Many of those born in the 90s miss a chapter of Kenya’s history when Moi was at the height of his dictatorial power. Anger directed at his leadership manifested in street protest In major cities in Kenya and here there was police violence of unparalleled proportions. This is when any sentence with the acronyms GSU would include the word ‘dreaded. The paramilitary GSU was the right hand iron fist of the executive and was often used to crush anti-government street protests. People would flee if it was rumoured that a convoy of lorries laden with maroon berets was sighted headed to a city. But where did Kenyans get the balls to openly confront Moi’s might?
Mid to late 1980s/early 90s was the climax of the freedom struggle in the apartheid South Africa. The black youth were leaderless after top anti-apartheid leaders had either been killed (Biko etc), imprisoned (Mandela etc) or in exile (Tambo etc) and their parents had given up, having seen successive massacres by the police. Seeing no future in oppression, waliamua kama mbaya, mbaya, quit school and vowed to make the country ungovernable till the racist regime falls. There were near-daily demonstrations in African townships to which the police reacted with predictable brutality that usually ended in fatalities. This took place at a time globalization was setting in and such events could be beamed round the world thanks to emergent cable television networks eg CNN. The struggle took centre stage (alongside the fall of USSR) in world news and people in western democracies such as in the US and UK begun to question the support their governments had been giving the racist government in South Africa.
As if taking cue from South Africa, the late 80s in Kenya were a time of intensified political repression under the KANU dictatorship and in the early 90’s their frustration brought in a turmoil last seen in the then young nation’s unpredictable 1960s. Then, a single emotional event could spark massive street protests and brutal backlash from state security apparatus. Examples include the February 1990 death of Robert Ouko, the mid 1990 Muoroto slum eviction, and the July 1990 multiparty push that led to the Saba Saba riots in Nairobi. It seems that the events in South Africa and Kenya were connected by their struggles against political, ethnic/racial and economic oppressions. The usually placid Kenyans could have copied and applied black south Africans’ violent urban protest techniques.
In true black South African culture, anti-apartheid protests were done with song. Quoting the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, the distinct style of the South African protest song is described as:
‘usually sung a cappella in the Christian hymn-style of three or four voices,
the lyrics were often presented in indigenous languages (mainly Zulu and Xhosa)
in a call-and-response manner and frequently with cyclically repeating sections’.
For example, the ANC is credited with the ‘Nkosi Sikelele Africa’ (God Bless Africa) song which is incidentally has gone on to become the national anthem for a handful of southern African countries. There was also the song ‘umchini wam’ translated as ‘give me my machine gun’ which was more militant and used for marching protests usually before a street battle with police ([I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFirCEGpq8g[/I]). Protests also used the traditional warrior march and dance simply known as ‘toyi toyi’ chants that mimicked rifle shotsI when done in unison and in tune with the march can serve to intimidate anti-riot soldiers. A protest is a really scary place to be and these are songs that can put fire into one’s blood and many died singing the same. In Kenya, particularly in Central Kenya there arose an unexpected spike in demand in protest songs in the early 90s. That is how Joseph Kamaru’s ‘mahoya ma mbiruri’ song laden with political symbolism and metaphors became such a hit ([I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVpoqRGfPi8[/I]). Also flying off River Road music shop shelves were cassettes and CDs of Kamaru’s older album ‘Nyimbo cia Mau Mau’. The re-awakening by central musicians could however not compare to that of Luo benga musicians whose community suffering under the kanu hegemony had started much earlier. But with saps now on their side, the anti-KANU musical protest seemed a national affair.
The black township protests always started in a rally where it would be agreed that people march to Pretoria to overthrow the apartheid government. This protest strategy was up fired by the iconic 1956 march by women to the Pretoria Union building which was symbolic of apartheid state power to protest the introduction of pass laws for women. In this march, the women were sang ‘wathinta abafazi wathintha imbokodo’ translated as ‘if you strike a woman you strike a rock’. The song has now become a women empowerment anthem. This is probably how some of Kenya’s opposition politicians with large followings would call protest by asking their people to converge at eg Uhuru park or Kamukunji so that they would march to the house on the hill to forcibly remove its occupants. This kind of protest got the most severe reprisals from the state and has only been tried two or three times in Kenya. However lower level protests eg to remove a chief or Kimunya when he was a cabinet minster have been more numerous and successful, and it is here you hear the chant ‘yote yawezekana bila…’.
Part of the South African black protest included hunting down (within a township or settlement) and lynching fellow blacks who were suspected of being state collaborators. The choice method of killing was the known as the ‘necklace’ which was done by first stoning or beating down a victim after which a tyre would be placed on the neck to appear like an oversize necklace. Everything would then be drenched with petrol and set alight. That’s where Kenya got its ‘weka taya’ lynch technique. This is the fate that Kenyan police would get if they happened to fall in the hands of protestors. To the present, tyres are burnt by protestors as if to display their arsenal and also as a menacing warning to the police.
Therefore as the struggle gathered support internationally, there also arose a demand to hear more of the soulful lyrics and movement. This is what prompted Mbogeni Ngema’s hit play and film Sarafina(!). Though released in the early 90s, the movie’s theme actually centred on the bloody 1976 anti-apartheid uprising by Soweto’s school children. The movie was very popular in Kenya where for example it ran for a record seven weeks, full capacity in one of the Nairobi cinema halls. Apart from nursing a crush on the beautiful photogenic and exuberant lead actress, Kenyan school boys may have picked up from this film the habit of burning school buildings as a form of protest. For many years the school burning culture had cost many lives and disrupted learning till it was crushed by the resourceful strongman matiang’i.
In the next article in the South African series, dorobo will try to argue that the existence of the Zulu tribe and their so-called kingdom is a scam that was used to set up and sustain apartheid, and how this connects to the BBI gamble.