https://untileverypod.com Until Everyone Is Free Thu, 07 Jul 2022 14:01:47 +0000 https://untileverypod.com en https://untileverypod.com/About Wed, 11 Nov 2020 07:32:35 +0000 Until Everyone Is Free https://untileverypod.com/About About This Project Stoneface Bombaa (Huduma Namba names Brian Otieno) is a community organizer at the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), where he runs the MSJC Kids Club and Art for Social Change. He is also a member of the Mathare Green Movement (MGM), a group of volunteers who, through planting trees throughout the informal settlement, practice collective imagination and action. His work at MSJC and MGM have given him a clear view of the “ecological injustice” that permeates life in Nairobi’s ghettos: exclusion from basic infrastructure like water, roads, electricity, exclusion from healthcare, exclusion from education, and so on. Stoneface has spent time helping young people in Mathare understand the systemic nature of the everyday violence that shapes their lives. Until Everyone Is Free is an extension of that work. April Zhu is a freelance journalist based in Nairobi, where she has written on gender, urban inequality, and China-Kenya as seen from the margin. While interviewing Stoneface for pieces on police brutality in Nairobi’s ghettos for The New York Review of Books Daily and The Baffler Magazine, a theme kept emerging in their conversations: archiving forgotten histories of resistance in Kenya.One day, after meeting at the PALIAct Ukombozi Library in town, the two walked down Murang’a Road to City Park Cemetery, where Pio Gama Pinto is buried. They read his headstone: Pio Gama Pinto. Born 31 March 1927. Assassinated 24 February 1965. Socialist and freedom fighter. If he has been extinguished, yet there arise a thousand beacons from the spark he bore.In the spirit of archiving forgotten histories, Stoneface and April decided to create a radio story about Pinto: to raise more beacons from the spark he bore. But, with the support of many well-wishers who contributed their skills and time, what began as a small proof of concept grew into a full-length series. This project was a labor of love, made by volunteers, independent of any organization and without any sponsorship. So we must take the time to thank the village that raised it. Stoneface brought on Felix Omondi—a Sheng translator, filmmaker, poet, and “hood communist” from Mathare—to report sections on modern-day wage exploitation. Felix translated significant portions of the script in Season 1, as well as parts of Season 2, and all of our special episodes.&nbsp;Later in 2023, Wairimu Gathimba joined our team, working on Season 2 and our special episodes as a researcher, scriptwriter, and co-host. A writer, cultural worker, Kenya Organic Intellectuals Network member, and community organizer at the Mathare Social Justice Centre, Wairimu brought a crucial feminist perspective to the analysis of labour theory at UEIF. Her writing has been featured in The Elephant, This is Africa, and Ukombozi Review, among others.&nbsp;We could not have created Until Everyone Is Free without the book Pio Gama Pinto: Kenya’s Unsung Martyr (Vita Books, 2018), edited by Shiraz Durrani. Durrani, who fled Kenya in 1984 after being interrogated at Nyayo House for an article he had written about Pinto, did not stop collecting documents and information about Pinto, for almost forty years. His archiving work is the foundation for this project; without his work, ours would not exist.Shukran to the PALIAct Ukombozi Library, a leftist library with roots in the underground December Twelfth Movement under Moi’s authoritarian regime and, more importantly, a radically public space in Nairobi. Kimani Waweru and Nicholas&nbsp;Mwangi welcomed and hosted us as we spent many hours researching, writing, and translating in their space.Many thanks to our generous editors Carey Baraka and Wangui Kimari, who donated their time to sift through our book-length script and find our blind spots. Special thanks to Theo Aalders for editing Episode 5 and helping us make Marxist theory make sense.We are eternally grateful to GoSheng, Felix Omondi, and Wyban Kanyi for translating our script with care, intention, and rigor. Translation is crucial but underappreciated, and even more so with a language as fluid and contextual as Sheng’. Until Everyone Is Free would not be the same if it were in another language. Our translators understood this and, the way they carried out their work, are truly our co-producers. We called up producer and musician Djae Aroni to produce one song for us, but he stuck around and brought the rest of our words to life, using the theory of vibes. &nbsp;Until Everyone Is Free was recorded at the Acacia Collective by Djae Aroni. Thank you Djae and Doug Kihoro for voice-acting the most important voices in our show. Writer and artist Wyban Kanyi, also part of Mathare Green Movement, wrote an original song for the series and translated significant portions of our script.&nbsp; Thank you, Maeve Frances and Rajiv Golla, podcast pros who have been on standby to offer us pearls of pod-wisdom from the very beginning. Thank you Mel Mbugua of Africa Podfest for your continued encouragement. Sella Oneko has been archiving information about her grandfather, Ramogi Achieng Oneko. She pointed us in the right directions and allowed us to use parts of her interview with Mau Mau fighter Gitu wa Kahengeri. Thank you, Olola Oneko, for your stories about “Uncle Pio,” which helped us imagine the past in colour.And most, most importantly—the family of Pio Gama Pinto. Thank you, Linda Gama Pinto, for your time and openness. Speaking with you and Emma Gama Pinto on the phone was a privilege. You all understand better than anyone else that freedom is not free. And yet, you also understand better than anyone else that from a single spark there can indeed arise a thousand beacons. https://untileverypod.com/Episode-1-Wapi-Uhuru Mon, 09 Nov 2020 19:19:43 +0000 Until Everyone Is Free https://untileverypod.com/Episode-1-Wapi-Uhuru Episode 1 (Trailer) Wapi Uhuru? Freedom. Dec 12, 1963. Independence Arena. The Union Jack was lowered. At 12:01, the flag of Independent Kenya was hoisted up to replace it. A new flag. A free country. Free at last. It was a happy moment, but very brief. Because this….this was not freedom. Maybe Kenya was a free country. But the people of Kenya… They had the freedom to be hungry. Freedom to remain landless. Freedom to remain jobless. Freedom to remain uneducated. Freedom to live in poverty. Only two years after independence, Kenya began killing its own freedom fighters. In 1965—less than two years from that time when the new Kenyan flag was raised up at Independence Arena—Kenya killed its first freedom fighter. The man they killed, he understood too much. He understood that your oppressors will not stop oppressing you if you ask nicely, that the only way British colonizers would leave is through organized violence—so he routed weapons to the Mau Mau forest fighters. He understood that stolen land was the root of colonization—so he fought, both before and after independence, to take it back from elites. He understood that colonization was not just economic control, but also mental control—so he supported small, radical newspapers in vernacular languages so that Africans could speak for themselves, to each other. He understood that the struggles of Kenyans was the same as that in India, or in Angola, or in South Africa, or in the U.S.—so he created bridges of solidarity across all continents. In other words, this man understood what freedom was. And he understood how to get it. The British colonizers detained him for many years. They put him away on Manda Island. But...the new rulers of Kenya? They did not detain him. They assassinated him. That man was Pio Gama Pinto. You’re listening to “Until Everyone Is Free.” I’m your host, Stoneface. Together with our producer April Zhu, we will tell you the story of Pio Gama Pinto, Kenyan freedom fighter. But we tell this story in order to answer a very important question: How did the country of Kenya become free... without the people of Kenya getting free? https://untileverypod.com/Episode-2-Mau-Mau-Ally Thu, 28 Jan 2021 02:45:27 +0000 Until Everyone Is Free https://untileverypod.com/Episode-2-Mau-Mau-Ally Episode 2 Mau Mau Ally We’re on Manda Island, in Lamu. The heat is thick. Mosquitoes hang in the air; on the ground, scorpions and snakes. The year is 1955, three years into the State of Emergency that the British colonial government declared in Kenya to suppress the Mau Mau insurgency. Detention camps—created to interrogate, torture, and punish Mau Mau suspects—have cropped up all over the colony. Most camps were set up in Central Province and around Nairobi, where the Mau Mau were most active. But Manda Island was different. Here, you didn’t even need a guard tower—there was nowhere to run. You were surrounded by the ocean, and if you were lucky enough to reach the mainland, there was only desert. When the British rounded up hundreds of thousands of Mau Mau suspects, they put them in three categories: Africans labeled “white” were considered safe enough to be returned to the reserves. “Grey” meant they could be reformed in detention centres. But “black” suspects were beyond reform. This was the beating heart of Mau Mau, the blackest of the black. They were so threatening to the British that they could not just be locked away. They had to be taken to Manda Island. They were the most dangerous because of their political knowledge. They were the most dangerous because of their ability to organize many others, even within detention camps. &nbsp; In Manda, hundreds of African detainees spent years here, sleeping on sisal mats. But there was one Asian detainee—and because everything then was segregated by race—he was separated from the rest, all by himself. [Gitu wa Kahengeri] Pio Gama Pinto was with us for the all the time. He&nbsp; was one of the Asian origin detainees who sat with us. Gitu wa Kahengeri is 98 years old. He was detained at Manda Island. He lives near Kilimambogo, and he is one of the last surviving Mau Mau fighters. He considered this Asian man to be one of their own. One of the few non-black allies who was all in. [Gitu wa Kahengeri] He was exactly with us completely in mind in activities. [Pio Gama Pinto] was our person. &lt;theme music&gt; In 1965, only two years after Kenya gained its independence, Pio Gama Pinto was shot and killed on his driveway in Nairobi. This was Kenya’s first political assassination. My name is Stoneface, host of “Until Everyone Is Free.” In this series, me and our producer April Zhu will tell the story of Pio Gama Pinto, a Kenyan freedom fighter. But we tell the story of Pinto to answer a very important question: How did the country of Kenya become free…without the people of Kenya becoming free? Pinto was a land justice advocate. He was a trade union supporter. He was a radical journalist. He was a political mastermind. But, from the beginning of the Mau Mau insurgency, he was an ally of these radical freedom fighters. Our story begins in 1952, with a series of gruesome murders.... &lt;clip of Lari Massacre re-enactment from “Mau-Mau” documentary (1955)&gt; “That evening while the men are still away, a mob of Mau Mau sets fire to their huts. Mothers, sons, and daughters, awakened by heat of flames, frantically trying to escape. Only to be met by Mau Mau guns. Young children are torn from mothers and torn to pieces. Fire roasts those too weak to escape.” The colonizers believed that Mau Mau were sick in the mind. They were crazy. They were wild. Colonizers believed that Mau Mau was gaining support by fooling poor, stupid Africans into oathing. [Narrator, Mau Mau (1955)] “The power of Mau Mau begins with the oath of initiation, cunningly devised to prey upon childlike fears of simple, uneducated people, long steeped in a primitive dread of death.” What the British did not know—or perhaps what they were not prepared to believe—was that Mau Mau was not just a few violent forest fighters. It was a grassroots movement. Ithaka na wiyathi. Land and freedom. By September 1952, almost the entire Kikuyu population, plus many in Meru and Embu communities, had oathed. On one hand, there was a military war, being fought with guns and airplane bombers. But the British also had to fight a huge grassroots movement. This was much harder. How do you fight an invisible movement of over one million people? You round up everyone. And screen them. One by one. The British set up detention camps around the country and detained over 90,000 people, mostly Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru, were detained. [April]&nbsp;When I first learned about these detention camps, it changed how I saw everything— [Stoneface]&nbsp;This is April Zhu, freelance journalist and producer of this show. Early on when we were making this show, we spent hours in the library, in her living room—doing research. [April]&nbsp;—Because it’s not even just about the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were detained, screened, tortured, forced to do hard labor… it’s about the fact that this history was erased. The fact that, Stoneface, even though you’re done with school, it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that you learned about the camps. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Yeah, this was not something that we were taught in school. [April]&nbsp;We can call this sanitizing history. Life is messy and complicated. But what gets called “history”—what is archived, what is documented, what is taught in schools—history is always written by whomever is in power. And often they sanitize history. Like pouring Jik on it and just rubbing it until it even burns off the color. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Yes exactly. So much of the history that we’re taught in schools is actually based on a curriculum from the perspective of those in power. We learned a “sanitized” version of Mau Mau, but definitely we didn’t learn about the mass detention camps. But! The thing about sanitized history is that...it has holes. [April]&nbsp;….what do you mean? [Stoneface] If you go to Kimathi Road in town, you see that statue of Dedan Kimathi. He was one of the Mau Mau Generals, he commanded the fighters in Mt. Kenya. [April] Ah, yes, I’ve seen that statue. He’s carrying an automatic rifle, he has these long dreads. The way he’s put on a high podium, cast in bronze—he looks like a hero. [Stoneface]&nbsp;He is a hero. But, here’s the thing. We too often forget that the government could not have set up these detention camps without the Home Guard. [April] That’s fair. For example, in Algeria, the French were not able to recruit a “Home Guard”-type group of loyal Algerians. What sets apart Kenya’s independence struggle from other countries’ is that in Kenya there was a Home Guard. This prevented Mau Mau from spreading; it meant that Mau Mau had to fight a guerrilla war from the forest. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Right. [April]&nbsp;When we read history, we always imagine that if we were there at that time and place, we would be on the “right” side of history. We would be the good guys. No one imagines that, if they were in the middle of the struggle for independence that they would be a Home Guard, working for the colonizer. Everyone wants to claim Mau Mau history now, they want to see themselves as descendants of someone brave like Dedan Kimathi. [Stoneface]&nbsp;But we forget that, at the time that the Mau Mau were fighting this war, many disavowed the Mau Mau. Many were saying they were too violent, too bloody. For example, even Jomo Kenyatta himself—even though he was seen as a symbol of independence by many Africans then, including by Mau Mau, who sang about him in their wartime songs—Kenyatta strongly and repeatedly disavowed them. [April]&nbsp;That part of history—sanitized. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Yup. You see that statue of Dedan Kimathi. What is he carrying? He’s not carrying a petition. He’s carrying a rifle. [April] Wow, yeah… Can you imagine what it must have felt like in 1953? When there is an outright war like that, guns on both sides, it is just so clear: everyone needed to choose a side. There is no such thing as neutral. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Sometimes we forget that some of those who did not support the Mau Mau—and yes, the Mau Mau was violent—those who did not support the Mau Mau made that decision not because they didn’t want independence, but because they did not believe that Kenya could become independent. They were practical. They wanted to protect their property, create a better life for their children, maybe they were also poor. But, they sided with the oppressors. Like you said, in a war for independence, there is no neutral. Just the oppressed and the oppressors. [April]&nbsp;So the Mau Mau were…we can say they were radical. [Stoneface]&nbsp;The Mau Mau were very, very radical. At a time when it was very dangerous, very risky to support them… At a time when many people with businesses and property opposed Mau Mau—one Indian-Kenyan man, who had just been kicked out of India by the British and the Portuguese, had returned to Kenya. He was with the Mau Mau all the way. This man was Pio Gama Pinto. [Pinto]&nbsp;It had become increasingly obvious that “constitutional,” “non-violent” methods of fighting for one’s rights were absolutely futile with the settler-colonial administration. Organized violence was the only answer. Fitz de Souza. Does this name sound familiar? In later years, he would become famous nationwide as the lawyer who represented Jomo Kenyatta and the others of the Kapenguria Six at the Kapenguria Trial. These African leaders, which also included Bildad Kaggia, Kung’u Karumba, Fred Kubai, Paul Ngei, and Achieng Oneko, were tried and sentenced to years in prison for organizing for independence. But that was later. Right now, he was a fresh, young 23-year-old lawyer who had just finished his studies in the UK and had just returned to Kenya. De Souza hadn’t seen his family in a long time and wanted to surprise them, so he didn’t tell them he was back. (De Souza’s father was a well-known doctor in Magadi.) So when De Souza landed in Nairobi, he didn’t know anyone—except the family of his flatmate in London, Abdul. De Souza’s family was originally from Goa, a small island off the southern coast of Indian subcontinent. Goa was a Portuguese colony—which is why de Souza and other Goans had a Portuguese name like Fitzval Remedios Santana Neville de Souza. When de Souza was studying the UK, he received some letters from another Goan in Kenya, a young journalist just a couple years older than him called Pio Gama Pinto. They had never met, but Pinto wrote to ask de Souza to bring some books for him when he came back from the UK. De Souza did. And when he reached Nairobi that year, all by himself, he arranged to meet with Pinto for the first time. As soon as they met, Pinto gave him a warm embrace, as if they’d known each other for years—not just meeting for the first time. Pio Gama Pinto. He was a handsome man. Full black hair. Eyes that smiled. He was athletic, almost represented Kenya as a track and field runner at the Commonwealth Games. At that time, both young men were “shabbily dressed.” They were excited about the same things, and became fast friends. That first day, de Souza and Pinto spoke for hours. De Souza learned that, even from Pinto’s early days, he was already getting into trouble. Pinto was born in 1927 in Nairobi. His father, an immigrant from Goa. When Pio was 8, his father sent him to India for his education, where he studied journalism. But, more importantly than this was his political education. It was in India that Pinto learned about colonialism—and more importantly, how to fight it. India was Britain’s largest colony. India was the core of the British colonial project, it was the economic engine. Independence in India would mean dismantling the entire empire. Pinto was only 17 years old when he helped organize a strike in Mumbai. But he didn’t stop there. Though he had been born in Nairobi, he had Goan roots, and got involved with the struggle to liberate Goa from Portuguese colonization. He helped found the Goa National Congress. All of this organizing made him a wanted enemy in the eyes of the colonizers. In order to even travel to the island of Goa from the mainland, other Goan freedom fighters had to secretly sneak him in. The Portuguese issued a warrant for his arrest. So did the British. They threatened to detain him at Cabo Verde, a small island, also a Portuguese colony, off the coast of West Africa. So Pinto returned to his home. Kenya. That day, when he met with de Souza in Nairobi, 1952, he was still only 25 years old. That night, de Souza decided that he didn’t want to stay with his friend Abdul’s family. He didn’t know them, and plus, they kept trying to set him up with Abdul’s sister. He asked where Pinto was staying. Pinto said he shared a small place in Pangani with two other Goan bachelors. Jokingly, de Souza boldly invited himself: “Well now you’ll be four.” Pinto laughed and very warmly invited him in:&nbsp; “You are most welcome. I’ve only got one bed, but you can have it. I’ll use a spare mattress on the floor.” And, for the next couple of weeks, de Souza stayed with Pinto, every night switching off sleeping on the floor. De Souza and Pinto used to eat at a restaurant owned by an Ismaili called the Blue Room, one of the only kinds that would serve both Asians and Africans. There was always this regular there, a well-known man who would always pop on over and say “Hello! Hello!” to de Souza, Pinto, and their friends. His name was Jomo Kenyatta. The whole country was buzzing with the energy of change. And not just in Kenya. In the US, the civil rights movement was breaking ground. Colonies throughout Asia and Africa were beginning to wobble and topple. Pinto knew that the racial oppression—things as small as racial segregation in restaurants to things as big as landgrabbing—could not be fixed by asking oppressors nicely. These were all symptoms of the same illness, colonialism. The only cure to the sickness of colonialism is to seize political power. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Many who owned businesses, owned farms, frequented the country clubs, were getting nervous. Many white settlers returned to Europe. Many were saying Kenya did not need a full overthrow, perhaps only more Africans in colonial government. Others just wanted to be safe, just wanted things to go back to the way they were before, even if it was not ideal. Mau Mau was striking fear and chaos into the fabric of everyday life. [April]&nbsp;Hm. This is the messy, unsanitized history, isn’t it? That the Mau Mau committed atrocities against innocent people. That not everyone supported Mau Mau. That even Kenyatta disavowed the Mau Mau. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Yes. A lot of people, especially those who had something to lose, did not support Mau Mau. Europeans, Asians, and Africans. People were whispering too. Most Goans in Kenya were whispering. They were saying that Pinto himself was a communist. A socialist. Even if they didn’t know what those words meant, they assumed those were bad things. But they knew for sure that the Mau Mau were scary and violent—they knew for sure that the Mau Mau were bad. And they were whispering that Pinto, he was even a Mau Mau himself. They weren’t wrong. [Cynthia] To me, Mathare is a place that people speak of badly. It's a place people speak of badly. Like if someone asks you where you live and you say Mathare, they think it's a place for the mentally ill, but no, if you live in Mathare, you know that it is a place of power, among many comrades. [Calvo] I'd say Mathare is a place where people like Dedan Kimathi hid, and where Pio Gama Pinto routed weapons. [Stoneface]&nbsp;So we're at Mau Mau Road. Here there's a sign that says Mau Mau Road. Why do you think this place is called Mau Mau Road? [Cynthia] It has its own meaning. It has a strong meaning. It means "Mzungu Arudi Ulaya, Mwafrika Abaki Uhuru" (The white man should go back to Europe so the African can remain free) so when someone hears that they think of Mau Mau, or freedom, so I feel comfortable here. [Calvo]&nbsp;It's a powerful name. Just that. [Stoneface]&nbsp;So when people ask you about Mathare, why is it like this and this and this, what can you tell them? [Cynthia] Mathare is a powerful place, with many people in industries like dance, music, etc. There is so much talent, like you wouldn't even be able to imagine. [Calvo] If you hear Mathare, people think it's just street kids. But if you hear Mathare, I would tell those people: Mathare is a country of power. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Have you heard of Pio Gama Pinto? Explain for us. [Cynthia] Pio Gama Pinto was an Indian but he loved Africa, so he was a Pan-Africanist. He saw the betrayal that happened, he didn't like it. So he helped those like Dedan Kimathi, Mau Mau, etc. So when he was paid—he was a journalist for Sauti ya KANU—and whatever money he earned he put towards weapons. [Stoneface]&nbsp;He stood in solidarity with Mau Mau? [Calvo]&nbsp;Yeah. [Stoneface]&nbsp;The point is this road, Mau Mau Road, explains to us exactly what happened. Mathare has the history of how Mau Mau helped Kenya to get independence. Not all wars are fair. In fact, most wars are very uneven. Usually, one side has a lot more power, more resources, more weapons than the other. The war that the Mau Mau fought was definitely unfair. On one hand, you had the British military. The same military that had fought World War Two less than one decade before. A world power. A world empire. By 1953, Britain’s 39 Corps Engineering Regiment arrived in Kenya to construct roads to Aberdares, Mt Kenya to fight Mau Mau forest fighters. Royal Air Force bombed forest fighters from the air, force them out of the forest. As in, they had the resources to literally build infrastructure in order to fight the Mau Mau. [Narrator, Mau Mau (1955)] On airports surrounding the Aberdare regions, RAF units of Harvard airplanes, slow-flying aircraft with great maneuverability, are armed with fragmentation bombs and machine guns for bombing and scraping missions. The Mau Mau forest fighters? They had almost nothing. They only had some WWII veterans who had fought alongside the British and then trained young Mau Mau fighters in the forest. They didn’t have a government backing them. But they had people power. And where there is a will, there is a way. The Mau Mau made their own weapons. There was an “Engineers Group” whose job it was to obtain arms, ammunition, material for manufacture of homemade weapons. Later in the war, when General China was caught by the British and detained, in his interrogation, he reported how many weapons they had: 14 automatic rifles, 361 rifles/shotguns, 4 grenades, 1 Bren gun, 23 revolvers/pistols. And 1,230 homemade weapons. Where did these come from? How did they get to the forests? Some came from police station raids, or picked off of killed home guard. But almost all were routed through Nairobi. Through the headquarters in Mathare. And Pinto was a key coordinator. Pinto had contacts with illegal South Asian gun-traders who secretly sold firearms and ammunition to Mau Mau. Pinto coordinated with the Muhimu to transport people and supplies, sent information back and forth, and raise money for the fighters in the forests and towns… When money was collected in sacks, it was taken to trusted people. Pinto was one of those trusted people. But remember earlier, we mentioned that this was not a pure military war. It was a mass movement. The British bombed and fought the forest fighters in Mt. Kenya and Aberdares. But they also had to suppress what was a growing grassroots movement both upcountry and in the city. In Nairobi, taxi drivers helped spread messages. Gang members and black marketeers helped move money, supplies, and weapons from Nairobi to the forest. Nubians in Kibra hid Mau Mau fighters during raids. Even in Nyanza. Some “hard-core detainees” were kept on Mageta Islands and Sayusi Islands. Some managed to escape, and nearby Luos sheltered, fed, and clothed them, and got them safely back into the forest. It was all hands on deck. The British were getting very, very worried. The resistance was becoming more and more difficult to control, especially because it was coming from all directions: trade unions, criminal groups, official organizations like the KAU, The governor sent a telegram to Britain, which said: “The movement has many heads. We are dealing with a hydra.” It became increasingly difficult for the government to tell whether an African was loyal, or if they were Mau Mau. The British devised a crazy plan. It seems impossible, but it is as you imagine. Round up every single African in Nairobi and screen them. One by one by one. It is 24 April 1954. It is a chilly, overcast morning in Nairobi. You’re in Mathare, awoken by the sound of shouting outside. The sun isn’t even out. You can sense that something is very, very wrong. You look outside. Everywhere you look, police. Police everywhere. On rooftops, there are machine gunners. Later, you will discover that the entire city of Nairobi has been sealed in. No Africans could leave or enter. By the end of that day, no African would leave Bahati, Pumwani, or Kariokor, except in the back of a caged lorry. This was “Operation Anvil.” You are told to gather some key documents. Don’t forget your kipande; put it on your neck. There’s a banging on the door. You leave your house, and find you and other Africans are herded into a queue like animals. They want to see your kipande. It has your tribe written on it. If you were Kikuyu, Meru, or Embu, you were automatically treated as a Mau Mau supporter. You would have to prove your “innocence.” But, for now, you were guilty. You are put into a caged lorry. You will be sent to a detention camp. At the camps, they would do screening. This word—“screening”—there was no translation for it in any of the African languages. It was a chilling, frightening, evil process. It was just called “screening.” The first screening is done by what looks like a ghost. It is a person wearing a long robe with a hood that hides their face—they were called gikunia. The gikunia takes a look at you. If they shake their head, that means they don’t recognize you as a Mau Mau—then you are released. But they look at you. They nod their head. Then there were other screenings. Physical torture. Beatings. Forcing people to recant their oath. Forcing people to give up names of other Mau Mau. At these detention camps, unspeakable things—that should never, never be done to a human—were done. By the end of Operation Anvil, more than 20,000 detention orders were given. And by the end of the year, over 70,000 Africans—mostly Kikuyu, Meru, and Embu—would be put in detention camps. Later that year, Pinto would also be detained. He was one of 700 suspects designated as “active terrorists.” “Hard core.” Blackest of the black. [April] His charges: Knowledge of illegal arms traffic. Assisted Mau Mau in drafting documents, arranged for printing of “African Liberation Army” membership cards. Assistance to non-military wing of Mau Mau in planning its subversive campaign. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Imagine, these things were happening right here in Eastlands, less than 70 years ago. Some of the people who were alive during Operation Anvil are still alive now. [April]&nbsp;But Operation Anvil, the detention camps, the screenings… these are not mainstream history. And that’s because history is always written by those in power. Those in power will always sanitize, remove some things. [Stoneface]&nbsp;They will. But there’s more. Imagine history is a room full of books. But imagine that, in every book, there are pages torn out. Somebody tore them out. Some pages might be lost forever. But some pages are just scattered in the room. If you can find even just some of those missing pages, you not only learn about what’s on those pages, you also learn something about the somebody who tore out the pages. What don’t they want us to know? Why don’t they want us to know it? You get? [April]&nbsp;I see. So by figuring out the parts missing from the “sanitized history,” we can learn about the fears of the sanitizers. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Yes. [April]&nbsp;You know what this reminds me of. During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany put millions of Jews in concentration camps, where they were made to do hard labor, and executed. But everyone knows this story. Not just Jews themselves, everyone around the world, even us two sitting here in Nairobi. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Yes. That page of the book was not torn out, because those in power wanted to—and could—tell that story. Those who won WWII, they defeated the Germans, so they could freely tell the story of the terrible things that the Germans had done. [April]&nbsp;So then what about Kenya? Why was the Mau Mau page of the book torn out? Why doesn’t every single Kenyan know about the fact that the British tortured and executed and detained thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Africans? [Stoneface]&nbsp;And, more importantly, the fact that that page was torn out, what does that tell us about those in power in Kenya? To answer that, let’s go back to the Mau Mau war. General China—who commanded the Mau Mau fighters in the Aberdares—was captured by the British. They were going to hang him, but they said that if he could convince Dedan Kimathi to surrender, that they would spare his life. General China tried to persuade Kimathi that perhaps an agreement could be reached with the British, and then maybe this whole violent, bloody war could come to a close. But Kimathi refused. He said that the war was about land. [Dedan Kimathi] We are fighting for all land stolen from us by the Crown through its Orders in Council of 1915, according to which Africans have been evicted from the Kenya Highlands…. The British government must grant Kenya full independence under African leadership and hand over all land previously alienated for distribution to the landless. We will fight until we achieve freedom or until the last of our warriors has shed his last drop of blood. [April]&nbsp;Land and Freedom. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Exactly. The Mau Mau fought for Land and Freedom. Now, take a look at the Kenyan people today. I’m not talking about the elite, I’m talking about wananchi. Do we have land and freedom? Even look at some of those same same Mau Mau fighters who are still alive today in 2020. Did they get land and freedom? [April]&nbsp;...No. [Stoneface]&nbsp;So. You had asked why the Mau Mau page of the book was torn out. Those who tore out the page of Mau Mau—maybe the reason they tore out those chapters is because, if we read those pages, we would understand that the Mau Mau never got their land and freedom. That the war was never won— [April]&nbsp;That the war was never won….. [Stoneface]&nbsp;—That the war is still going on. That maybe, Kenya is still a colony. And that would tell us all we need to know about who the new rulers are. [April] Eheh. That independence is not the same as decolonization. That….Kenya is still ruled by an elite. That… the nation of Kenya became “free” without the people of Kenya getting free. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Yes. Pinto understood this. [Pinto]&nbsp;If, when we have achieved independence, we only have black Lord Delameres instead of white Lord Delameres, we will have achieved very little. [Stoneface]&nbsp;The colonizers put Pinto in detention. They put him in Manda Island, because they knew his ideas were dangerous. But for the new colonizers, those who came to power after Kenya became “independent,” simply detaining Pinto was not enough. They had to kill him. In our next episode, we talk about the thing that Pinto spoke out about. The thing that made the new colonizers realize they needed to kill him. Something over which many Kenyans have lost their lives. Land. ReferencesDe Souza, Fitzval. Forward to Independence: My Memoirs. 2018. Durrani, Shiraz, editor. Pio Gama Pinto: Kenya’s Unsung Martyr. Vita Books, 2018.Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. 1. Owl Books ed, Holt, 2006.Footage - Personalities - Nehru - 1947 August 15, #01 - YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2Ac_X1noLQ. Hobson, Fred. “Freedom as Moral Agency: Wiathi and Mau Mau in Colonial Kenya.” Journal of Eastern African Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, Nov. 2008, pp. 456–70. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1080/17531050802401841.Hornsby, Charles. Kenya: A History since Independence. New paperback edition, I.B. Tauris, 2013. Lonsdale, John. “Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya.” The Journal of African History, vol. 31, no. 3, 1990, pp. 393–421. Maloba, Wunyabari O. Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt. Indiana University Press, 1993.Mau-Mau (1955) | Early Grindhouse Exploitation Documentary - YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT-cJC4EKAo.Odinga, Jaramogi Oginga. Not Yet Uhuru. Heinemann Educational Books, 1967. Osborne, Myles. “‘The Rooting Out of Mau Mau from the Minds of the Kikuyu is a Formidable Task’: Propaganda and the Mau Mau War.” The Journal of African History, vol. 56, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 77–97. Throup, David. Economic &amp; Social Origins of Mau Mau 1945-53. J. Currey ; Ohio University Press, 1988. https://untileverypod.com/Episode-3-Land-Justice-Advocate Tue, 16 Feb 2021 05:27:25 +0000 Until Everyone Is Free https://untileverypod.com/Episode-3-Land-Justice-Advocate Episode 3 Land Justice Advocate [Stoneface] We’re in Uhuru Park. Freedom Corner. [April] The plaque says, “Jeshi la Kenya la Ardhi na Ukombozi.” Kenya Land and Freedom Army. Also known as Mau Mau. [Stoneface] The statue is of two Mau Mau, a man and a woman. They’re both wearing peasant clothes, the man has long dreads, and the woman’s head is covered in a shawl. They are both leaning forward towards each other. A moment of exchange. The woman is handing the man a bag, with supplies inside. The plaque explains that there were many Mau Mau who assisted the military forest fighters with food, weapons, and information. [April] I like that the memorial doesn’t just recognize men with guns who fought, but rather, it recognizes that Mau Mau was a mass movement. One that relies on many people coming together, you know? [Stoneface] Yeah, it’s important to recognize that Mau Mau was a grassroots movement. But there’s still one problem with a monument like this. [April] A problem? [Stoneface] What they did fight for, they never got. [April] Hm, ok. What do you mean? [Stoneface] They got a monument—great—but, look here at this plaque, what did they fight for again? [April] Land and freedom. [Stoneface] They never got land and freedom. Take a look around. Who owns land today in Kenya? The Delameres never left. Huge multinational corporations like Del Monte, Lipton, etc still own huge pieces of land. And look at what that land is used for. Much of the most fertile land is still not being used to feed the country or to feed those who work on it, but rather to grow things like coffee, tea, sisal, or flowers, which are then shipped out of the country. And the profits go to the rich person who owns the land, not the people who work on it. Those people remain poor. Exactly like it was when the Mau Mau decided to rise and rebel. Exactly like when Kenya was a colony. [April] So the Mau Mau fought a war against colonizers... many were detained and tortured and killed. Then Kenya became independent, but… nothing changed? Something doesn’t add up. [Stoneface] Land is everything. After all, this was what the Mau Mau fought for. They didn’t fight for this bronze statue. In 1965, only two years after Kenya gained its independence, Pio Gama Pinto was shot and killed on his driveway in Nairobi. This was Kenya’s first political assassination. My name is Stoneface, host of Until Everyone Is Free. In this series, me and our producer April Zhu will tell the story of Pio Gama Pinto, a Kenyan freedom fighter. But we tell the story of Pinto to answer a very important question: How did the country of Kenya become free…. Without the people of Kenya becoming free? Pinto was an ally of the Mau Mau. He was a trade union supporter. He was a radical journalist. He was a political mastermind. But among his most important work was the work he did advocating for land justice. But… before we can understand why or how he advocated for land justice, we need to understand land injustice… Before colonizers arrived in Kenya, not everyone owned land. But, back then, even without land, you could make a decent living, feed your family, live a good life. Landlessness did not mean poverty. There were many different ways people could exchange their labor for land. This was not governed by an official law, but rather through traditional customs linked to kinship. For example, among the Kikuyu, you had something called a mbari, which was a family group. Everyone in a mbari descended from one founder. All of the land that belonged to that mbari was called a githaka. Now. If you were landless, you had some options. You could approach a mbari and come to an arrangement where you live on a piece of his githaka, but at the beginning of every season, you give them something like one bag of crops. In this arrangement, you would be a muthami. But often, the muthami would marry into the mbari that owned that land. Then they would become muthoni. So muthami, muthoni. Then, you had the ahoi. The ahoi did not live on the farm but would work on the farm, provide crops to the landowner, and also protect the land from intruders, such as neighboring Maasai. Then, because one githaka would be split so many times with more and more descendants, it would get crowded. So then sometimes one descendant would break new ground. Find new land. Start their own githaka. And so, in this way, slowly slowly over generations the Kikuyu expanded from the Mount Kenya region down into Kiambu. But still, at the end of the day, there was always enough land for everyone. Until…. The colonizers came. The British came to Kenya to build a railroad from Mombasa to Uganda. And the reason they came to build a railroad, was so they could control the source of the River Nile. And they reason they wanted to control the Nile was so their colony up in Egypt, which was strategically important, would be safe. But this railroad was so expensive, so impractical. People back in the UK complained, called it the “Lunatic Express,” said it was a waste of their taxpayer money. The British built it anyways, but they needed to find a way to make it profitable, so they could break even. Uganda and Kenya did not have minerals that they could extract and send out on the railway. But they did have something else: land. The British advertised Kenya as a great place to live. Kenya was called a “white man’s country.” (And in fact, many of the European settlers in Kenya until 1912 were actually whites from South Africa.) At the height of British rule, 1,000 white settlers owned 8 million acres. Basically all of the land in Kenya suitable for growing crops. Kenya became a settler colony, just like the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. Not just a place where resources like oil, minerals are taken from, but one where colonizers come to settle, make a living, start a family. Of course I don’t need to explain to you that, in order for Kenya to become a “white man’s country,” it needed to be stolen from the black people who were already there. “Stolen. African land was stolen.” This word “stolen.” It’s so simple. But what does stealing land even look like? With violence, with guns and weapons, for sure, in many cases. But also through law. One law, the 1902 Crown Land Ordinance, which stated that “Africans had no recognized title to waste, unoccupied, or uncultivated land.” Laws can also be violent. Colonizers came, created “laws,” and now suddenly Africans who had lived there for centuries were suddenly “illegal.” Most people who lived in the Highlands were separated from their ancestral land because of this law. Barbed Wire (Madolla, Stoneface Bombaa) produced by Djae Aroni Colonizers walikam, waligrab zetu land,walibrag, then, si then Barbed Wire. Zikasundwa zetu land Nasema Barbed Wire.Zikasundwa zetu land Nasema Barbed Wire.Zikasundwa zetu land.... Hundred thousand walichujwa Rift Valley Bila kujali Bila anything ata kuuliza ka swali Haja ilikua wachukue yao Mali bilakujali Ndio wavune yao asali&nbsp; They took their land, no man to stand Sent them away, none to stay This the baddest situation The worse affectation The bad day affected the nation Walichujwa walifukuzwa Land zao poa zikauzwa Walibaki bila na kupuuzwa Kutolewa kwao bila kuulizwa Hizi lands zilipeanwa European Eight million acres wakajipin Ati kulea kuweka mimea Mbona wakucare nafeel imenifika there Colonizers walikam, wakigrab zetu land,wakibrag, then, si then Barbed Wire. Zikasundwa zetu land Nasema Barbed Wire. After independence waliexpect changes Ndio waforget mashida endless But kucome Kenya ikaturn Ikageuza hizo land zao zakuearn Kuna kitu nililearn: There was a shift of land on another hand That was bad, that was sad, that was hard No one to guard Me nitatalk me nitawalk Kuna kitu inanihurt tu a lot: Mbona wengine waligenya Instead hao pia ni Wakenya? Imefika time kua sincere Maisha hakuna wakuskia But najua God atatuskia Let's stand onemusije kufearI’m a human rights defender Akuna siku nita surrender This is only agenda Hifuate days za calender Colonizers walikam, wakagrab zetu land,wakibrag, then, si then Barbed Wire. Zikasundwa kwenye land Nasema Barbed Wire.Zikasundwa kwenye land Colonizers walikam, wakagrab zetu land,wakibrag, then, si then Barbed Wire.Pio Gama Pinto was looking for a typewriter. He asked a friend of his, called Apu Pant, who happened to be High Commissioner of India. Apu Pant was a comrade in the struggle for Indian independence from British colonialism, and he was sympathetic to the Kenyan independence struggle. Pant gave him a desk at the Desai Memorial Library. And a typewriter. The Desai Memorial Library was named after Manilal Ambalal Desai, an activist and journalist who went from town to town, preaching to the Indians to wake up, fight for equality, and join hands with Africans. Kind of like Pinto. In that sense, it was perfect that this place is where Apu Pant chose to give Pinto a desk. This is where Pinto would spend many of his long nights, into strange early hours of the morning. It was where he would do a lot of his land advocacy work. In 1951, the Land Reform Act was on the table. Pio Gama Pinto wanted to work on this law, to help Africans get their fair share of land. Those early days—when Fitz first met Pinto and they took turns sleeping on the floor—they shared a small place in Pangani with several other Goans who lived 2-3 to a room. Living was simple. They’d cook together and share meals. There was one makeshift bathroom they would share, taking turns to bathe with a little mug. Many Goans were clerks who needed to get to town on the 8am bus from Pangani, but Fitz and Pio were in no rush in the mornings. They’d wash in the morning, get to the bus stop by 8:30am, and go to Pio’s “office” at the Desai Library. When the desk was first given to Pio, the library was falling into disarray, but once he “moved in,” it gradually bloomed into life. A couple of students who got in trouble at Makerere—Pinto took them in and gave them jobs tidying up and organizing the library. It was here in this office that young people excited about fighting for independence would meet. Most of Pinto’s work on land reform would be done right here. At this desk. At this typewriter. Late at night. Alone. Reading, reading, reading. Typing, typing, typing. After WWII ended, the entire global economy was in bad shape. This included Britain’s colonies. The economy in the colony of Kenya was doing very badly, and so the British government decided to investigate some of the economic problems in Kenya. So they created the East Africa Royal Commission. And this included “reforming the traditional tribal systems of land tenure.” In order to do this, the Royal Commission on Land asked for evidence regarding land ownership. But, remember in 1954, after Operation Anvil, many African leaders like the Kapenguria Six were in prison. There was no one to represent the voices of Africans who had land claims. At that time, Pinto was the editor of the Daily Chronicle. But when he heard of this, he promptly resigned and prepared himself to help out in whatever way he could. He took statements from Kikuyu elders. Wrote out their claims. Typed them, right there in that office. At that time, there were no photocopy machines, only this machine called a cyclostyle which you had to turn by hand. For three months, Pinto wrote and typed and cyclostyled, often until the early morning hours when the birds would begin singing again. Pinto didn’t tell anyone about this work. He wasn’t looking for credit. At the end of this, he produced a 200-page “Kikuyu Tribe’s Memorandum” and a memorandum for Mbari clans in Central. In fact, when Jomo Kenyatta was presented with a copy of this while in detention in Lodwar, he was so impressed with it that he suggested it be published. But he knew that land was linked to freedom. After all, when the colonizers came, they came for land. But how did he understand this? Before he was able to do all of this, first he himself needed to understand the roots of the land problem in Kenya. He needed to read a very important document called the Carter Commission. It’s the late 1920s, about two decades after the railroad began to be built. Before, there was enough land for everyone. Before, if you did not have land, you could work on someone else’s land as muthami, muthoni, or ahoi, and be fine. But with the railroad and colonization, this was no longer the case. Landless Africans—mostly