Politics
South Sudan: Rebels Seek to Remove President Kiir From Power as Country Marks 10 Years of Self-Rule
17 min read.Even as South Sudan marks 10 years since it attained its independence from Sudan, the fragile peace is at risk of collapsing.

In an interview with this writer in a Nairobi hotel on July 10, former SPLA chief of staff Gen Oyay Deng Ajak declared they are planning to oust President Salva Kiir this year.
Ajak, who is also a former minister of Investment and National Security, accuses President Salva Kiir of tribalism, destroying the ruling party SPLM, the SPLA army, the police and running down the country.
He also says that President Kiir does not want to leave power, and it is not possible for the youngest African country to go to 2023 General Election with him in power. Gen Ajak says he want to die on the seat.
Ajak is among the 11 political detainees accused of plotting a coup in December 2013 against President Kiir. The others were Deng Alor Kuol, Geir Chuang, Cirino Hiten, Kosti Manibe, John Luk, Gen Madut Biar Yel, Chol Tong Mayay. former SPLM secretary general Pagan Amum Ajak, former Defence minister Majak D’Agoot and former Ambassador to the US Ezekiel Lol Gatkouth.
They were released to Kenya in a deal between President Kiir and Uhuru Kenyatta under the auspices of Igad.
Only recently, before this interview, did President Kiir tell Citizen TV that he felt let down by Igad and particularly President Kenyatta.
“You know for Kenya, I am not happy because after the coup of 2013, President Uhuru took the lead that he was coming to take the leaders that I had apprehended during the coup. I told him, my brother, I cannot give you these people because they have to answer the charges on the role they played in the coup.”
“But President Uhuru put himself in front of me that he will not allow them to talk a single political sentence, that he would keep them safe in his house until I am convinced that they did not do anything. And so we released them to you [Kenya],” Kiir told Citizen TV in the interview aired on July 7.
The 11 detainees had become a sticking point at peace talks.
In his speech on the 10th Anniversary, Kiir vowed not to allow South Sudan to slide back to war. But he identified the National Salvation Front led by Gen Thomas Cirilo as a group that has refused to be part of the peace process and still contributes to instability in some parts of South Sudan.
General Ajak speaks about what happened in the 2013 alleged coup and the new plans to remove President Salva Kiir from power this year.
***
Eliud Kibii: What happened on that night before President Salva Kiir accused you of trying to overthrow the government?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: A week earlier, we had a serious discussion with Salva, me, Taban Deng, who is now a vice president, Paul Malong, now a minister and a former minister of Finance at the palace in J1 about the problems we were facing as a movement and party.
We advised that given the situation, it was better to delay the meeting of the National Liberation Council and meet with Riek Machar – First Vice President – and discuss the internal problems because people were talking about the SPLM convention, which was going to take place in May 2014.
We met with him and told him to talk to Riek, meet with Mama Rebecca [Garang], talk to [SPLM secretary general Amum] Pagan, all these people who want to contest the election next year. And these are your friends, your brothers, your comrades, you have been together – here to discuss with them. And after you meet and discuss with them, you call for a meeting of the Political Bureau, which is the most senior, and the Political Bureau will decide what action to take and how people are going to work and move ahead together.
Salva agreed and we had a good evening, had dinner, drunk and had a good time to relax up to very late hours.
At midnight, we went to our houses confident that Salva would agree to the proposal and would not call the meeting. But two days later, he called the meeting, The National Liberation Council is a big body.
Most of them [members] are very young, thus emotional. Salva raised many issues about people who want to challenge his position.
Riek said he would not attend another meeting because he was personally attacked in the way some people made their comments. Mama Rebecca also refused to go for another meeting.
Pagan was told not to attend the meeting and instead to stay in his house. Look, he is the Secretary General of the party. There is no meeting of the party without the Secretary General.
I was not a member of the National Liberation Council. I was a member during the struggle but when the army was separated from the party, I was relieved.
Now on the day the shooting took place. I was doing a distance learning programme and there was no WiFi in my house for one week. So, I went to a hotel near the airport.
Two of my colleagues came to my house on that Sunday at around 10:30am and when they could not get me, they called and I told them I’m in the hotel and I will be coming home.
But instead waiting, they came to the hotel.
The message was that lets go meet Salva Kiir. It is Malong who was talking.
“We want you personally to go and sit and discuss with Salva,” Malong said.
I refused and said if there is a meeting with Salva, it can’t be me alone. It has to be all of us. Malong was very disappointed with me.
We had lunch with them up to 1:32pm and they left.
Then Taban Deng called and asked me where we were having lunch. I told him we had lunch with Cirilo and General Malong, who have since left so let’s go home. General Gier also called and we went to the house.
One of the officers from the barracks called Taban and this officer used a local dialect. The officer and Taban are Nuer. The officer told Taban, “These Dinka boys have come to disarm us”.
This was the beginning of the problem.
Taban put the phone on speaker and I talked to the officer.
I said, “What is the problem?”
He said they there are Dinka boys who have come to disarm us.
And so, I asked him, how many boys have come?
He said a one company. One company is 120 SPLA officers.
But then the Nuer boys who are at the presidential guard unit are more than 1,000. They are 1,500. They cannot be disarmed by one company. Please don’t create problem, I said.
This officer told me big man, the way these people are behaving, we will not accept it. We are going to fight now.
I told them, please don’t. Let me call the SPLA headquarters and this problem will be solved.
I tried to call the Chief of General Staff then, he is a Nuer, but he was in Australia, and he was coming back by that evening.
Taban said the way this thing is, it will not reach evening. There will be a serious fight.
So, he said instead of waiting for lunch, let him go and brief Riek Machar about what was happening.
I was left with Gier.
Pagan’s sister came from church and passed by the house, Majak was coming from Nairobi, he passed by, Thomas Duoth, who was the Director General of External Security Service also came. I told him thank God you are here; you are the right man to take this message now to the President.
I tried to talk to the Acting Chief of Staff, he was not picking up the phone and I called the then Defence Minister Majak, who was also not picking up
I called the director of military intelligence who was in Uganda, the phone was ringing but nobody was picking up.
I told Luoth there is a problem in the barracks and it is you people who can solve this problem.
Unfortunately, he, with the director of internal security, decided to keep quiet. Nobody went to the president who was closing the meeting I talked about of the National Liberation Council.
