KENYATTA DAY: THE KAPENGURIA SIX WERE THIEVES NOT HEROES

For those of us who do not know how it came about may be we need to shed some light on the so called Kenyatta Day.
On 20th October, 1952 a few men who were accused of belonging to Mau Mau were rounded up by the colonial regime and sent to detention at Manyani detention camp. The victims included Jomo Kenyatta, Kung'u Karumba, Paul Ngei, Achieng Oneko, Fred Kubai and Bildad Kagia. They came to be known as the Kapenguria six.
I find this historical events significant not because some men were arrested and detained for engaging in a struggle to liberate our country from the colonial chains but because history gives us a sense of belonging and appreciating the values that hold us together as a people with common history and destiny. This standpoint therefore calls for historical facts to be put across to us so that we may be fair in rewarding and punishing those values that either kept us together then or those that pulled us apart. That is the second reason history exists. To tell us who we are, why we are here and more so who is responsible for why we are what we are. It is then incumbent upon us to decide who we should reward and who we should punish.
The Mau Mau war was fought for two reasons. One to bring back the land that had been alienated from the black man and two to recapture the freedom that had been taken away from the indigenous people. We shall recall that around 1928 the Kikuyu community had sent Johnstone Kamau ( Later Jomo Kenyatta) to London to take complaints to the royal crown on matters of land by the subjects of the Monarch. Kenyatta instead joined the para military training college in London and served as para military officer until 1945 when he heard that Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Moziah Garvey, Julius Nyerere among other luminaries were meeting in Manchester to espouse and propound the concept of Panafricanism. He remembered that that is what he had been sent to do and therefore crossed over and joined the luminaries in their meeting. In 1946 he came back to Thogoto and the rest is history for you.
But one thing I have always admitted is that Kenyatta was a man who was at the place at the right time and something always happened just by his mere presence. For example in 1946 when he came back Kenya African Union(KAU) and the members of the a forty group transformed into the radical Mau Mau triggering an unprecedented political force that grabbed global headlines in the world press. People like Franz Fanon died regretting why he never met Dedan Kimathi and help him fight in the forest. Kenyans must, however, be told the fact that Jomo Kenyatta denounced Mau Mau as a retrogressive group that did not stand for what he believed in. His lawyer, Professor Thurgood, cemented this view in the court abroad and locally. That was partly the reason Kenyatta was so angry with the Mau Mau fighters that even after independence he sought to punish them by denying them the chance to recover their lost land. The debate continues to date.
Now other people like Paul Ngei surely, theirs is even more hilarious. Actually Ngei had no role in Mau Mau nor in the struggle for Kenya's liberation. It is believed he was a pick pocket and so when the swoop was carried out the colonialists thought he could fit in that camp. He became a liberation hero in the process and Kenyatta loved him and rewarded him dearly after independence. For Achieng Oneko, it was a case of a man caught in the wrong/right place at the wrong time. After all it was emergency time, anything at sight was being apprehended. Otherwise Oneko had played no role in the struggle for independence. Not even in his homeland, Kavirondo, where the struggle was hot.
The point I am driving home is that our country has fallen in the habit of rewarding the wrong people and punishing the right ones. Why for example did we have to name 20th October as Kenyatta Day and not Kimathi Day? We all know what Kimathi stood for. It is best captured in the immortal dictum, 'I had better die on my feet standing than live on my knees for fear of colonial rule!' Yet to date as a country we do not know where his remains were buried! The least we could demand from the Britons is not actually compensation for their having destroyed our cultural values but that the remains of our hero-Dedan Wachiuru Kimathi be located and given a decent send off.
And this is my plea to those crafting for us a new constitution. We must now confront these lies we have been told for over decades. We must change the name of the 20th October holiday. We must change the name of that University called Kenyatta or Jomo Kenyatta and Moi or even Lord Egerton. First we must ask ourselves whether it is necessary to name those institutions after people's names then ask ourselves whether those are right people to name. If it a must then Kenyatta University should be named Tom Mboya University. Moi University should named Kimathi University and Egerton University should be named Pio Gama Pinto or even Mekatalili University and Jomo Kenyatta University should be named Koitalel Arap Samoie or Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University.
Coming down to other areas like street naming in the city centre for example, why do we have a street like Mama Ngina when there is no street named after J.M Kariuki?
I submit that this Kenyatta Day should teach us a few lessons and more so serve as a reminder to us that we need to get our history right and interrogate the popular views that we have all along been told. We must reward the correct people and identify our heroes right.
I submit that the people we have rewarded as heroes in the country are the thieves who stole such rights from those who deserved it. It is time we gave back those titles to those who rightfully deserved!

