Post by Onyango Oloo on Aug 19, 2017 14:50:24 GMT 3
Some reveries from Onyango Oloo
I just turned 57.
Thanks to all those friends around the world who through various social media platforms have conveyed their salutations to me.
As someone who was born around the time many African countries were getting independent, my fifty plus years echoes many of the triumphs and travails of our continent.
Speaking personally, it has been a very mixed blessing.
While I am thankful that I have lived to celebrate my fifty seventh birthday, I still mourn the loss of those who are no longer alive. From my own family, I just buried my second last born sister who died in South Africa at the end of May this year. This is a few months after I lost one of my favourite nieces to leukemia when she was only in her early twenties and in her third year of university-a death compounded by that of her younger sister and her mother a few years before, leaving my brother a frequently grieving sibling. Ten years ago I too, lost my wife a day after my one of my aunties departed from us. It is pointless to go through the litany of siblings and relatives lost for they are among millions who have died over the years.
I am a true child of the sixties which for Africa started with a lot of hope and optimism before degenerating into coups, civil wars, assassinations, strife and turmoil. My age mates in Kenya had names like Lumumba,Obote, Kwame, Odinga and Nyerere-reflecting the pride that our parents had for Pan Africanist ideals.
I remember, when I was a tiny boy of four my father lifting me up on a Nairobi street to see the motorcade of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta drive past. And everybody was waving a Kenyan flag and cheering him on.
But at the age of nine, when I was a Standard Three pupil marching with other members of our primary school, AC Luanda in Gem to Malanga for the burial of Argwings Kodhek, Kenya’s Foreign Minister who died under politically unclear circumstances. The same year, in July 1969 the country was mourning the brutal assassination of Tom Mboya who was gunned down by a government hired killer at a chemist’s shop.
When I was fifteen years old Kenya wailed when a patriot, the popular MP J.M. Kariuki was discovered murdered and thrown in a bush by killers suspected to be emissaries of President Jomo Kenyatta. That tragic event threw the country into turmoil and increased the level of anti-government opposition especially by Kenya’s Left. A few days after my eighteenth birthday Kenya was in confusion when the only head of state they had known-Mzee Jomo Kenyatta died. Many did not know whether to cry or celebrate because he had been a colossal figure who dominated the Voice of Kenya news broadcasts and had photographs on the front pages of the daily newspapers every time school children and traditional dancers entertained him at State House.
By late 1981, I was a university student in Nairobi but a few months later I was to spend my twenty second birthday in remand prison accused by the state of the crime of sedition for having the audacity to write in biro on foolscap paper a draft of an undistributed student essay calling on Kenyan youth to stand up to power and protest when our lecturers and popular leaders were abducted from the lecture theatres and homes to detention without trial and kangaroo courts. Within a couple of months, I had been sentenced to serve five long years behind bars at the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison where I served a big chunk of my twenties.
Just before my twenty-seventh birthday, I was a newcomer to Dar es Salaam, not as a tourist but as a UNHCR refugee from Kenya escaping state authorities of Moi-KANU dictatorship who were clamping down on dissent. Our stay in Tanzania was barely a year before I and other Kenyans were flown to Canada to shield us from secret police of the Kenyan state who were planning to do what they had done to Ochuka and his Air Force comrades-abduct us and return us back to Kenya.
A few months after my birthday in 1988, I was on my way to Lester Pearson Airport via Schiipol in Amsterdam to begin life as a “new worker” and landed immigrant in Toronto, Canada.
I was to spend the rest of the eighties, all of the nineties and part of the early years of the twenty first century as a political exile living in Toronto, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec where I learnt a lot from the movements of women, Caribbean and African Canadians, Native and Indigenous People, Irish, El Salvadoran, Latin American, Middle Eastern and Asian movements as well as from affected GLBTI, student, environmental and workers’ struggles.
I did come back to Kenya in 1994 for the first time since I fled to Tanzania. A day before my thirty fourth birthday I got an unexpected gift when none other than the late Francis Kwinga, the Principal Immigration Officer at his Nyayo House office reached into one of his drawers and handed me a brand new passport-thanks to the efforts of Dr. Willy Mutunga, the late George Anyona and the late George Kapten’s interventions on my behalf.
But on my flight back to Canada on an Air India flight, I was detained by the immigration authorities of that huge sub-continental’s country who accused me of being a Nigerian (as if that was in itself a crime) on account of the fact that I produced my brand new Kenyan passport and my battered Canadian permanent residence when asked to identify myself. It took the speedy intervention of Mumbai based Canadian consular authorities to verify that I was in fact, a bona fide Canadian tax payer who lived and worked in Ontario.
In October 2005, I was head hunted while in Montreal by the organizers of the Kenya Social Forum to come back to Nairobi and head the East African Secretariat planning the 2007 edition of the World Social Forum being held in Africa for the very first time.
I was hardly back home for a month when I was thrust into the Kenyan civil society’s involvement on the November 2005 Referendum against the infamous Wako Draft of the proposed constitution.
Over the next ten years I witnessed, first Mwai Kibaki and PNU and next, Uhuru Kenyatta and Jubilee and install themselves in power through dubious means leaving thousands of deaths in their wake.
On the eve of my fifty seventh birthday yesterday, I saw NASA present twenty five thousand pages and parade over twenty lawyers who will represent the opposition at the Supreme Court to hear the petition which those of us who have become cynical are firmly convinced, will be rejected by that court but will still play a vital role in testifying to the world how Uhuru, Ruto and Jubilee stole the elections for the second consecutive time.