Kikuyus, many of them ahoi—were now making noise about this issue of landlessness. Until even the British government had to pay attention. They commissioned a panel to investigate. They said, ok let’s investigate this issue of land claims—people claiming that their land was stolen and now they have no land—and settle them once and for all. Only one problem: the people they chose for this panel? Three white men. Sir William Carter, Captain Frank O’Brien Wilson, Mr Rupert William Hemsted. White, white, white. And not just white men—three settlers who lived in, had land in, Kenya. At the time, there was a young man called Johnstone Kenyatta (later he would change his name to Jomo), who was the lobbyist and secretary of Kikuyu Central Association in London. Kenyatta pointed out the commissioners’ conflict of interest. So you’re going to ask people who are sitting on—profiting from—stolen land, to “investigate” land claims by the very people they stole the land from? Kenyatta said, at the very least there should be Africans on this panel. You can already see how this is going to go. Of course the British didn’t listen. In June 1932, the Carter Commission began their investigation….in London. They began by listening to the advice of “Kenya experts” with long experience in and “specialized knowledge of” Kenya. A couple months later, they went to Nairobi. Over 400 statements from Kikuyus were submitted to the Carter Commission. Each claim basically said that, when Europeans came to take land for farming, they did not consider or compensate the mbari who already owned this land. You see, before Mau Mau picked up their guns, many Kikuyus tried to get their land back through the law. They heard that this Carter Commission wanted to settle their land claims, so many mbari gave statements. But we already know how this ends. The Carter Commission read all of these statements, but concluded that these claims by Kikuyus were all invalid. Every one. “Kikuyu rights to land external to their reserves would be extinguished permanently by a subsequent order in Council.” The Carter Commission was a very important turning point. The Carter Commission made it clear that non-violent, legal methods would not work. That the colonizers would not simply return this valuable land if you asked politely. These Kikuyu decided, ok the only way we can get land and freedom is to fight for it—with guns. [Stoneface] Everyone knows this part. 12 December 1963. Kenya is no longer a colony. Kenya is an independent country. Exactly one year later, 12 December 1964, Kenya becomes a republic—The Republic of Kenya, and Jomo Kenyatta becomes the first president of an independent Kenya. The same Jomo Kenyatta who was imprisoned by the British in Lodwar for many years, the one that Mau Mau had sung about in their songs during the war. So, colonizers are out. The leader that the colonizers imprisoned, he’s the new president. Seems like a happy ending— [April] But hold up, hold up. But how did we reach this victory? Was there like, you know, in the movies, at the end there is one final battle, good guys on one side and bad guys on other, they look at each other, then they shout and run towards one another and fight until one side is all dead? [Stoneface] In Kenya’s war for independence, there was no clear “military victory” like that. It wasn’t as if so many British were killed that they decided to pull out. [April] So how did we go from hundreds of thousands of Africans in detention camps—to now suddenly a peaceful victory? [Stoneface] This is a very good question, and this is very, very important. When we hear “decolonization,” we only think of this moment of victory. Celebration. Music. Mzee Kenyatta, walking side by side with other African leaders wearing traditional African regalia. Everyone is smiling. Victorious. When we hear “decolonization,” we think of a victory. Winners and losers. [April] Africans win. Colonizers lose. [Stoneface] Right. But, sometimes—at least in Kenya—decolonization is not that kind of a victory. Decolonization is a….handshake. [April] A handshake…. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Not black winners and white losers. A handshake between a few white winners, and a few black winners. Let me explain. By the 1950s, it was already clear to the British that this idea of Kenya as a “white man’s country” was doomed. Number 1, the colonizers were outnumbered. It wasn’t like in North America and South America, where disease and war killed most of the indigenous people. Here in Kenya, settlers were few, and as the Mau Mau showed, this was an insecurity problem. Number 2, bringing in more white lower-class immigrant workers did not make sense because there was enough cheap labor here. And, number 3, the white settlers were so racist that intermarriage and integration was definitely not an option. It was just not going to work. They needed to abort the mission. Then, the Mau Mau uprising, and the extensive crackdown in response, showed leaders in London that the Kenyan colonial government could not “control” their colony without expensive support from London. The British had decided already that they wanted to pull out. So then, now they asked themselves...how do we manage an “orderly transition” from colony to independence? So this wasn’t a military victory. No, it was more of a bargain. And the most important bargaining chip? You guessed it. Land. And not just any land. The 7.5 million acres reserved only for Europeans—the “White Highlands.” By the end of 1956, Mau Mau was pretty much almost defeated. So many people were in detention camps, including leaders. And some leaders like Dedan Kimathi, were hanged. In 1958, the State of Emergency ended. Many leading organizers, like Pinto, were released from the detention camps, but still placed in “open detention” in remote places like Kabarnet, Kapsabet, or Marsabit. Pinto was transferred to Kabarnet, where he was the only detainee in the entire town. He was allowed to reunite with his wife Emma, but he was not allowed to have visitors, he was under surveillance, and all communications in and out were heavily censored. So then, what was happening between 1958, when the State of Emergency ended, and 1963, when Kenya became independent? Well, there was a lot going on, but at the centre of it was the question of land. How were European settlers going to transfer ownership of White Highlands over to Africans? There was lots of debate. Months and months of disagreement, with many divisions among whites and among Africans. Finally, all sides agreed on one plan called the “Million Acre Settlement Scheme.” Over five years, European-owned lands would be subdivided and transferred to thousands of Africans. The plan itself was devised by Delamere and Oates, two settler farmer leaders. [Stoneface] The one important question we are trying to answer in this show is “how did the country of Kenya become free, without the people of Kenya getting freedom?” Some of the answer to that question lies in what happened between 1958 and 1963. It has to do with what happened to Kenya’s stolen land. Because land was at the core of the colonial project. This is a very complicated issue. To fully explain what happened to Kenya’s stolen land, our show would take weeks and weeks. So, to help us understand the most important parts, we’re gonna bring in Felix Omondi, poet and community reporter. He helped us research on land alienation—and connect it to the problems that we still see today in Kenya. Hey Fello. [Fello] Like you just heard, I’m Felix Omondi, poet and community reporter, but the most important thing is I’m a boy from the hood. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Ok, so the first thing I want to understand is… this Million Acre Settlement that we just mentioned, the settlement created by Oates and Delamere. If the point of this settlement was to return land to Africans...isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t this what Africans meant when they said they want their land back? [Fello] No, not at all! Here’s the important thing about the Million Acre Settlement. The settlers weren’t returning land to Africans. No. The Kenyan government would buy the land from the settlers, at a very high price. 15 pounds per acre. And then Africans would take out loans to buy that land, and slowly repay. [Stoneface] Wait wait hold on, so let me get this straight. So the people who stole the land from Africans got paid back for it? They made money back by selling what they stole? [Fello] Yeah, it didn’t make sense to Africans either. They said, first, this is our land. Then also we were the ones who worked the land and made it productive. So now why are we paying for this? Wapi uhuru? [Stoneface] Hm… [Fello] And then also, you had tribes like the Kalenjins and Maasai who said, this was our ancestral land to begin with, before it was stolen by Europeans and then Kikuyus and other tribes came to work on their farms. So how can you sell the land of our fathers to other Africans just because they can pay for it? [Stoneface] Ah ok, so these are the roots of the post-election violence in 2007-2008. [Fello] Well, it’s a lot more complicated than that, but that was one of the deep, deep sources of conflict in the Rift Valley—where a lot of these white settler farms were. This hundred-year-old tension was like a pool of kerosene...and then the 2007 election was like a match that lit everything on fire. [Stoneface] Ok... but going back to the Million Acre Scheme, how was the Kenyan government able to afford to pay these white settlers for their land, especially at such a high price? [Fello] Aha. That’s the key question. The British lent the Kenyan government 21 million pounds. Some was grant money, but some was a loan. [Stoneface] Ok, so let me get this straight. The British colonized Kenya. [Fello] Mhm. [Stoneface] They stole land.[Fello]&nbsp;Exactly. [Stoneface] Taxed Africans for simply existing, forcing them to work on white settlers’ farms.[Fello] Yup. [Stoneface] Then, that stolen land was sold back to the settlers. Africans had to buy land….and to do that, they had to borrow money from….the colonizer?? [Fello] And these white settlers were paid in cash. They took the money, and went with it to Britain. Some of them made so much money from these sales that they then came back to Kenya to buy land that wasn’t set aside just for Africans. Of all the land sold to individuals after independence, over half was sold to white people. [Stoneface] Wueh. Wapi uhuru? This is not how you develop a new country. [Fello] There’s more. The Million Acre Settlement Scheme only accounted for ⅙ of all the White Highlands—where European farms were split up and sold to Africans. Another ⅙, the farms were kept intact and simply sold directly to wealthy Africans—at a very, very cheap price. This is what we call “willing buyer, willing seller.” So lots of these wealthy Africans—including Jomo Kenyatta, his wife and children, but also Oginga Odinga, Moi, Koinange, Ngei, Muliro, J.M. Kariuki…. Kenyatta said that there should be no “free land” given out. He said you should work for what you get, and that his government would not be a “gangster government.” But a lot of politicians like bought lots of land at these low prices, then whenever they wanted to do a political favor, they would “gift” this land to someone else. They turned farms into a something for tricking the masses in their game of “politricks.”&nbsp; [Stoneface] Politricks.&nbsp;So some people were getting free land. [Fello] Those who were in power, or close to those in power. [Stoneface] I think that’s an important takeaway in all of this. It’s not enough just to see that white owners were now giving over their farms to black owners. Decolonization is not just going from white to black. Decolonization is about going from unequal to equal. You have to pay attention to class. [Fello] The Africans who were eligible for loans to buy land—those were middle or upperclass Africans. Educated people, people with wealth in their families. Many were actually loyal to the colonial government during the State of Emergency. So what you had was, those who “played it safe” during the State of Emergency, they were the ones who benefited after independence. On the other hand, the poor, landless people who risked it all—killed in the forest, hanged by the British, tortured in detention camps, carried supplies and messages to the forest—those people didn’t get anything. [Stoneface] Right. So, in the end, what happened to the Mau Mau? I’m still thinking back to that monument we visited at Uhuru Park. [Fello] Well, after uhuru, the Mau Mau fighters were pardoned, so they couldn’t be jailed for anything that they did. But they didn’t get any preferential treatment when it came to land—or even jobs. And, remember, a lot of the Mau Mau were not very educated, and they obviously didn’t have much money. So there was no way Mau Mau could participate in the “willing-buyer, willing-seller” system. [Stoneface] Well, of course. They had bought this land with their blood. Why should they borrow loans from colonizers to buy back land? [Fello] There’s this one quote from Jomo Kenyatta in 1962 that tells us all we need to know about his government’s attitude towards Mau Mau: [Jomo Kenyatta] “Mau Mau was a disease which must be eradicated, and must never be remembered again.” [Stoneface] Should be forgotten? Mau Mau? The guys who fought for our country? [Fello] Right. Those guys. [Stoneface] The likes of Dedan Kimathi? [Fello] Yeah the likes of Dedan Kimathi and Mathenge. The whole lot. And, you see, Mau Mau was banned in Kenya, even after independence. You know which year Mau Mau was no longer banned? [Stoneface] 1972? 1992? If I’m not mistaken. [Fello] 2002. [Stoneface] 2002?&nbsp;Just right here after we were born?&nbsp;Be serious man. [Fello] Imagine. [Stoneface] I can’t even imagine how it was on that day when the statue honouring Mau Mau fighters at Uhuru Park was being unveiled. Just imagine the opening ceremony. There were even surviving Mau Mau who attended the event, old grandmas and grandpas who took a mat from Nyeri. Who still don’t have land. Imagine looking them in the eye and saying that this monument is honoring them. [Fello] Ironic, man. [Stoneface]&nbsp;What did they fight for?[Fello] Nothing, man. Nothing. One of the most vocal proponents of land justice—and a close friend of Pinto—was Bildad Kaggia. Kaggia was an ex-soldier. He fought alongside the British in the Middle East, England, and Europe. That experience radicalized him. The racism he experienced embittered him and made him believe that foreign religion was poisoning Africans. So when he returned to Kenya, he created an Afro-centric religion, which his followers called “Dini ya Kaggia.” It spread throughout Central, Ukambani, and even Nyanza. Kaggia, like other radical ex-soldiers, was a Mau Mau leader. He was one of the key coordinators in the Muhimu—the Central Committee of the Mau Mau, with its headquarters in Mathare. And so, after Independence, when he saw that ex-Mau Mau were still not getting land, that they were still not getting any kind of compensation, he spoke out about it. But, you see, at that time, there was already a big rift forming between two sides of KANU. The land issue was only one of the issues that divided KANU into two camps. On one side, you had Kaggia, Odinga, Oneko, and of course, Pinto. The radicals. The radicals believed that Mau Mau should get land and compensation. The radicals believed that there should be a land ceiling, a cap to how much land one single person can own. 500 acres. The radicals believed that Europeans should not be compensated from the land they stole; it should be seized from them. The radicals believed the land should be owned by the nation—”nationalized”—and then lots of Kenyans employed by the state to work on it, or sold to co-operatives which are owned by many workers, and its profits shared. Ultimately, the radicals believed this: you cannot fix a rotten system by putting new people in it and moving things around. You have to break it. Start anew. Colonialism and capitalism is what created this mess in the first place. But now we have a new opportunity. Uhuru. Now is the time to imagine a new way of sharing land and sharing wealth. By 1964, Kaggia was getting increasingly frustrated by the direction he saw the country going in. All of these things I’ve just mentioned, Kaggia wrote this out. Land must be distributed equally. But Kenyatta saw Kaggia’s message as personal criticism. Kenyatta was offended, and asked him to resign. He did. Not long before Pinto was killed, he told Kaggia an important piece of information. It was about land, of course. Kaggia believes it was what got Pinto killed. This was what Pinto told Kaggia—in confidence, of course. Britain sent a large sum of money to Kenya—for “grants and loans for development, land settlement, compensation for overseas officers and administration from Britain.” 12,400,000 pounds. Today, that would be worth 186 million pounds. In Kenyan shillings today? Almost 27 trillion shillings. The money was supposed to go towards resettling ex-detainees and freedom fighters, especially those who lost family members in the war. Pinto received word of the grant from Cairo. He heard that “the money reached the Kenya government, but it went no further.” Even for such a big sum of money, no Kenyan newspapers printed news about the sum of money. This information was extremely damaging to the President. Kaggia knew that Pinto would raise the issue. Pinto would never keep silent about an injustice, especially one this big. But, Kaggia believes that Pinto shared this information not only with him, but some other friends. One of them betrayed him. Kenyatta found out. The tension between Pinto and Kenyatta had reached a fever pitch. It was a February afternoon. February 1965. Fitz de Souza was on a tea break outside the Parliament building. Then suddenly, a man came bursting out and called to de Souza to come quickly. A fight had broken out. It was Pinto and Kenyatta. Their voices were getting louder and louder, echoing throughout the veranda. Everyone could hear. Tom Mboya was there as well, and a crowd formed. Pinto and Kenyatta were swearing at each other. Pinto’s face was twisted with anger, and he shouted, “I’ll fix you!” De Souza says that then he knew exactly what they were yelling about: the English farms that Pinto believed Kenyatta was grabbing. De Souza ran up behind Pinto and wrapped his arms around him, restraining him and trying to calm him down. Kenyatta left. The silence was deafening. De Souza and Pinto went to sit down, Pinto still breathing heavily. De Souza told Pinto not to shout at Kenyatta again. Remember that question that Kenyatta always asked at all the meetings, one that didn’t need an answer? Mzee used to say, “If a man plants a tree, and it grows fruit, who has the right to claim the fruit?” Kenyatta had given up much for this country, de Souza said, he had planted this tree. Let him have this portion. More importantly, De Souza said, if push comes to shove, there’ll be two shots fired at you. And in a year’s time, no one will remember you. Pinto shook his head, No no, if they killed me, there would be a bloodbath. Pinto was an incredibly perceptive person; he really understood people. But he did not believe that his fellow freedom fighters, those who had been detained at the same time as him, those he fought alongside against the British, could turn around in a couple years and see him as an enemy. He did not believe that the revolution would begin to eat its own children. He was wrong. ReferencesBoone, Catherine. “Land Conflict and Distributive Politics in Kenya.” African Studies Review, vol. 55, no. 1, 2012, pp. 75–103. Boone, Catherine. “Politically Allocated Land Rights and the Geography of Electoral Violence: The Case of Kenya in the 1990s.” Comparative Political Studies, vol. 44, no. 10, Oct. 2011, pp. 1311–42.&nbsp; Coray, Michael S. “The Kenya Land Commission and the Kikuyu of Kiambu.” Agricultural History, vol. 52, no. 1, 1978, pp. 179–93. End of Empire (1985), Chapter 12: Kenya - YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTtD8bxROmI&amp;t=2862s&amp;ab_channel=msvetov. De Souza, Fitzval. Forward to Independence: My Memoirs. 2018. Durrani, Shiraz, editor. Pio Gama Pinto: Kenya’s Unsung Martyr. Vita Books, 2018.Harbeson, John W. “Land Reforms and Politics in Kenya, 1954-70.” The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 1971, pp. 231–51. Hornsby, Charles. Kenya: A History since Independence. New paperback edition, I.B. Tauris, 2013.Kanyinga, Karuti. “The Legacy of the White Highlands: Land Rights, Ethnicity and the Post-2007 Election Violence in Kenya.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies, vol. 27, no. 3, July 2009, pp. 325–44.&nbsp; Maloba, Wunyabari O. Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt. Indiana University Press, 1993.Mau-Mau (1955) | Early Grindhouse Exploitation Documentary - YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT-cJC4EKAo.Odinga, Jaramogi Oginga. Not Yet Uhuru. Heinemann Educational Books, 1967.Wasserman, Gary. “Continuity and Counter-Insurgency: The Role of Land Reform in Decolonizing Kenya, 1962–70.” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines, vol. 7, no. 1, Jan. 1973, pp. 133–48.&nbsp; Wasserman, Gary. “The Independence Bargain: Kenya Europeans and the Land Issue 1960–1962.” Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, July 1973, pp. 99–120. https://untileverypod.com/Episode-4-Radical-Journalist Wed, 21 Apr 2021 16:23:14 +0000 Until Everyone Is Free https://untileverypod.com/Episode-4-Radical-Journalist Episode 4 Radical Journalist This is a story of two Kenyan journalists. Well, before they were journalists, they were boys. So really, this is the story of two boys. This is the story of two sons who, when we look at how they lived their lives so differently from their parents, we wonder, where did this even come from? These were two sons who loved their parents dearly—but did not follow in their path at all.