside. A gentleman and lady in scrubs usher us into aneerily cold room. A faint stench of bleach hangs in the air.

Lying in one of the freezers is my best friend wrapped in a white sheet like an Egyptian mummy.Eyes closed and peaceful. Except for his pale lips and bulging forehead veins, he might as well besleeping. I call out his name. Try to wake him up without success and the reality finally descends likea ton of bricks. He is gone. Crossed to the land of no return. Unable to contain my emotions anymoreI break down. Weep like a toddler without care of who is watching.

The next couple of days are terrible. I have lost people before. Friends. Relatives. But this loss is toopersonal. For almost a decade he was my best friend, wingman, confidant and more like an elderbrother. He taught me pretty much everything I know about being a man. He was the man I went tofor advice. Whenever I was in trouble he bailed me out.

To deal with the loss, I start drinking more than usual. I switch from beer to whiskey in an effort tonumb the pain. I begin doubting the existence of God. He was such a selfless, loyal, caring and astand-up guy yet he died young, why was I spared?

I bottle up these feelings while trying to avoid the places we used to frequent together. Despondencysets in. One of my initiatives as a lifestyle blogger involves helping out people. I listen to theirproblems while trying to find solutions. People of all ages, both online and real-life come to me forhelp. I am their rock. A shoulder to lean on. Tens of people reach out to me with their life issuesevery week, however, none of them ever inquires how I am doing. My pal was the guy I went to withmy problems. Now, I have nobody in my corner.

To deal with the emotional turmoil I begin hooking up with random women for no strings attachedsex. The actual human connection I seek proves elusive. In Nairobi, it is way easier to hook up with arandom person every night than it is to find someone who is real.

The drinking intensifies, cheered on by my acquaintances. I become that guy, the life of the party onthe outside but wounded inside, crying out for help. Those around do not seem to notice it. I rapidlysink into depression and loneliness but I am too ashamed to admit for I care too much for my publicbrand.

One morning I step out of bed only to lose balance and fall to the floor. The room spins in circles. Ifeel terribly sick. My stomach churns. I stagger to the toilet, sink onto my knees, pull up the seat,hunch over and try to puke. Nothing comes out. That is when I realize I have not eaten anything forover two days. It was clear I had completely lost control to my addictions.

My denial only exacerbates the situation. I try travelling, sampling the nightlife across the countrybut there was no escape from this labyrinth. I have to face my demons head-on.

So, I de-clutter my life and give away most of my possessions including gadgets clothes and shoes.Then I hire a pick up to ferry what was left to my parent’s home in Kwale, the only safe haven I could

think of.

Just as the crew finishes unloading, my old man walks out of the house. If at all he was surprised tosee me, he does not reveal it considering I did not notify him of my impending arrival.

At 26, my old man built his mother a house. He lost his father at a young age, faced adversity forcinghim to single-handedly take charge of his family, educate siblings and change his fortunes. Havinggone through that tough life he made sure I lacked nothing. Sons are supposed to be better thantheir fathers in all aspects of life. Sadly, I may never to be half the man my old man is despite alladvantages life has given me.

“Come in and have some breakfast.”

My father fries two eggs, toasts bread and serves me together with some coffee.

My parents never ask me why I came back home. Instead, they seem genuinely happy to see me andwelcome me back like the prodigal son. After two weeks, I open up about my struggles and why Ineeded time off the city to heal.

“Son, there is no shame in a man asking for help. You made the right choice to come back home.Even when you are fifty years old, you always have a place in this home.”

The next day, my parents give me a house to move into, appoint me as a manager to the familyventures complete with an office and access to a car. I work twice as hard masquerading as anentrepreneur does but deep down I know I am only lucky and not the self-made man I pretend to be.

Time off the city changes my outlook towards life. I take time off social media in an effort toreconnect with my inner-self, hang around people who I have known for years.

I had been harbouring hate, avoiding dealing with grief, trying to seek acceptance, unconditionallove and support in all the wrong places because I was too embarrassed to ask for help. I learnedthat being a man should never be an excuse to bottle up everything. I am human after all and thereis no shame in stumbling. It takes courage to continue and failure is such a great teacher.

The true measure of a man is not defined by the invincible cloak we wrap around our publicpersonas but by how we continually respond to the challenges of life.

After almost a year of working for family, I hand over the reins and move back to the city a bit wiserwith a single goal. Reclaim my life and work on becoming a better man.

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. ~ GeorgeMoore

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WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections ofa Britain’s gulag survivorBy Cucu Wanjiku Mirye

My dad was born in 1946. His dad, my grandfather, was born in 1918. Both of them were born at thetail end of wars that everyone thought would be the wars to end all wars. Many things happenedbetween those two births. Kenya officially became a colony, the Great Depression ruined the globaleconomy, and a new, bigger, and more destructive war begun and ended.

My grandparents got married, hurriedly, in 1941 (or 1942). Their black and white wedding phototells nothing of the turmoil that was already taking place. All it shows is a young couple in love, withmy grandmother sitting in her white dress, shoeless, and my grandfather standing next to her.Nothing in the photo tells you that it was only months before my grandfather was conscripted tofight in a war he had no stake in.

His war was not in the trenches. At least not the literal ones. His was in the camps, in the medicaltents, and wherever men and women trying to hurt each other finally succeeded. There was Burmaand Egypt, and every battleground in between. In lieu of bullet or shrapnel wounds, he came backwith his face and soul permanently marked. The reminders of chickenpox he contracted trying tomake sure other soldiers didn’t. He came back with those scars, a metallic service bowl, and a virile

need to survive. So immediately the guns went quiet and he could finally come back to his wife, theyset at it. They spent the next decade doing exactly that, through the turmoil of the ‘50s. Mygrandfather spent his lifetime as a health officer. He sought stability and discipline, and his scarssurvived not just as physical marks, but as a nickname given to him by his boys.

I was born to my father in his 40s. He’s a man’s man and an introvert who prefers solitary walks tolong conversations. On his face he has a scar from one such walk at night. Years before I was born,he was attacked on a walk and slashed on the forehead. He healed, but the scar hasn’t faded withtime. On his ebony skin, even as age grows on him, it still defines the right side of his forehead.Itmade him more careful, but didn’t kill his love for long solitary walks.

But there were other things. Like his dad, who grew up in the early years of the formal colony, mydad also was raised in a land in brutal transition. His was not the kipande or labour system, it wasthe Mau Mau war. He was arrested, at least twice, while he was a kid in Kiambu. Once, no one knewwhere he was for three days. He and his cousin had been picked out of a random line-up by snitchescovered in sacks-called gakunia-as Mau Mau sympathisers. They were barely 10 years old. Thoseexperiences made them cautious, and the trauma made it easy for them to see enemies where thereweren’t.

My dad does not say much about the Roaring 60s, but I think the decade meant a lot to him. He wasin his 20s, he had hope, and he lived in a country full of opportunity and promise. Then the 70s hadresponsibility and commitment. The 80s too. The 90s even worse. Somewhere in between thosedecades, he became a police clerk, then settled on teaching as his lifelong work. And retired just atthe start of the new millennium. In those decades he could count among his students two of myfuture teachers, and one future Attorney General.

As three generations of firstborn sons, our childhoods couldn’t have been more different. One livedthrough the early years of colonialism. The next through the Emergency years. I lived through theausterity years of Nyayoism, in the dying embers of the political revolution that begun in the early80s. Did that define our chosen crafts? From a health officer to a teacher to a writer?

Of these men, I am the only writer and the only atheist. At first it felt unique to be these things, like Ihad the privilege of not having the trauma of war and conquest in my childhood. But it doesn’t feellike that anymore. Now it feels as if I carry the traumas of their generations as well as mine, and mylove for history doesn’t help. As if my quest for knowledge is a quest to understand them, and atleast find little ways to help my generation not repeat the same mistakes, and to process its traumadifferently.

In 2002, my dad told me he would vote for Uhuru Kenyatta. I did not understand it. The man wouldlose, we rightly agreed, so why would he still vote for him? I thought he more than most wouldunderstand. He had seen bad politics break the society he worked in. He had lined up to swear the1969 oath as a young adult, not by choice, but it still markedly defined how he views Kenya as anation state. His trauma from the 1950s was weaponised for political gain, yet he was a curious soulfor whom tribe has never meant anything in social and business interactions. He was there, not justas a witness and a student of history, but as a teacher of it for three decades.

I thought he would understand. He should have. But now I get him. I think. His reason at the timewas loyalty, or something like that. Loyalty to home. To people. To an idea. It sounded incomplete,but it was a lesson in experiences.

For most of my life, he was an agnostic, the first one I ever knew. He still identified as Christian, butsomething about denominations bothered him. He was a seeker, an open book as he called himself.

Then, as the grey took over and his gait became more deliberate, he made a decision. He became thepeople he had been sarcastic about, choosing one denomination over all others. One way to worshipover everything else.He had only seen his father as a man with the scars of war in timeless patternson his face and heart; a man for whom death had been real and close. Perhaps his father’scommitment to a single church, the Anglicans, was why he needed to seek first. Decide later.

I have always been an avowed atheist. Still, every few years I wonder if age will make Pascal’sWager look more enticing. Like it did for him, until it did not. Am I walking the same journey as heand his father, only in a different time with different experiences? Is it cascading through us, threemen with alternating surnames, this life experience? Sometimes I think the difference is in what agethey had to raise the next generation of men. My grandfather was just two years shy of 30 when hegot my dad, while mine was well into his 40s. Their ideas were markedly different; one wanted toraise a strong son who would be his legacy, the other wanted his son to find himself from an earlyage. The only thing that made my dad tick, other than bad grammar and bad grades, was myexperiments with all the girly stuff that littered our home.