Since nobody called me, I thought everything was okay and so I went out for the normal logistics.
The shooting took place at 7:30 at the barracks and Taban called me immediately.
If I take you back to the part where I said the Neur said the Dinka boys were disarming them, it was not really a disarmament.
The Nuer boys had put their weapons in an armory and the Dinka boys had surrounded it. Not that they were carrying the arms with them.
Up to now, nobody knows who sent these boys.
So, when Riek boys came under intense pressure, he gave the order that they take their arms and to do that, they had to break in the store and that’s when the shooting happened around 7:30 in the evening.
I was away at the hotel, Lumulul Logistics, and when coming back at around 9pm I passed by Jimmy’s house, the Chief of General Staff and told him there is an ongoing shooting, which is getting very serious. Let’s go to the barracks. He said no, there are officers controlling the situation and they’re not in dire need. These are the presidential guys fighting themselves. So, you go to your house and relax you just rest, he said.
There was a lot of movement of forces on the road and my house is not very far from that of Salva Kiir.
I told Jimmy, as you see I do not have bodyguards, give me some of your bodyguards for escort to my house. He agreed.
Some of Salva’s soldiers asked me why I was still moving at this time when there is a shooting and I am a General. I told them where I was coming from and that I was going to my house.
When I got to the house, I told the kids to sleep down stairs as there was shooting all over Juba.
I stayed in the sitting room until morning.
Salva’s bodyguards were deployed and that’s when they came and put me under arrest with the others in the morning.
We really don’t know, and this is something that has not been investigated, who gave the order for part of the presidential guard unit, mostly Nuer, for their arms to be taken.
Eliud Kibii: Why do you think you were fingered as one of the suspects? Could these meetings have been the reason?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: Possibly. Or maybe Salva did not expect me to be part of this Malong group that came to signal me to meet with Salva. But all of us are friends of Salva. When I was relieved from SPLA, most of these soldiers who are mostly were Nuer from Bentiu they were the bodyguards of the former general Paulino Matip, who was a militia commander working with Bashir and we were fighting them. So even one time these same forces, they tried to attack me in my office when I was Chief of General Staff. And my argument was Salva was over this force that there is no way you can have a unit, which is mostly from one particular tribe and staying in one place.
As the Chief of General Staff, I wanted these forces to be disarmed, sent to the unit, and then mixed with the other forces so that they are part of the rest SPLA. It was Salva himself who refused this.
Salva was then thinking that he would use this force from Nuer to intimidate Riek, who is also Nuer, who was also having problems with Paulino Matip, who was also Nuer.
This force was not trained in SPLA, they were former militia and then the Dinka boys, who were also brought to Juba after I was released, were locally recruited and armed from the Office of the President, not through the Minister of Defense, not even the Chief of General Staff knew anything about them.
So, this special force, which was locally recruited and privately armed were brought to Juba by Salva himself.
When we go back to that day of the shooting, it is not SPLA soldiers and officers who fought in Juba. It is this private militia group. The militia of Omar Bashir, mostly Nuer from Bentiu, and the privately recruited militia from Dinka who fought. And this is the crisis of leadership, which has affected that country up to today. As we talk now, we the SPLA has fought and split up.
Up to today, you do not have a national army in South Sudan. SPLA has been destroyed by Salva Kiir.
Eliud Kibii: So how many of your comrades who were victimized during that alleged coup are outside the country right now?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: Cirilo, myself, Pagan, Kosti, the former Minister of Finance. We are still out up to now. And there are so many others.
Eliud Kibii: Didn’t the last agreement have a provision for your safe return?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: The last one? We call it Khartoum agreement and we don’t see this as an agreement because the deal that we discussed was signed in Addis.
Salva refused to sign in Addis Ababa but due to regional and international pressure, he agreed to sign the agreement in Juba. But he said to everybody in Juba that this agreement is neither the Quran nor the Holy Bible.
Precisely, after few months, he broke the agreement and shooting took place in J1, in Juba because Salva was not convinced of the agreement he signed. The fighting continued until 2018.
In 2018, when these talks took place, we were in Khartoum and recommended that we go back to the previous agreement. But Khartoum, the likes of Bashir, said no and the whole thing ended up being shuttling between Khartoum and Entebbe.
So, we as the South Sudanese did not sit down to discuss and agree on something in Khartoum. It was just Khartoum telling us accept this one, don’t accept this, you have to agree to this and that through a lot of intimidation to Riek Machar.
And of course, we said no, we are not going to sit and agree on something we did not discuss. We left Khartoum some of us came to Nairobi, Kampala others went to Addis.
Those of us in Nairobi went to a meeting at Mama Rebecca’s house after the signing of the Khartoum agreement. We signed a document delinking ourselves from Khartoum peace talks. We said they were not genuine peace and its implementation would be difficult.
We rejected the Khartoum agreement because there was a lot of mess. It was not practical and that’s why we remain outside.
But again, after the signing of that agreement, Salva sent for our colleagues and said he has a special request for us. He wanted us to go to Juba.
I was in Addis and Mama Rebecca called saying we had to send a team to meet Salva. I and Cirilo refused to go.
The team went to Juba and came back but here was practically nothing.
What was the special offer? Some ministerial positions? That’s not enough. There are real problems that need to be solved in that country.
Cirilo, Pagan and myself refused to go and went back to Addis.
We remain outside and believe the Khartoum agreement was not really an agreement. It is like Salva telling us come to Juba and keep quiet.
Eliud Kibii: The Economist says it is Unhappy Birthday to South Sudan. From where you stand, how do you think the problem in South Sudan should be resolved?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: The problem in South Sudan is the problem of leadership. You solve the problem of leadership; you solve all the problems in South Sudan.
But there is every reason for the people of South Sudan to celebrate the 10th year of the Independence Day because our people started fighting the colonial government in 1955.
In Anyanya 1, they didn’t gain much they agreed on regional autonomy. That agreement was not respected and the South Sudanese again started fighting in the 1980s. We achieved the Independence of South Sudan and the people voted on vote given to them after many years of fighting and sacrifice. They voted 97 [er cent for the Independence of South Sudan. We lost so many people and comrades to achieve this independence.