&nbsp; The first boy was entranced by the magic of printed words—that one person could write something, and those same words could be repeated to—"read"—by tens of thousands of other people, in different places, in different times. But it was only through a new and foreign religion that one could access the power of the written word. And this was something that his parents did not trust. To learn the magic of printed words, the first boy had to join this religion, take on a new name, leave home. This first boy was called Muoria. When Muoria was born, they prophesied that he would become a "mundu mayo," or a seer, a wise man. Muoria was born in 1914, in Kabete, just a few miles out of Nairobi. His parents owned land, and his father worked with electrical installations for wazungu in Nairobi, returning home only on weekends. So Muoria was not among the poorest of those around him—but he was far from rich either. He spent his childhood herding his father's sheep and goats. But this Muoria, his mind often wandered far. He often daydreamed. He had many questions. His mind was full of restless ideas. He always wondered why things are the way they are—and what it would be like if they were different. He thought farther into the future than those around him. Anyways, when Muoria daydreamed, he often forgot about his sheep and goats and, when the animals would inevitably wander into neighbors' farms, they would get angry at him. He was not a good herder. Maybe he was a seer after all. Muoria had a friend who was attending school. Back then, this idea of "school" was new. The only schools in Kenya were missionary schools, run by Christians. And these schools—this is where the written word came from. Kikuyus called these Christians "athomi," or readers. At that time, few Africans could read. They didn't need to read. But when Muoria's friend was walking back from school, he'd pass by Muoria and his sheep and sometimes the two of them would sit on the grass. Muoria would pore over his friends' schoolbooks. (Again, forgetting the sheep and goats. Again, angry neighbors.) Muoria was fascinated. These tiny black symbols on the page carried the exact meaning that the author intended. You could print the same thing over and over and it was as if the author's voice was multiplied again and again. He asked his mother if he too could learn to read. She said no. She and his father did not trust these new missionaries, and besides, the sheep needed to be herded. But, when Muoria was twelve years old and his younger brother was old enough to watch the sheep, Muoria finally learned to read. He started evening classes at Kirangani, one of the missionary schools. He learned to read and write in Gikuyu first, then in English. This was a time of great change. Muoria's age-set was called ndege, because it was around this time that the first aeroplane was seen flying over Central. When he was thirteen, Muoria was circumcised into the ndege age-set. But, Muoria chose not to participate in the full ritual, which included celebrations where the young men would be taught important elements of Kikuyu culture and where their parents would get to show them off and be proud. At that time, the Christians felt that Kikuyu customs were backwards. Muoria didn't participate. When Muoria's father found out that his son was only going to quietly go through circumcision, he was furious. To him, this was cowardly. Unmanly. If you wanted to be a man, there were certain things you must go through. Everyone does them. What had he done to deserve a son who embarrassed him like this? Dishonored him in front of the whole community? Anyways, Muoria soon realized that his parents would not support him to go to school, especially if he was going to be learning from these athomi to forsake important cultural customs. He moved into Nairobi to work as a manual laborer. But that didn't last long. One day, his Indian boss slapped him for making a small mistake. Muoria was humiliated and could not tolerate this kind of indignity. So he returned to his upcountry school and supported himself by selling vegetables on weekends at the Nairobi market. Muoria soon took on the name Henry, after the dynasty of powerful English kings all with the same name. When he was sixteen, he was baptised. Henry Muoria Mwaniki. Muoria loved his parents dearly. He respected his father. It wasn't that he disrespected Kikuyu culture. It was more that...he didn't believe that change was necessarily always a bad thing. So much was changing in Kenya. So many new things: written language, railroads, aeroplanes, electricity, wazungu. But Muoria believed—and this is important—Muoria believed that change brings opportunity. Change brings opportunity. We'll talk about this more later. When money ran out for schooling, Muoria went back to Nairobi to look for work. He eventually found a job working for the railroad as a railway guard. This railroad took him to all different parts of the country. He got to see more of Kenya than he had ever before—and he did not like what he saw. He saw colonialism at work. He saw other Africans being treated poorly like he was when he worked for that Indian in Nairobi. But, for Henry Muoria, the job offered one perfect opportunity. Sitting in the back of the train, he could read. And read. And read. And read. Muoria read Shakespeare and other English writers. But he also read the work of Jomo Kenyatta—and it was then that he realized that an African could write just as well as any mzungu. So Muoria decided it was time for him to write something himself. Change brings opportunity. How does one take advantage of these opportunities? When the train had stopped in one of the hottest, hottest parts of the railway—in Magadi—Muoria wrote a 100-page pamphlet in Gikuyu, called "What should we do, our people?" This pamphlet was perhaps one of the first self-help books in Kenya. It explained the virtues of progress, knowledge, and hard work. For example, in one section, he says that a lot of people pray to God for success and wealth, but then they just sit and wait for Him to deliver it to them. No, they should pray instead for God to give them the strength to work, so they can create that wealth with their own hands. The pamphlet also argued that Christianity did not necessarily compete with Kikuyu traditions, and that it could offer Africans important values. The pamphlets were published and sold in missionary bookstores in Nairobi. Muoria made a bit of money from this. But what energized him more... was seeing his own work—his own writing—on the shelf in the bookstore. The little shepherd boy had finally grasped the magic of the printed word. Those restless ideas of his, he could now put them onto ink and paper… and then hundreds, maybe thousands of people could read his thoughts, in exactly the same way he had thought them. The magic of the printed word. Once he tasted it, he could not turn back. Muoria made a bit of money selling these pamphlets. He used it to start a Kikuyu newspaper. It was called Mumenyeri, which means “The Guardian.” It would become one of the largest circulating, most popular, longest lasting vernacular newspapers at the time. Yes, vernacular newspapers. And there were many. People often forget this part of the fight for independence. It wasn’t just guns and bombs. Before Mau Mau fighters started fighting from the forest, there was another very, very important war that needed to be won first.The war for the hearts and minds of Africans. On one side, the British who controlled the colonial government. They wanted the Africans to be ok with the status quo, not stir the pot. On the other side were Africans who wanted to tell their own stories. There was one issue of Mumenyeri printed this big headline at the top. It was a headline Muoria himself wrote, as editor. This is what that headline said: “The present battle is the brain battle.” This was the sound of an information war. Yes, an information war. What is an information war? An information war is when battles are fought not over territory or resources but minds. Like Muoria said in that headline, an information war is a “brain battle.” Maybe this sounds familiar. With social media today, we see information wars all the time. Whether it’s about COVID or election results, people put out information, misinformation, and disinformation to try to win over minds. But this particular information war that Muoria was part of broke out in 1945, after the end of WWII. A&nbsp;time before there were even copy machines. At a time in Kenya when official information was almost completely controlled by colonizers, some Africans were able to start up their own newspapers. Think about it, this period of time, so much was changing, so fast. There were so many new ideas, discussions, debates that needed to happen between Africans. Like, can Christianity coexist with old cultural traditions? Were there customs, like those about marriage or FGM or land ownership or food, that needed to be reconsidered? Or maybe they should be preserved? Or left behind? What should Africans do about racial discrimination? About the theft of their land? Not all of the papers had views that we would consider progressive today. For example, one editorial argued that Luos should stop bathing naked in public because it would embarrass the tribe. Others argued that Kenya didn’t need to become an independent country, only that maybe we needed a few more Africans to be in the colonial government. But the important thing was that these vernacular papers created a lively, diverse space where these ideas could be spread, read, and discussed. These vernacular papers would be printed and distributed. Often, they would be read out loud by those who could read to those who couldn’t. Parents would buy papers and then make their children, who had learned to read in school, read it out loud to them. The vernacular papers created a space: like one big public square. A space where these discussions could happen. Africans speaking to one another, in their own languages. This was the golden age of the vernacular paper. Kenya would never again have a diverse, grassroots-level journalism ecosystem like this again. Between 1945 and 1952, there were over 40 newspapers owned by Africans. It may not sound like a lot now, but remember, at that time, the population of all of Kenya was about the same as the population of just Nairobi today. It was the power of the printed word—now in the hands of Africans—which allowed ideas to spread. And spread. And spread. Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote in his book Decolonizing the Mind, “Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control.” And as these ideas spread through these vernacular papers, the British knew that they were losing mental control over the African population. They needed to stop this. The British collected some of these vernacular newspapers. They translated them and sent clips back to London, asking, “What do we do about this?” The colonizers thought, “Ok, maybe these Africans are just hungry for content, so let’s just feed them these safe, non-political, fluffy stories.” So they created and sponsored newspapers in Swahili and English which were very moderate, not radical at all. They even gave them out for free. But Muoria knew that African news consumers were smarter than that: “Africans are wide awake. And will not buy papers which have no interesting news. People are not goats. They cannot buy a worthless thing.” Even if Africans were poor, they would find a way to pay for good content. Important content. Mumenyeri was a paper with a lot of information about Kikuyu culture, like where you could get traditional food in Nairobi, and it was filled with Kikuyu sayings. It would even advertise certain places where people could take “chai”—code for oathing ceremonies. In this way, even though Muoria embraced Christianity, he did not forsake his Kikuyu heritage. He just felt that we shouldn’t try to replicate history. Instead, we can use history however way we want, to inform how we live in the present. And so that’s what he did. He used the wisdom, the values, some of the customs from traditional Kikuyu culture. Wrote about it. Published it in a way to help Africans in his time—in this fast-changing time—to help them understand their own power. Their cultural power. And their political power. But it was nearly impossible to make lots of money by selling newspapers. Muoria subsidized the price of Mumenyeri with money he made while farming on the side. He was the first African to own his own printing press. But, he was the exception. Most papers were printed by Indian printers. This is the part of the story where Asian-Kenyans came in. Because this golden age of vernacular papers—it would not have happened without Asians. [April]&nbsp;Ah. Asians. So where do Asians come in? [Stoneface] So it’s like this. Imagine you’re a guy in Mathare. You want to upload a music video, or maybe write out a message and post on social media. But you yourself don’t have a computer. So of course you go see your boy at the cyber. Maybe you pay, or maybe he does you a favor and let’s you off this time. Then you use his computer to do your thing, maybe post the video or put out some music, to the internet. [April] Ok I see. So the Asians were like the cyber. They owned the printing press, where they did commercial printing jobs, but they would also let African publishers use them to print their own newspapers. [Stoneface] Yeah. But it was hard to make any money selling newspapers, so sometimes the Africans would default on their payments, and the Indians would be like, “I’ll only help you ‘this one time,’ bro.” So this entire “world” of publishing was often just people going from one printer to the other, back and forth from printer to publisher, from editor to journalist, just people going round and round. [April]&nbsp;Ah, I see. So it was quite….fluid? Quite collaborative. [Stoneface] Yes, a lot of collaboration and mixing. Plus, at that time, Indians were coming back and forth from India to Kenya a lot. They were bringing equipment, but they were also bringing “master printers,” who had a lot of expertise on the technology side of printing. [April] It also seems kind of like...no one really owns anything? Like it wasn’t like today, where you have these few major media houses owned by nani or nani. You have lots of papers where it wasn’t even clear who “owned” it or who was working on it. The printers weren’t the same people as the editors.&nbsp; For example, there was a time that Mumenyeri was printed by a company owned by Oginga Odinga and Ramogi Achieng Oneko. They also printed Mwathia (Kikamba), Mulinavosi (Kimaragoli), Radioposta (Kiswahili), Mwalimu (Khamisi’s paper), and Uhuru wa Afrika (Ngei’s paper). Odinga and Oneko made no profit from these, but saw it as their “contribution to the cause of African independence”. But the flatbed printer that they were using was sold to them by the Daily Chronicle, the paper that Pinto wrote for. [Stoneface] Yes, and that is exactly why it was difficult for the British to clamp down. Journalists, editors, printers—African and Asian—they would move around constantly. This made it hard to pin down. Plus, they’d write in so many different languages: English, Swahili, Gujarati, Kikuyu, Konkani, Kikamba, Dholuo, Kimeru, Maragoli, etc etc… [April] Were all of these papers, like, radical? [Stoneface] Definitely not. For example, the Indian-owned papers were quite divided on the issue of race. Some supported racial segregation. As tensions were rising and change was in the air, this was a time when the Indian community was having to decide where they would stand on the issue of African nationalism. Most, especially those in the leadership at the Indian Congress, were very conservative. They did not want drastic change, and they certainly did not support independence. But other young, militant Indian-Kenyans stood in solidarity with—and we should talk more about this word “solidarity” later in the episode—Others stood in solidarity with Africans. One of these papers was called the Colonial Times. It claimed to be “Africa’s largest selling Indian weekly,” with a circulation of 10,000 papers per week. It was started in 1933 by an Indian-Kenyan called Vidyarthi. (Later, Pinto would also write for them.) The Colonial Times was written in Gujarati and English. And it was very radical. In fact, it was so radical that the British wrote that Indian papers like the Colonial Times were “egging on” Africans to participate in dangerous activities like Mau Mau. The British called these papers “irresponsible publications.” In 1947, the government arrested Vidyarthi and convicted him of sedition. The Colonial Times was handed over to his brother, but his brother was much more moderate, more conservative, and the whole spirit of the paper changed. So Pinto partnered with Harun and others to start their own paper, called the Daily Chronicle. Pinto resigned his job at the East African Indian National Congress to become editor of the Daily Chronicle. But even while he was working at the East African Indian National Congress, Pinto was already actively involved in helping other African newspapers. It’s important to understand that not all African-owned papers were the same.&nbsp; Besides bigger papers like the Colonial Times or Mumenyeri, there were many, many small newspapers that were for the everyday man, the poorest and for the landless ahoi that we mentioned in the last episode. Most of these papers were in Kikuyu. These were much more radical. They incited people to action. They even invited people to violence. They encouraged people to join Mau Mau. Many of these weren’t even written by educated people. Some were written by&nbsp; fundis. They also weren’t always necessarily true, definitely not fact-checked. At the time, Pinto was at East African Indian National Congress office which had a cyclostyle (old duplicating machine). He’d type up these small radical papers and copied them on the hand-turned cyclostyle. The British would target these small broadsheets, the radical ones, and ban them. But then two weeks later, you’d see the same paper but under a different name. Copied copied copied. Banned. Pop up. Copied copied copied. Banned again. Pop up. Then copied copied copied. You remember, in Episode 2, when we talked about the gruesome murders carried out by the Mau Mau? Especially when white settlers were the victims. Well, the British realized that it wouldn’t be enough to keep playing this cat-and-mouse game with all the small papers. Ban, pop up. Ban, pop up. The British realized that they were losing the information war. The British knew the power of media. Pinto also tried to start his own printing press, one that didn’t have to make money but was dedicated to amplifying the voice of Africans who could not afford to print their own papers. We have a document where one of Pinto’s applications for a printing license was rejected by the government, saying it was clear that he was going to use it for subversive purposes. In 1952, When the State of Emergency was declared, the government decided it could not control these papers anymore. They banned all the newspapers. Only a couple exceptions. The golden age of the vernacular paper in Kenya was over. It would never be the same again. Right before the state of emergency, Muoria had just happened to have travelled to London. At this time, they were really targeting journalists, editors, publishers. Fighters of the information war. Muoria knew that if he were to remain in Kenya, he would most certainly be imprisoned, detained, and quite possibly killed. He would end up living almost his entire life living in exile, returning to Kenya only once before he died. Pinto, however, was still in Nairobi, when he was helping Mau Mau, advocating for land reform, printing all of these illegal papers. And, of course, we know that Pinto was arrested, jailed, and taken to Manda Island. In the beginning of this episode, we said we would talk about two journalists, who started out as two boys. We spoke about Muoria. But now it’s time to talk about the other one. That was, of course, Pio Gama Pinto. If you go to Manda Island today, you’ll see giant wave-breakers by the water. These huge, huge boulders of coral that have been moved to the edge of the water. They were all carried by hand by Mau Mau detainees. In those four years at Manda, Pio suffered. Once you reached the detention centre, you did not know if you would leave on your feet or inside a coffin. Or maybe you would never leave. Maybe you would be buried in a pit in the sand, a shallow grave—which is what the guards often threatened to do. When Pio first arrived at Manda, he saw that the conditions at the camp were so inhumane that, he staged a hunger strike. Refused to eat—in protest. One day, two days, three days. Nothing happened. Four days. Five days. The authorities didn’t even seem to notice. Six days. Seven days. Eight days. Nine days, still without food. It was only on the ninth day that Pio realized the authorities didn’t care if even he starved himself to death. Nothing was going to change. Pio’s family would send him some small money for cigarettes, but he would always give it all away. The “special rations” he received because he was an Asian—he gave away, whenever he had the chance. Even the letters that his wife wrote to him; he shared those too. He shared everything. Ramogi Achieng Oneko was a good friend of Pio. Oneko was one of the Kapenguria Six who was detained with Pio in Manda. Oneko says that he chose to be “Treasurer” for Pio’s cigarette money, in order to stop Pio from quickly giving away everything he received. He was only half-joking: Pio really did give away everything he had. That was just who he was. On the day that Pio was released from Manda, he surprised everyone by walking out barefoot. Kumbe he had already given his shoes away to someone who was released earlier. Pio tried on Oneko’s shoes but decided against taking them, saying “You see, Ramogi, no one will notice my bare feet, whereas you would shock so many if you were released today without shoes!” That was just Pio. While at Manda, Pio was given an office job working for the Officer in Charge, since, as a journalist, he had secretarial and clerical skills. At first, other detainees thought that Pio would use this privilege to cooperate with the authorities and get an early release. Many other detainees had done just that. But not Pio. Even when the Special Security teams interrogated him to confess, using forms of psychological torture… even when they offered him an early release or a one-way ticket to India… he did not bend. He did not forsake his comrades. While Pio was in detention at Manda Island, his father fell ill in Nairobi. Pio begged the authorities for the chance to go and see him. After all, his father had worked loyally for the colonial government for thirty years. But the authorities refused. Pio’s father died in Nairobi in 1957. When Pio received the news, he sobbed and cried. Oneko said it was the only time he ever saw Pio completely break down. [April] Stoneface, there’s one word I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. A word which you mentioned earlier in this episode. Solidarity. [Stoneface] Solidarity… Yes I’d mentioned that there were certain Asians like Pinto who were “in solidarity” with Africans when Africans were oppressed. So let’s break down what this word means. [April] So in this word solidarity, you have the word solid. If you have many individuals, we are weaker when we’re separate. But when we come together to form a solid community—to solidify—then we are hard to break. [Stoneface] But I think what’s more important is that it’s not about being in a group where everyone is the same, and everyone has the same interests. It’s about standing with someone else when they are hurting, even if you are not. You stand with them in solidarity simply because they are your brother or sister—not because it helps you personally. For example, me I am an able-bodied person. I do not have physical disabilities. But we have brothers and sisters who do. To be in solidarity with them means to back them up, stand alongside themstand with them. So when they have something to say, their message is louder because many, many are standing with them, as one single solid unit. [April] I think if there’s one word that gets to the heart of Pio and what he believed, it is solidarity. What’s in it for him? He’s an educated, privileged Indian. At a time when it was so difficult for anyone to go to school. What good did it do him to spend all those nights late at the office copying these small kikuyu papers? It didn’t do him any good. But he could see that his brothers and sisters were not free. So he felt that he was not free. [Stoneface] Until everyone is free, no one is free. That is solidarity. But, that’s the thing. Where did this come from? Why was he like this even? This is something that his wife had a lot of time to wonder about. When he was at Manda. Because they had just gotten married a few months before he was detained. Emma. Let’s give her a bit of an intro first. The year was 1953. September. Jacaranda season in Nairobi. It was Emma’s first time in Kenya. She had flown over from India to visit her twin sister Joyce, who had just married a Goan man working in the Kenyan civil service. Emma was beautiful, with strong, straight brows and a gentle smile. She had a good head on her shoulders. She was whip-smart, and stood her ground. You know the story—a beautiful, intelligent, single woman arriving in Kenya? Of course Goan families had to start making “inquiries.” Pio’s father was eager for the two to meet. He was getting worried about Pio’s political activities and thought that marriage would “settle” him. So Pio’s brother Rosario contacted the husband of Emma’s sister Joyce—and the two arranged to meet. At the time, Pio was 26 years old. He was cut like an athlete (she said “he liked to keep his muscles”), and he was indeed an accomplished runner, at one point chosen to represent Kenya at the Commonwealth Games. But Emma found him...unlike other Goan men. He was sharp; at the time, he was a journalist, writing about social change for a radical newspaper. He was driven. Hardworking. Humble. And he was invariably kind, so generous, with an easy laugh. Emma had been told by whispering Goans that Pio was “politically active” and a “communist”—all meant to be bad things. Even while they were courting, he made it clear where his heart and mind truly lay: to help the Kenyan people. “Pio was honest in a funny way,” Emma said. “He told me he did not make much to support me and I should therefore start thinking about getting a job myself!” It was clear to her that he “was not a marrying-kind.” Later, she would often wonder what made him decide to marry after all, when it was so clear that his first love was his “cause.” Still, despite these very honest “terms and conditions,” Emma was dazzled by Pio. And besides, she felt that, if they married, perhaps she might “bring him back to the church.” The two agreed to marry. And that was that. They were engaged in October, and within the three months that Emma had on her visitors visa, she was married. They honeymooned in Jinja. Once they returned to Nairobi, Emma realized that Pio would remain true to his word. Their life was not comfortable. They stayed in a 1-room bedsitter at Fitz de Souza’s house (Fitz’s parents stayed in the main house). The 4-ft by 4-ft kitchen had only a single-burner stove. The toilet was a hole in the ground. Emma’s parents flew in from India to visit the newlywed couple. When they saw the conditions in which their newlywed daughter was living, they were shocked. Had they given their daughter over to a life of poverty? They gifted the young couple a car, a washing machine, and some cash. Later, Pio sadly confessed that he used some of that money to make a down-payment on a printing press. Hardly any printing presses then were owned by Africans, and Pio wanted to operate one as “the voice of the people.” Emma knew then that she would be sharing her husband with the entire country. Even in those early months, he was like a flitting shadow, always moving, always working. He was barely ever in their tiny little bedsitter. He barely slept. Pio separated his life into compartments and kept them sealed. He told Emma very little about his “political work.” He kept the two worlds apart, made sure they did not touch. But his work would do more than just touch Emma. It would change her life, shape her life. Only a few months after Pio and Emma were married, Pio was arrested. They held Pio at Nairobi Prison for a brief period. Pio’s friend Fitz de Souza took Emma to see Pio there. After that day, she did not know when she would see her husband again. So this was the life she had married into. From Nairobi, Pinto was transferred to Fort Jesus in Mombasa, and then to Manda Island. Manda Island, where the “active terrorists” were held. Maybe she would never see Pio again. The printing press, which Pio painstakingly bought with their wedding money, was lost after his arrest. Not even one full year had passed since Emma arrived in Kenya for the first time. And now she was alone in Nairobi. She wasn’t prepared to, and didn’t have any way to, make an income. She lived with Pio's parents, who were not well off and stayed in a one-room building. For Emma, those years were hard. During those first four years of her marriage to Pio, while he was in detention, Emma spent a lot of time reading. She wanted to understand why he was in politics for a country that was not his. [April] Emma spent a lot of time thinking about, where did this come from? Why was he like this? Many other Indian kenyans at the time were not in solidarity with Africans. Even other Africans weren’t in solidarity with Africans fighting for freedom. So what happened in the childhood of Pio that he became this way? So I was actually able to reach out to Linda Gama Pinto, who is Pio’s eldest daughter. She lives in Canada, which is where the family moved to after Pio was assassinated. Linda was only six when her father died, so she doesn’t have very many memories of him, but she also has had an entire lifetime to wonder the same questions: why her father was this way? So I asked her this question. Where does this come from? She said, that is the great mystery. [Linda] His father and mother were very, very bourgeois, I would say, in their attitudes, in their ambitions. They were really the epitome of bourgeois in the most classical sense. Of shallow. Of appearances. Of status. Of ancestry. He loved them dearly, but everything that I’ve heard about them from people is that they were really not people of grand vision. Not people of great compassion. No. So where does it come from? I have no idea. [April] Pio is the second boy in today’s story. Pio was born in Nairobi, but when he was 8, he was sent to India. Until he was 16. He was alone. [Linda] I don’t know what that does to a human being. To be dislocated for such a long time from your blood relatives, from your family. Maybe when he was young he spent time, like Muoria, gazing at the sky, wondering what makes a place home? What makes someone your brother or sister?