I write because my father made writing, even letters to him, an exercise in expression. Letters cameback marked with corrections and notes to improve diction. History books littered my childhood, andknowledge, especially questioning history, were one of the few things that made his eyes light up.His father was a distant man with the demons of war tormenting him even before the previous onehad abated.

I write because I can’t not write. Even if I had ended up in a lab or at crime scenes, which was mychosen career, I would still write. I wanted to live in a lab to tell stories of sex, money and murder,the three pillars to any great story worth telling. Yet I found myself miles away from a lab, fromtrace evidence and semen samples, and in a world where they still exist, but seem to make moresense. What if that’s how, when he ended up in the war, my grandfather found himself treating thewounded and the dying. Making sure they didn’t contract more diseases or injuries than theyalready had? What if it was taking the road less travelled, and finding that there were several littlepaths that led from it? How my father, in the decade after independence, found himself offeredmanagerial jobs in several companies but chose, instead, to be a police clerk. Then a teacher ofwomen and men. A man who, even after he retired, still found time to teach older men and women.Who loved languages and history and everything in between. Was that his war, ignorance? Does hehave scars from it I haven’t understood yet? What is my war? What is it that, by virtue of the personI am in the sands of time, is my lifelong work?

In my culture, there would be a generation transition every 30 or so years. It was a massive affairwhere aging men accepted they couldn’t fight any more. They couldn’t fend for all. And mostimportantly, that they had done their part. They needed to let younger men find and do theirs. Eachgeneration understood it had a short window to get its work done. Its life purpose. Whether that waswar or peace didn’t really matter, because each is a version of the other. The last one was just acentury ago, the same year my grandfather was born, but its tenets are now lost. Its rules shouldhave survived in some way, not just in retirement age, but as a concept. That youth is fleeting. Thatit’s the time to be energetic, and reckless. With your physical self, with your ideas of the world. Atime to fail and succeed. To make stupid mistakes about whatever the new technology is at the time.To rage and fight and protest. To work and cry and try. To experiment. To simply live.

In our family this transition was marked somewhat by the death of my grandfather just months afterI came into this world. He had done his part, and once told my mother that at least he had lived tosee himself. Did he hope, like I see my father with his grandkids, that life would be better for methan it had been for him? That I wouldn’t carry his scars but I would learn the lessons they leftbehind?

I often wonder how these lessons have cascaded in ways I don’t understand yet. I am a millennial ina world where my generation is seen as needy, aggressive, liberal, reckless, and distracted. Like myparents were when they walked into the ‘60s with unbridled optimism, youthful exuberance, and ataste for the latest fads. That forced those older than them to ban miniskirts and long hair, becausethey were ‘spoiling the youth.’ Kenya has been here before, because the experiences of eachgeneration shape how it raises the next. I think of this when I see how my generation, now youngparents, are struggling to raise their kids in a world on steroids.

What makes a millennial a bad word? What makes it a thing to be said disparagingly? Is it becausewe live (according to Western statistics-which are wrong) in the most peaceful time in recordedhuman history? Is it because not only do we talk to each other remotely, we now live and work theretoo? Is it because we are more informed about sexual and reproductive health, about gay rights andright of Palestine to exist?Or is it because we didn’t live through some of the most defining momentsof the nation-state we call home.Will we find, as we age into our 30s and 40s, the smartphonegeneration as obnoxious as older generations find us today?

Life is a lived experience. There is only one way to do that, to live it. To seek. To find, sometimes. Toaccept Trump as the clarion call to the next phase of American aggression, which might just drive usto the next war we historians will describe as the war of our generation. To accept that eachgeneration has a purpose, and ours isn’t defined by colonialism and independence, as much as it isdefined by our need for jobs, better Internet, fewer wars, more inclusion, and a more humanistapproach to social problems. By rapid political transitions, a debt bomb, the traumas we inherited,and those we are inflicting on ourselves. Those are our wars, so far, and they are real. If the nextgeneration has different wars, then so be it.

My grandfather, my dad and I are three different men, all born in the same century yet defined bydifferent experiences. We are broken in different ways yet we have, if my mother is to be believed(and she’s a mostly solid source), similar in our ways. Our reactions. Our decisions. Ourstubbornness. Our messes. Our mistakes. Yet still, our views of the world, our politics and ideas, area world apart. Even though we mostly have the same genetic tools, we are different because wewere born in different times, and we processed them differently. Their generations were broken, butthey were also blessed. Mine is too. I am a millennial, and my generation is struggling to defineitself. To find its purpose. To do its best and worst.

We are different. And that’s okay. For those of us who don’t believe in an afterlife, this is the onlyrun. And fucking run we shall!

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WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections ofa Britain’s gulag survivorBy Cucu Wanjiku Mirye

Reading recent submissions to The Elephant by Millennials, one gets the impression that there is agenerational battle going on in Kenya. It is portrayed as the Millennials beating back their elderswho, having sold out first to the Colonialists and then to kleptocracy, now persist in accusing thisgeneration of narcissism for rejecting colonial precepts of success and progress. The mostastonishing assertion in this verbal deluge was made by Kingwa Kamencu.

“[Millennials] question everything. They ponder and muse over and critique everything given tothem, weighing and evaluating its weight and worth, something their parents’ generation neverdid. Their parents simply swallowed all that was force fed to them as truth.”

The evidence suggests otherwise and we shall return to the work of our parents. First the musings ofthe youth. Walking behind a trio of Ugandan youths one day I overheard this snatch of conversation;

“…I told my Mzee – No, I expect something more expensive than that for my birthday…” Theywere not ten years old, closer to twenty. The other two listened while the first explained that hehad rejected a first offer of a birthday present and was waiting to see what his father would turnup with at the end of the day.

There was another one who would not leave my bank manager’s office until his father (the manager)

had promised to ‘see about’ a car.

They didn’t strike me as being part of the “mass-movement of philosophers” that Kamencu claimsthe youth are, just frankly brats with a heightened sense of entitlement. But to judge all youngpeople by the actions of a few would not be helpful in grappling with the existential issues at hand.Admittedly Kamencu states she speaks for the affluent whose concerns are ‘the higher things of life.’

In defense of Generation X-ers and earlier generations

Our forebears were just as much victims of colonialism as are the present generation. The differenceis our forebears had to find a way to survive the immediate physical and economic barriers to theiradvancement. It was a time when the entire population of Kenya was diagnosed as being geneticallybackward. It was said that if the African was not colonized and made to labour, s/he would becomeextinct and so they were flogged and starved in to submission. And yet they survived and prosperedmainly through their physical labour as farmers.

They survived the onslaught by a combination of diplomacy, subterfuge and open defiance. Apartfrom one chiefdom in West Africa that was traded for a consignment of alcohol, there is no record ofour ancestors voluntarily giving up their sovereignty.

Without judging the choices of any one cohort, it is necessary to point out that the most defiant didnot live to tell the tale. Neither did their communities.

King Jaja, of Opobo in today’s Nigerian Rivers State had been trading in the area since 1869(Meredith, 2014). Jaja had developed a monopoly, by fair means and foul, and was a successfulexporter of palm-oil. He managed to by-pass local merchants and sell directly to ports in Britain. Sosuccessful was he that he could afford to have his children educated in Scotland. The National AfricaCompany obtained a royal charter in 1886 to encroach on Jaja’s territory. He resisted. In to thisscene stepped Harry Johnston, the British botanist who invited Jaja to a meeting on his ship with theassurance that he would be free to leave whether or not he accepted British proposals. Jaja never setfoot on Opobo soil again but was transported first to England where, bizarrely he met QueenVictoria, and was then exiled to the West Indies (Cookey, 2005). The Royal Niger Company went onto develop its own monopoly of palm-oil for many miles along the River Niger.

Sultan Abdullah of Perak (now part of Malaysia) spent seventeen years in exile in the Seychellesfrom 1877. His was a rout – thirty-seven others were exiled with him. Also exiled were Ghana’s YaaAsantewaa, queen mother of Ejisu of the Ashanti Empire and her son King Perempeh. Sultan SayyidKhalid bin Barghash Al-Busaid of Zanzibar was exiled there in 1916.

After protracted guerilla warfare Kings Kabalega and Mwanga of what are now kingdoms withinUganda, were exiled to the Seychelles in 1897 where they met with fellow exiles of the British.

Possibly the best example of the Imperial take-no-prisoners approach is the ancient and extinctKingdom of Benin. Benin was a sophisticated, prosperous and powerful kingdom. It remainedindependent until the nineteenth century despite increasing pressure from the British to form atrade alliance (and become a Protectorate). In the seventeenth century it was described as follows;

“The King of Benin can in a single day make 20,000 men ready for war, and, if need be, 180,000,and because of this he has great influence among all the surrounding peoples… His authoritystretches over many cities, towns and villages. There is no King thereabouts who, in thepossession of so many beautiful cities and towns, is his equal.”

British pressure mounted leading to two Benin soldiers opening fire on British troops. After the

Benin Punitive Expedition in 1897, all that remains of the Kingdom of the Benin is its artefacts,themselves the property of Western museums.

