A Painting's Absence

Every morning on the way to work, I jump out of a crowded matatu, sling my black bag over my shoulder and walk along a dirt path that leads to our office.

This is an uneventful walk. Trees, grass, mud, litter, a women selling bananas and peanuts out of a small green basin, and the guys painting the large clay pots that are sold alongside the road. Along the dirt road in front of our office, is something of a nursery with a couple dozen people watering plants, or haggling with prospective buyers.

Last week Monday, I had something of a surprise, when I walked by the Paresian Center—home to a dentist firm, a World Vision office, and a couple other organizations/businesses—and found a large white rectangle of paint on the surrounding wall.

I looked at it for a second, trying to understand what happened. There used to be a nice large painting there of a man in a hospital bed with a quote next to it. It was one of the best public paintings I'd seen in Nairobi—in Kenya.

When I first looked at the painting, back in August, I was ignorant. The painting seemed loud, like it was making a statement, and struck me as too specific in its detail to be just another sick person in a hospital bed. But I couldn't make the connection. Could it really be just another painting about HIV/AIDs?

On October 20th, I discovered who it was. The 20th is a national holiday in Kenya, called Kenyatta Day, after Kenya's first President Jomo Kenyatta. The holiday was originally meant to invoke the (intellectual) heroes of Kenya's liberation from British colonialism: a group that included Kenyatta and his eventual successor Daniel arap Moi.

What the holiday (under Moi and Kenyatta) did not emphasize were the people who violently fought the British during the Mau-Mau rebellion. These people, generally from an “ethnic group” called the Gikuyu, hid in the forests, swore secret oaths, launched attacks on white settlers, and created enormous panic for the colonial rulers. Among their numerous frustrations, perhaps the chief one was that the colonial settlers stole their land.

The rebellion led to the declaration of an eight-year state of emergency, imprisonments of hundreds of thousands Gikuyu, and tens of thousands of deaths. Locally, it's seen as what triggered the British to give up its colonial rule of Kenya. (Though, since this was replicated all across Africa with all of the colonial powers suddenly granting independence roughly around the same time, it's unclear that the Mau-Mau rebellion caused or even speeded up Kenya's independence.)

When Kenyatta came to power, he was quick to distance himself from the Mau-Mau fighters, calling them a bunch of thugs and criminals. This might seem ironic since the British imprisoned Kenyatta as one of the leaders of the rebellion. In fact, it was strategic: he wanted to portray himself as a national leader, a national hero; not someone who would be held ransom to the demands of Mau-Mau fighters, or even one ethnic group. (Kenya says it has 42.)

As Kenyatta's increasingly dictatorial regime gave way to Moi's overwhelmingly corrupt one, Kenyans, especially Gikuyu decendents, began to mythologize Mau-Mau fighters as brave and creative warriors who fought for Kenya's independence—a struggle that was now continuing against their own rulers to bring democracy and justice to a country that failed to live up to pre-colonial rhetoric.

No fighter is more remembered or more mythologized than Dedan Kimathi. Once captured in 1952, he escaped with the help of local police. A year later he became a field commander, coordinating the Mau-Mau forest fighters for three years. The British labeled him a terrorist and finally shot and captured him. An ailing Kimathi lay in a hospital bed, awaiting his death sentence.

That, of course, was the painted-over image on the wall that I saw. That painting may be lost, but Kimathi's legacy lives on. The Kenyan government has now commissioned for a statue of him to be built; he's already the central character in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 's play “The Trial of Dedan Kimathi”; and he has a street named after him in Nairobi. Since Kenyatta Day is meant to remember national heroes, the media includes Kimathi among the ranks, showing this famous image.

I don't know if Kimathi is actually the national hero that he's now portrayed to be. His added prestige these days may involve more than a little white-washing: click here for a colonial police officer's less favorable remembrance of Mau-Mau, with its own share of vicious, brutal internecine warfare.

I'll miss Kimathi on that wall, not because I think he ought to be praised, as I'm sure the artist intended, but because that image reminded me of something else. The British labeled him a terrorist, Mau-Mau fighters called him their martyr, and the Kenyan elites dismissed him as a leader of criminals. In death, Kimathi is all of these things and none of them. That's the Kimathi I saw looking out at me, someone who lost control of his own destiny.