&nbsp; [April] Maybe it had something to do with, that when young Pio was sent away, from everyone and everything that he knew. To India, a place where he looked like everyone else, but felt he was a stranger. Like Muoria, Pinto grew up during a time of big change. Maybe being in India alone made it so that he was not an extension of his parents, but rather, able to form his own thoughts. To chase his own big ideas. Maybe he was like young Muoria in that sense. It wasn’t as if he hated his parents. But he was always looking forward. He was always thinking about, like Muoria when he was sitting there on the grass, not herding the sheep…. Why are things the way they are? Could they be different? What must happen to make sure that my brothers and sisters can be as free as I am? How we can all be freer, together? &nbsp; [Linda] My father was not a reminiscer. I think he was somebody who was always looking forward. What's the next plan? Next activity? How do we resolve this problem or that problem, or identifying the problem? he was always driving somewhere to do something, not sitting, talking about anything about the good ol’ days. There were no good ol’ days for him. [April] We don’t know much about Pio’s inner thoughts during that time. Like Linda said, Pio never dwelled on the past. He didn’t talk much about his past. But maybe Pio’s turning point has to do with one man Pio met when he had just returned to Nairobi. Another Indian-Kenyan, like him. A man who brought together Asian and African workers—in solidarity—to raise their fists against not only their bosses but the colonizers. For one important week in May 1950, these workers—the poor, the unemployed, the criminals, all of those who live in Eastlands—joined together and shut down the entire city of Nairobi. It was something unlike anything that had ever happened before. Pinto saw that. Maybe that was the moment he knew that there were only two choices. Stand in solidarity with your comrades. Or stand by and watch. We know what he chose, and we knew that he never, ever turned back. [April] Last year, in 2020, Emma Gama Pinto and the families of her three daughters Linda, Malusha, and Tereshka celebrated the 33rd anniversary of landing on the docks of Montreal. They set up a Zoom call with all three families and sang rounds of “CA-NA-DA,” the Centennial Song.&nbsp; Because of the pandemic, Emma was moved from an assisted living residence to the home of her eldest daughter, Linda, which turned out to be a true blessing. Emma’s 2020 was spent enjoying almost daily video calls with her daughters and her grandchildren, all in different time zones. On 28 October, 2020, Emma Gama Pinto died peacefully at the age of 92 in Ottawa, surrounded by her loved ones. Though I could not imagine a more beautiful way for her to spend her final days, the news of her death broke our hearts. Stoneface and I had been looking forward to sending Emma photos and notes from listeners who will have been deeply impacted by her husband’s work. But, unfortunately, it was not to be. But then again, I also suppose Emma Gama Pinto is really the last person to whom any explanation of the huge difference Pio made in this country needs to be made. Although we would have loved for her to hear the voices of those “thousand beacons that arise from the spark he bore”—that’s the epitaph engraved on Pio’s headstone—we know that Emma understands, more than anyone else in this world, how the price which both of them paid for a better Kenya will lead to the continuation of the fight for freedom. In our correpondence, Linda Gama Pinto wrote this to me: “Mum was a powerful match to my father. Her strength, independence, non-conformist tendencies, and intelligence freed Pio to pursue his vocation: justice for the Kenyan people. Without self-pity, she was proud of his work and his sacrifice. To those who did not know her, she was ‘the wife of....’ But to those who did know her, she was Emma! Fearless!” ReferencesDe Souza, Fitzval. Forward to Independence: My Memoirs. 2018.Durrani, Shiraz, editor. Pio Gama Pinto: Kenya’s Unsung Martyr. Vita Books, 2018.Frederiksen, Bodil Folke. “Print, newspapers, and audiences in colonial Africa: African and Indian improvement, protest, and connections.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 81, no. 1, 2011, pp. 155–72.Frederiksen, Bodil Folke. “‘The Present Battle Is The Brain Battle’: Writing and Publishing a Kikuyu Newspaper in the Pre-Mau Mau Period in Kenya.” Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, edited by Karen Barber, Indiana University Press, 2006. Frederiksen, Bodil Folke. “Writing, Self‐realization and Community: Henry Muoria and the Creation of a Nationalist Public Sphere in Kenya.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, vol. 18, no. 2, Jan. 2006, pp. 150–65. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1080/1013929X.2006.9678253. Gadsden, Fay. “The African Press in Kenya, 1945–1952.” The Journal of African History, vol. 21, no. 4, Oct. 1980, pp. 515–35. Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/S0021853700018727. Gadsden, Fay. “The African Press in Kenya, 1945-1952.” The Journal of African History, vol. 21, no. 4, 1980, pp. 515–35.Muoria-Sal, Wangari, and Henry Muoria, editors. Writing for Kenya: The Life and Works of Henry Muoria. Brill, 2009.Nyabola, Nanjala. Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era Is Transforming Kenya. ZED, 2018. Odinga, Jaramogi Oginga. Not Yet Uhuru. Heinemann Educational Books, 1967.Osborne, Myles. “‘The Rooting Out of Mau Mau from the Minds of the Kikuyu is a Formidable Task’: Propaganda and the Mau Mau War.” The Journal of African History, vol. 56, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 77–97. wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. J. Currey ; Heinemann, 1986. https://untileverypod.com/Episode-5-Trade-Unionist Wed, 29 Dec 2021 14:03:30 +0000 Until Everyone Is Free https://untileverypod.com/Episode-5-Trade-Unionist Episode 5 Trade Unionist You've arrived in the Happy Valley. You're in the Kaloleni Valley, between Shauri Moyo and Pumwani, not far from the old Nairobi railway station. Some call this place a "waste land"—it's by the river, you can't build here, it's dirty and polluted. It's sort of empty, a sad piece of land. It's a no-man's land. But right now, in this particular moment in May 1950, it is not a no-man's land. Rather, the Happy Valley is an "every-man's" land. The place is filled with people. Thousands. There’s dancing, singing, chanting, speakers with megaphones. What's going on? A huge bonfire burns in the centre of the Happy Valley. It has burned for days—day and night, never extinguishing. Every so often, men refuel it with engine oil from railway workshops nearby. The bonfire is a signal. But of what? You see a young man speaking through a megaphone. "We will not be treated like children," he says. "We will continue for one year if we have to." The crowd cheers. You think to yourself, there could be three thousand, four thousand, maybe even five thousand people here. You see young people, old people. Women and men. Some groups of youths walk from community to community, telling people to join. Join your brothers and sisters. Join in solidarity. Join us as we strike against the government. We spoke before on this show about how some chapters of history are erased. This is one of them. Did you know about the fire that burned in the Happy Valley of Kaloleni for days and days? Did you know about the time that workers from all sectors, from all tribes, came together and brought the city to a grinding halt? Did you know about the General Strike of Nairobi? While the General Strike was organized by trade union leaders, most of the people who took part in it—who gathered by the bonfire and raised their fists in the air—they weren't cardholding members of official unions at all. They were unemployed youths. People employed in casual labor. Landless ahoi who were pushed out of reserves. Sex workers. Petty thieves. Criminals, even. They were outcasts. I don't need to tell you all that there are two Nairobis. Us in Mathare understand that there is one Nairobi for the rich and another for the poor. Our Nairobi is "outcast Nairobi." Like us here in Mathare, the people who don't have jobs, who don't get water, who grow up around trash and not trees. Where we live, the Constitution doesn't work. The heart of the Nairobi General Strike in 1950, was right here in Outcast Nairobi. In Kaloleni Valley. In Eastlands. And that's because the foundation of this strike was people like us: "Outcast Nairobi." You've seen workers' strikes before: teachers' strikes, nurses' strikes. But a general strike is when workers from across different sectors all come together and demand big changes, not just better conditions for one single factory. In the Nairobi General Strike, people were striking for better conditions for Africans, especially the poor. They were demanding better sanitation in the black informal settlements, they were demanding water be provided, they were demanding for jobs. But they were asking for much more too. They were asking for something that scared the colonial administration. Freedom. The strikers saw the connection between the bad conditions that Africans in Nairobi lived in and worked in...and colonization. The Nairobi General Strike was an important point on the path to independence for Kenya. The sight of thousands of people, gathered together, singing and dancing and demanding for their freedom, this was an image that struck fear into the hearts of the colonial government. Seeing people united. Seeing that people recognized who their true enemy was. The colonizers knew that, if they wanted to stop this movement from growing, they could not just do small small things. They needed to extinguish this movement completely. [THEME] In 1965, only two years after Kenya gained its independence, Pio Gama Pinto was shot and killed on his driveway in Nairobi. This was Kenya’s first political assassination. My name is Stoneface, host of Until Everyone Is Free. In this series, me and our producer April Zhu will tell the story of Pio Gama Pinto, a Kenyan freedom fighter. But we tell the story of Pinto to answer a very important question: How did the country of Kenya become free…. Without the people of Kenya becoming free? Pinto was an ally of the Mau Mau. He was an advocate for land justice. He was a radical journalist. He was a political mastermind. But among his most important work was the work he did as a trade union supporter. A lot of people know about how the Mau Mau helped Kenya get its independence. But not so many people know about how the trade unions helped Kenya get to independence. Not so many people know about the Nairobi General Strike of 1950, which was one of the first moments where Africans and Asians came together to say: the colonizers must go. From 1939 until the year of the strike, 1950, the population of Nairobi doubled. It was overcrowded, and the African settlements were in bad shape. Unemployment was everywhere. World War II had just ended, the economy was bad. Britain was in debt and leaned on its colonies to help out. Things were getting more expensive quickly, even as wages remained the same. Farms were pressured to produce and produce and produce, in ways that degraded the soil and made it less fertile over time. Plus, a lot of the European settler farmers were now using machinery to farm, so they didn't need to employ as many Africans. So a lot of landless squatters (ahoi) who never had land to begin with and were now kicked off their reserves came to Nairobi to try to find work. At that time, where you stayed in Nairobi depended on the color of your skin. Africans stayed in places like Eastlands which were located on bad soil. Here, no public water was piped in, there was poor sewage. Mabati houses, impermanent structures. Not too different to what Mathare looks like today. Outcast Nairobi. Discontent among Outcast Nairobi was brewing, but what brought all of Outcast Nairobi together...were trade unions. [April] The first trade unions in Kenya began in the 1920s, with Asian railway workers. But those unions were not only limited to Asian workers, they were limited to just the railway industry and only focused on negotiating wages and working conditions. There was one Indian-Kenyan man who would change this. [Stoneface] Pio Gama Pinto? [April] No, not Pinto. We'll get to Pinto later. This man was among the most important figures in Kenya's history of labor organizing, someone who helped Kenyans recognize that their enemies were not workers of another race, or workers of another tribe, but rather the people at the top—the people who were profiting from their poverty. This man was called Makhan Singh. [April]&nbsp;Many Africans resented Asians, believing that Asians were taking away jobs that could be for Africans, or that Asians enjoyed special privileges over Africans. But Singh believed that our similarities as working people were greater than our differences in race and culture. He understood that, if we stand side by side, we could be powerful enough to confront the real enemies: those exploiting all of us. But this doesn’t work if only a few workers stand together. Or only the most exploited workers stand together. Or even if it excludes unemployed people. No, it is powerful only when everyone stands together. And how do you organize everyone to stand together? You need a union. This is why, in 1934, Singh founded the Labour Trade Union of East Africa (LTUEA). It was the first labor union that united both Asian and African workers. Change was in the air. Progress was in the air. In the years after World War II, the spirit of workers' strikes was in the air, all over Africa. First, Uganda and Nigeria in 1945. After that, Tanganyika. Then Zanzibar. Dakar and Dar es Salaam. South Africa, Gold Coast, and Mozambique. Around that time, there was a big general strike in Mombasa, organized by the African Workers Federation. Workers in Nairobi heard about the Mombasa Strike. They heard how the entire port, the entire city came to a standstill for days. They heard that Asian and African workers stood together. Over 6000 workers. They heard how the striking workers were not only making union demands, but actually calling for an end to colonial rule. They heard that striking workers gathered every day under a large tree, and that they called this place Ofisi ya Maskini. They thought, maybe we could do this too. The strike in Mombasa radicalized the workers in Nairobi. [April]&nbsp;But, first, let’s slow down. What does it mean to be radicalized? So, Stoneface. [Stoneface] Yeah yeah?[April] Who or what radicalised you?[Stoneface] So when I joined the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), I joined as a musical artist, so that I could do what I needed to get a bigger platform. But after some time, especially getting involved with the Mathare Green Movement,&nbsp; JJ (a community organizer in Mathare) encouraged me to also start coming to the MSJC Saturday meetings. So I prepared myself, got some lines ready, boom boom cha boom boom cha. Wrote them down in a notebook and put it in my bag. Got to the meeting on time and waited. The 2pm meeting started. After a while, I heard... “Comrades, power! POWER! Long live the spirit of Thomas Sankara! LONG LIVE! Long live the spirit of Pio Gama Pinto! LONG LIVE!” I asked myself, where does my music come in, into this “long live” stuff? So I thought, well let me stay a bit so I can understand what this is all about. After staying longer, I understood. Here, we were saying “long live” because of the struggle that we go through in the ghetto. The youths who have been killed, many who were murdered on the streets died ultimately because of joblessness.&nbsp; I could relate to this, to the struggle that we all face in the ghetto. I thought, ok I’m an artist, so I can speak on what’s happening in the community through art. So I eventually became the coordinator for Art for Social Change at MSJC. Later, I also realized, children need to be liberated too. So I also then became a coordinator for the MSJC Kids Club. On that note, I started to develop political consciousness. Eventually, it was me who was also saying, “Viva! Long live the spirit, long live! Let’s go, let’s move!” So this was my moment of radicalisation. [April] Political consciousness. That’s key. No one just emerges from the womb as a revolutionary. It’s kind of like this. All children, whether rich or poor, think that their life is normal. Then, people, when they get older, realize that not everyone grew up like them; they realize that life is not fair. But then, some people go beyond that. They see that life is not fair, but they also see who is causing this to happen. Who is oppressing them, their brothers and sisters, and causing them all to suffer. Causing them all to not be free. When they see this, they cannot unsee it. Not only can they not unsee it, these people then decide to do something about it. When they decide to do something about it, AND when doing something about it automatically puts them in opposition to those in power—that is called becoming radicalized. [Stoneface]&nbsp;The “brothers and sisters” part is important. It’s not like you’re sitting in your house alone in the dark reading about the government of Kenya, then you feel mad and that is called being radicalized. No. Radicalization is a social process. Radicalization requires that you find unity with your brothers and sisters—in a common oppressor. You understand that, in fighting a common enemy, you have more in common. [April]&nbsp;Right, so I see how this connects now to the strikes in Mombasa and Nairobi. Asian railroad workers, unemployed petty thieves, taxi drivers, sex workers, even higher-paid public workers—they are so different, but they made the connection that their common oppressor were the rich white men calling the shots. Making money from their labor. Keeping them poor. [Stoneface]&nbsp;—and when they saw the poor coming together like in the Mombasa strike, they realized they too could come together . They were radicalized. [April] Wow. ….Do we know what radicalized Pinto? [Stoneface] We don't know very much about what Pinto was thinking when he first got back to Kenya. But we do know that he did not immediately join the liberation struggle. In fact, when he got back to Kenya, he worked in Magadi as a clerk. Just, you know, writing stuff down, taking notes. Not anything very....revolutionary. Pinto had just been kicked out of India. He fled. Because you remember, at the time, he was working with freedom fighters in Goa, so much that both the British and the Portuguese colonizers issued warrants for his arrest, and threatened to detain him and send him to Cabo Verde. So, I don't know, we can only imagine what it was like for him. What was he thinking when he returned home to Kenya for the first time since he was 8? He had been so involved in the Indian freedom struggle, and all of that organizing, for what? Now he was starting over, in a place that should feel like home to him—he was born in Nairobi, after all—and yet, seemed so new. So different. [April]&nbsp;Maybe, during that year in Magadi, he wondered if he should just...lead a "normal" life. He was educated, after all. Perhaps he should just hold on to a stable job, maybe marry and raise a family. The things that his parents would have wanted him to do anyways. Being a freedom fighter in Goa had almost gotten him killed. Maybe this was the right time to start anew. [Stoneface] Well. One day, in 1949, Pinto went to town. Traveled from Magadi to Nairobi, on an outing. And it was there in Nairobi that he met none other....than Makhan Singh. [April] Ah hah. Okay. Okay. [Stoneface] They spoke only briefly, because Pinto had somewhere else to go after that. But they did speak. Pinto had some questions for Singh, who was older and had been involved in the trade union movement for longer. Singh saw some flecks of himself in the young Pinto—he could see even then that Pinto was a “freedom-loving man"—and at the same time, perhaps Pinto saw in the older Makhan Singh a glimpse of his potential future. An Indian-Kenyan who brought together the poor, workers, Africans and Asians, to all march side by side and demand freedom, together. Freedom from colonization. And freedom from poverty. When Pinto was a young boy studying in India, the union that Makhan Singh established—the one we mentioned earlier, the first union where African and Asian workers joined hands—organized a strike that lasted for 62 days. Our worker comrades! Come forward! March ahead! If you do not march ahead today, then remember that you will be crushed under the heels of capitalists tomorrow. Workers should have a united stand and should stand up strongly against the capitalists so that they should not ever have the courage to attempt to exploit workers again, nor to take away workers’ rights from them. They got a 8-hr work day and a wage increase of 15% to 25%. After that, the union gained many members in both Kenya and Uganda. By the time Pinto and Singh met in Nairobi, the LTUEA had grown to over 10,000 workers! Just months prior, Makhan Singh and Fred Kubai, another important leader in the trade union movement, founded the East African Trades Union Congress (EATUC). The EATUC—they were the ones who would organize the Nairobi General Strike the following year, 1950. So that day in Nairobi, Pinto asked Singh what a young man like him would need to do if he wanted to get involved in the liberation struggle. Singh told him he should get a certificate of permanent residence in Kenya, or else the government might deport him if he got in trouble. And that was that. Pinto had to go, he thanked Makhan Singh, and left him with some political magazines. The next time Makhan Singh would hear from Pinto, it would be in the form of a letter. A letter that Makhan Singh would receive while in detention in Lokitaung. Where Makhan Singh would be held for ten long years. Even before the Nairobi General Strike, the British colonial government saw the general strike in Mombasa. What they saw happen