Kings and chiefs attempting to resist the annihilation of their Kingdoms and way of life; weredeposed either by the British government itself or by their commercial agents, the CharteredCompanies, other examples are; Dizinkulu and Lobengula. The aftermath of the Maji Maji and HeheRebellions, the Matabele and Mashona wars, the Mau Mau Uprising was not victory for the African.What can be said is that they established a tradition of defiance.This would not have been possiblehad each been focused on his/her own navel. To interprete their predicament as ‘chugging downWesternization’ as Kamencu does is simply childish.

More recently Albert Luthuli, Robert Sobukwe, Bantu Steven Biko, Nomzamo Winnie Mandela andMadiba, Albertina and Walter Sisulu, Oliver Thambo, Samora Machel, Amilcar Cabral, KwameNkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, the children of the Soweto Uprising and Thomas Sankara questionedeverything.To these add Achebe, Ngugi, p’Bitek, Neogy, Abrahams et al and those who read andconstantly re-read them.

Each of these represented and was largely supported by her/his generation. Progress was made, butthe cost was always high. It was only made possible by cultivating ‘old-fashioned’ values such asforebearance, longsuffering, community spirit. Ubuntu.

It is just as glib to say such and such an age cohort is lazy as it is to say,“Our parents, directly in thefrontlines of Westernization during colonialism and in the new independent state … never had theluxury of looking for this thing called purpose.” The pursuit of political and economic freedom wastheir purpose. The work is not yet complete.

They had their faults and personal failings from which I am sure Millennials do not suffer. But theywere prescient too, listen to Biko’s interview on Black Consciousness. His discourse on theexploitative economic structures of South Africa sounds as though he was being interviewed lastweek. Biko was thirty-one by the time he predicted that post-Colonial freedom not accompanied byredistribution of wealth would result in a black ruling class and a [persistently] poor Black majority.This has come to pass.

In South Africa the missionary education Africans received enabled them to side–step the subversiveapartheid Bantu school system and develop the skills to form and commit their thoughts to paperusing conventional language, spellings and grammar accessible to the wider population, which iswhy we have them today. They were able to communicate with allies outside their own ethnic andgenerational groups and beyond their own borders to spearhead the anti-apartheid andindependence movements. Had the elders rejected wholesale all that their forebears and themissionaries represented, Millennials would be labouring on corporate plantations and onlyphilosophizing during their lunch-break if any.

Speaking of which, what is the philosophy of the Millennial?

Per Kamencu– We wear, do, say what we want. Nothing new there. Biko famously said, “I write whatI like.” He was killed for it.

– We sing in Sheng and not English, she pouts, supposing new ground is being broken. But beforeSheng there was popular music in Swahili, Luo, Luganda, there was mbaqanga, Lingala…almost asmany languages as there are ethnic groups. In any case, Sheng is an X-er thing, the term was in useat least as early as 1993.

Kamencu then claims wearing vitenge as a new form of decolonisation along with natural hair. Of

course vitenge, tie-dye, corn–rows (Kiswahilli in Luganda), Ghanaian wuzi (natural hair styled withcotton thread) and naturals or afros made their first appearance as symbols of Black Power in the1960s during the struggle for Independence and American civil rights.

This lack of awareness of our liberation history is worrying. What hope is there in an awareness ofImperialism in camouflage? Can we look to Millennials for solutions to neo-colonialism – now calledstate-capture or subimperialism– and to unsustainable debt? What about Foreign Direct Investorscarrying on from where chartered companies left off?

Many privileged Millennials, enjoying hard won racial equality – do not minimize the importance ofracial equality – and enjoying all the advantages of the education, healthcare and transport facilitiestheir forebears worked and paid for, and many beneficiaries of post-Independence crony capitalism,have yet to go beyond pointing out the shortcomings of everybody around them, to suggest someviable answers to the questions of the day.

It is only at the end of her discourse that Kamencu mentions the socio-economic issues:unemployment and the lack of a social safety–net. There is no acknowledgement that precarity ispartly a result of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) and has forced Millennials to makecertain life choices. No recognition that precarity exists in colonizing countries as well as among thecolonized or among the elderly whose pensions and savings have been demolished by mandatorycurrency devaluation and other international monetary interventions. No understanding of the roleof capital in all of this.

It is not only Millennials that have valid grievances. Many Boomers and Generation X–ers moved onto middle-age and retirement to find that the social support systems they paid in to and that theirforebears enjoyed in that phase of life are absent, such as; real pensions, affordable housing, reliablepublic transport and affordable health-care – to which, arguably, they are entitled. In manycountries, Uganda being one, the fifth ‘marker of adulthood’ – saving for the future – was renderedmeaningless by currency devaluation.

In defense of the Millennial

More encouragingly, Joe Kobuthi’s analysis of Kenya’s post-Independence (post–Moi) historysupported by facts and figures is the first coherent, contextualized description of the challenges ofAfrican Millennial life this writer has seen. It also makes clear that the privileged (whether in fact orin attitude) are a tiny minority of society.

Darius Okolla is similarly engaged in a factual analysis of the individual phenomena of modernliving’ in their socio-economic context, the famous five ‘failures’ in ‘adulting. He is strongest whenhe challenges the assumption that an age-cluster is necessarily a homogeneous or bonded entity.Okolla argues that Gen X-ers were interrupted in their ‘bonding’ by the disruptive effect of the SAP.Many of them he rightly points out, elected to buy in to short-termist economic policies that did notbuild for the future. (One could go further, looting the State is not even an economic policy properlyso-called. It is theft.)

Perhaps this is where the fundamental error lies, equating arithmetical age-groups to cohorts thatcome of age together in the structured, time-honoured and accepted rituals of the past, ritualssymbolizing and founded on a common outlook: the Kikuyu Mariika or the Inkajijik for example.

It may be a conflation of the two that leads Okolla to the staggering assertion, without hischaracteristic presentation of evidence, that the SAP “united [Gen X] in sedative leisure of booze,longing for emigration abroad, sex and despondency.”

Perhaps it is a Kenya-specific thing. Ugandan survivors of the same period will find the particularlypainful.

Western generational clustering is not helpful in defining the parameters of the struggle foreconomic liberation. Any struggle should encompass the entire population facing uncertainty – thePrecariat – regardless of age or nationality.

Lessons need to be learned from past mistakes because there is no guarantee that the young wouldbe immune from tendencies to corruption, self-indulgence and consequent poor governance (comethe revolution) by which they stereotype the older generations. Remember, the authors ofstate–capture were once freedom fighters.

We have heard too this week, about Mathare Futurism an initiative of the youth of Mathare to beginimagining a better future. Interestingly, the founder Wyban Mwangi is not a child of privilegepreaching divisiveness but someone who out of necessity was taught to beg on the street before helearned the alphabet. It is he who proposes the beginnings of a solution.

The Mathare Futurists have started a green movement to provide nourishment and medicinal plantsas well as trees to make Mathare beautiful, more liveable. Importantly, the initiative involves ahealing process in which trees are planted in remembrance of those who died at the hands of theState.

The healing needs to extend to those who have ‘folded in to themselves’ as Troy Onyango puts it.The depression he (and one imagines others) suffered seems to be related to a phenomenon FrantzFanon observed among Algerian victims of French oppression and described in The Wretched of theEarth. Fanon’s patients had succumbed to an apathy accompanied by a mysterious physicalparalysis, losing the ability to function. There was no visible cause and they recovered whenremoved temporarily from the hostile environment.

Onyango recognizes that when elephants fight it is the grass that suffers. He affirms thecontribution made by earlier generations even as he deplores their intolerance of the necessarychoices the younger generation has to make.

We are not far off agreeing that the local agents of foreign capital, Fanon’s ‘native elite’ do notrepresent the interests or intentions of their generations. Patrick Bond describes them as “aglobal–scale buffer elite emerging which the imperial powers generally find useful in terms oflegitimation, financial subsidisation and deputy-sheriff duty.”

We are all victims of these men.

It is true, as Joe Kobuthi says, we lack an ‘organizing theory’ around which to rally. Amilcar Cabralfound the same in the 1960s,

“[…]The ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, within the nationalliberation movements — which is basically due to ignorance of the historical reality which thesemovements claim to transform — constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses of our struggleagainst imperialism, if not the greatest weakness of all.”

If X-ers were allowed to make a contribution, I would suggest we work towards planting a tree tosymbolize the search for what Kobuthi calls new concepts and the new wo/man.

As in the days of old when communities gathered under communal trees to diagnose and discusstheir problems, we need to come together to heal,for each generation to show empathy for the

others, to confirm our common interest in a better, less precarious future and to identify andorganize against those who would deprive us of it.

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WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections ofa Britain’s gulag survivorBy Cucu Wanjiku Mirye

The representation of women in political leadership globally hovers around 20% of mostgovernments, parliaments, heads of state, according to United Nations documentation. Between1995 and 2015, there was approximately a “major” 10% increase (from 12-22% parliaments; 12-19%

executive branch; 6-18% cabinet ministers. According to The World’s Women 2015.

A few factors contribute to this blatant underrepresentation. Women are seldom leaders ofmajor political parties, which are instrumental in forming future political leaders and insupporting them throughout the election process. Gender norms and expectations alsodrastically reduce the pool of female candidates for selection as electoral representatives, andcontribute to the multiple obstacles that women face during the electoral process. The use bysome countries of gender quotas has improved women’s chances of being elected. Yet, once inoffice, few women reach the higher echelons of parliamentary hierarchies

So how does Winnie Mandela fit into this framework. Clearly she was a leader not so much of herpolitical party (African National Congress) but of the people, a grassroots organic leader. And clearlyas well, she was betrayed by that same movement, from gaining the political power to make changesat the state level; and in part by her then husband, Nelson Mandela as he became president of SouthAfrica. Still in my view, she functioned as a kind of shadow or alternative president, and definitelyrejected the mythical “First Lady” paradigm with its expectations of a certain compliance.