There are some issues we did not solve and which should have been part of the discussion between Juba and Khartoum. The issue if Abyei, Nuba Mountains and the border demarcation between the north and the south are still pending.
The fact that South Sudanese attained their independence is something we continue to celebrate.
One day, were sitting with an old man discussing the problem of South Sudan and he said, “Look, if God wants to punish you, He will give you a bad leader”.
Sometimes I want to believe in what the old man said. But still ask myself, what did we do as the people of South Sudan for God to give us a bad leader?
Because during our struggle, on so many years of this struggle, we had the best leader.
John Garang was an excellent and exceptional leader.
Garang was just a normal South Sudanese, or Sudanese and he did not consider himself as coming from this particular tribe or this particular community. He treated people equally.
So when John Garang died, we found ourselves in a serious problem.
Can we give the leadership to Salva? We knew his weakness!
Or do we say no? And if we say no, Salva would create problems and Khartoum could use those differences amongst ourselves against us.
So, we said okay, knowing the weakness of Salva Kiir, we gave him the open support and unshakeable solidarity given his seniority.
The crisis in South Sudan can be solved in a day, if you have the right and strong leader.
But you cannot solve it with Salva Kiir because he destroyed the SPLM, the party we created in 1983.
And you know what Salva did? He organized tribal leaders called the Dinka Council of Elders, who now the one who are taking over the role of the party, the SPLM. They destroyed it.
You have the Dinka Council of Elders from their own communities, and they came to the capital Juba, and they are sitting in Juba running the party running the SPLM. Where in the world can you get such as thing?
I give an example of myself. I come from the community of the Shilluk, from the Kingdom of the Shilluk. The current king was a banker, university graduate. And when the community called him, he removed his suit and tie and put on the Shilluk traditional dress and went to the Shilluk land where he stays. He does not stay in Juba or Marakal.
If the Dinka want to have a Dinka king, we don’t have a problem with that. Let them go to the Dinka land. But there is no way that they can come take over the party and assume the role of advising Salva.
So Salva destroyed the party, created these tribal differences and now the Dinka are taking land from other communities. So, you are creating problems in the future even for the Dinka themselves.
It’s not a good thing to do. You cannot expect Salva will unite the people of South Sudan and we will not have a country called South Sudan under Salva Kiir. Not until he is gone.
He has destroyed the national army the SPLA, the national security, the national police and the national party, which was the biggest party in South Sudan, the SPLM.
Eliud Kibii: How entrenched is ethnicity in South Sudan?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: Salva Kiir entrenched it. During all these years of the struggle, the people of South Sudan were united.
By then, you could move from the Ethiopian border to the border of Central Africa Republic and every village you go to, the people would serve you.
When Garang was the leader, there were many commanders from various tribes and could go everywhere to fight. There was nothing called tribalism. But now, it is Salve Kiir who created this [tribalism] in a very serious way.
So now, the people of South Sudan are fighting e.g in the greater Upper Nile, tribes are fighting. Every tribe in South Sudan now has its private army and commanders in chief. So in general, it is Salva Kiir who created this.
Eliud Kibii: Do you think Riek Machar is a better leader than President Kiir?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: He has never been a leader and I don’t want to assume he would be better, unless the people of South Sudan elect him. But there are many people in South Sudan who can be leaders.
However, in comparison with Salva, I think Riek would be better but I don’t think he would be better than Garang because he demonstrated his leadership and up to today, people cry, even in the Sudan.
The people will in future decide if they want to work with Riek, but I don’t think anybody will vote for Salva again. But there are many people who can lead that country in a better way.
Eliud Kibii: What do you think about the upcoming election in 2023?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: I don’t think there will be an election under Salva Kiir.
What created this problem in 2013 was because Salva was afraid of going for election. The agreement they signed talks of an election but I don’t think it will happen.
How do you conduct an election when you do not have national security? When you do not have national army?
Look, we are the only country in the world, if we can call ourselves so, where you have, take an example, Uhuru Park in Nairobi where you have Kenyans running away from President Uhuru Kenyatta and they are being protected by Somalis and Rwandese in the park and Uhuru is sitting at State House. Would Kenyans agree to do this?
This is what is happening in South Sudan. In Juba, you have 200,000 South Sudanese who are running away from Salva Kiir and are being protected by Rwandese, Ethiopian and Kenyan armies in Marakal, in Bentiu. These are our citizens being protected by regional troops in the capital city.
You have more than two million refugees in Uganda alone, half a million in Kenya, another half a million in Ethiopia and more than three million in Sudan. So, how can you talk about an election. How are you going to organize it? So, these refugees in Uganda, will they vote there for the President who chased them from Juba? This election talk is at best a joke. Nothing will take place. It will not work.
Eliud Kibii: If there are no foreseeable credible elections and you say there can’t be peace under Salva Kiir, so what is the way out?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: There are two options. The first is concerns the region – and I know they have their own problems. But if South Sudan is a member of Igad, EAC and the African Union, the only solution is for the regional bloc and the international community to pressure Salva Kiir to step down. To resign. And he can stay peacefully anywhere in the region or we in South Sudan can forgive him and let him stay in Juba but let the current regime resign and form the government of technocrats that will restructure and lead the country for three to four years or whatever to a credible election. This cannot happen under Salva Kiir.
If that doesn’t work for Salva, the only other option if for us the South Sudanese to fight and chase him away from that chair. Otherwise, there will be no election and there will be no peace under Salva. And Salva wants to die on that chair.
So, there is always time for everything but time will come very soon for Salva to go. Either he goes by resigning as I said or we are going to fight him.
Eliud Kibii: You speak like there is already a plan?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: Yes, it is there. Look, when we went for these peace talks in Rome I told them that if there are any mistakes that I have done in my life, it is to refuse to take up arms from 2014 when we were released from jail. I could have joined Riek or I could have formed a separate front to fight Salva. And there are so many of my colleagues who are calling. So, it is a mistake which I have done almost eight years now. We have been made refugees from the country we liberated, we have been chased from but we will not continue staying in Kenya, Ethiopia or Uganda. This year, we are going to put on our uniform and go back and fight Salva Kiir. And he must go. That country belongs to all of us not to a particular group or leader to destroy. So definitely, we are going to fight him.