there frightened them, so the colonizers already began preparing to extinguish it. They decided to act before the strike would even happen. On Monday 15 May 1950, in the very early morning hours, the government arrested Makhan Singh and Fred Kubai. What the government didn't know is that, by doing this, they would actually set the strike into motion. The next day after Kubai and Singh were arrested, organizers announced that the general strike would begin the next day. They demanded the release of Kubai and Singh. They demanded 100 KSH minimum wage in the entire city. But they also had more general demands, like better water and sanitation in the settlements where Africans lived in Nairobi. And one important overall demand: “freedom for all workers and all the East African territories.” This was a turning point for many of Nairobi's workers. And, perhaps, this was Pinto's moment of radicalization: seeing Makhan Singh and Fred Kubai arrested by the police and jailed for organizing workers. Not long after the arrest, Pinto did all the things that Makhan Singh told him he would need to do if he wanted to be a part of Kenya's struggle for freedom. Pinto left his job in Magadi, he came to Nairobi, he got his certificate of permanent residence, and plunged into the freedom struggle. From this moment until the day of his assassination, Pinto never turned back. Tuesday, 16 May. Loudspeaker vans drove around the African settlements in Nairobi, spreading the word about the strike. Youths called "flying pickets" were going around, convincing people to join the strike by explaining what it was about. The bonfire in Kaloleni Valley was set and became the heart of the movement. The government responded in the same way it does today. Police shot teargas at the strikers at the Happy Valley. Police beat strikers and arrested many. But the bonfire kept burning, and the strike didn't just continue. It grew. Wednesday, 17 May. The workers at many bakeries, hotels, petrol stations in Nairobi also joined the strike, leaving those businesses at a standstill. City Council workers from the road, sewers, and other departments also joined. So did workers from East African Power and Lighting. So did workers from the Public Works Department. Workers were now also striking in Nakuru, Mombasa, Thika, Nyeri, and Nanyuki. Thursday, 18 May. Maize production control staff were out. Even though they were offered double pay, only 44 out of 700 showed up for work. The African staff at oil companies also joined the strike. Staff at the European boys schools. Many of the skilled workers and those essential to the functioning of the government—they were all on strike. Nairobi was brought to a screeching halt. The running battles between police and the strikers intensified. More tear gas. The government deployed an airplane to fly constantly over Happy Valley, sometimes flying very low, just skimming over the crowd. Still, the bonfire did not die. Strikers danced around the fire, they chanted. Organizers with loudspeakers spoke to the huge crowds at Happy Valley. One, called Maina Kabiru, was the one who shouted to the crowd, "We will not be treated like children! We will strike for a year if necessary!" The crowd roared in agreement. Later on, Kabiru was snatched from the crowd by police and detained. Friday, 19 May. The strike had now reached even Kisumu, Kakamega, and Kisii. In Nairobi, a 20-year-old Indian worker called Jarnial Singh Liddar, had gone to the rail yard and addressed a few hundred Africans during the lunch hour. He told them to return at 4pm. They did. Over 1000 railway workers had gathered. But by then, Liddar had been arrested. The next day, the rail yard workers went on strike. Saturday, 20 May. They downed tools in Nairobi's rail yards, maintenance workshops, and engineering depot. The government really began to panic "since the strike was now beginning to paralyse the infrastructure." At the airport in Eastleigh, many workers also striked, and this immobilized the entire airport too. Workers in military establishments also joined the strike. It was clear to the government by this point that the general strike was not just about higher minimum wage, not just about 14 days of leave per year. No, this strike was political. It was an uprising of Africans against an oppressive SYSTEM. Most of those striking didn’t even have jobs. It wasn’t about just better hours or salary raise, it was Africans saying, this system is chewing us up. We are not free in this system. We want to get free. And it was becoming obvious to everyone in Kenya that, when all workers came together in solidarity, the government looked very, very weak. And there was very little it could do besides shoot tear gas. But the tear gas would fade away with the wind. The bonfire did not fade away. Sunday, 21 May. The government was afraid that everything would turn upside-down and order would collapse in Nairobi. They decided that it was too dangerous to keep Makhan Singh in Nairobi. At 4:30am, they transferred him to Nyeri. Monday, 22 May. A new week. The strike was still on. Over 300 people had been arrested during this first week of the strike, but instead of frightening people off, it seemed to make them more angry. At the Bata Shoe Factory in Limuru, one thousand workers walked out. By Wednesday, 24 May, the strike was in full force in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Kakamega, Kisii, Nakuru, Thika, Nyeri, and Nanyuki. The government had never looked weaker. The people had never looked stronger. This could have been the end of colonial rule. But it wasn’t. And maybe that’s why so few of us have even heard about the Nairobi General Strike of 1950.[Stoneface] Why did the general strike fail? Or, even more general: why is it that living conditions in Nairobi today—poverty, poor sanitation, unemployment—is not so different to what people in 1950 rose up against? To understand this, we called on our friend Fello. [Felix] Hi, my name is Felix Omondi. [Stoneface] At the peak of the general strike in 1950, the government looked so weak and so scared. People power was so strong. What happened? [Felix]&nbsp;Well, as you know, the two key leaders of the EATUC, Fred Kubai and Makhan Singh, were already in detention. That’s what triggered the strike in the first place. But the strike organizers who took their place, they made a big mistake. [Stoneface] And what was that? [Felix]&nbsp;Well, the short answer is that they negotiated for some small gains, but they did not shift the balance of power between the poor and the rich. In the end, the people in power were still in power. They still owned all the land, all the money, all the companies. The strike was like pouring water over a hot pan, but the pan is still sitting on the jiko. It’ll still get hot again. [Stoneface]&nbsp;What do you mean by “the balance of power?” [Felix]&nbsp;To understand that, first we need to talk about the C-word. [Stoneface] Sea World, like the water thing? Or— [Felix] Capitalism. [Stoneface]&nbsp;Ahh.... [Felix]&nbsp;And no one understands capitalism better than a worker who is being exploited by it. [Felix] So let’s start with your name. What do you do, and for how long?[Eunice] I’m Eunice Akoth, I work as house help. I began in 2005. Eunice and I met in Mathare. She is currently unemployed, but before she worked at a place where she wasn’t paid fairly or on time. [Eunice] I started by cooking for a school where I was paid 4500 KES (~$45/month), but we were reaching almost one month where I was owed payment and the boss was not paying me. So I had to leave.If the workers’ strike was an example of what it looks like when workers are empowered, then Eunice’s case is what it looks like when workers have zero power. When their employers can do basically whatever they want. [Eunice] Sometimes you leave for work in the morning in the rain, then leave at 5pm again in the rain, you don’t even have bus fare, and your children are waiting for you at home, but you’re stranded. Sometimes there’s no money you can even send them so they can eat because you haven’t been paid. If Eunice is being treated so badly though, why doesn’t she just choose to do something else? No one has forced her to be a mamafua. Of course we know that’s a stupid question. She can work under bad conditions, or her children can starve—what “choice” does she really have? If she doesn’t accept bad working conditions, someone who is even more desperate than her will accept it. Generally speaking, in a capitalist system, the boss will only pay their workers the bare minimum. Any more will cut into their profits, unless there is something like laws, unions, or morals to make them pay more. But this is also why, left unchecked, there will always be mass unemployment. It is a necessary feature of capitalism. Because workers will always have to accept low wages when there are always ten other workers even more desperate than they are, ready to replace them at their job. The only way to get around this is to unionize. When the boss realizes they can’t just replace one worker with another one, only then will conditions improve. But, right now in Kenya, unions are more comfy with bosses than with workers, so they don’t do anything. Technically there are labor laws in Kenya. There is a minimum wage in Nairobi. It’s something like 10,000 to 13,000 per month. But, of course, that doesn’t matter. For househelps who work in Eastleigh, their pay is some of the lowest in the city.Eunice told me there were times when people from the Ministry of Labor would come around Eastleigh and Pangani to ask around how much they were being paid, if it met the minimum wage, and if the working conditions were favorable. You know, like sick days and leave. But their employers would bribe the askaris with like 200 bob to not allow the guys from the Ministry into their compound and interview the women. [Stoneface] Ok, yeah yeah. This all makes sense. What I still don’t understand though is… what do these working conditions have to do with political power? [Felix] Yeah, good question. So, to understand that, we need to understand: who owns the means of production?&nbsp; To explain this, I spoke to another worker. [Jemo] All my names or just one? [Felix] Whatever you feel comfortable with. [Jemo] Ok let me just give one then. My name is Jemo, and I work at a hotel/bar in Westlands. (Because of the pandemic, Jemo was let go from work and has not found a stable job since then.)&nbsp; [Felix] Jemo is a bartender, which means that the working hours are irregular and long. On peak days like Thursday through Saturday, sometimes he works for 15 to 18 hours. No breaks for food. If he needs to use the bathroom, he has to kubaliana na co-worker to cover him while he's out. He works and works—obviously he works very, very hard—but he can barely cover his costs. And we're not talking about a lavish lifestyle, Jemo lives right here in Mathare. But the hotel where he works? That hotel is profiting. The owner of that hotel is profiting. [Stoneface] I mean, si the point of a business is to make a profit? [Felix] Yes. And that's the point. The worker will never get back the full value of their labor in wages, because if they did, the company they work for would not make a profit. The whole point of capitalism is to take advantage of the vulnerability of workers. Turning them into slaves to wage labor. [Stoneface] What do you mean slaves to wage labor? [Felix] Think about it like this. Jemo is paid barely enough to cover his fare. After food, after bills at home for basic things, there is hardly any money left. He's trapped in a cycle where he can’t not work. But even if he works so, so hard, 18 hour days, he can barely survive. He’s working, the business is thriving, but Jemo remains as poor, as vulnerable, as ever. He’s not free. This is because Jemo does not own the means of production. If he and his fellow workers owned the hotel, then the profits would be shared; that’s a co-operative. But he is a wage worker. He has a choice which is not really a choice at all: work like a dog, or starve. Is that freedom? Or slavery? [Stoneface] Freedom... I've not thought about wages and exploitation in terms of "freedom." This is reminding me of the first "salaries" or the first wages in Kenya. It reminds me of how, before the colonizers came to Kenya, there were different ways to make a living and live on the land. But then, the colonizers needed to figure out a way to get cheap labor for the farms on the land they just stole. So how did they do that? They created a hut tax. In some ways, they invented this idea of "bills." In order to pay this hut tax with money, Africans had to find a job. [Felix] Yes, you've made the most important connection. That's the connection between colonization and capitalism. [Stoneface] —and because the farms were of course meant to make money, make tons of profit for the owners of the farm, not the workers who tilled the fields, of course those workers would be paid as little as possible. [Felix] Exactly. [Stoneface] And they were trapped in the same cycle that Jemo finds himself trapped in today. Working day in and day out, on his feet all day with barely enough time to eat, yet can barely cover his costs. All while the boss makes profits. [Felix] Yes. Colonization is a capitalist project. In the beginning of the episode, you'd mentioned that at the end of World War II, Britain needed money because it was in debt after fighting an expensive war. Where did it extract that from? Well, first, from British workers. But once it extracted everything it could from them, it turned to colonies, like Kenya, who could produce for every cheaper than British workers would. At the end of the day, if colonies did not help Britain make money, if colonies were not strategically located to help Britain maintain political and economic power, then there would be no point in having the colonies. [Stoneface (unrecorded)] Makhan Singh understood this. Fred Kubai understood this. They understood that what workers in Nairobi were striking against—poor sanitation, no water in African settlements, poverty, unemployment, disease—that all of these "economic" conditions could not be separated from "politics." Could not be separated from who is in power and who owns the means of production. If workers wanted to improve those conditions, they needed to get rid of the colonizers. The colonizers who owned the companies that exploited African workers. The colonizers who owned farmed that employed Africans who had no choice because they had to pay hut and poll tax. The colonizers who created those taxes.&nbsp; That’s why Makhan Singh and Fred Kubai said: The real solution to the problem is not this or that small reform but the complete independence and sovereignty of the East African territories and the establishment of all these territories of democratic government elected by the people and responsible to the people of those territories only. Africans needed economic freedom. Africans needed political freedom. The two cannot be separated. This is the reason why you see some of the same faces in the trade union movement and the radical wing of the new Kenyan Government after independence. People like Pinto, Bildad Kaggia, Fred Kubai, J.D. Kali. &nbsp; This is what Pinto told dockworkers at Mombasa, after he had been released from detention. They had gathered to hear him speak, because they admired his role in the struggle. Both before and after independence, Pinto would be deeply involved in the trade union movement. For him, the rights of the working poor and unemployed, would be central. Until everyone was free from poverty, no one was free. Africans needed economic freedom. Africans needed political freedom. The two cannot be separated. But, back to 1950. The General Strike. Unfortunately, the other strike organizers did not understand this. They got some “small reforms” and accepted those. They did not recognize that Outcast Nairobi, the people who had been on the frontlines of this strike—the jobless, the landless, the people driven into lives of crime to make a living—did not get what they striked for. Outcast Nairobi wasn’t satisfied. This outcome wasn’t going to help them. Some of these people decided that the only way forward would be joining the Mau Mau. The only way forward would have to be violence. [Stoneface (unrecorded)] What do you think of when you hear this sentence: “Poverty is violence.” [April] Hm. Are you talking about physical violence, like police beating people in the ghetto? [Stoneface] There’s that. Obviously people who are poor see more physical violence. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about: Poverty itself is a form of violence. Someone here in Mathare is born into a life of disease, no education, sexual assault, precarity. A life of dead ends. What ends up killing you might be HIV/AIDS, or a fire. Or a small injury but you can’t treat it but now you can’t work. Or other poor relatives, whom you have to support. Even though no one person is physically hurting them, this person has been beaten down by the entire system. Every day they go hungry, every day they live as slaves to wage labor, they are being struck by the system. Their poverty is breaking down their body, killing them. Leave alone the police bullet. You’ve heard people say, violence is not the answer. But what about the violence of poverty. The violence of poverty that poor people go through every single day, for all of their lives. “Violence is not the answer.” That’s easy to say when you don’t live in Mathare. When you don’t live a life of everyday violence. When you are not attacked by the violence of poverty. It’s hard to tell someone who is not free to say that they can only use nonviolence to get free. The Trinidadian-American civil rights organizer Kwame Ture once said this: “Nonviolence only works when your oppressor has a conscience.”In 1958, when the Kapenguria Six were convicted, they were taken to the prison at Lokitaung. They looked across a wide valley and, in the distance, they saw an Asian man waving his hands at them. They thought, that must be Makhan Singh. By that time, Makhan Singh had already been imprisoned for 8 years. Since the Nairobi General Strike. Makhan Singh would serve the longest detention sentence of anyone in Kenya’s liberation struggle. Ten and a half years, many of those years completely alone. Singh went on three hunger strikes, each one longer than the one before. His last hunger strike lasted 21 days. One day—when he was in Lokitaung I think—Singh received a book. It was An Outline History of the World by H.G. Wells. It was from Pinto, written “from your Nairobi friends.” On it also written two lines, something like “It is the man who not only shows the way to others but also to himself walks over the same.” Singh thought, this was how Pinto thought and acted too. The gift reminded him that the fight was still going on, beyond the walls of his desert detention camp. That his comrades in Nairobi were fighting the fight that he had begun years before. That he was not forgotten. A luta continua. In 1961, Makhan Singh was released. By that time, Kenya was well on its way to independence. It was a beautiful moment for the new country. It was a victory not only for the Mau Mau forest fighters, but also those who had spent years in detention. It was a victory for those who had participated in the strikes that paved the way for independence. There was not one single group that could claim responsibility for Kenya’s independence. This fight required unity and solidarity and sacrifice. But. The very things that paved the way for Kenya’s independence—unity and solidarity and sacrifice—would soon be replaced by others. Greed, tribal divisions, individualism. Even though colonizers left the country, many Kenyans got poorer. Unemployment increased. Kenyans began demanding, “wapi uhuru?” We are still not free. Independence was not decolonization. ReferencesDe Souza, Fitzval. Forward to Independence: My Memoirs. 2018.Durrani, Shiraz, editor. Pio Gama Pinto: Kenya’s Unsung Martyr. Vita Books, 2018. Durrani, Shiraz. Kenya’s War of Independence: Mau Mau and Its Legacy of Resistance to Colonialism and Imperialism, 1948-1990. Vita Books, 2018. ---, editor. Makhan Singh: A Revolutionary Kenyan Trade Unionist. Vita Books, 2015. ---. People’s Resistance to Colonialism and Imperialism in Kenya and Reflections on Resistance. Vita Books, 2018. Lubembe, Clement K. Trade Unions in Kenya’s War of Independence. Vita Books, 2018. The Inside of Labour Movement in Kenya. Equatorial Publishers, 1968. Stichter, Sharon B. “Workers, Trade Unions, and the Mau Mau Rebellion.” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines, vol. 9, no. 2, 1975, p. 259. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2307/484083. https://untileverypod.com/Episode-6-Political-Mastermind Sun, 29 May 2022 20:46:44 +0000 Until Everyone Is Free https://untileverypod.com/Episode-6-Political-Mastermind Episode 6 Political Mastermind William Hollingsworth Attwood. Journalist turned diplomat. William Attwood was a U.S. ambassador in Guinea, when Sekou Toure was president, but Attwood got polio and had to return to America. He then worked for U.S. President John F Kennedy, he says, to negotiate with Fidel Castro. But then John F Kennedy was assassinated. After that, the Foreign Service gave Attwood a choice for where he could work next. He could be ambassador in Chile or in Kenya. Attwood chose Kenya in a heartbeat. For many reasons. Number 1, he said, Kenya had just gotten independence. "Here was a country about to undergo the birth pangs and growing pains of independence. There would be problems—the kind I enjoyed coping with." He made sure he said "Kehn-ya" and not "Keeenya" like the colonial British. And so, in 1964, William Attwood became the first U.S. ambassador to KEHN-ya. As the first ambassador to KEHN-ya, Attwood had an important job. This was during the Cold War, between the U.S. and its allies (the Western bloc) and the Soviet Union and its allies (the Eastern bloc). It was Cold because there was no direct military violence happening—at least within the superpower countries. Basically, you had these two sides (Western bloc, capitalist; Eastern bloc, communist) vying for influence in newly independent countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. And so, at the same time that all of these countries were finally independent in the 1950s and 1960s, there was now a new "scramble for Africa." A scramble between the West and the East for influence over the new African leaders. But this wasn't a nice, polite process of wooing and vying.&nbsp; Superpowers don't ask nicely. If you're an African leader, they could give you favors and you would be their puppet. They would help you stay in power. But what if you didn't want to be their puppet? What if you wanted Africans to decide for themselves, like Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara? Or Pio Gama Pinto? Well, they would try to replace you, get you out of power and put in another puppet. But if they realized that you could not be silenced.... they would take you out. In 1965, only two years after Kenya gained its independence, Pio Gama Pinto was shot and killed on his driveway in Nairobi. This was Kenya’s first political assassination. My name is Stoneface, host of Until Everyone Is Free. In this series, me and our producer April Zhu will tell the story of Pio Gama Pinto, a Kenyan freedom fighter. But we tell the story of Pinto to answer a very important question: How did the country of Kenya become free…. Without the people of Kenya becoming free? Pinto was an ally of the Mau Mau. He was an advocate for land justice. He was a trade union supporter. He was a radical journalist. But he was also a political mastermind, and that is what made him so dangerous. It was a big weekend race at the Ngong Race Course. William Attwood and other important people were there. Attwood looked around, taking it all in. The place, as usual, was filled with all sorts of people. At the bookies—the place to place bets—there was a crowd of all sorts of people. Some wearing "tribal robes," others wearing saris and turbans, others wearing neat houndstooth jackets, others with bare feet, some with binoculars and shooting sticks. Even though most of Attwood's job involved schmoozing with Kenyan leaders, it was also important for him to help give everyday Kenyans a "good impression" of America. This was not an easy task, because that summer of 1964 was a summer of racial violence in the U.S. Every day newspapers and TV carried reports of Black Americans being brutalized by white racists, especially in the South. So, for Attwood, it was important that there were “useful visitors” that could prove to Kenyans that Americans were good people. USA Marafiki. Earlier, 4,000 American sailors from the US Navy docked at Mombasa. They "swarmed over the city for four days": sports teams competed with Kenyan teams, they spruced up playgrounds in the city, and local Kenyan leaders were invited on the ship and entertained and dined. They put on a military show where they shot into the air, explosions. Typical Cold War stuff. You had to display your guns and bombs so your enemies could see. You wouldn't use them, but your enemies had to know that you could if you wanted to. One Kenyan minister even said, “It is comforting to know that we have such powerful friends.” According to Attwood, groups like these Navy sailors were, "useful visitors." But that day at the Race Course, Attwood ran into a “not-so-welcome visitor.” Someone who made him panic, even if briefly. The man was sitting in the VIP Box, with President Kenyatta. The man was wearing spectacles. He was leaning over, listening to a member of Kenyatta's cabinet. At first glance, Attwood thought he was a white man. But then he took a closer look, and saw that he was just lighter in complexion. Then, he took an even closer look—and realized this man was a very, very controversial guest indeed. This man was Malcolm X. [Malcolm X] “One of the first things that the independent African nations was to form an organization called the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The purpose of our Organization of Afro-American Unity, which has the same aim and objective: to fight with whoever gets in our way, to bring about the complete independence of people of African descent here in the Western hemisphere and first here in the United States, and bring about the freedom of these people by any means necessary.” This was not his first trip to Kenya, but it was his first trip since Kenya was an independent country. It would also be his last. Why was he here? He was touring Africa to gather support from African leaders. He wanted to bring the problem of racism in the U.S.