An Evil God?: Introduction

Introduction

“The Bible may be an arresting and poetic work of fiction,” says Richard Dawkins, “but it is not the sort of book you should give your children to form their morals.”

Like most Christians, I once thought that the Bible was the only source of morality for humanity. The thought that it could teach immorality would have been blasphemous. It was the most beautiful book in the world, written by God himself.

In other words, I was delusional. Even though I had read the Bible many times, I could only see it through the lens of faith. If anything was confusing or seemed out of place, it only spoke of my unfaithfulness and ignorance — it couldn’t be anything wrong with the Bible itself.

With that perspective, the Bible cannot be proven wrong. The Bible doesn’t contain contradictions, only paradoxes. God isn’t schizophrenic, he’s mysterious and beyond our understanding. And if your prayers don’t work, well, it’s because you don’t have enough faith.

It’s amazing that anyone can escape the cult of Christianity after using that kind of circular logic for so long.
The Bible Can Support Anything

As history attests, the Bible can be cited to support almost anything. It can inspire both good and evil, for it contains both.

It can be used to support pacifism (Jesus says “do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”) and war and genocide (God commands Saul to “strike Amalek and [destroy] all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant…”).

It can be used to support slavery (Paul says “slaves, obey your masters with fear and trembling … as you would Christ”) and human dignity (Jesus says “love your neighbor as yourself”); misogynism (Paul says “women are not permitted to speak [in church], but should be in submission,”) and equality (Paul says “there is no male or female … you are all one”); in obeying government (Paul says “let every person be subject to the governing authorities”) and disobeying government (The apostles refused to obey the Roman authorities saying they “must obey God rather than man”).

It can support killing those who disagree with you (God said “you shall not permit a sorceress to live”) or to love and pray for them (Jesus said “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”).

It can support intellectualism and reason (God said “come, let us reason together”) and blind faith (Jesus said “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”); family values (Paul says, “if anyone does not provide for his relatives … he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever”) and family hatred (Jesus says, “[whoever] does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters … cannot be my disciple.”); monogamy (Paul said “each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband”) and polygamy (God said “if [a man] takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food or her clothes…”).

It is the same with God. He is a forgiving God who “forgives iniquity, transgression and sin” and an unforgiving God who sends a flood to destroy everyone on earth and banishes anyone who does not believe in Jesus to everlasting torment in hell. He insists he is a just God, yet to prove his justice he cites his unjust practice of “visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.” He is love itself, yet hated Esau from birth. This can go on.

Is it any wonder there are so many sects of Christianity that all disagree?
Because It was Written by Men

The Bible can support all these positions because it was written and changed by men throughout thousands of years. It is not, as Christians often claim, a cohesive, peaceful, loving, perfect, God-written treatise.

I am not denying that the Bible has many inspiring and morally uplifting stories and teachings — it does. But I also think we too often ignore or forget the dark side of the Bible.

I’m going to show you that side by looking at some of the stories from a different perspective. As we will see, Yahweh is not just the God of love and justice, but a God full of wrath and jealousy, who delights in acts that most of us — without the blinders of faith — would consider the height of evil.