This mythology of the first lady has been substantially challenged recently by the presence of blackwomen, who are historically the anti-thesis of the idealized white female identity historically alignedwith service to white male patriarchal power.We can say as well that Winnie Mandela, like MichelleObama in the United States, presented images of beauty, strength in her physicality, and presenceas a black woman and an unabashed sense of personal style but above all an amazing love for familyand community and people in general.

For women, like Winnie Mandela who end up having to resist that compliant construction, insteadthere is a deliberate construction, as I have argued elsewhere, of a “selfin resistance tocolonial/patriarchal order.” This is resonant in the idea of leaving (or staying with) the ‘Great Man.’As other women who were married to world leaders reveal, such a decision is always fraught withdrama as the subsequent activities are still always carried out in full public view. So in many ways,though their relationship ended after his release from his twenty-seven years imprisonment as apolitical prisoner, Winnie had left the “Great Man” emotionally, although she continued to supporthim politically.

The life of Winnie Mandela and the end of that relationship for example is illustrative. AlthoughWinnie Mandela had waited 27 years, it was not a passive waiting. Throughout the years, shetirelessly advocated for her husband’s release, created a movement in her husband’s name which inmany ways almost destroyed her given the activist choices that were made in the face of the world’slast and most horrendous system of oppression – apartheid — was not seen still as having givenenough. Recent filmic documentation from agents and operatives for South African governmentintelligence agencies reveal that they wanted her as far from Nelson as possible as he was beinggroomed for the presidency and once he became president. In fact it is even clearer now that theapartheid state launched a campaign to malign her, through creating and placing horrible storiesabout her in the media which were then circulated worldwide and worse still through placing theiragents in her security service who committed criminal acts attributed to her. For her part, Winniefunctioned and aided the military wing of the ANC as one of its soldiers technically providingsupport for those engaged in armed struggle. She became the voice of resistance and consistentlygrew in confidence, in service and in articulation of the goals of South African liberation as outlinedin its Freedom Charter. The attempts to discount or trivialize her contributions, based on sexualityprovides proof that women as leaders are more often evaluated in terms their sexuality than by theirpolitical contributions unless these are recovered and made meaningful by other thinkingindividuals.

Since patriarchy is so entrenched in societal thinking about women’s roles in political leaders’ lives,one of the ways that women have accessed power is through marriage to a “great man.” At times,they are ones who help to cultivate them along the way. Still, these women’s contributions arealways minimized in order to reduce them to the role of appendages. However, in all theprofessional-political marriages I have studied, the wife has a particular skill set that allows the manto take his leadership to the next generation. In the Winnie Mandela case, she reports that Nelsoncalled on her to help fund raise. While this was clearly an ulterior motive to get to meet her, heclearly recognized a certain sophistication and competence in her bearing and in her delivery ofsocial services to her community, which he realized right away would make her the ideal partner forsomeone in his situation.

The Winnie Mandela case reveals the fact that black women have continuously exercised leadershipin many different ways. This leadership has tended to be subject to historical erasure given the waysthat histories have been written to privilege white/male power. So, until her passing, some membersof a new generation in South Africa indicate that they were not taught about her contributions in theending of apartheid.

Men who were leaders of major nationalist movements throughout the 20th century often hadwives/women who were ideologically in tune with their various projects. Winnie was clearly one ofthese women and excelled I believe even beyond Nelson’s expectations. Winnie Mandela says in Partof My Soul Went With Him:

“So there never was any kind of life that I can recall as family life, a young bride’s life, whereyou sit with your husband and dream dreams of what life might have been, even if we knew thatit would never be like that”

“I knew when I married him that I married the struggle, the liberation of my people.” (65).

Thus we see that there has been a consistent pattern of women contesting their exclusions,challenging attempts at dispossession and asserting the parallel right to occupy leadership positions,particularly when they have the credentials, experience and ability to lead. Since women’scontribution in twentieth century activist movements was often taken for granted, it made it easy forthem to be written out of history in relation to the men in their lives. But in the Winnie Mandela’scase, we see a deliberate set of actions to defy being written out of history: an awareness of theplace of black women in society; a conscious assumption of a political role in the liberation of herpeople.

Generic organic leadership of activist women like Winnie Mandela remains still further away fromrecognition. But I think Winnie Mandela created another leadership paradigm. Her trajectorywithout Nelson charts the activism generated by the understanding that the rights of women arefundamental to national rebuilding following the ravages of corrupt and violent male leadership.

This discussion has paid attention to the ways in which women like Winnie Mandela have writtenpolitical leadership into existence and therefore have contributed to an ongoing understanding ofsome of the world’s current social problems as they pursued a range of cultural and intellectualadvances. New and continued questions remain about the nation as a masculine construct, createdfor the benefit of male leadership. We continue to ask: What new institutions and leadershipparadigms, especially in Africa, have really been created to take us into the future?

In her speech titled “Being a Black Woman in the World” delivered in Chicago, Illinois, for theV103’s Expo for Today’s Black Woman, we get a direct sense that her ideological orientation shapedby the black consciousness movement had a women’s rights component, indicated as follows:

“By inducing pride and dignity in Black people, the Black Consciousness Movement demandedof Black people to become their own liberators, thus expediting the subjective prerequisite forliberation. An important aspect of the Black Consciousness Movement was its location of thepossibility of change within the Black community. This lesson applies to Black women whereverthey are.”

Winnie Mandela, while identified as the wife of Nelson Mandela became the primary activist on theoutside from 1962-1990, during the 27 years of his incarceration. So lets us raise in closing ahypothetical question: What would have happened in terms of delivering more progressive gains toblack South Africans if Winnie Mandela had become the president of South Africa instead of Nelson?We will never know now. Perhaps state power corrupts and one is never able to achieve all that isexpected when one takes formal political office. This is one possible reading of what happened toNelson Mandela, when, as an elderly man, he became president after years of incarceration. Sowhile we are happy for his release, still in a final assessment, we can say that in the same way thatNelson was denied this leadership for 27 years, by the white power structure of apartheid and thengroomed for leadership in a way that would create a compliant process of transfer. For those sametwenty-seven years, by contrast, Winnie Mandela a woman, denied the formal recognition that shedeserved as the leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, nonetheless functioned in myview as an alternative, organic president, and as a consistent critic of the failures of leadershipevident in South Africa still.

Recognized as perhaps the most significant woman who exercised leadership at critical junctures inher country’s history, perhaps staying outside of the official political structures, while experiencingthe same pattern of hardship, denials, great pain and a series of trials and tribulations, that blackSouth Africans experienced, gave her a different relationship to the larger community of SouthAfricans and world citizens. One can see a certain poetic justice in her being named “Mother of theNation.”

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WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections of

a Britain’s gulag survivorBy Cucu Wanjiku Mirye

A stuck story is like a baby who does not want to be born; keeping you in a long painful state oflabour. Now I understand what Maya Angelou meant when she said, ‘There is no greater agony thanbearing an untold story inside you.’

This is all I have.

My words, my stories. I sit with them in the mornings; I eat them for dinner. My nightmares areletters falling over me in torrents ready to swallow me. I rock in my chair afraid of them but they areall I have – I love them.

******

I started seeing the letters, ‘circa 1994’, when my Russian mother and Kenyan father had had aferocious argument in our Nairobi home. My mother managed to tramp away.

She was always determined to walk away but she never really left. It was a habit. A couple of weekslater we would do it all over again.

Anyhow, as I cling to her, my father comes to the vehicle, a little yellow Volkswagen, and starts topull me out. My mother wrestles to keep me in. Like a tug of war, I swung back and forth, to and fro;it did not even matter that it hurt me and I was wailing. They each needed to have their way. Whichside I eventually landed on was no longer of essence. My spirit stayed haunted in between.

I clearly remember it was a sunny day and while I swung side to side the memory of the rays shiftingwith my movement as I helplessly gazed to the sky gave me hope. I love sunny days and this is a veryimportant thing to note in this particular story.

Those who fought the fight feel the sting of history and justify why they have to protect a way ofbeing. For me, it all seemed futile, for eventually they both died by 2003, when I thirteen. What wasthe point?

See, a few months after I was in Migori burying my father. They called me the mzungu child ofNyangi, the special one, named after his mother, Boke. I was a sweet girl the colour of honey, theysaid – and that’s what Boke meant – Honey. That was my identity.

But a few months later I was in Krasnodar, South of Russia, a new person in the thick of winter,burying my mother who had finally walked away from my dead father, for it was until death do usapart. Neither died peacefully. By extension neither could I live peacefully.

The only thing worse than regret is an untold story that didn’t die with the dead.

How did they die? The short version is they killed each other. The long version is my father’s kidneysfailed and 5 years down the line he gave in. He was resilient I must say. He kept saying he was dyingwhen struck with pain and nausea every few days. So every morning I would wake up to confirm. Hewas always still there. I called him the dying man who refused to die. It took 5 years! My mother –that is the difference between them – she wanted to live, she thought she would live- a faith born outof desperation. But the cancer ate her until there was barely anything left. Had I not known she wasmy mother all through, I would not have recognized her.

That is how my identity struggled: one side of it was dying but would not die, the other wanted tolive but could not. Duality! Which identity wanted to live? Teenagers have lots of questions too andthat’s what I started asking myself.

