Collective Amnesia

Chapel is not one of my favourite things here I have to admit. Yesterday's chapel time however rates among the most interesting ones. However, my interest had nothing to do with the biblical content in song or speech. Nope, my mind came to a screeching halt when the speaker mentioned that he grew up in a farm. A white owned farm. Oh, the rest of the very interesting testimony was sadly lost to me.

I guess for someone who loves stories, heard or written, the snippets I heard about his growing up years were enough to whet my appetite. One that will not be satisfied. Not while I am neck deep in linear logic papers my profs so kindly dole out besides about 1000pages to be read per week. Why its a pleasure.

The reference to the brutality of the colonialist on their labour force is consistent with the stories that my father has told me. As far as I can tell, the speaker and my father are either contemporaries or close to it. The incident about a mauling by dogs was in my opinion the tip of the iceberg as far as the stories he has to tell about his experiences are concerned.

Although others like Ngugi wa Thion'go have written about this period, the bitterness of colonial rule that paints all settlers black is evident. That I cannot stand. The political twist in the narratives, though part of the period, do not interest me. I want to hear personal experiences of Africans and the settlers in that period of time, good or bad in relation to each other.

Why the interest? The phenomenon I call collective amnesia. I did history for eight years of my schooling. Some of the deepest treatment of history were in high school and in college. The teaching about the colonial period had to do with two things; politics and religion. I don't care who formed KADU, KANU, or the trade union movement. The only thing I heard about missionaries was how they “told us to bow and pray and when we opened our eyes, our land was gone.” Sorry but, so what?

Apparently, when Kenyatta took power, he said two things. To the settlers; stay and shut up or get out. To the rest of us; let us forget the past and move on together. And forget we did. The history I learnt was stripped of humanity. All we ever learnt about is dry boring political manoeuvring and posturing that is no different from what we read in the papers today

While at the time re-examining the things that had happened may have been painful and even counter productive, it is interesting that we have buried history and are determined to forget it. Instead of historical knowledge on the colonial times, I have been fed caricatures that may hang on some evidence but I have had no freedom to decide what I think. For example, were all settlers bad by virtue of the fact that they were colonizers/missionaries and the black good by virtue of being the oppressed?

Here is the bad news. As hard as we try to bury a sordid colonial past, for whatever reason, it will come back and bite us at various quarters. The post election violence was just a symptom and I fear not the end. I think its time we stopped ignoring the elephant in the room. So what if there are skeletons? And there are. Ignoring them will not make them disappear.

I think its time we talked.

Now if only I had the time to mosey up the stairs and ask the Daktari to talk away...