Threads of Time

Kimani Waweru, Mugo Theuri

Description

Mugo Theuri was plucked from his reporting job at the lawcourts in Nakuru after barely three months in post and driven to Nairobi for what would turn out to be 49 days of torture in the infamous Nyayo House. Jailed for four years, he joined the ‘Liberation University’, the study group in prison, and emerged a much more thoughtful and reflective man. He uses personal memoir to thread his personal experiences into the historical events in the country and the world.

His experience with the courts, and his attempt to get justice for his wrongful imprisonment enable him to reflect on the justice system, just as his average scholarship give him clarity of how the country’s systems and policies discriminate against the poor and frustrate the right to justice and education.

The candour with which Threads of Time is rendered allows the reader into the writer’s personal crisis in struggling to reconcile his father’s public role as headman during the Mau Mau war of independence in a context where most of his family were guerrillas in the forest, as well as his relationship with religion.

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Vita Books
• Date de parution: 29 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789914962116
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

THREADS OF TIME TORTURE, IMPRISONMENT AND A QUEST FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE

MUGO THEURI

THREADS OF TIME Torture, Imprisonment and a Quest for Social Justice

By Mugo Theuri

Published in 2023 Vita Books P.O. Box 62501-00200 Nairobi. Kenya http://vitabooks.co.ke [e-mail]

ISBN 978-9914-9621-3-0 (paper) ISBN 978-9966-114-53-2 (eBook)

© Mugo Theuri

Design and layout by Brian Rowa Cell: [phone] [e-mail]

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Validating Bestiality Son of a Headman Forgive but Don’t Forget Dreams from my Father My Uncle Gathogo Doing Good for Its Own Good My Mother Charity The Doctrine of Discovery Building A Church at Kimbo Lost Identities An Academic ‘Failure’ The Beauty of Reading Joining the Labour Force An Anti-government Element Back in Court At the Helm of ‘The People’ Newspaper END NOTES

iv 1 8 21 38 50 58 68 79 93 113 122 144 150 161 180 198 213

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my daughter, the late Wambui Mugo. Having been born when I was in prison, she gave me the strength to triumph through extreme diïculties to be able to enjoy the family love and warmth only she and her mother, Wangui Mugo, could provide. My father, Allan Theuri Wanderi, and my mother, Charity Wambui, gave me life and nurtured me from the delicacy of infancy to who and what I am today. They set the outlines of my moral standing that is reected in this book. My uncle Gathogo Muthura (Gathogo wa Muingi) gave me the strength and desire to serve the people selessly. I am happy that my daughter, Nyambura Mugo, and my grandchildren, Mugo Theuri AJ, Ella Wangui and Tawala Wanja, and all my nephews, nieces and all my other grandchildren and great-grandchildren will not need to hustle around to discover who I am and what I stand for. This is my legacy to them. The book is also dedicated to the thousands of Kenyans who have shed their blood in the struggles to liberate this country and all the oppressed people of the world. It is not within the scope of a book like this one to name all those heroes and sheroes who have lost their lives defending the freedom and dignity of Kenyans.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A lot of input from dierent people has shaped the opinions and propositions that have gone into this book. I may not be able to mention all of them but every single one of them, like strikes of a hammer, have molded my mind into what is reected in this book.

My wife Wangui Mugo has walked with me through the most diïcult periods. Without her support I would no doubt be a dierent person and this book may not have been written. Of course the long journey started with my father, Allan Theuri Wanderi, and my mother Charity Wambui. Although they did not go far in their formal education they made sure that none of my academic and intellectual insuïciencies would ever be blamed on them. They paid my school fees and bought all my school requirements without fail and they made sure I never lacked in food and shelter during my critical formative years. I would like to pay special tribute to my sister Akisa Wangari Mathenge who sat me at the foot of her bed those many years ago and painstakingly taught me how to identify and pronounce the magic words printed on those childhood books. Unfortunately, she passed on recently before I could complete this book which I am sure she would have been proud to hold in her hand. Her late husband, Papias Mathenge Waruta, apart from instilling a sense of honesty, hard work and discipline in me, introduced me to higher levels of learning. He challenged me to îll crossword puzzles published in the newspaper. He also invited me to join him while he played the equally challenging word game called scrabble. Apart from improving my vocabulary, they taught me to think widely and deeply. I would like to thank my very good friend and brother, the late Wahome Mutahi ‘Whispers’, who picked my badly written articles, polished them and by publishing them gave strength to my tentative steps into a new profession. He pointed me to the direction towards being an acceptable newspaper journalist. His brother, the late Njuguna Mutahi, introduced me to networks which, although they led us to prison, changed my perception and allowed me to look at and relate situations in dierent and deeper perspectives. New vocabulary was introduced and new friendships formed whose value I enjoy today and has contributed to the publication of this book. My very good friend, Njuki Githethwa, interrupted his very taxing work

and academic programme to discuss with me various aspects of this book. I would particularly like to thank him for reading the manuscript and making very valuable suggestions. Although I am entirely responsible for the content of the book, my discussions with Njuki went a long way in motivating and pointing out things that might have been ignored.

Within Kenya’s fascist prison system, I was able to join and participate in study groups in which, although we did not have study materials, we used our experiences and memories to harmonize our way of looking at the world on class standpoints. I have listed some of the names of those who participated with me in those study sessions in the pages of this book. However, I would like to make here a special mention of Prof. Maina wa Kinyatti whose dignity in adversity and his passion for the total liberation of Kenya is unmatched.