Eliud Kibii: You are confirming there are plans underway?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: Yes, we are working on it and this is what I am saying. We are talking to various SPLA officers from all communities and Salva is going to be shocked very soon. And there are no peace talks that will work with Salva Kiir again and so the only option left to us is to fight him. We are planning, we are organizing and we are ready.
Eliud Kibii: Could President Salva Kiir be reacting to such plans when he says Uhuru betrayed him when he released you, then detainees, to Kenya only for him to issue you with passports?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: He is always blaming other people. If President Kenyatta were to help us, even with weapons, we would have marched to Juba a long time ago. But Kenyatta said he wants peace in South Sudan and wants a peaceful solution. What did Kenyatta do? Nothing.
Salva is unable to unite his own people and now wants to blame leaders in the region. The region has told us they can only help us by facilitating talks. No country has given us weapons to fight him.
So, if he is complaining about a passport, that’s an assistance he can blame the region for it. Of course, I need a Kenyan passport to go for treatment in South Africa. Is it a crime for Kenya to give me this? You don’t go and fight with a passport. So he has failed and just wants to blame other people.
Eliud Kibii: Do you feel there are people in his government who like you feel he needs to go?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: They are many but there are very few in government who are revolutionaries. But the government in Juba has been taken over by former Khartoum people, the National Congress Party. Those we were fighting. They are the ones who have taken over in Juba, traitor who have blood of the South Sudanese in their hands. We will get them soon. This year, the time of Salva is coming. And it has happened all over the world.
Eliud Kibii: What message would want to send to the people of South Sudan?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: They should celebrate this Independence Day. From every family, we have lost a child during the struggle. They must always remember they fought and attained their independence. They should be proud of themselves.
And the tragedy we are going through is man-made and Salva will go. And when he goes this year, we will have a strong government of South Sudan.
My message is those who are being misled by Salva Kiir, don’t join them We are going to look for them. It happened in Rwanda, Liberia, Sudan and it is now going to happen in South Sudan. Those responsible for the atrocities will he held to account, we are going to arrest them, including Salva Kiir. Either he goes to court at The Hague or arrest him as the Sudanese have arrested Bashir and try him. I would not want to kill him, he must be arrested and taken to court. This is what I have to say.
Eliud Kibii: And how are the five vice-presidents working with all the divisions?
Gen Oyay Deng Ajak: There is no government in South Sudan. It is gang of criminals and the five vice presidents, we as the South Sudanese did not discuss and agree on them. Riek was just pushed.
It was Bashir or Museveni who came up with the idea. They are not working; they are not even functioning. One of them asked the President to relive him of his duties. It is only Salva who is running government alone.
For instance, what is the function of Riek in Juba? His army, which he has been commanding for six, seven years is still out there. How can you be proud of yourself and you sit in the chair as vice president when you leave your own people who have been fighting for you all these years outside and you run to Juba to get money or positions. That is rubbish.
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Politics
Pattern of Life and Death: Camp Simba and the US War on Terror
The US has become addicted to private military contractors mainly because they provide “plausible deniability” in the so-called war on terror.

Though it claimed the lives of three Americans, not 2,403, some liken the January 2020 al-Shabaab attack at Manda Bay, Kenya, to Pearl Harbour. The US would go on to unleash massive airstrikes against al-Shabaab in Somalia.
“We Americans hate being caught out,” a spy-plane pilot and contractor recently told me. “We should have killed them before they even planned it.”
Both the Manda Bay and Pearl Harbour attacks revealed the vulnerability of US personnel and forces. One brought the US into the Second World War. The other has brought Kenya into the global–and seemingly endless–War on Terror.
Months before launching the assault, members of the Al Qaeda-linked faction bivouacked in mangrove swamp and scrubland along this stretch of the northeast Kenyan coast. Unseen, they observed the base and Magagoni airfield. The airfield was poorly secured to begin with. They managed not to trip the sensors and made their way past the guard towers and the “kill zone” without being noticed.
At 5.20 a.m. on 5 January, pilots and contractors for L3Harris Technologies, which conducts airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) for the Pentagon, were about to take off from the airfield in a Beechcraft King Air b350. The twin engine plane was laden with sensors, cameras, and other high tech video equipment. Seeing thermal images of what they thought were hyenas scurrying across the runway, the pilots eased back on the engines. By the time they realized that a force of committed, disciplined and well-armed al-Shabaab fighters had breached Magagoni’s perimeter, past the guard towers, it was too late.
Simultaneously, a mile away, other al-Shabaab fighters attacked Camp Simba, an annex to Manda Bay where US forces and contractors are housed. Al-Shabaab fired into the camp to distract personnel and delay the US response to the targeted attack at the airfield.
Back at the Magagoni airfield, al-Shabaab fighters launched a rocket-propelled grenade at the King Air. “They took it right in the schnauzer,” an aircraft mechanic at Camp Simba who survived the attack recently recalled to me. Hit in the nose, the plane burst into flames. Pilots Bruce Triplett, 64, and Dustin Harrison, 47, both contractors employed by L3Harris, died instantly. The L3Harris contractor working the surveillance and reconnaissance equipment aft managed to crawl out, badly burned. US Army Specialist Henry J Mayfield, 23, who was in a truck clearing the tarmac, was also killed.
The attack on Camp Simba was not the first al-Shabaab action carried out in Kenya. But it was the first in the country to target US personnel. And it was wildly successful.
AFRICOM initially reported that six contractor-operated civilian aircraft had been damaged. However, drone footage released by al-Shabaab’s media wing showed that within a few minutes, the fighters had destroyed six surveillance aircraft, medical evacuation helicopters on the ground, several vehicles, and a fuel storage area. US and Kenyan forces engaged al-Shabaab for “several hours”.
Included in the destroyed aircraft was a secretive US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) military de Havilland Dash-8 twin-engine turboprop configured for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. A report released by United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) in March 2022 acknowledges that the attackers “achieved a degree of success in their plan.”
Teams working for another air-surveillance company survived the attack because their aircraft were in the air, preparing to land at Magagoni. Seeing what was happening on the ground, the crew diverted to Mombasa and subsequently to Entebbe, Uganda, where they stayed for months while Manda Bay underwent measures for force protection.
I had the chance to meet some of the contractors from that ISR flight. Occasionally, these guys—some call themselves paramilitary contractors—escape Camp Simba to hang out at various watering holes in and around Lamu, the coastal town where I live. On one recent afternoon, they commandeered a bar’s sound system, replacing Kenyan easy listening with boisterous Southern rock from the States.