—violence against Black Americans, their disenfranchisement, discrimination and poverty—before the UN.This is the man Attwood saw, sitting with Kenyatta. Attwood panicked. He turned to one of his Kenyan colleagues nearby and asked him, Who did this man come with? Who let him come? Do they know who he is? The Kenyan colleague responded that Achieng Oneko was introducing him as “America’s outstanding civil rights leader.” No no no, said Attwood, that's not who he really is. Malcolm X was indeed fighting for Black liberation, but what set him apart from other civil rights activists in the US is that he believed black people in America should get power “by any means necessary”—including violence. Black people in the US were being beat up, being killed, being lynched. And people were asking Black folks to nonviolently, nicely ask their killers to stop killing them? Attwood alerted other parties in Kenya of Malcolm X’s arrival, suggesting they “enlighten their African friends in advance.” He thought that, like the Kenyan dignitaries in Mombasa who were just happy to have "such powerful friends" in the U.S.&nbsp; It did not occur to him that Black people in America and Kenyans, who had just fought off the British, had so much more in common. That they were connecting the dots between their struggles for Black liberation from the “white power structure of capitalist imperalism." They were fighting the same enemy, from Mississippi to Nairobi. You could hear from the way Attwood spoke that he thought Kenyans were gullible and simple, that they were easily impressed. He thought that Malcolm X was just "wooing" them in the way that he was. It did not occur to him that there was a dialogue, that in their solidarity, Black Americans were also learning from radical Kenyans. At a 1964 rally in Harlem, New York City, Malcolm X shared what he had learned from the Kenyan struggle for independence. [Malcolm X] In Alabama, we need a Mau Mau. In Georgia, we need a Mau Mau. Right here in Harlem in New York City, we need a Mau Mau.At that same rally, the SNCC Freedom Singers sang a song about Oginga Odinga.When Mau Mau began using violence, picking up and making their own guns, then the white colonizers declared a State of Emergency. When Malcolm X called for Black Americans to take up arms and get freedom through violence—like the Mau Mau did here—he caused a State of Emergency in the U.S. Malcolm X learned a lot from his trips to Africa. He gained a pan-African consciousness. He learned that the struggles faced by Black people in the US and Kenya were not so different just because they were separated by borders. Malcolm X realized that the minds of Black Americans also needed to be decolonized. There was one person Malcolm X really connected with when he was here in Nairobi, a man who helped him on his campaign to bring the U.S.' atrocities against Black Americans to the UN. We haven't been able to confirm this, but it is said that, when Malcolm X was in Nairobi, he may have stayed in the guest room of a smallish house in what is now Westlands. 6 Lower Kabete Road. This was the house of Pio Gama Pinto. 6 Lower Kabete Road. The place where that house used to stand is now Sarit Centre. That's why one of the small roads next to Sarit Centre is called Pio Gama Pinto Road. Pio and Emma would have never gotten this house if it weren't for Emma. If it was up to Pio, they might have lived in that one-room bedsitter forever. After Pio was released from detention on Manda Bay, Pio and Emma stayed together in "open detention" for years in Kabarnet—meaning they couldn't leave the house and all communication coming in was censored. During that time, Linda was born. After his release, they moved back to Nairobi, back into their one-room bedsitter behind the house of Pio's friend Fitz de Souza. Maybe it was fine for Pio, because he was rarely home, always busy organizing, meeting with people, here and there. But Emma was stuck in this tiny house, taking care of two young children with her mother. The toilet was a hole in the ground. Emma put her foot down, and said, no, Pio this is not okay. You have children now. We have a responsibility to them. [Linda Gama Pinto] "I have overheard my mother say that it was on her insistence that they got a house. At the time, they had two children. She said, 'This is ridiculous, you now have two children, you need to have a house. You go talk to your friends and get us a house.' So it was really on her insistence that we actually had a place to live. Because I think my father—details, details, these personal details he was not really interested in." Pio's friends agreed with Emma. They all had houses. They kept telling Pio he ought to buy a house, but he always put it off. Joseph Murumbi, one of Pio's best friends, decided they would just stop asking him. They went directly to Emma and told her they had decided to buy a house for them. They told Emma to go around town and look for a house that was suitable, and then tell them. They would not give the money to Pio, because "if that money was in Pio's hands, it would soon be distributed to all his friends and those in need." Just like those days in detention, when he left Manda Island barefoot because he'd given even his shoes away. Pio would never change. That was just Pio. Emma found a house, and his friends bought it for them. 6 Lower Kabete Road. It wasn’t very big, but it had a few bedrooms and a large yard, with lots of trees and a vast, open lawn. It was there that Pio and Emma made their home. When a large tree in the yard fell down, Pio kept it. He would chop some of it every day. Little by little. A daily exercise. Emma said it was because he liked to keep his muscles.[Linda Gama Pinto] We had this big, big fallen tree in the yard, and he would go out there with an axe and chop away at it, so that would be one of his exercises. He would go out there and chop at this massive tree for 15-20 minutes at a time. I mean, he was not a big man, but he had his muscles. I have a feeling that he did have a degree of vanity in that he did keep up a bit of a physical regime to maintain his looks. He didn't get fat; he kept his muscles strong. Mum, do you have anything to add? Was Papa vain? [laughs] [Emma Gama Pinto] No. [Linda] She says no, but I— [Emma] He liked to keep his muscles. [Linda] Yes, my mum says he liked to keep his muscles. He was an athlete, so I think he kept that aspect of training. His daughters, Linda, Tereshka, and Malusha, grew up in that house. The little girls would climb up on their father's back, and he would do "weighted" push-ups out on the grass, while they squealed, jolted up and down. What Linda remembers from those days was always being surrounded by Kenyan women doing household chores. There was a gate at the back of the yard, and people would often show up asking for help, or asking for a job. Pio never said no. He would always give them something, or find some little job around the house for them to do. And so, in those days, Linda remembers there were always plenty of people around, doing small tasks like picking out stones from rice or sorting beans. Pio set up a study in one of the bedrooms. He put lots of large desks there, and also a bed. Every day, they received newspapers from all different countries. Pio always had an eye on the news and an ear to the radio. He was glued to his typewriter, sending off letters or articles to&nbsp; leaders of freedom movements all over the world. Emma described their house as more of a hotel. It was a place where everyone was welcome. People were always dropping in for meals at all hours of the day. And they would often host revolutionaries who were escaping from their home countries like Angola or South Africa. They would stay over for a night or two and share stories about the situation back at home. 6 Lower Kabete Road was a little refuge for those all over the world fighting for freedom. Uhuru. Dec 12, 1963. Independence Arena. Chilly, night time. At exactly midnight, the lights were all turned off and the place was plunged into darkness. The Union Jack was lowered. At 12:01, the flag of Independent Kenya was hoisted up to replace it. Black, like the people of Kenya, red for the blood shed during the fight for independence, and green for the country's land. It was the end of 68 years of colonial rule. In a speech, Uganda's premier Obote honored the Kenyans who died in the struggle for independence. “The struggle in Kenya was bitter. Many people lost their lives. May they not look backwards. May they make their hard-won independence a reality.” President Jomo Kenyatta also made a speech. But his speech did not even mention Mau Mau. He did not honor the Kenyans who did not live to see this day, did not live to see this flag, did not live to hear this national anthem. Oginga Odinga later wrote that "the fighters of the forest and the camps" are in danger of becoming the "forgotten men of the freedom fight." The Forgotten Men of the Freedom Fight. For the most part, they weren't given land (Episode 3). These fighters definitely weren't given positions in government, or in the army, police, because it was said they were uneducated. These fighters remained unemployed. The children of detainees or dead freedom fighters could not afford school fees. Who did get government office? Who got opportunities for higher education? Who got stable jobs in the new administration? Loyalists. Those who remained loyal to the British, while others were fighting "Mzungu aende Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru." Those who risked it all in the detention camps and in the forests—they had lost out to the people who had played it safe. Oginga Odinga said this: “The stage following on independence is the most dangerous. This is the point after which many national revolutions in Africa have suffered a setback. National governments have left too much in their countries unchanged." [Stoneface] This is a very important point that I want to spend some time thinking through, so we’ve called in Fello. How are you? [Felix] Great. [Stoneface] What does this mean: That independence is not the same as decolonization. [Felix] Independence is not the same as decolonization. Ok, so we know what independence looks like. Midnight, national anthem, one flag down, another flag up. What does decolonization look like? [Stoneface] To understand decolonization, let's start with colonization. What is that? [Felix] Well....you have a few people in power, foreign people. And they steal the land, they take the natural resources of the country and they "own" it. [Stoneface] Mhm. And how do they turn that land into money? [Felix] They grow stuff on it. Well, *they* don't do the growing, they force local "natives" to work on that stolen land, almost for free. Then they sell those cash crops, like coffee, tea, whatever, to outside of the country. [Stoneface] So basically they are turning the land into crops, turning the crops into money, turning that money into houses and nice things—for themselves. [Felix] —because it is a privately owned farm. It is the colonizer's farm. [Stoneface] So the colony, both the land and the people, are being extracted of all their value, and that value goes to Europe. [Felix] Ok, so that's colonization. [Stoneface] Right. So now. Look at what happens in Kenya after independence. What changed? Well, the color of the faces of people in power changed. Now the government has black people. But, the balance of power. Who owns what? Who makes money from whom? The power structure never changed. The owners of these big, private farms are black instead of white. [Felix] Right, there's that quote from Pinto that goes: [Pinto]&nbsp;If when we have achieved independence, we only have black Lord Delameres instead of white Lord Delameres, we will have achieved very little. [Stoneface] And many of the same laws that the colonizers created to control the natives, they didn't throw them out. They kept them. [Felix] Like what? [Stoneface] Ok, like even this year with corona. In March, Uhuru used the Public Order Act in order to enable the pandemic measures, like curfew. This Public Order Act was created in 1950, right before the Mau Mau State of Emergency. It allowed colonizers to basically round up whomever they wanted. [And, as you know, police have been so violent with curfew enforcement...] [Felix] So the new leaders really just took over from the colonizers and were like...actually, this is not so bad. Let's not change things too much. [Stoneface] I mean, things did change. But, again, we need to focus on power. Always look for where the power is. Don't look at the color of the faces, or the tribe. Who really has the power? [Felix] So what you're saying is that Kenya got independence and went from a colony to the Republic of Kenya—BUT that Kenya did not decolonize, because underneath all the new black faces in government, the underlying power structure did not change. [Stoneface] Exactly. [Felix] So then, if these new black faces are the new rulers, does that make them colonizers? [Stoneface] No, not really. They're simply the new Home Guard. [Felix] Ohhh...... [Stoneface] The real colonizers are still foreign countries. In colonial times, the British depended on the Home Guard to keep the local population under control, so that they could continue extracting from the land and people. But of course these Home Guard, chiefs, and other loyalists, they got perks. They got some land, or they got more money. Same thing happened after independence. The colonizers, before leaving, wanted to make sure that land and industries were put in the hands of an African elite. [Felix] How did they do that? [Stoneface] So the Agricultural Development Corporation, which funded a lot of the land buy-back programs, was heavily financed by UK, West Germany, US. British employees as a condition. National Assurance Company of Kenya was made into a national company, but only 10% of the company was owned by Kenya. Most of it was British insurance companies. But, to run all of this, you need to have loyalists in power. That is why, not only in Kenya, but in colonies all around the world that were close to independence, colonizers worked hard to build up a comfortable middle class and build alliances with them. [Felix] A new Home Guard. [Stoneface] Exactly. And that's why we call this.....neo-colonialism. The new colonialism. [Felix] Ahh.... Hm, this makes a lot of sense. And it also makes me think...of course this is not anything new. I don't think we need to teach people that their leaders are corrupt— [Stoneface] —but it's not even just about corruption. Everyone has a corrupt uncle. We can replace one corrupt leader with another until we're all dead. The problem is that neocolonialists have put people in power who are moderate and easily corruptible, who give handshakes with colonizers rather than put their fists in the air. Instead of asking why those people are so corrupt, we should be asking why they are holding power, and not the people. [Felix] But corruption is a big problem, no? [Stoneface] The problem we choose to see defines how we solve it. If we choose to see corruption as the main problem, then the solution to that is to find purer and purer leaders... [Felix] Mm. [Stoneface] ...but if we take a step back and see the problem as the entire system, neo-colonialism, that Kenya is still a colony...then the solution to that requires structural change. [Felix] What do you mean by structural change? Like, big change? [Stoneface] As in, you can't just repaint the house. You have to knock it down, re-build a foundation, and build a new one with new walls. You have to change the structure. [Felix] But what would structural change look like in Kenya? [Felix] We have been told that it is only through private property that progress can be made. You’ve heard this argument. In fact, it was even in the BBI report. They wrote that, even if you split all the wealth among 40 million Kenyans, everyone would only have a small amount. They’re saying that what we actually need to do is grow the entire economy so everyone can have more. [Stoneface] But look at Nairobi. There is already so much wealth. Look at all those skyscrapers, all those new highrises and hotels, office buildings. [Felix] Yeah, that’s the real question. If the entire economy grows, will everyone have more? [Stoneface] No, of course not. Not the way that the economy in Kenya is structured right now. ...Not with capitalism. [Felix] Once the construction workers who build those skyscrapers are done building them, the buildings will be hidden behind barbed wire. Those construction workers will never get to live in them. In fact, they probably wouldn’t even be let in, unless they’re there to fix something. Neither will their children. Nairobi keeps growing, keeps modernizing….. but only behind barbed wire. [Stoneface] And who is all this barbed wire for? The poor. The desperate. Outcast Nairobi. [Felix] Exactly. So this is the tragedy of private property. So long as you have private property, you will need to protect it from the destitute. ...And how do you protect it from the destitute? Gates. Barbed wire. Askaris…. [Stoneface] …police. [Felix] Yes, police. Police exist to protect private property.... But only the private property of the rich. [Stoneface] You see that, in Nairobi, it is only the ghettos that are surrounded by police stations. In Mathare, we have four police stations. Let me read a quote from Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party in the U.S. He said, [Huey Newton] “The police in our community couldn’t possibly be there to protect our property because we own no property. They couldn’t possibly be there to see that we receive due process of law for the simple reason that the police themselves deny us due process of law. And so it is very apparent that the police are only in our community not for our security but for the security of the business owners in our community, and so to see that the status quo is kept intact.” [Felix] You see how Huey Newton from the Black Panther Party, and people like Malcolm X and Kwame Ture in the U.S. were talking? Black people in the U.S. were talking about the same things as black people in Kenya and other parts of Africa. They realized very similar things are happening across different continents. In the U.S., Black people were forced to work as slaves on plantations so that white people could “grow the economy” and get rich, build things for themselves, and put them behind barbed wire. What about Kenya? Black Africans were forced to work as wage labourers on farms so that white people could “grow the economy” and get rich for themselves, build things for themselves, and put them behind barbed wire. Both in the U.S. and in Kenya, the elite created police to protect themselves and their things from the poor surrounding them. When you stockpile wealth for yourself, but there are lots of poor people around you whom you are exploiting, then you have to find a way to keep them away from it. Whether it is barbed wire or police. Are you seeing what I’m getting at? So what is really the common enemy? It is capitalism. And you cannot easily separate racism and capitalism. As soon as you identify capitalism as the enemy, then you realize that the struggle of a poor woman farmer working on a huge white-owned farm in Kitale is connected to the struggle of a factory worker in China who works 18-hour days. And that is connected to the struggle of an undocumented Mexican worker cleaning toilets in California. And that is connected to the struggle of a single mother of five in a favela in Rio. [Stoneface] Whoa. ok. [Felix] It seems complicated, but the bottom line is simple. All oppression is connected. That’s why Malcolm X came to Africa. He was fighting for freedom for Black Americans, and he wanted to learn from Africans who had just won their struggles for liberation.We don’t have many photographs of Pinto. He didn't attend events to be seen. He wasn't the kind of politician who would stand before a crowd of people and deliver a speech. The photos we have of him tell us how he spent his time instead. There's a photo of Pinto and Kenyatta, while Mzee was detained at Lodwar, and Pinto and others like Odinga were fighting for his release. There's also a photo of Pinto, Fitz de Souza, and others protesting with signs against Portuguese colonization of Angola. Or a photo of Pinto visiting the family of Senior Chief Koinange while they were in restriction in Kabarnet. Or a photo of Pinto at a reunion of ex-Mau Mau and ex-detainees. Pinto was always working behind the scenes. He brought different groups of people together. He helped organizations improve their tactics. When someone needed help—whether that was printing a radical newspaper, getting school fees to families of ex-Mau Mau fighters, or organizing a labor strike—he was there. Pinto was an organizer. There's been something I've been thinking about recently: the difference between a politician, an activist, ...and an organizer. A politician is someone who is in power. They have the power to make change. An activist is someone who doesn't have power but "speaks for" the powerless, either to politicians or to those all around the world, to raise awareness... and pressure those in power to make change. But an organizer... An organizer doesn't wait for those in power to make change. Organizers bring the people together so they can take that power back. Organizers don't speak for people; they let the people speak for themselves. And how do they do that? By bringing people together. In solidarity. Politicians have power, but organizers also have a kind of power: people power. Whenever there was a need, Pinto showed up. He showed up for the Mau Mau, getting them weapons, funding, and medical care when they were fighting in the forest. He showed up for the families of detainees and forest fighters who had died; he helped gather money for their children's school fees. He showed up for the trade unions, helping them to craft better demands for their strikes and writing letters to MPs in the UK to support the young trade union movement in Kenya. He showed up for the small vernacular newspapers that couldn’t afford to pay printing presses to print them. Whatever it was, whomever needed help, Pinto was there. There’s another photograph of Pinto when he became MP in 1964. Propped up on the shoulders of his friends, with his hands in the air. Pinto actually never wanted to be an MP. He wasn't that kind of a politician. President Kenyatta tried many times to get him to be part of his government, to take up some high position, but Pinto always refused. But, after some time and much persuasion, Pinto decided that, at least as an MP, he could put pressure on the government from within the Parliament. In his short time as MP, that is exactly what he did. He made trouble for Kenyatta and the conservative wing of the government. And that… that is what would lead to his assassination. Even right after Kenya became independent, it was clear that there was a big split in KANU. On one side, you had capitalists who believed that if farms and industries were privately owned and made more profits—if we could "grow the economy"—then the wealth would trickle down to the rest of Kenyans. But on the other side, you had radicals like Pinto who believed that the existing system was already rotten to the core—because it was built on colonialism. They believed you had to break everything down. But not only break things down. To rebuild. There was no going back to "the way things were before" colonization. Independent