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In April, Ahmed Aidarus, the founder of Jahazi Press called me to say he was organizing a panel talk centred on Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust as seen through three generations, and would I be interested in taking part? I said yes.
I’d first read the novel with the rushed excitement of a reader enjoying a story, and I’d not imagined that I would ever take part in a conversation that was built around its seminal themes: the persistence of ghosts across time and the Kenyan landscape.
I discovered that a part of me was scared. In any case, I’d seen the very events described in Dust unfold during the 2024 anti-finance bill protests, and it seemed as though I was a witness to a prophecy, someone summoned to confirm that indeed, a nation cannot move on until it acknowledges its ghosts.
And so I began to read again. I sought hidden meaning in the murder of Odidi by the police in Nairobi (the same city where Mboya was shot in 1969, and where fifty-five years later, Kenyan Gen Z would lie dead after being shot at by state operatives).
As I read, though, it occurred to me that time and space had somehow dissolved, and that the ghosts of Pinto, Mboya, Kariuki, Ouko, Masai, Mutisya, Kiratu, Shieni, Chege, Kamau and all those who’d died while speaking out against the government had formed a pantheon of gods to protect Kenya, a communion of spirits aware that death, simply, was not the end of a revolution.
How was it possible that Rex Masai’s mother reminded me, partly, of Akai-ma, the fiery matriarch in Dust? The patriarch Nyipir contends with ghosts that have returned to remind him that his son’s death doesn’t exist in isolation, that everything started with the ghosts of Burma. How many fathers, after June 25, had grieved their dead children in the same manner as Nyipir, and had discovered the great hollow of silence that marked Kenya’s march to the promised future?
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Picture: the murder of Mboya in 1969, and the blanket of suspicion that would define how Kenyans voted in the years that followed, the mistrust of “those people”, and the murder of JM Kariuki years later.
Picture: the banning of Kenya People’s Union (KPU), and the switch to a single-party state. And afterwards, during the ’80s and ’90s, the enforcement of oaths of silence that would trickle from State House all the way down to Kenyans.
Picture: Violent histories – the 1984 Wagalla massacre, the Rift Valley clashes in the ’90s, and further down through the river of time, the 2007 post-election violence.
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As I read Dust, a pattern emerged. The troubles of Kenya were the howl of ghosts (distant and recent), forgotten voices that had coalesced to a thundering. All those who’d died in Kenya’s liberation struggles gathered and asked the living for the truth. After all, those who’d grown up in the years surrounding independence were handed portions of silence, and as time went on, these silences came to claim what was promised: spilled human blood. Each time, commissions of truth sprouted, and yet the truth seemed evasive, reports bleached of honesty and replaced with alternate truths.
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When I was a teenager, I found in my mother’s collection an issue of a magazine whose name I don’t remember. In the magazine a young woman narrates how one Sunday in the ’90s a group of plainclothes policemen picked up her brother Kiragu from church, and disappeared him. I wouldn’t understand the gravity of that account until 2024 when everywhere around me young activists began to be abducted by intelligence operatives in Subarus, and it became as though I was observing events in history unfold in real time. Now, looking back, I wonder how many young men and women went to church or on a date or to work and never returned.
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During the panel talk, I commented on my growing up during the Kibaki-era, how I’d listened to stories about Moi from my friends and family, and how, years later, as I scrolled through Tik Tok, I witnessed and equally recoiled at the sight of choirs singing for the late president while all KANU had done was plunder Kenya’s economy and suppress dissenting voices. In the perfect delivery of those choirs I’d sensed a forced presentation, the desire to show the world that dissident voices were wrong. We were a happy family. We contained our losses, and believed that we’d buried them. Kenya was a paradise.
During the Q/A session, a young man reminded me that the freedom to watch those Tik Toks had been fought for, and now weeks later, it doesn’t escape me that all revolutions are connected. For days, I thought how absurd it had seemed that anyone should compare Moi to a voice of reason, discovered that we choose what to remember, that it takes work to replace the illusion of what could be for what is. Of course, an imagined paradise is important for a revolution. But what happens when we arrive at a moment in the future and that paradise doesn’t exist?
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My father revered the late President Moi, thought him a great patriot, and when the president passed, travelled from Machakos to view his body as he lay in state. Upon his return, my father spoke about that last final rite as though it were a pilgrimage. In April 2020, the subject of Moi’s passing came up during lunch at our home, and my grandmother described the late president as an evil man. I wondered what it had felt like to live in those KANU days.
How was it possible that two members of my own family could experience a regime so differently? Hadn’t they gone through the same food price hikes and suffered through the same stifling years of a single party? Obviously, I imagined, their lives had been touched when the Structural Adjustment Programmes came into play. The answer, I imagine, lies in the fact that parts of the truth had been erased so what they saw were tricks of light. Fascists show you what they want you to see.
The manner in which members of my family perceived, and by extension, received Moi’s government, would translate decades later, when President Ruto, Moi’s protégé, came into power. My grandmother would speak proudly of the protests while my father said the protesters were foolish. Tuesday mornings, my mother sent me SMS messages asking me to stay inside.
On one hand, my parents feared for my life, seeing as I’m an only son, but on the other hand, their reactions to the anti-finance bill demonstrations were shaped by their memories of the ’80s and ’90s when they’d watched their peers disappear and turn up dead. My parents, like all boomers, carry the suffocation, silences, and hauntings of the years that have gone, and unjustly so. They supplant that fear on us, the Gen Z who grew up when Kibaki was in power. We don’t know fear. It strikes us as wrong that we should live as our parents did. We demand things to work.
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On Africa Uncensored, Samira Sawlani writes about Too Early for Birds, the theatre troupe bringing dead Kenyan revolutionaries back to life through acclaimed stage productions. Tom Mboya, one of the troupe’s longest running productions, was written to pay tribute to the pro-independence luminary. Even so, as the anti-finance protests raged and tens of protesters died, it became apparent that the dead youth should appear on stage.
And in August 2024, the dead youth, now ghosts, took form in Tom Mboya. Old and new ghosts met at a point in history.
Kenyan youth know what we need: a robust historical education to combat the loss of our nation’s collective memory. On Tik Tok, creators share their opinions on why we need new systems and laws. Bunge La Mayut, a youth assembly of ideas, flourishes. On X, we repost hashtags, post bail, contribute to those who have fallen, boost posts, and organise marches. Readings across Nairobi are on the rise. Art spaces, too. Volumes of Kenya’s brutal and beautiful history exist outside the normal citizen’s reach and what better way to present them than through stories?
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What endures? Owuor asks in Dust. Kindness, I suppose.
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In her memoir Unbowed, the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai details a three-day siege in which her house in South C was surrounded by police officers who had arrived to arrest her. Maathai had been part of FORD, a pro-democracy movement that threatened President Moi’s KANU. For days, she refused to open her doors to the police, and only talked to those who visited through a window. As the days passed, she served the police officers tea. What had begun as a conflict thinned to a simple act of kindness. Still, they sawed through her window bars and arrested her.
What endures?
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Years pass and we experience history. June 25. Saba Saba. Madaraka Day. Through all resistance movements, the ghosts of those who’ve passed during the struggle reach out through time and space to say, “We’re here. You just can’t see us.” What is that if not a collective permanent hope?
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Somewhere in my childhood, aged five or six, I’m staring at the fountain of the boy holding a fish outside the Supreme Court. Now, after all these years, I’m fascinated by that image: something both mysterious and playful streams from his posture. In this memory, a police officer holding a gun stands next to the fountain with the doleful expression of a man in a portrait. I like to imagine that my idea of Kenya forms from that image. Who is he, what has he done, what will he become?