Sweet home Alabama!
An ISR operator and I struck up an acquaintance. Black-eyed, thickly built, he’s also a self-confessed borderline sociopath. My own guess would be more an on-the-spectrum disorder. Formerly an operator with Delta Force, he was a “door kicker” and would often—in counter-terror parlance—“fix and finish” terror suspects. Abundant ink on his solid arms immortalizes scenes of battle from Iraq and Afghanistan. In his fifties, with a puffy white beard, he’s now an ISR contractor, an “eye in the sky”. His workday is spent “finding and fixing” targets for the Pentagon.
Occasionally, these guys—some call themselves paramilitary contractors—escape Camp Simba to hang out at various watering holes in and around Lamu.
He tells me about his missions—ten hours in a King Air, most of that time above Somalia, draped over cameras and video equipment. He gathers sensitive data for “pattern of life” analysis. He tells me that on the morning of the attack he was in the King Air about to land at the Magagoni airstrip.
We talked about a lot of things but when I probed him about “pattern of life” intel, the ISR operator told me not a lot except that al-Shabaab had been observing Camp Simba and the airstrip for a pattern of life study.
What I could learn online is that a pattern of life study is the documentation of the habits of an individual subject or of the population of an area. Generally done without the consent of the subject, it is carried out for purposes including security, profit, scientific research, regular censuses, and traffic analysis. So, pattern-of-life analysis is a fancy term for spying on people en masse. Seemingly boring.
Less so as applied to the forever war on terror. The operator pointed out the irony of how the mile or so of scrubland between the base and the Indian Ocean coastline had been crawling with militant spies in the months preceding the attack at Camp Simba. Typically, the ISR specialist says, his job is to find an al-Shabaab suspect and study his daily behaviours—his “pattern of life.”
ISR and Pattern of Life are inextricably linked
King Airs perform specialized missions; the planes are equipped with cameras and communications equipment suitable for military surveillance. Radar systems gaze through foliage, rain, darkness, dust storms or atmospheric haze to provide real time, high quality tactical ground imagery anytime it is needed, day or night. What my operator acquaintance collects goes to the Pentagon where it is analysed to determine whether anything observed is “actionable”. In many instances, action that proceeds includes airstrikes. But as a private military contractor ISR operator cannot “pull the trigger”.
In the six weeks following the attack at Magagoni and Camp Simba, AFRICOM launched 13 airstrikes against al-Shabaab’s network. That was a high share of the total of 42 carried out in 2020.
Airstrikes spiked under the Trump administration, totalling more than 275 reported, compared with 60 over the eight years of the Barack Obama administration. It is no great mystery that the Manda Bay-Magagoni attack occurred during Trump’s time in office.
Typically, the ISR specialist says, his job is to find an al-Shabaab suspect and study his daily behaviours—his “pattern of life.”
Several al-Shabaab leaders behind the attack are believed to have been killed in such airstrikes. The US first launched airstrikes against al-Shabab in Somalia in 2007 and increased them in 2016, according to data collected and analysed by UK-based non-profit Airwars.
Controversy arises from the fact that, as precise as these strikes are thought to be, there are always civilian casualties.
“The US uses pattern of life, in part, to identify ways to reduce the risk of innocent civilian casualties (CIVCAS) (when/where are targets by themselves or with family) whereas obviously Shabaab does not distinguish as such and uses it for different purposes,” a Department of Defense official familiar with the matter of drone operations told me.
The Biden administration resumed airstrikes in Somalia in August 2021. AFRICOM claimed it killed 13 al-Shabaab militants and that no civilians were killed.
According to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Mustaf ‘Ato is a senior Amniyat official responsible for coordinating and conducting al-Shabaab attacks in Somalia and Kenya and has helped plan attacks on Kenyan targets and US military compounds in Kenya. It is not clear, however, if this target has been fixed and killed.
A few days after the second anniversary of the Manda Bay attack, the US offered a US$10 million bounty.
The American public know very little about private military contractors. Yet the US has become addicted to contractors mainly because they provide “plausible deniability”. “Americans don’t care about contractors coming home in body bags,” says Sean McFate, a defense and national security analyst.
These airstrikes, targeted with the help of the operators and pilots in the King Airs flying out of Magagoni, would furnish a strong motive for al-Shabaab’s move on 5 January 2020.
The Pentagon carried out 15 air strikes in 2022 on the al-Qaeda-linked group, according to the Long War Journal tracker. Africom said the strikes killed at least 107 al-Shabaab fighters. There are no armed drones as such based at Camp Simba but armed gray-coloured single-engine Pilatus aircraft called Draco (Latin for “Dragon”) are sometimes used to kill targets in Somalia, a well-placed source told me.
The US has become addicted to contractors mainly because they provide “plausible deniability”.
The contractor I got to know somewhat brushes off the why of the attack. It is all too contextual for public consumption, and probably part of army indoctrination not to encourage meaningful discussion. He had, however, made the dry observation about the al-Shabaab affiliates out in the bush near the airfield, doing “pattern of life” reconnaissance.
The strike on Magagoni was closely timed and fully coordinated. And it appears that the primary aim was to take out ISR planes and their crews. It was private contractors, not US soldiers, in those planes. I pointed out to the operator that those targets would serve al-Shabaab’s aims both of vengeance and deterrence or prevention. His response: “Who cares why they attacked us? Al-Shabaab are booger-eaters.”
With that he cranks up the sound, singing along off-key:
And this bird, you cannot change
Lord help me, I can’t change….
Won’t you fly high, free bird, yeah.
Politics
Breaking the Chains of Indifference
The significance of ending the ongoing war in Sudan cannot be overstated, and represents more than just an end to violence. It provides a critical moment for the international community to follow the lead of the Sudanese people.

They say that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
As someone from the diaspora, every time I visited Sudan, I noticed that many of the houses had small problems like broken door knobs, cracked mirrors or crooked toilet seats that never seemed to get fixed over the years. Around Khartoum, you saw bumps and manholes on sand-covered, uneven roads. You saw buildings standing for years like unfinished skeletons. They had tons of building material in front of them: homeless families asleep in their shade, lying there, motionless, like collateral damage. This has always been the norm. Still, it is a microcosm of a much broader reality. Inadequate healthcare, a crumbling educational system, and a lack of essential services also became the norm for the Sudanese people.