But this is what happened. A third dimension came in. My brother and I moved back to Kenya fromthe south of Russia.

Why? Because the stereotypical Russian enjoys his alcohol and my drunken uncle was becoming anuisance (RIP to him too by the way). The fear of forgetting fights the fear of remembering. Iremember the morning we woke up and dressed for school -my brother and I. We sat across eachother on the small kitchen table. We stared at each other and communicated with our silence. Wehad no food. There was one small biscuit and about a third of a cup of milk. Being the elder one, Ibroke the biscuit into two halves and gave him the bigger one. We each took a few sips of theleftover milk and, still silently, went to school.

A missionary Catholic Church in Nairobi took us in by virtue of the long hours my mother ofdesperate faith spent in the chapel those last years. Looking back, I suppose a sense of kinship for awhite woman struggling in an African country played a role. Aha! By then I was 14. I got accustomedto the way of the Catholic Church: balanced meals “Buon Appetitos”, proper use of cutlery, elbowson the table when you eat, modesty, hush hush tones, a short siesta in the weekend afternoon,church bells at vespers …

I joined school. Murmurs started at the Catholic school. Jokes in class about my poor Kiswahiligrammar, “tumsamehe Katya,” the teacher said.

“Her father is a priest but it’s a secret,” went another.

They say that girls often shut out the noise by studying harder and hence do better in school when inadverse situations. That was me. “The Russian girl is not only pretty, she’s smart too,” they said.

I became an observer, watching the world around me disintegrate from my essence then come back

together, like a runaway wounded dog limping back to what it once called home, hoping to beaccepted again, here in Kenya. It hurt to leave. It hurt to come back. It hurt to do it over and overagain, battling my inner demons – they too had questions. Why are you still here? Who are you? Whois your father? Does he art in heaven?

I became a collector of multi identities, a product of othering; Almost Kenyan, Quite Russian,Daughter of a priest, Poor Swahili, Good grades and graces.

But what next? Well, next was Lent, 2004; a time to solemnly confess our sins, practice self-denialand turn the focus on building our spiritual lives. Mass held profound messages during these 40 daysas we prepared for Easter, the resurrection of our good Lord, Jesus, the saviour. I was not diligentabout fasting as a form of self-denial so I instead pledged to always have my homework neatly andpromptly done. It did build my spiritual serenity not to disappoint my teachers.“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thievesbreak in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven …,” read Father [Rafael] thatSunday.

His aging white face had lines of red capillaries showing through his translucent skin and his noseturned pink when he wanted to emphasise the sermon, staring into the congregation but looking atno one in particular. A momentary silence and then he closed by saying that our true riches were inheaven.“The mass has ended, go in peace to serve and love the Lord,” closed padre.

I was bewildered by how humbled and fragile people became during mass. I mused at the experienceof one woman. She was my sermon that day. I watched this woman, as she sat at the back – animpassive dark beauty. She robotically followed each ritual of the mass then left the church at thevery instance of the close, a child tied to her back with a faded kanga and another whose hand shefirmly held. She looked physically strong a hint of muscle in her arms. She also looked emotionallyweary depicted by the ridges on her forehead and a nonchalant expression. Her pleasantly greenapron dress was creased and a red scarf neatly wrapped her hair – she had put effort to make it tochurch and came looking the part. I wondered what more she could deny herself this Lent. Iobserved her as she hurriedly walked to the gate and disappeared round the corner as though shewere an unwanted guest.

I wanted to run after her and ask her, ‘How do you do it? How do you find the strength to come hereevery distraught Sunday? How did you believe? Do you really believe?

I did not have the courage. I remained stiff, watching her fade away like a sunset, but faster.

I thought of how she stoically attended to her life that day. I thought of how her entire life, from ourdistance, was the virtue of self-denial. The church was the one place that ensured her of a waitingreward in heaven. Church was the one place where she could find glory in her poverty, find thesought assurance that the material world was just a passing horror; a test of our faith and thecontent and obedient will find favour.

I wondered: How far is heaven? Where is my faith? Where is my God? Why did I need to eat anddrink the body and blood of Christ? Why did this woman have to give up wanting more for herself?Why did my life turn out this way? Was life just happening to me? Did I have a say in who I am?

And that was how by age 15, I ceased going to confession and the teenager in me overslept themorning mass, promising my caregivers that I would attend the evening one. I had one pendingconfession – I had lost my faith and with it my identity, long before this Lent.

…

As I had priests for fathers, I had access to a small library. I spent long hours in my extra timedissecting the ‘Who am I’ dilemma: Socrates, Aristotle, Epictetus the stoic, The African Bible. I readand I read and I wrote and I wrote – lost poems.

Lost because I feared someone would discover my deepest thoughts. I took my 300-paged notebookand soaked it in water- the one thing in my life that died a peaceful death.

Did I regret it? Yes. But remember what I said,

The only thing worse than regret is an untold story that didn’t die with the dead.

It was worse.

I could not sleep at night. I had dreams of my mother’s head and shoulders peeping through a cloud,wanting to live again. I smelt the varnish of coffins in my sleep and woke up in a cold sweat. Idrenched my pillow with my deluge of tears. I dreamt of my father passing me in the streets ofNairobi as though as I was a stranger, only for us to look back at each other metres ahead. Neverdid I see them in the same dream. My mother’s spirit roamed the Ural Mountains and my father’sstood on the edge of gentle green hills of Isebania looking out to Tanzania, with his back to me.

My spirit lay haunted in between – 13,000 kms apart.

Socrates did not answer who I was. I went about the next decade complacently navigating life by theday, keeping to my few good friends who dared to see the insides of me and doing well in school.Books and words replaced my faith. Reading in the sun reminded me why I may have belonged here.That sun that gave me hope as I swung to and fro. That sun that set – I knew it would not leave me,it would return in the morning. That Kenyan sun.

In 2017, now 29, I sat in an Uber driving along the Southern Bypass as the driver initiated aconversation (probably for the sake of a good rating) on our infrastructure. He said, “Kenya is thebest country if not for elections.” I consented and offered my usual “Indeed”. The amicable driver,perhaps in his early 40s then said, “Maybe a saviour will come, someone new and tribe-less acceptedby everyone.” I never responded. I had long forgotten about religion and that kind of faith. Ipondered on how likely it were. The last person of such vast influence was Jesus; no one wasplanning to replace him just yet.

Was I also waiting to be saved? I considered that perhaps he had a point – a new saviour! Was Jesusa redundant history over 80 percent of Kenya clang on to, the same way we cling onto failedfamilies, failed identities and failed governments for lack of a divine alternative?As he muttered on about our roads, my long-term relationship with his words conjured up a memoryof Mzee Jomo Kenyatta talking about neo-colonialism in the idealistic days of the struggle, “I amamused by those who suggest that we cannot condemn something we have not seen or tasted.”

I reflected.

“Maybe we need to save ourselves,” I said, suddenly conscious, half-smiling, as I flipped through mysocial media feeds, scrutinising messages, careers, make-up and hair. The pressure to be a finishedproduct was high. One had to be savvy, smart, beautiful, busy, in the gym at the some point (workingout or taking selfies) and to claim an identity as a self-actualized individual. This god of image wasbecoming the alternative saviour.

…

When I was done with my errands that morning, my close friends and I headed out of town to escapethe geopathic stress of the god of image who needed WiFi to thrive. We arrived at our destinationwhen the sun was setting and the hills rolled on and on like sleeping giants guarding the tranquilLake Naivasha. The Olerai trees glowed in the sunset light- everything was still and perfect; Kenyawas perfect –the driver was right. The wide undisturbed landscapes still had a sense of longevity inthem, lying in oblivion; tolerable because they were secluded, sans people – everyone was in Nairobisearching for their dream, having left behind the dream-like reality of the serene lake and the giantsthat would not wake any time soon.

How could God be anywhere else but here? How could I be anywhere else but here?

History causes hangovers. I was recovering from an inherited trauma. I remembered that sun as myparents pulled me to and fro. It was my hope. Here it was setting in front of me, and tomorrow Iwould see this sun of God again.

This is who I am.

This is where I rightfully belong.

This is my history.

This is my story.

…

“We are lost in the same song. We’re the same lost song”Dust, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

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WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections ofa Britain’s gulag survivorBy Cucu Wanjiku Mirye

Millennials have been blamed for pretty much everything that is going on wrong in the world today.Marriage is failing, thanks to hook-up culture and Tinder’s “I’ll get with anything I swiped right on.”The real estate market is falling because millennials would rather spend all their money on avocadotoast than take up mortgages and buy homes. The meat industry is failing because millennials caremore about animals’ pain and after all, vegan is the new wave.

Millennials are entitled snowflakes with a fundamentally skewed sense of how the world reallyworks. They complain on the Internet on how the baby boomers and Gen Xers have ruined the worldwith neoliberalism and polluted the planet with carbon emissions – if they are woke enough tosimultaneously share a picture of their decaf soy latte next to a pristine Macbook on Instagram(#Workflow). They eschew responsibility and have a questionable attitude towards stable middle-management corporate jobs. They would rather “find themselves” by Air-B-n-bing and backpackingacross continents, “do work that excites them” by building an app that delivers food via drones and“follow their passion” of selling torn clothes and labelling it avant-garde fashion – after all, if KanyeWest did it, why can’t we?

“Why can’t they just listen? Why do they feel so damn entitled? Didn’t they know how hard we hadit?”