I must thank my nephew Moses Kimathi Mathenge (DJ Moz of Kubamba TV) who provided me with valuable interventions at critical moments. Tony Kwereba Karanja, another nephew, read the manuscript and made valuable comments. John Gakuo, Boniface Muturi, David Mwaura Gakami and Peter Githinji Njuki helped me to relax when the strain of writing the book almost overwhelmed me.

INTRODUCTION

The title of this book,Threads of Time, as well as the theme are derived from an article I posted on social media on March 8, 2021. The article was based on my reactions as I watched an interview of Prof. Micere Githae Mugo, one of Kenya’s foremost playwrights, novelists and political and gender activists, on television.

“I knew James Baldwin. He was a friend of mine.” The weight Prof Mugo assigned her statement was apparent from the tone of her voice and the look on her face when she spoke. She was not trying to impress Je Koinange in the interview on Citizen Television’s JKLive. It was a statement of fact uttered with the unchallengeable conîdence of an eyewitness.

I immediately recalled a statement I read somewhere, “Oftentimes, I înd myself envying the generation that was served this kind of music. I might be younger than the song but my soul belongs to those days.” I had copied the statement in my notebook because it echoes our satisfaction and appreciation when we can recall or relive impactful events that happened in the past, sometimes even before we were born.

Even if we may not personally make any impact in the times when we live, each one of us feels proud to be associated with the times when a great event happened. I always feel the pride of an eyewitness when telling about the îrst space shuttle even if I only watched the lift o on television, just like a person born many years after the event will be mesmerized watching it on YouTube. The same feeling engulfs me when I know that the îrst landing on the Moon and Mars, the launching of the International Space Centre and the space telescopes, including Keppler and James Webb, have happened in my lifetime.

But Prof Micere’s pride in having known and been friends with Baldwin, being personal and being more an encounter between contemporaries, is more emotional than my watching space scientists blast into space thousands of miles away. Prof Micere, a highly acclaimed literature and theatre scholar, was reminiscing about a person who had left an enviable legacy in her îeld of expertise. Her pride in having personally known Baldwin, a man who had authored 29 books in his lifetime including Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), The Amen Corner (1954), Notes of A Native Son (1955), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Sonny’s Blue (1957), among others, in addition to being a playwright, an actor and a civil rights leader, is understandable.

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It reminded me of what musician Donny Osmond (of The Osmonds) said when eulogizing Michael Jackson, his friend since childhood. “We may have lost a genius, but the legend will never die. He left us his music, he left us his legacy. We should be grateful that we lived in the same time with Michael Jackson because years and years from now people are going to say, ‘I wish I could have been on the planet, I wish I could have been alive’.” That is the way I feel when I read books or listen to music written and composed before I was born. And the same way I feel when I read about places and civilizations from the distant past – Mesopotamia, Egypt, the great ancient civilizations of indigenous Americans, China, India, Greece – and cities that were consumed by the fury of nature such as Pompeii, Santorini, among others. That feeling of not having been there, of not having the authority of the eyewitness, steals through my mind every time I read such narratives. A strong desire to have seen it happen. It is not the frustration and regret that one feels when a close friend or relative dies and one feels there were important things one would have wanted to share with the departed; the way I feel about my father. Certainly not the deep feeling of loss after a divorce or the breakup of a young love aair. But still a feeling of lost opportunities when things that should have been said were not said and a deep but futile desire to recapture those moments. Prof Micere’s statement declared that she was an eyewitness to the great legacy of James Baldwin, which she admired greatly. She was saying that she was happy that although he passed on, he, like Michael Jackson and his music, bequeathed those who would come after him with works of literature and theatre that would make future generations feel as if they lived during his time. The professor was resigned to the thought of not getting another chance to sit and chat with Baldwin and probably ask some questions that have perhaps nagged her. Reading through this book, you will notice the same frustrations about my not having asked my father some very important questions when he was alive. But I don’t dwell on the frustrations because they are overshadowed by other enduring legacies that I inherited from my father, my uncle Gathogo and other older people that I interacted with as I was growing up. Add to this my personal experiences and the sketch of Threads of Time viii

takes shape. It is a record of those legacies and experiences threaded in time to make me who I am. A lot has been written about Kenya’s freedom struggle. However, none of the literature is about the war as seen through the eyes of a child. I was born just a few months after the State of Emergency was declared in 1952 and although I have no eyewitness experience of active combat and was not directly aected by the adversities occasioned by the emergency and its attendant curfew, I have tried to recapture those childhood experiences and emotions, and enriching them with events happening in other parts of the world at dierent times. I hope my account will further enrich the record of the liberation war. I have used my experiences in adult years to highlight injustices that deîne Kenya as a neocolony. These include government’s tactics to avoid providing education to all Kenyans, in most cases deliberately pushing out a large population of young Kenyans out of school. This is done in spite of provision of education being a right enshrined in Kenya’s constitution, and the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations and assented to by the Kenya government. In the same vein, I have pointed out weaknesses in Kenya’s judicial process that deny millions of Kenyans justice and in very many cases lead to thousands being punished through illegal procurement of evidence and confessions. It is a process in which the police, as the investigating agency, uses torture, unlawful pre-trial detention and the accused person’s fear and ignorance while the Directorate of Public Prosecutions and criminal courts turn the other side to pack prisons with innocent Kenyans. I hope you will înd the book useful and entertaining and, even more importantly, I hope it will inspire young Kenyans in years to come as a record of their glorious history. Mugo Theuri Juja, March 3, 2023

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