This would be different, of course, if the ruling party owned the facility you were in, with the paved roads leading up to their meticulously maintained mansions. This stark contrast fuelled resentment among the people, leading them to label the government and its associates as “them.” These houses were symbols of the vast divide between the ruling elite and the everyday citizens longing for change. As the stark divide between “them” and “us” deepened, people yearned to change everything at once, to rid themselves of the oppressive grip of “them.”
Over the years, I understood why a pervasive sense of indifference had taken hold. The people of Sudan grew indifferent towards a government that remained unchanged. It showed no willingness to address the needs of its citizens unless it directly benefited those in power. For three decades, drastic change eluded the Sudanese people. They woke up each day to a different price for the dollar and a different cost for survival. The weight of this enduring status quo bore down upon them, rendering them mere spectators of their own lives. However, as it always does, a moment of reckoning finally arrived—the revolution.
Returning home after the 2019 revolution in Sudan, what stood out in contrast to the indifference was the hashtag #hanabnihu, which from Arabic translates to “we will build it.” #Hanabnihu echoed throughout Sudanese conversations taking place on and off the internet, symbolizing our determination to build our nation. To build our nation, we needed to commit to change beyond any single group’s fall, or any particular faction’s victory. Our spirits were high as everyone felt we had enough muscle memory to remember what happened in the region. We remembered how many of “them” came back to power. With the military still in power, the revolution was incomplete. Yet it still served as a rallying cry for the Sudanese people. It was a collective expression of their determination to no longer accept the unfinished state of their nation.
Many Sudanese people from the diaspora returned to Sudan. They helped the people of Suean create spaces of hope and resilience, everyone working tirelessly to build a new Sudan. They initiated remarkable projects and breathed life into the half-built houses they now prioritized to turn into homes. We had yearned for a time when broken door knobs and crooked toilet seats would be fixed, and for a time when the government would smooth out the bumps on the road. For four years following the revolution, people marched, protested, and fought for a Sudan they envisioned. They fought in opposition to the military, whose two factions thought that a massacre or even a coup might bring the people back to the state of indifference that they once lived in.
Remarkably, the protests became ingrained in the weekly schedule of the Sudanese people. It became part of their routine, a testament to their unwavering dedication and the persistence of their aspirations. But soon, the people found themselves normalized to these protests. This was partly due to the fact that it was organized by the only body fighting against the return of this indifference: the neighborhood’s resistance committees. These horizontally structured, self-organized member groups regularly convened to organize everything from planning the weekly protests and discussing economic policy to trash pickup, and the way corruption lowered the quality of the bread from the local bakery.
The international media celebrated the resistance committees for their innovation in resistance and commitment to nonviolence. But as we, the Sudanese, watched the news on our resistance fade, it was clear that the normalization of indifference extended beyond Sudan’s borders. The international community turned a blind eye to justice, equality, and progress in the celebrated principles of the peaceful 2019 revolution. In a desperate attempt to establish fake stability in Sudan, the international community continued their conversations with the military. Their international sponsors mentioned no retribution against the military for their actions.
During my recent visit to Sudan, the sense of anticipation was palpable. It was just two months before the outbreak of war between the army and the paramilitary group. The protests had intensified and the economy was faltering. The nation stood at the precipice as the activism continued and the tensions between “us” and “them” had begun to grow once again.
Now, as war engulfs the nation, many Sudanese find themselves torn. At the same time, they hope for the victory of the Sudanese Army. Despite the army’s flaws, Sudanese people hope the army will win against “them” while recognizing that this war remains primarily between different factions of “them.” We wake up every day with a little less hope. We watch them bomb Khartoum and the little infrastructure that existed turn to dust. We watch as the resistance committees continue to do the army’s job for them. They work fiercely to deliver medicine, evacuate people and collect the nameless bodies on the sides of the streets next to the burnt buildings that were almost starting to be completed.
Another battle takes place online. On Sudanese social media, people challenge the negative mood of the war. Sudanese architects and designers work from their rented flats in Cairo or Addis, posting juxtaposed images that place the grainy, rashly captured photos of the latest burnt-down building in Khartoum next to different rendered perspectives. These perspectives reimagine the same building in a rebuilt Sudan. They thus instantly force a glimpse of hope in what now looks like a far-fetched reality to most people.
Just as these young visionaries attempt to defy the odds, international intervention and support are pivotal to help Sudan escape the clutches of this devastating conflict. Let Sudan serve as a catalyst for the change that was meant to be. Diplomatic engagement, humanitarian aid, and assistance in facilitating peaceful negotiations can all contribute.
The significance of ending the ongoing war in Sudan cannot be overstated. It represents more than just a cessation of violence. It provides a critical moment for the international community to follow the lead of the Sudanese people. The international community should dismantle the prevailing state of indifference worldwide. The fight against indifference extends far beyond the borders of Sudan. It is a fight that demands our attention and commitment on a global scale of solidarity. We must challenge the systems that perpetuate indifference and inequality in our own societies. We must stand up against injustice and apathy wherever we find it.
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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.
Politics
Mukami Kimathi and the Scramble to Own Mau Mau Memory
The struggle for control of Mau Mau memory and memorialisation resurfaces with the burial of Mukami Kimathi.

May the scramble for memorialisation commence. The body of Dedan Kimathi’s widow was barely in the ground before the wannabe Mau Maus began using her to score cheap political points. The line between “rebel” and “loyalist” is blurred once again, as it was during and after the liberation struggle. Just as hotly contested is the struggle for control of Mau Mau memory and memorialisation. Who owns Kimathi? Who owns Mukami? The usual suspects, most of whom had nothing to do with Mau Mau, came running to stake their claim.
Kenyan politicians love a good death—captive audience, media spotlight, the chance to dress up, and a feast to follow. Predictably, they made a meal out of this one.
Attempts to control the narrative kicked off at the burial, and in tributes reported in the media. Raila Odinga and William Ruto went head to head, the president declaring: “Mama Mukami Kimathi courageously withstood the brutality of colonial oppression, proudly wore the scars of battle, and bore the terrible losses of war with admirable fortitude.” Whether she actually took part in physical combat, as this implies, is neither here nor there.