***

The attitude the older generations have towards millennials, specifically, their perceived inability to“listen” to the words of the elder statesmen (and women) and the sheer gumption of making theirfuture without being beholden to the past reminds me of an excerpt I recently read from The SecretFootballer: Access All Areas (Guardian Faber, 2015) on the author’s experiences coming through asa young professional footballer:

“Then a curious thing happened once I was signed by my first professional club: my fellowfootballers, my teammates, laughed at me. I wasn’t a kid…they talked about me as if I was ateacher’s pet who had no idea how to play ‘proper’ football. I wouldn’t last five minutes. Some ofthem tried to bully me, until they realised that I bit back…

“I realised that the ritual was about keeping me in my place, but I wasn’t interested in playingalong. They’d call it ‘paying your dues’, I hadn’t paid my dues in professional football. Fine. I’dcall what went on a short-sighted, half-arsed form of bullying, really.

“Let me tell you the run of the before, the during and the after of that early football education.At first they laughed. The thought of a new nobody coming into their dressing room and intotheir dressing room was so strange to them that their only response could be to laugh. Thenwhen the ‘nobody’ did well on the pitch it wasn’t so funny. They became jealous. This wascounter to everything they had been taught to everything they had been taught when theystarted out in the academy, not long after they were potty-trained. His dues! His dues! Hehasn’t paid his dues!”

It was all too relatable. Not because it was profound, but rather, because it was such an accuratedescription of my experiences in the legal profession for the past year and a half.

***

In the legal profession, “paying your dues” means ticking all the right boxes: an unforgiving fouryear slog in university (preferably a public one like THE University of Nairobi– never mind they havebeen on strike/closed for over a year– and counting); a backbreaking year at the Kenya School ofLaw, pass the bar exams administered by the Council of Legal Education – if you are lucky (an examwith a pass rate of only 10% or less, check the statistics); a six-month pupillage and a coveted spot“holding over” in a law firm. When you are done, Canaan beckons- admission to the Bar as anadvocate of the High Court of Kenya, and all the rewards that follow.

While paying your dues, you should keep your head down. Be like a child in Victorian England – seenand not heard; preferably with a blend of stoicism and blandness of expression – think MarkZuckerburg and his ill-fitting navy-blue suit before Congress. Offer no opinion on the irony as yourboss points out that the Employment Act requires that employment contracts of more than threemonths to be in writing; yet you have never seen such a written contract for the ten months you havebeen employed there for a stipend that is way below the statutory minimum wage. Keep a stiff upperlip as you watch the former Chairman of the Commission on Administrative Justice, in open court,stating that being represented in court by a young lawyer is an act of “great contempt”. Smile andwave like the Penguins in Madagascar as your boss makes remarks, within earshot, that schoolsnowadays “produce nothing but half-baked lawyers.”

***

“Holding over” is a particularly loathed stage in an advocate’s career, falling just between the six-month statutory term of pupillage and admission to the Bar. It is a stage of professional purgatory –you are not a pupil but you are not an advocate either. It gets worse if you are in a firm where thecarrot of being retained as an associate turns pupillage from what is meant to be a learningexperience to a bare-knuckled Hobbesian fight to the death; a nasty, brutish and short period.

Immediately after my six-month pupillage, I was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. Ipolitely declined a very generous offer to stay on at the firm and instead took the time off torecuperate. I lived my best life for the next three months: no more waking up at 5 a.m. to battle with

the insane Nairobi traffic. A normal day would start at 11 a.m. with a healthy brunch and a dose ofNetflix. I was on twitter for most of the day – sharing memes. I experimented with some projects – Istarted a legal blog that crashed and burned, miserably so on account of low readership. To earn afew coins, I took on research projects for law firms, “consulting” – I called it, to give a sheen ofrespectability to the work.

My decision brought immeasurable strain in my relationships. My parents were supportive, ofcourse, they were, but I could always see the shake of the head and the silent sigh over the dinnertable. The person I was “talking to” at the time could not handle my “lack of ambition.” My friendsthought I had genuinely lost it. To them, I had committed the cardinal sin of looking a gift horse inthe mouth and labelling it a sneaky gift from the Greeks “So much potential and you are here,throwing it all away.”

How could I turn down such a marvellous opportunity to make a reputation? How was I to get myname out there? Did I want to make it in this profession without paying my dues?

***

As recently as 2012, it was actually an offence for an advocate to start their own firm straight afterbeing admitted to the Bar. One had to serve for at least two years under someone who had been inpractice for five years, before entertaining the thought of going solo. It was a very invidious piece ofgatekeeping backed by legislation – more specifically section 32 of the Advocates’ Act; naturally intrue Kenyan fashion after the promulgation of the 2010 Constitution, someone went to court tochallenge this.

The petitioners in Okenyo Omwansa George & another v Attorney General & 2 others [2012] eKLRargued that this particular provision of the law was unconstitutional, as it subjected young advocatesto forced labour and servitude. The law compelled a young advocate to work for someone againsttheir will so as to attain an expected level of learning and experience in the legal profession tobranch out on their own.

The respondents had a different view, of course. The rules were there for a reason: for the younglawyers’ own good. Supervised practice enables young advocates to gain experience under thetutelage of senior advocates, which prepares young advocates to discharge their most noble calling.It is a good idea to protect the public from the impetuousness of youth and their propensity to makemistakes.

The Honourable Mr Justice Majanja agreed with the respondent. He reasoned that the pursuit of alegal career is a voluntary act. Nobody forced anyone to become an advocate, the petitioners fullyknew what the statutory requirements were. Furthermore, slaves do not have the luxury of leaving.The best the petitioners could do was to quit whining and suck it up for the two years.

This decision was short-lived. Section 50(2) of the Legal Education Act, 2012 repealed the dreadedsection 32 of the Advocates’ Act. Free at last, free at last, young advocates were free at last, topractise on their own.

***

After my admission to the Bar in December 2016, the charade was up. I was 26, squatting at myparents’ house. The pressure was on to do something more meaningful with my life other than“writing things on the Internet.” I was tired of being broke. My rebellious nature ensured that I hadburnt most of my bridges. This, coupled with the slight taste of freedom I had recently begun toenjoy, meant I was, for all intents and purposes, unemployable in conventional legal practice.

Thankfully, the law allowed me to start practising law in the way I thought fit and in the words of themodern-day philosopher, Russell Westbrook III, I asked myself, “Why not?”

I realised that this was an undertaking I could not possibly accomplish by myself. I partnered with afriend (also 26) from university and law school, who was equally “directionless” according to hisgrandparents. We cobbled together a few resources and started drafting plans. In our youthfulnaiveté, we picked the worst possible time to start a new business. It was July 2017, a month beforethe General Elections. The way this country is set up, any semblance of economic activity isinformally suspended for months before (and especially after) the elections.

“Let us see how this thing will turn out, then we’ll talk,” was the default Kenyan stock answer wegot. In the very rare event we were fortunate to get some work, we did not get paid, because “Let ussee how this thing will turn out, then we’ll talk.”

When the skirmishes broke out after the result of the August 8th election, I was mightily relieved thatI would not have to go to our threadbare office – it was literally four walls and a room. I live nearKawangware and I was marooned in the house, in fear (but relieved) as the police brutally crackeddown on non-existent protests. Even if I ventured out, there was absolutely no work to be done.When the Supreme Court nullified the results of the August 8th election and ordered a fresh election,my partner and I took it on our glass chins, because the cycle of “Let us see how this thing will turnout, then we’ll talk” had just begun. Again.

***

An outcome of the August 8th election was the deluge of election petitions that were filed. My partnerwas politically savvy and had made friends with clients at the firm where he had undertaken hispupillage. One of them was a losing aspirant who wanted us to file his election petition. We couldsmell the big time.

The politician was none too pleased with our quotation. In a heated exchange with my partner, hemade a huge meal of the fact that he did not go with “experience” but rather with young hungryadvocates. “You charge way too much for people just starting out. Give me a rate that reflects your‘experience’. Otherwise, you’re just being too greedy, asking for too much, too soon.”

We refused his offer. He never filed his petition and poof! The big time vanished.

We learnt an important lesson along the way, reinforced by many futile attempts at bidding for work,identifying the dog whistles.

“Experience”. “Solidity.”

“People who have done this for years.”

“People who know what they are doing, not those who will learn on the job.”

Another experience my partner had was with one of his grandfather’s friends from the village.People generally do not take advice, especially legal advice, from people younger than their last-born children.

“Young man, I saw when your mother was changing your diapers. We held a harambee for you tostudy law, and YOU are here telling ME that I have to subdivide my land to MY DAUGHTER! YOUNGPEOPLE OF NOWADAYS, NO RESPECT FOR CULTURE! I WILL TAKE THIS UP WITH YOURGRANDFATHER!”

That is not as funny as clients who openly question your age or your looks.

“I would prefer if you tried to at least grow a beard. It would give the impression that you are not17.”

***

I recently sat down to lunch with a friend making the transition back into legal practice after a stintin academia. I had met her on one of these Law Society of Kenya things where people just lovelistening to the sound of their own voices, struck a good conversation and a respectful professionalfriendship. It is not every day I can call a PhD holder and ask her to have lunch. Over a very mehglass of red wine (her words) that was not a Merlot (I learned what a Merlot was not on that day),we shot the breeze and talked shop, from the Miguna saga to what the Lands Ministry was doingwith e-conveyancing.

“I mean, be honest, you older lawyers, don’t respect young lawyers, and that’s a fact.” I suggested.