I just turned 57.
Thanks to all those friends around the world who through various social media platforms have conveyed their salutations to me.
As someone who was born around the time many African countries were getting independent, my fifty plus years echoes many of the triumphs and travails of our continent.
Speaking personally, it has been a very mixed blessing.
While I am thankful that I have lived to celebrate my fifty seventh birthday, I still mourn the loss of those who are no longer alive. From my own family, I just buried my second last born sister who died in South Africa at the end of May this year. This is a few months after I lost one of my favourite nieces to leukemia when she was only in her early twenties and in her third year of university-a death compounded by that of her younger sister and her mother a few years before, leaving my brother a frequently grieving sibling. Ten years ago I too, lost my wife a day after my one of my aunties departed from us. It is pointless to go through the litany of siblings and relatives lost for they are among millions who have died over the years.
I am a true child of the sixties which for Africa started with a lot of hope and optimism before degenerating into coups, civil wars, assassinations, strife and turmoil. My age mates in Kenya had names like Lumumba,Obote, Kwame, Odinga and Nyerere-reflecting the pride that our parents had for Pan Africanist ideals.
I remember, when I was a tiny boy of four my father lifting me up on a Nairobi street to see the motorcade of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta drive past. And everybody was waving a Kenyan flag and cheering him on.
But at the age of nine, when I was a Standard Three pupil marching with other members of our primary school, AC Luanda in Gem to Malanga for the burial of Argwings Kodhek, Kenya’s Foreign Minister who died under politically unclear circumstances. The same year, in July 1969 the country was mourning the brutal assassination of Tom Mboya who was gunned down by a government hired killer at a chemist’s shop.
When I was fifteen years old Kenya wailed when a patriot, the popular MP J.M. Kariuki was discovered murdered and thrown in a bush by killers suspected to be emissaries of President Jomo Kenyatta. That tragic event threw the country into turmoil and increased the level of anti-government opposition especially by Kenya’s Left. A few days after my eighteenth birthday Kenya was in confusion when the only head of state they had known-Mzee Jomo Kenyatta died. Many did not know whether to cry or celebrate because he had been a colossal figure who dominated the Voice of Kenya news broadcasts and had photographs on the front pages of the daily newspapers every time school children and traditional dancers entertained him at State House.
By late 1981, I was a university student in Nairobi but a few months later I was to spend my twenty second birthday in remand prison accused by the state of the crime of sedition for having the audacity to write in biro on foolscap paper a draft of an undistributed student essay calling on Kenyan youth to stand up to power and protest when our lecturers and popular leaders were abducted from the lecture theatres and homes to detention without trial and kangaroo courts. Within a couple of months, I had been sentenced to serve five long years behind bars at the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison where I served a big chunk of my twenties.
Just before my twenty-seventh birthday, I was a newcomer to Dar es Salaam, not as a tourist but as a UNHCR refugee from Kenya escaping state authorities of Moi-KANU dictatorship who were clamping down on dissent. Our stay in Tanzania was barely a year before I and other Kenyans were flown to Canada to shield us from secret police of the Kenyan state who were planning to do what they had done to Ochuka and his Air Force comrades-abduct us and return us back to Kenya.
A few months after my birthday in 1988, I was on my way to Lester Pearson Airport via Schiipol in Amsterdam to begin life as a “new worker” and landed immigrant in Toronto, Canada.
I was to spend the rest of the eighties, all of the nineties and part of the early years of the twenty first century as a political exile living in Toronto, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec where I learnt a lot from the movements of women, Caribbean and African Canadians, Native and Indigenous People, Irish, El Salvadoran, Latin American, Middle Eastern and Asian movements as well as from affected GLBTI, student, environmental and workers’ struggles.
I did come back to Kenya in 1994 for the first time since I fled to Tanzania. A day before my thirty fourth birthday I got an unexpected gift when none other than the late Francis Kwinga, the Principal Immigration Officer at his Nyayo House office reached into one of his drawers and handed me a brand new passport-thanks to the efforts of Dr. Willy Mutunga, the late George Anyona and the late George Kapten’s interventions on my behalf.
But on my flight back to Canada on an Air India flight, I was detained by the immigration authorities of that huge sub-continental’s country who accused me of being a Nigerian (as if that was in itself a crime) on account of the fact that I produced my brand new Kenyan passport and my battered Canadian permanent residence when asked to identify myself. It took the speedy intervention of Mumbai based Canadian consular authorities to verify that I was in fact, a bona fide Canadian tax payer who lived and worked in Ontario.
In October 2005, I was head hunted while in Montreal by the organizers of the Kenya Social Forum to come back to Nairobi and head the East African Secretariat planning the 2007 edition of the World Social Forum being held in Africa for the very first time.
I was hardly back home for a month when I was thrust into the Kenyan civil society’s involvement on the November 2005 Referendum against the infamous Wako Draft of the proposed constitution.
Over the next ten years I witnessed, first Mwai Kibaki and PNU and next, Uhuru Kenyatta and Jubilee and install themselves in power through dubious means leaving thousands of deaths in their wake.
On the eve of my fifty seventh birthday yesterday, I saw NASA present twenty five thousand pages and parade over twenty lawyers who will represent the opposition at the Supreme Court to hear the petition which those of us who have become cynical are firmly convinced, will be rejected by that court but will still play a vital role in testifying to the world how Uhuru, Ruto and Jubilee stole the elections for the second consecutive time.