Fans of Raila took to Twitter to claim that he had taken better care of Mukami and her family than his political opponents had. “Baba used to look out for the late Field Marshall Mukami Kimathi. “Hao wengine ambao wanajiita [those others who call themselves] ‘sons of Mau Mau’ never met Mukami until she passed away.” Other tweeps spoke of a “showdown” between former Mungiki leader Maina Njenga and Vice President Rigathi Gachagua at the burial. “Who is the true son of Mau Mau between Maina Njenga and Riggy G?”. One young woman scathingly noted: “There is nothing Mau Mauish about Mukami Kimathi ‘s burial. That MC was the worst very sad. Watoto wa home guards have hijacked the burial.”
This story isn’t really about Mukami as a person or as an activist. It doesn’t need to be. It discusses what has been projected onto her, and will continue to be projected onto her and Kimathi, in the slippery process of memorialising Mau Mau (more properly, the Land and Freedom Army; its members never called it Mau Mau). It also draws some parallels between Mukami and Winnie Mandela.
As Julie MacArthur wrote in the introduction to her edited volume Dedan Kimathi on Trial, “Kimathi’s legacy was never a simple exemplar of patriotic martyrdom, and his place in the postcolonial imagination reflected the complicated legacy of the Mau Mau rebellion: at times suppressed or downplayed, at others lauded and filled with mythic importance, but always contested.” This landmark 2017 book ran five “critical essays” by scholars—alongside a transcript of Kimathi’s trial—from primary documents which MacArthur had discovered. It was an exciting find of archival papers everyone had “long thought lost, hidden or destroyed”. She described how, when Nelson Mandela visited Kenya for the first time, in July 1990, he was surprised to find that Eloise Mukami (as MacArthur calls her) had not been invited to the festivities, and “lamented” her absence. He also queried the absence of a proper grave for Kimathi, and said he would have liked to have paid his respects there, as one freedom fighter to another. The face of then President Moi, as he listened to this homage, was reportedly stony. At that time, Kimathi was not considered the right kind of hero. Mandela had publicly embarrassed him.
Winnie and Mukami
It is fitting that we refer to Mandela here, since there are some interesting parallels to be drawn between Winnie and Mukami. Both were iconic as the wives of famous freedom fighters, though Winnie differed from Mukami in being a huge political figure in her own right. Both led underground networks, of ANC activists in Winnie’s case, and (if reports are correct) of Mau Mau fighters and supporters in Mukami’s case. The two couples both spent more time apart than they did together, exchanging precious letters. “He talked with letters,” Mukami told interviewer Wambui Kamiru; they used a secret code. The Mandelas, too, relied on letters, albeit heavily censored ones. It can also be argued that Winnie suffered more on the outside, during her husband’s 27-year incarceration, than he did on the inside. She was constantly hounded, held under house arrest, vilified and spied upon. In May 1969 she was arrested and jailed for 491 days, 400 of them in solitary confinement. In his new biography Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage Jonny Steinberg writes that by the mid-1960s “the security police expended astonishing energy to render her life unlivable”. This included hounding those close to her; for example, her brother Msuthu was arrested and jailed for vagrancy. Then, when it became known that Winnie had taken other lovers, even before Nelson was imprisoned on Robben Island, she was vilified as a cheating wife. A man in the same circumstances would have escaped blame. If anything, it would have enhanced his reputation. (Kimathi reportedly had many lovers in the forest, while banning his fighters from cohabitation outside marriage.)
Both were iconic as the wives of famous freedom fighters, though Winnie differed from Mukami in being a huge political figure in her own right.
To my knowledge Mukami was never accused of being unfaithful (is that even possible for a widow?) but some of this also applies to her. She suffered for decades after Dedan was executed, living in poverty and struggling to bring up four children alone (some reports say ten). Wambui Kamiru (widow of the late Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore) refers to “the cost she paid for freedom” in her unpublished Master’s thesis “Memorialising the Kimathi Family”, based largely on informal interviews with Mukami at her home in South Kinangop. (My thanks to Wambui for sharing a copy of this long ago.) Mukami’s biographer, Wairimu Nderitu, has also described her struggles and incarceration, ultimately in Kamiti Prison.
However, accounts of Mukami’s time in the forest do not add up. While some writers including Nderitu claim that she spent years in the forest, led a platoon and was quarter-master of a fighters’ camp, other accounts contradict this. Writes Kamiru: “Although Mukami had initially followed Kimathi into the forest in 1952, when their eldest son Waciuri became a toddler, Kimathi asked her to leave the forest so that the child and the family to come would be raised outside of war.” Which is it? In the weeks and months to come, we can expect more “active forest fighter” tributes to Mukami. Her story is already becoming embellished.
Why Mau Mau memorialisation is still contested
It shouldn’t be necessary to repeat this, 60 years after independence. Mau Mau was not a unifying movement. It remains an open wound on Kenya’s body politic. Its sheer ambiguity makes it so, and no single figure was more ambiguous than Kimathi. Kenyan scholar Simon Gikandi, writing in the MacArthur collection of essays cited earlier, calls him “neither the demonic figure of colonial discourse, nor the heroic subject of radical nationalism, but what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously called a ‘floating signifier’, a term intended ‘to represent an undetermined quantity of signification’, but is in ‘itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning’. Kimathi is a signifier with a value, but what this value represents is variable and open to multiple interpretations”. In other words, anyone can project onto him whatever they wish. He represents whatever they want him to. Now people will do the same, to a much lesser extent, with Mukami.
Another problem is this. Millions of Kenyans have forebears who were what I call neither-nors – neither Mau Mau nor so-called loyalists. Many may have moved up and down a spectrum that had Mau Mau and loyalists at each extreme, ducking and diving when necessary. Naturally, many of their descendants don’t want to be reminded of this; it’s all too painful. Historian Daniel Branch has described the complex blurring of allegiances in Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya. He notes, for example: “In late 1952 and through much of 1953, Home Guards repeatedly assisted Mau Mau units”. As in any civil conflict (and yes this became one, despite what the naysayers claim), some people play a double game in order to survive. They may also, as Branch describes, join a particular side not for ideological reasons but in order to settle private scores. As he put it, “The violence of the conflict became privatised as individuals assumed the labels of Mau Mau or loyalist to pursue rivals who had declared for the other group.”