She gave me that long withering stare Stringer Bell reserved for his dumb hoodlums in The Wire. Itdid not help that she is bespectacled.

“First of all…”

I knew I was going to get it, and by it, I do not mean a Head of State Commendation.

“I have a legal assistant, who for all intents and purposes, is clueless. Zero initiative. He thinks heknows it all already so he doesn’t listen. You young people are too entitled yet you don’t want to putin the work. I understand you don’t have to go through our experiences, or live a life as hard as wedid. I don’t expect you to read 100 law reports when kenyalaw.org have it for free, but come on.Basic stuff like punctuality, politeness, work ethic. Some of you make it so incredibly hard to takeyou seriously.”

“But…but…the pay,” I countered.

“The pay, we could do better with the pay, but the way this Kenyan economy is set up…we all gotpaid peanuts. Suck it up and get on with it.”

***

On the way back from lunch, I was still frothing indignantly about being owned, so I turned to myInstagram. An acquaintance from law school had posted his first draft of an agreement they wereworking on. On Instagram Stories, with the hashtag #LawyerLife #RespectTheHustle. It is reallyhard to defend millennials when someone pulls this kind of stunt and claims to take their work, theirethical obligations and themselves, seriously.

But the older generation has to understand that this is a new world and the worst thing they canpossibly say to us is, “Well, in my day, we did it like this.” We do not have to walk to school for tenkilometres barefoot just because you did it “back in our day”, and we do not have to use a tin-and-wick lamps to study when there are solar-powered lights. We do not have to suffer the indignitiesyou did on the come up; to insist on such and calling it “toughening up” is nothing more thaninstitutionalised hazing.

As a young professional, I am sick and tired of being patronized by my seniors and made to feel as ifI am not working hard enough, or that I do not belong, despite the Churchillian blood, sweat and

tears I have spent getting here. There is no need for me to work twice as hard to be considered halfas good, in the face of insurmountable obstacles placed by older people who have wreaked havoc onthis economy through decades of mismanagement and poor governance. I will certainly not be called“half-baked” by someone who is in charge of teaching and churning out the “half-baked” student,after ruining the education system through underfunding, poor teaching methods and the rapaciouspursuit of profit. I will not “respect my elders” when they have done very little to show me why theydeserve that respect, other than being old.

And, no, I will not be paying my dues anytime soon, because I am coming out to claim them.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections ofa Britain’s gulag survivorBy Cucu Wanjiku Mirye

Allow me the joy of teaching you a new word today. The word is ‘duru’. Most of my millennial peers,where I come from, have an extensive grasp of what it means. It is simply the art of approaching astranger, after careful analysis, wearing a sunken face then stretching your hand to them the sameway a customer does when asking for their change. I am emphatic about calling it an art, since it is askill that requires a lot of practice and experience. Mothers and aunts are the best teachers for thisskill set. At least that is how it was set up for my family and many other families within mycommunity as I grew up. Every morning, my cousins and I would be woken up very early to go andbeg in the streets of Pangani shopping center and around the Pangani mosque, in the company ofour unemployed aunts. They would carefully discern potential targets from afar then tell us to wear‘the face’ as we made our approach. Stretching of the hands was supposed to be followed closely bythe words:

“Anko saidiaa, saidiaa anko …!”

“Help me uncle, uncle please help …!”

It was the surest way to solicit for a few much-needed coins out of a random stranger’s pocket.

For some reason, these tactics had a fair success rate in that we would go back home with quitesome cash for food and a few other amenities. Even so, the kid who would manage to bring home thebiggest share was rewarded with little favours here and there. Naturally, as naive as we were, wewould get jealous and try ‘working’ to earn the extra perks of our labour. This was way before mostof us even got an opportunity to join school. At the time, I was a mere 3-year-old boy with the wholeworld before me. So yes, I was learning how to be a professional beggar before I studied ABC!

You do not have much of a choice when you are under the care of a young single mother in Mathare,who works as a casual labourer at City Park market in Parklands. What mum and her cronies woulddo was get hired to wash sack after sack of muddy potatoes, upon arrival in lorries from the farm.However, the job was barely assured so she preferred not to put all her eggs in a single basket.Begging was the most plausible alternative then. At the end of the day, all that mattered was somefood on the table.

The bulk of the population consisting my age-mates in Mathare can be distinguished by this common

denominator. A history of begging and absolute dependency. As a matter of fact, thousands of usonly made it to school when Missions Of Hope International (MOHI), a charity NGO, moved in to ourcommunity, offering free education, a feeding program and, get this, spiritual nourishment. Parentscould not afford the thought of missing a spot for their children. That is how most of us were lucky toleave the streets. It became a major relief to our mothers and fathers across the village.

I was four-years-old when I joined nursery school at MOHI. Now more kids were accessing primaryand secondary education with much ease and this brought about a different wave of energy that wasunheard of. Before that, the number of people I knew who had made it beyond primary school wascountable! With time, however, more and more organizations were set up around us, attempting toaddress various issues from HIV/AIDS awareness to women empowerment, to food insecurity and soon, a good number of which were briefcase outfits obviously erected to siphon off grant money or asvehicles to dodge tax. This is the thing about the dark side of charity; It offers as much instantgratification to the giver as it does the receiver, but its implications can be grisly. What thismissionary zeal was doing therefore, was give the impression of filling up the vacuum created by aretreating state. And they were. Clearly, the state had completely abdicated its traditional duty andcontinues to neglect these marginalized urban areas.

Now from the inside looking out, I cannot help but feel like these NGOs have over the years crippledmy generation and community at large in materially consequential ways. Their real contribution hasbeen to defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have byright. In the process, they have cushioned the people’s angst and altered public psyche, blunting theedges of political consciousness and resistance. We have been moulded into a voiceless generationof dependent victims, constantly awaiting outward help to change our circumstances. We haveended up becoming an NGO-ized generation who society prefers to label as lazy and entitled.

In view of the current economic order and political landscape, it has been hypernormalised foryoung people to be educated yet unemployed, violated and silenced. It even gets worse in Matharewhere young people are profiled and victimized every other day without their voices being heard. Itis a war that the state seems hell bent on waging against this generation. The very state that hasneglected us and hushed our attempts at speaking up. In his article, “Extra Judicial Killings inNairobi and Community Based Response”, Brice Jacquemin (a Belgian masters research student Imet in January 2018) argues that the police do not perform police work, rather are a force of socialcontrol. They play out the role of the ‘reasonable’ man in an unfair, unreasonable war. I realize thatit is easy to twist that statement into an indictment of all the police. That would be a falsehood. Inthe murky waters of brutal corrupt urban policing, of course there are a few of those doing somevaluable work. I mean, the police force is also an institution faced with a myriad of issues such asinadequate funding, repression and so forth. But it is necessary to shift our attention slightly furtheraway from positive work done by a few individual policemen, and examine the policing culture froma much broader political context.

Mathare is surrounded and socially controlled by an unmitigated force, the legacy of colonialinstitutional omnipresence – You find police stations at every entrance into Mathare Valley; PanganiPolice Station to the west, Muthaiga Police Station to the north, Huruma Police Station to the eastand the Moi Airbase military barracks to the south. According to a participatory action reportdocumented and launched by the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), between 2013 and 2016,the police killed 800 young people in Mathare.

To survive our existential realities as the youth of Mathare, we have been forced to employ clevertactics on how to avoid any sort of foul encounter with the police. You are supposed to carry yournational ID card every time you leave the house. Failure to provide the document when asked wouldmean sour negotiations that may lead to aimless harassment or even apprehension for

apprehension’s sake! Strangely enough, the most notorious killer cop is largely known here both byface and name yet no one dares say his name out in public without feeling of paranoia coursingthrough their body. It is as though he sees and hears everything. Most people believe he does.Imagine. No one man should have all that power – having an entire community on their knees.

In order to look out for each other therefore, we have had to invent a nickname for him. ‘Mjamaa’.That way, everybody can say the name without raising tension, including women who are generallythe first informers whenever he is around appearing in a nondescript Probox car. Mjamaa isnotorious for causing mayhem in youth bases. One time he aimed his gun and shot at a sound systemthat was playing music during a funeral fundraising ceremony for a young man he had recentlyexecuted, disrupting it immediately and hurling countless insults, saying:

‘thugs’ deserve to die and to bury themselves after!

Movement is also limited in our very own neighbourhood. You cannot walk around freely at night: ifyou go out partying in the wee hours, you can only come back home at your own peril. In fact, for ayoung man in dreadlocks like myself, the risk is enormous! It is one of the main features used toprofile us, among many other codes of dressing. According to the police, dressing a certain way onlyputs you in the guilty-until-proven-innocent category. Like there is a signature look for criminals.This includes wearing of shiny chains, certain shoes and caps. The reasoning behind it is alarminglydisturbing; the police are actually convinced that unemployed youth cannot afford to wear decentchains and shoes without committing some kind of crime. Why a simple hairstyle or stylish dresscode is frequently used to profile ‘suspected thugs’ is way beyond me.

The police are predatory to us over here. All the incidents of abuse and immense brutality are devoidof any no trace of humanity whatsoever. They are the symbol of a society that thrives off victimizingan entire generation. A society that taught us how to beg, handing us scraps with zero opportunities,yet does not condemn injustice and their abject failure at governance.