Millions of Kenyans have forebears who were what I call neither-nors – neither Mau Mau nor so-called loyalists.
Why do I refer to naysayers? Because the struggle within a struggle (including that between Kimathi and his own fighters, some of whom turned against him) is dismissed by some as yet another colonial invention. All this messy complexity is now brushed aside, in an effort to present a seamless metanarrative of freedom struggle—not least by the state.
Moreover, the entire population of “peasants” did not rise up and join Mau Mau, despite Ngugi’s best attempts to claim that they did. (Calling them peasants is a tad derogatory, isn’t it? Pastoralists, for one, are not peasants, but they too revolted against the colonial state at various times. And Kimathi had been a teacher, not a peasant.) If some readers are harrumphing as they read this, and want to accuse me of heresy, that proves my point: Mau Mau is still utterly divisive, but critique is healthy and necessary, in this or any other discussion of the past. The critical essays in MacArthur’s volume, written by eminent Kenyan and British scholars with a Foreword by Ngugi and Micere Githae Mugo, attest to that. Many other Kenyan scholars have previously written critically about Mau Mau, notably E.S. Atieno Odhiambo, Bethwell Ogot and others in Mau Mau and Nationhood. Ogot has argued that the narrow focus on Mau Mau as the sole actors in the independence struggle obscures the role that others (such as trade unionists, intellectuals) played in achieving the goal of uhuru. He wrote of how “the heroes and heroines are identified with the forest fighters in the 1950s, and the rest of our freedom fighters are supposed to suffer a second death like Fanon”. The anticolonial movement, he argues, was much larger than that. Most scholars would agree: the uncomfortable fact is that Mau Mau failed militarily, and may even have delayed independence.
Let’s take the contradictions and anomalies that swirl around Jomo Kenyatta. He is hailed as the founding “father of the nation”, while Mau Mau is simultaneously seen as the foundation story. Yet there is no evidence that Jomo was ever in Mau Mau. How can these two opposites be reconciled? Though he swung between denouncing Mau Mau and occasionally embracing it, Jomo declared it to be “a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again” (speech at Githunguri, September 1962, just after he was released from detention). Scholar Marshall Clough has said of this: “Kenyatta’s use of criminal analogies and disease metaphors directly recalled the British discourse on Mau Mau, and suggested not only a political repudiation of the movement but a certain degree of personal distaste.” (I quote from his chapter in Mau Mau and Nationhood.) As I have previously written in the MacArthur volume, “On coming to power, Jomo Kenyatta ushered in a period of orchestrated amnesia about Mau Mau, which served his political purposes.” Those purposes included the urgent need to unify a divided post-conflict nation. They included the need to obscure his own role (or lack of it) in the freedom struggle, at least that part of it involving actual physical combat. He also wanted to fend off what he saw as veterans’ unrealistic demands for compensation, free land and jobs, and possibly to avoid the expense of erecting memorials to liberation heroes. That only started once Mwai Kibaki came to power and embarked on a mausoleum-building spree.
Let me quote from the horse’s mouth. My late informant Paul Thuku Njembui was a war veteran with the best of credentials—he claimed to have sheltered Kimathi in his home for a while. He spent seven years in British detention camps, where he learned some English. In conversation with me (we spent many hours talking at his home in Karima Forest near Nyeri; funnily enough Wambui Kamiru was briefly my research assistant), he was adamant that Jomo was never in Mau Mau. “Kenyatta was not a Mau Mau,” he told me. “Who could have become the first president of Kenya? Is it Kenyatta or Kimathi? Kimathi continued fighting for freedom up to the end of his life, but Kenyatta surrendered, he betrayed his people … Mau Mau fought for land and freedom, but it is the children of the loyalists who got the land. The truth only comes from us [veterans], other sources may not have been accurate.”
“On coming to power, Jomo Kenyatta ushered in a period of orchestrated amnesia about Mau Mau, which served his political purposes.”
It is a refrain often heard from veterans, both living and dead. It belies the Jomo-led official mantra “We all fought for freedom”; that is, all communities, not just Gikuyu and the few members of other ethnic groups who joined Mau Mau. Thuku also believed that Kenyatta told the British to execute Kimathi: “He was there to say [to the British]: ‘Kill Kimathi! Let him die!’ Because he knew that he would [otherwise] have no chance of being president.”
That was obviously a myth, but it served a purpose in Thuku’s mind: it made sense of the past. His past. Myth forms an important part of what scholars call regimes of memory, which simultaneously feature “forgetting”, myth, occlusion, absences, contradictions, and often a surfeit of memory. Memory can be both individual and collective. It is vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, as French historian Pierre Nora famously wrote, particularly where the construction and reconstruction of nationhood and national history are concerned. His description of memory as “susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived” applies to Mau Mau memory, as Clough has previously pointed out. Equally, it also applies to its memorialisation, which has taken on a life of its own.
This is where it gets doubly tricky: when the government of the day uses select narratives to construct the official “story of the nation”. Nowhere is the struggle to produce a coherent story of Kenya, most particularly the story of Mau Mau, more apparent than in the permanent history exhibition at Nairobi National Museum, which opened in 2010. (See my chapter on “The Production and Transmission of National History” in Annie E. Coombes, Lotte Hughes and Karega-Munene, Managing Heritage, Making Peace. History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya.) In the “Armed Struggle” room, Kenyatta’s role in the fight for independence is fudged. When I last visited some years ago, I asked a guide what connection, if any, there was between Kenyatta and Mau Mau, since this was not at all clear from the display. “He led Mau Mau but he pretended that he did not” came the reply. Oddly, his photograph was not included in a display showing three of the Kapenguria Six, who were jailed with Kenyatta. The caption read: “The militant leaders of the Mau Mau movement” rather than members of the militant wing of the Kenya African Union (KAU). Other questionable features of the exhibition included displays presenting “collaborators” and “resisters” as binary opposites, and a video showing interviews with Mau Mau veterans, who all happened to be Gikuyu—thereby contradicting the line that Mau Mau was multi-ethnic. These displays may have changed since I was there.
And so we have returned, with the burial of Mukami, to the idea that “We all fought for freedom”. This is not said in so many words, but it is implied, and is being relayed once again as a unifying message from a new president to a divided nation.
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