Someone said to me that these social problems, the unending bureaucratic capitalism, neo-feudalismand imperialism will not be changed by reforms alone. Nor elections. That should social movementslack the dynamic of the youth, they are sure to die. I could not agree more. Part of how Mathare istreated is because of its disheveled environment. Because of this, a team of fellow young people Iwork with in the community came together and coined the term ‘Mathare Futurism’ which isbasically imagining possible realities then ultimately working to design a new future for Mathare.Our approach is planting trees to not only green our environment, but also feed the communitythrough fruit trees, provide natural sources of medicine through medicinal trees, make thecommunity beautiful through ornamental flowers and commemorate the lives of those we have lostto extra judicial executions in Mathare by planting trees in their memory. This offers healing to awounded people, family and friends of the victims.

We are the Mathare Green Movement (MGM) and what we are doing is applying different forms ofadvocacy to build consciousness in society. We use art, music, words and trees as our symbols ofpower. Trees are a symbol of regeneration and we intend to nurture our lives together with thecommunity. A tree is the totem of resilience and its survival amidst forces working against its growthis illustrative of how we shall rise, eventually, and choose to cease being beggars but the masters ofour own fate!

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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WHAT WE NEVER SPEAK OF: Reflections ofa Britain’s gulag survivorBy Cucu Wanjiku Mirye

“We must begin to tell our youngThere’s a world waiting for youThis is a quest that’s just begun”~ Nina Simone, Young, Gifted and Black

By the age of nineteen, I had worked three jobs: the first, as a “fetch boy” in a cramped room atCMC Motors in Kisumu where all I had to do was wait for an order to be processed, and then runaround looking for the spare parts required using the reference number; the second, was as asalesperson for Britannia which involved standing in a supermarket all day and trying to push their

digestive biscuits to unwilling buyers; the third, general trade merchandiser for Unilever Kenyawhere I had to get into people’s shops and put up a display for the Unilever products.

I hated all three.

The first, I hated because I was seventeen and fresh out of school, having only finished my KCSE. Iwanted to do other things that kids my age were doing – having fun, playing defiant and beingreckless – but my strict, authoritarian mother would have none of that. The second, because theynever paid me, not even to date. The third, well, I hated it because the supervisors and themanagement barked down at us and we all ran with our tail between our legs.

Then I joined the University of Nairobi to pursue a degree in law. For a moment, as a fresher tryingto figure out stuff, my parents tried to make me study something else. My mother, who was moreconvinced that either I would make a good doctor or a better nurse than I would a lawyer, tried topersuade me to switch lanes. I was adamant. I wanted to fight for human rights, be the defender ofsocial justice and, well, become rich. And for the next two or three years, I stuck to it and madestrides; I volunteered for legal aid, I tried – albeit briefly – to participate in the moot court, I ran foroffice and won once, lost once.

Then during the end of my third year, I struggled with depression and anxiety. I folded into myselfand became more of a recluse, missing classes and barely talking to anyone outside my small circleof friends. I listened to Suicide Silence, Dimmu Borgir, Cannibal Corpse, Children of Bodom and allthe bands that either told me I deserved to die or I had nothing worth living for. And for a while, Ibelieved them. I hated myself, I hated my family, I hated my friends and I hated, basically,everything.

My existence was characterised by the absence of colour.

I was in an abyss, surrounded by total darkness and there was nothing to hold on to even if I tried.The voices around me mocked me and however much I wanted to shut them out, I could not.

A friend, one of the few who understood what I was going through, told me to see a therapist. Hewould foot the bill and take care of anything else that was required. He had been there before, hetold me. Another, one who I was closer with than the first, told me,

“You are not depressed. You just like whining like the rest of your generation. You are so entitledand when you are not given what you want, you act out.”

Like the rest of your generation.

Those words, I must admit, still ring in my head each time I think about that period. Those words –and the fact that I hated being on Xanax and Prozac – made me doubt if therapy really worked. Iwent in for two sessions and left. I never told anyone about it.

I told myself that I would not be like the rest of my generation. I would not whine, I would not tellanyone my problems, I would not say I needed help. I closed myself off even more, making sure tolock out everyone. I became irrational, erratic, angry and impatient. I fought and argued witheveryone around me. I blocked close friends who tried to reach out. The world had wounded me andI did not want it coming to tell me that it wouldn’t do it again.

No one should live that way. No one should be made to.

Sometimes, the only way to confront pain is by interpreting the world differently. By looking at the

world – people, events, ideas, et al – in a way that only you can comprehend. At that time, I foundother escapes. The only one that makes sense to mention now is reading and writing. I read VirginiaWoolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin. And I wrote letters to the world;ones they would never see. I wrote stories that made no sense to no one else but me. That was myway of interpreting the world. Of taking it all in. Of processing the events around me. Of living.

It was in that period of a low-high when I found my third job. An administrative assistant position inan organisation that dealt with human rights and international humanitarian law. The position, if Iam to say now, required barely nothing from me. I was never assigned anything in the way of workand the stipend I got was actually decent. I moved out of campus and got my own place.

Freedom, one thinks.

Perhaps not.

Loneliness, like the low wind at the foot of the mountains that carries with it cold that finds its wayinto the bones, crept in. Whereas in campus, even if I did not associate with many people towardsthe end of my stay, the mere thought that they were available to observe, kept me afloat. The factthat I could be my weird self and knock on someone’s door and talk to them for a few minutes thengo back to my room, was a reality that no longer existed. That option was gone.

I folded into myself more, barely meeting or talking to people.

Then, slowly, I came out of that slump and started talking to and meeting new people. But almosteveryone I knew was battling some form of depression, some ‘demon’ that they were struggling with,or some stagnation that caused them stress.

Is it just our generation?

I have heard it in person so many times. Seen it on social media. Read it in books. Heard it in music.Watched it on TV. People who occupy certain positions of power or influence saying how thisgeneration – the millennials – are just a bunch of lazy, entitled, whiny, spoilt brats. I have seen themattack us for our political views, for our forms of expression, our existence, our taste and preference,our freedoms.

I am a millennial, I am aware, but I have never thought of myself in the lens described by thesepeople. I would never regard myself as lazy or whiny. Just because I do not believe in the ideologiespropagated by an individual loved and adored by people in my father’s generation, does not mean Iam not appreciative of their contributions to the freedoms I enjoy now. Or, more harshly, knownothing about politics, an assertion that I have heard so many times when I, as a young Luo man,state openly that I do not believe in Raila Odinga’s candidacy in the presidential elections. In suchmoments, I have been accused of ‘selling out’ or being ‘ignorant of what he (Raila) has done for theLuo community.’

I am not.

I simply recognise that despite his contributions and service to the Kenyan society, I do not share inthe belief that he has to occupy the office of the presidency to be the statesman that he already is.Unlike my father who believes that he is entitled to the presidency more than anyone else in thiscountry, I simply think that we exist in a system that blurs the reality and makes us believe thatthose two (the Kenyatta-Odinga dynasties) are our only options. I believe that the options arenumerous and we exist in a flawed society that eliminates anyone who threatens to tinker with thepseudo-balance created by these two, pivoted by the irrational belief in tribe that we have. And who

suffers? US. WE. YOU AND ME.

“You are just a child, you know nothing about politics.” He tells me.

Perhaps.

And, just because I believe that people should be allowed autonomy and free will, does not mean I donot understand how religion and morality work. The fact that I believe people should be allowed toexpress themselves in the way they feel brings out the best in them. I do not believe in theunnecessary sanctioning of forms of expression that people like Ezekiel Mutua are so eager tocommit. People whose deliberate intentions are to deny and erase narratives of minority groups likethe LGBTQ. People who would rather police freedoms than find ways to create a world wherecoexistence is a reality and mutual respect is achieved.

That does not mean I am clueless about the limits to certain forms of expression. Furthermore, if wehad an efficient system of governance, we would be able to discern and distinguish the unruly,uncivilised and ungovernable from people who are genuine in their pursuit for freedom to exist inthe way they truly know best. To people whose expressions do not interfere with other people’sexistence. An unjustified limit to an expression, I believe, alienates and frustrates the members ofsociety for whom that expression is vital.

The conclusion, mostly by members of the Generation X or the Baby Boomers, that millennials arelazy and entitled is an unfair generalisation that seeks to vilify a generation struggles to keep up andstay afloat in a world that moves so fast. There is an information overload from all the technologythat we interact with. And in the age of social media that relies on us keeping up with – sometimes –faux lifestyles of celebrities and friends who, by virtue of their access to certain spaces, make othersfeel as if they are not doing enough. Not living enough. Not good enough.

And yet, and yet.

Amidst all this, there is the pressure from our parents (Gen Xers, Baby Boomers) to achieve, to bebetter than the rest of your generation. To stand out. To compete. The whole idea of being the besteven if nothing else remains afterwards, to fight even when you are left with nothing at the end ofthe fight, is a scourge planted amidst us by the same parents who would rather call our generationlazy, entitled and whiny.

No, we are not any or all of that.

We are the children of the brave new world.

To be a millennial is to believe in freedom. To acknowledge that the ideals that make up the societyshould not erase or ignore certain people whose existence are in/within/revolve around the samesociety. It does not mean I am ignorant of the moral fabric of the society, but it allows me to believein recalibration or readjustments of the society and to re-evaluate what works to include the largestnumber – as many as everyone – into this society. To ignore binaries. To constantly avoid amonochromatic, single-lensed view of life. To me, as a millennial, the hope is to exist in akaleidoscopic society where each and every one of us is represented on the canvas of life. Not to beerased. None of that. Instead, to be acknowledged, to be respected and valued, to be – alive.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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