African countries had to build something new in place of colonization. For example, instead of keeping those European-owned farms intact and just selling them to rich Africans, we should nationalize them. Make them owned by the state, then employ people to work on them. Or give them to co-operatives owned by landless Africans. You can’t just change the color of the skin of the landowner. You have to make a bigger change. This goes back to what we talked about earlier. What makes a colony a free country? A new flag? A new national anthem? Or is it....the relationship of power between a government and its people? Does this new country still treat its people as colonized subjects, to be exploited and extracted? How free are the people? Are they only free to choose between low wages and starving? School or hospital bills? Are they slaves....to the cost of living? A lot of African leaders at the time understood that freedom must mean freedom from poverty. Freedom from the cost of living. Do citizens have enough to eat? Can they afford rent? School? Do they have jobs? These leaders understood that you could not just evict colonizers. Colonizers had already built a system where wealth was drained out of the colonies. Remember the barbed wire? Where wealth was growing, but only for a certain elite, the colonizers. Colonialism and capitalism go hand in hand. So, these leaders said, in order to be truly independent, we need to rebuild a new system, to keep wealth right here. And not just for elites. We need that wealth to go back into schools, hospitals, universities, industries, things that can make the lives of Africans happier, healthier, and more free. This is why so many of Africa's first leaders were socialists. Kwame Nkrumah. Thomas Sankara. Julius Nyerere. And yes, Pio Gama Pinto was a proud socialist. [Pinto] “Kenya’s uhuru must not be transformed into freedom to exploit, or freedom to be hungry, and live in ignorance. Uhuru must be uhuru for the masses. Uhuru from exploitation, from ignorance, disease and poverty.”In Kenya, living conditions were actually getting worse after independence. The slogans we used to hear before—"Uhuru na umoja, uhuru na harambee, uhuru na ujamaa" (Freedom and unity, freedom all together, freedom and familyhood)... Kenyans were now saying “uhuru na njaa.” (Freedom and hunger) Kenyans were saying, “Wapi uhuru? (Where is freedom?)” How free are we when more people were unemployed after independence than before independence? When more people are hungry? When people are still landless? We know that Pinto was on a hit list for a long time. We know that both the Kenyatta government and foreign governments were monitoring him. But we don't know what was the last straw that made them decide that Pinto had to go. That the deed needed to be done. There are many theories. Some believe that it was because Pinto knew that Kenyatta was eating the money given by the British, which was meant to resettle landless Kenyans, especially Mau Mau. Some say that Pinto was ready to expose Kenyatta's corruption, which would spell the end of Kenyaetta's reign. Others say that it had to do with the Sessional Paper No 10, a plan that would chart a capitalist path for Kenya which was written by Mboya and some Americans. Pinto had prepared an alternative socialist policy paper on behalf of Odinga, which would compete against Kenyatta and Mboya's. There was enough support for Pinto's version among the MPs that it could have been passed. Whatever the last straw was, we will never know. Before Pinto could expose Kenyatta's corruption to Parliament, before he could present that socialist plan for Kenya and threaten Kenyatta's grip on power.....he was dead. Slumped over in the driver's seat of his car, right outside his house. That same house on 6 Lower Kabete Road. Special thanks to Linda Gama Pinto. It was an honor to share space with Emma Gama Pinto before she passed in October 2020. Special thanks too to the SNCC Legacy Project for permission to use audio of from a performance of “Oginga Odinga” on 10 Nov 2007 at Woodson Regional Library, Chicago, IL (Presented by Chicago Area Friends of SNCC and the SNCC History Project). You can watch their performance here. ReferencesDe Souza, Fitzval. Forward to Independence: My Memoirs. 2018.Durrani, Shiraz, editor. Pio Gama Pinto: Kenya’s Unsung Martyr. Vita Books, 2018. Durrani, Shiraz. Kenya’s War of Independence: Mau Mau and Its Legacy of Resistance to Colonialism and Imperialism, 1948-1990. Vita Books, 2018. Koster, Mickie Mwanzia. “Malcolm X, The Mau Mau, and Kenya’s New Revolutionaries: A Legacy of Transnationalism.” The Journal of African American History, vol. 100, no. 2, Apr. 2015, pp. 250–71.&nbsp;Mbughuni, Azaria. "Malcolm X, the OAU resolution of 1964, and Tanzania: Pan-African connections in the struggle against racial discrimination." The Journal of Pan African Studies 7.3 (2014): 177-194.Odinga, Jaramogi Oginga. Not Yet Uhuru. Heinemann Educational Books, 1967. https://untileverypod.com/Episode-7-Shujaa Thu, 07 Jul 2022 14:01:47 +0000 Until Everyone Is Free https://untileverypod.com/Episode-7-Shujaa Episode 7 Shujaa 1985. The Nyayo years. A man is sitting in a bus going from Nairobi to Arusha, hoping nobody recognizes him. He just needed to make it to the airport in Arusha, catch a flight to London, and then he would be safe. Nothing can prepared you for the moment you have to flee your own country. Will you be caught? Will you ever come back? Which of your family members and friends will die while you are gone? Which of them will you never see again? …..Was it all worth it? This man was already interrogated twice by Moi’s Special Branch, the kind of people who would make political dissidents disappear. The first time, they came to his office and asked him to turn over some documents. He did, but they were not satisfied. The second time, he was brought to Nyayo House. They still were not satisfied with what he told them. The third time? There was no third time. His friends told him if he went in for the third time, he would not come back out. His wife helped him secure a plane ticket as soon as she could. So there he was, sitting on a night bus to Arusha. He was now a political asylum seeker. The man’s name was Shiraz Durrani. His crime? Writing an article in the Standard. What did the article say? That Pio Gama Pinto was a national hero. That Pio Gama Pinto worked for, and only for, the people of Kenya. And that Pio Gama Pinto was assassinated. He was assassinated by the government of Kenya. And, for that, he had to flee Kenya. Pio and Emma were living in Nairobi now. The days of detention were over, Kenya was a free country. Pio was a part of KANU, and Emma was the breadwinner of the family. She worked as the personal secretary to Ramogi Achieng Oneko, then the Minister of Information.[Olola Oneko] Kenyatta was now the president of Kenya and my father [Achieng Oneko] was Minister of Tourism and Information. He had already known Pio Gama Pinto. Ever since Pio and Achieng spent years together at the brutal Manda Island detention centre, they and their families remained very close. Pio and Emma were like uncle and aunt to Oneko’s children. They were the kind of family friends who didn’t need to call before dropping by the house.[Olola Oneko] Emma Gama Pinto became my father's personal secretary. Very nice people. Not just a personal secretary. Pio was like an uncle. And, with Emma, anything for example we as children needed, we could call her or go to the office, or when she comes around, we could tell her we need this and this and that... Of course she checked with my mum and mzee—you know, kids "need" so many things!—to cross-check, is this correct? Emma was always smartly dressed. But Uncle Pio. On weekend afternoons, sometimes he’d roll by wearing shorts and sandals. [Olola Oneko]&nbsp;Emma was very smartly dressed. Pio was...not that he was not smartly dressed, he was smart, but very casual. You'll find him, for example, in the late afternoons when he comes to our house, you see him with sandals. Not that roughly dressed but, you know... He was not that Nairobian, with a tie. I rarely saw him with a tie, unless we had a party where people had to put on ties, then he had one [tie]. Otherwise, normally, that was not Pio. He could just come. Even the car that he was driving: he used to drive, you know, nothing so... nice. He’d swoop up the kids and them on a ride in his not-so-nice car into town. Then, they’d get ice cream. For the Oneko brothers, this was a big treat. The boys were still new to Nairobi and city life, having spent much of their lives in shags, or in open detention in Marsabit and Kapsabet. Ice cream with Uncle Pio was a true luxury. But one time, right before the contested election between KANU and KADU, when tensions were rising, Uncle Pio pulled up to the Oneko house when the boys were home alone. It was clear from his demeanor that something was wrong. “Olola. Lwanda. Come with me. Come with me now, get your things.” The two boys collected some clothes and got into Uncle Pio’s not-so-nice car. He drove, and drove, and drove… That night, they arrived safely in Nakuru. Apparently, some people had heard that Oneko’s house—with Olola and Lwanda inside–was going to be attacked, probably by people hired by political opponents. Uncle Pio had saved their lives. On another occasion, when Achieng himself received death threats, Pio risked his life to hide Achieng for an entire month. Then, knowing how lonely Achieng must have felt during that tieme, Pio and Emma would smuggle him into their not-so-nice car, hide him under a blanket, and drive him to a drive-in movie. There, the three of them would watch a movie together. Pio would sometimes drive for hours to other parts of the country to warn friends of possible arrest. In those times, you could never be too careful. When Pio drove in his not-so-nice car, he often would not take the most direct route. He would take a more complicated route, with his eyes always glancing at the rear-view mirror, as if he was being followed. There was a beach house in Mombasa, the only one on that stretch of coast which was not owned by Europeans at the time. Fitz de Souza had purchased it, and he and his friends would often stay there. One of the friends in their circle was a Goan-Maasai Kenyan. Joseph Murumbi. Fitz had first met him in those early days in Pangani when Fitz and Pio took turns sleeping on the bed and the floor. They met Joe at the bus stop one day, on their way to Pio’s office at the Desai Memorial Library. At that time, in early 1965, Joe was Minister of Foreign Affairs. He happened to be traveling in Mombasa, so decided to drop by Fitz’s beach house to take a look. He was surprised to find that someone was already staying there. It was Pio. Joe asked Pio what he was doing there. Pio told him, he was brought there beacuse people had told him his life was in danger. He had been tipped off about a plan to murder him and Bildad Kaggia and J.D. Kali, for their “secret government activities.” Oginga Odinga himself had driven Pio overnight from Nairobi to Mombasa. Pio was making plans to flee to Mozambique. Joe looked at him. He chuckled. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Pio, come back to Nairobi. It’ll be fine. We will raise the issue of your safety with Mzee, or with Koinange or Njonjo.” Pio agreed. The next day, he returned to Nairobi by train. 24 February, 1965. A Wednesday. In the morning, Pio and Emma got into their car. Pio drove Emma into town, to drop Emma off at her office in Jogoo House. They he drove back home. At that time, Pio was an MP, and the Parliamentary sessions always began at 2pm. So in the mornings, he would always be in motion, always a blur—off to a meeting, typing up a memo on his typewriter, or writing a letter. That day, Pio took a quick breakfast and collected his Parliamentary papers before heading off. Six-year-old Linda, Pio’s eldest daughter, was practicing her multiplication tables. Her grandmother was wearing a white sari, a ruler in hand. Little Linda stood there before her grandmother, reciting numbers. If she got one wrong, a sharp smack of the ruler was waiting for her. Pio came into the room to say goodbye, before heading off for the day. He patted Linda on the head. He gave Grandma a kiss on the cheek. Now it was time for Tereshka’s small treat. Pio’s youngest daughter Tereshka was only 18 months old. Every day on his way out, Pio would sweep her up and put her in the back seat of the car. On special days, he’d give her a sweetie. Then, father and daughter would take a short, little, slow joyride—just from the back of the house to the front gate. Two or three minutes. Then, Pio would stop the car at the gate. The maid would come and open the door, pick up Tereshka, and carry her back home. On Wednesday, 24 February 1965, Tereshka rode with her Papa for the last time. Joe Murumbi was still at home that morning, just a five-minute drive from the Pintos’ home. He was shaving in the bathroom. His phone rang, and he picked it up. It was Achieng Oneko. Achieng said that Pio had been beaten up at his home, and Joe should go see what happened, since he was so close. Emma, who was with Achieng at the office, had gotten a call from her mother. Her mother was screaming that Pio had been attacked. Emma had rushed into Achieng’s office and told him, then started making phone calls to arrange for a car to pick her up and take her home. Murumbi bolted into action. He sent his driver and another employee at the house to drive there first, while he splashed water on his face and hurriedly threw on some clothes. He followed them soon in another car. Murumbi swerved and parked his car on the road, outside the Pintos’ house. 6 Lower Kabete Road. He saw police officers. He saw Pio’s car parked right by the front gate—and he could make out that Pio was still inside. Murumbi rushed out of his car and ran towards the car, yelling, “Pio! Pio! What happened? Are you okay, Pio? What happened?” Emma’s heart was pounding. She saw Joe’s car, parked. Pio’s car, parked. She rushed past them both, into the house, to find her mother, daughters, and Pio. She found her mother, in that white sari, eyes wild with fear. Linda was still in the house, her face blank. “Where’s Pio,” Emma asked, “Where is Pio?” “He’s still in the car,” was the reply. “He’s been killed.” Emma ran back to the car. In the driver’s seat, she saw a body covered in a pink blanket. Emma’s mind went blank with shock. It was if she stood, alone, while the world spun around her. Friends and strangers rotating in, asking her questions she could not hear. Journalists and police. Emma dabbed her eyes and looked around for her daughters, drawing them close to her instinctively. A phrase came to Emma’s mind. “Bitterness is like a fire in the corner of a house which will eventually consume the whole house.” She couldn’t remember where it came from. Maybe it was one of those books she had read while Pio was in detention at Manda. In those first four years of their marriage, Emma read a lot to try to understand the man she had just married. To understand why he fought so hard for a country that was not his. A country that had now betrayed them both. The light in the house turned to a strange, warm color. Emma turned toward the back door and saw a huge fire burning in the backyard. Two of Pio’s close friends were tossing things into the fire. Both of them were friends who had worked closely with Pio. They knew that, in that tiny bedroom Pio used as an office, there was lots of confidential information. Information that, if discovered, could endanger organizers around the world. Without thinking to ask Emma, they fed everything into the fire. From this point on, whatever Emma had kept, whatever she had set aside in her mind as memories—that would be all she had. Everything else was gone. Pio was gone. At one point, Emma was sitting in the living room, still in shock. Fitz de Souza and Joe Murumbi were beside her. Two people carried Pio’s body—still wrapped in that pink blanket—into the living room. They uncovered the blanket. Emma looked at her husband. She could see that small, evil hole under his ribs. The only words that came out of her mouth were: “Gosh. Pio looks so pale.” Fitz looked at the men who brought the body in and, with a tortured look on his face, turned to Emma and said, “Get out. Get out of this room.” He led her away. Their home, Emma and Pio’s home, had become a crime scene. It had become a nightmare. You can tell what kind of person someone was...by seeing who attends their funeral. Pio Gama Pinto was buried at City Park Cemetery. On that day, the park was filled with people. Of course there were his friends from politics. Achieng Oneko, his friend from their days in detention on Manda Island. Bildad Kaggia, from their days routing weapons to Mau Mau forest fighters. Oginga Odinga, his staunchest supporter in government, with whom he fought to make Kenya a more equitable, socialist country. Joseph Murumbi, an old friend from Pinto’s days working at the Desai Memorial Library. Fitz de Souza, the young Goan Pinto had welcomed to Nairobi and brought into Kenya’s freedom fight. And many other politicians that, even if they often disagreed, never doubted that Pinto had a pure heart. But many, many ordinary people also came. Many poor people whom Pinto had helped in their time of need. Many elderly Kikuyu traveled to Nairobi from different parts of Central Province to bid farewell to a man who fought alongside them. It was a shock to the nation. Kenya had not even been an independent country for two years. And a freedom fighter was killed. He was killed by those who, only just a few years earlier, had fought with him against the British. Killed by his own government. So this would be how power would be wielded in our new Kenya. One very important person, a man who used to be a good friend of Pinto, a man whom Pinto had fought to be released from detention and who had visited him in Lodwar—this man was missing from the funeral. President Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta sent an ivory sculpture as a gift. But he did not come. Who killed Pio Gama Pinto? The answer to this question...is both very clear and unclear. Two teenagers were arrested for Pinto’s murder. Chege Thuo and Kisilu Mutua. Both were said to have been near the site of the assasination when it happened. They were brought before Supreme Court Justice John Ainley and pleaded “not guilty.” Kisilu admitted that he had been paid to scare Pinto. Those who paid him wanted Pinto to stop doing what he was doing—advocating for land justice, socialism, equity. Kisilu testified that he was near the scene of the assassination, but he denied that he was the one who killed Pinto. Kisilu said that, as he approached the Pintos’ house, he heard shots ring out. He saw Pinto collapse in his car—but he couldn’t see who shot him. None of the ten fingerprints found on Pinto’s car matched Kisilu’s or Thuo’s. Thuo was released. But Chief Justice Ainley said that, while it was plausible that Kisilu didn’t pull the trigger, he had to have known something if he was there at that time and place. Chief Justice Ainley sentenced Kisilu to be hanged. That sentence was later commuted (changed) to a life sentence. Kisilu spent 36 years in jail. He was released when Moi gave him a presidential pardon. The last attempt to investigate Pinto’s murder was the Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) set up after the post-election violence of 2007-08. The TJRC was built on the idea that, in order for the country to move on past post-election violence, there needed to be true reconciliation. But, in order to have true reconciliation, first you needed to have justice. And you cannot have justice before you know the truth. So the TJRC began by trying to find out the truth about not only post-election violence, but the many acts of political violence that have occurred throughout Kenya’s history. And this includes political assassinations. An assassination is not just any murder. It is a planned elimination of a person with a lot of political and symbolic importance. Someone who, if they are “taken out,” will have huge political consequences and send a strong message to the political opposition. The TJRC classified Pinto’s murder an assassination. It was the first assassination in Kenya’s history as an independent country. The TJRC made four conclusions: The assassination of Pio Gama Pinto was motivated by ideological differences at the heart of the global Cold War—that is, West versus East. Capitalist versus Socialist.The conviction of Kisilu Mutua did little to clarify who was actually behind the assassination, and why they ordered it.Both Kisilu and Thuo were used as scapegoats to distract from those who ordered Pintos’ execution.“The government was involved in the killing of Pio Gama Pinto.” But even the TJRC was not able to definitively conduct a proper investigation. Why? Because the evidence that they needed—which definitely exists, for example, the archives of the National Security Intelligence Service—they were denied access to this. The government has information that might lead to the truth about Pio Gama Pinto’s assassination—and that truth might lead towards justice for Pinto’s family—and that justice may finally lead to reconciliation. But the government refused. “The Commission was not allowed to access many of the documents held by the government that would have assisted in investigations such as this, including the archives of the National Security Intelligence Service.” But the government’s silence about Pinto’s death, and what they have done to keep others from finding out more about it….these silences speak louder than words. If there was nothing to hide, then why didn’t the government just hand over the necessary documents to the TJRC? You can tell if the government has something to hide by when they begin to silence those who tell the truth. There was a man who tried to tell the truth about Pinto. That man was Shiraz Durrani. And it was because he tried to tell the truth about Pinto that, in 1985, he was sitting on a bus to Arusha. Alone and anxious. Hoping he would be able to make it to London. During the Moi days, many of the people who believed in and fought for the same things Pinto fought for—socialists like Pinto, or “the Left”—had to go underground. Movements like Mwakenya or the December Twelfth Movement had to organize in secret, to avoid the authoritarian regime. In those days, there were secret police everywhere. You would not even want to talk about Pio Gama Pinto in a bus, because someone might hear you, and then before you know it, you would be visited by police at your home. At that time, Shiraz Durrani was doing research for another project when he was at the library and stumbled upon a book by Ambu Patel, called Pio Gama Pinto: Independent Kenya’s First Martyr. [Shiraz Durrani] While looking for some material about it, I came across this book by Ambu Patel, "Independent Kenya's First Martyr: Pio Gama Pinto." And that had a great impact on me, not only in terms of Pinto but the politics of Pinto and what was going on. Shiraz read it. He was blown away. He had heard of Pinto’s name, but he had never known Pinto’s story.[Shiraz Durrani] This book really came as a shock to the system, that this was something totally ignored and not known by many people, and yet this book was sitting in the library. Shiraz was very involved with the underground movements of resistance against Moi’s authoritarian regime. He understood the dangers of telling a story like Pinto’s. It would almost certainly lead to his arrest or murder. But this was a time when the resistance movement was getting more and more fractured. Morale was low. “Cells” of resistors were getting disconnected from one another. Organizers were isolated from one another and had no way of communicating with one another.[Shiraz Durrani] Now around that time in 1982, the time of the coup, a lot of people of the December Twelfth Movement were either arrested or had to go into exile, and that broke a lot of linkages in the organization. So Shiraz decided he would take a risk. He decided he would do something bold and send a signal to the country that the Left in Kenya was still alive. That the resistance was still here. What did he decide to do? He wrote an article about Pio Gama Pinto. [Shiraz Durrani] At that stage, I decided that perhaps I needed to come out a little bit into the open, send it to the Standard—a number of articles, starting with Pinto. To highlight the fact that the Left was still alive, that Pinto was one of the leaders who was ignored, and, hopefully, if it goes out in my name, we would start connecting with people who were in different cells of the December Twelfth Movement. The Pinto [article] was in two parts, and they put a lot of pictures. And it got a big splash. We already know what happened to Shiraz when the story came out. He had to flee his own country. His application for political asylum was granted by the UK. He had fled the country for writing about Pio Gama Pinto. So he thought: [Shiraz Durrani] So why should I now stop writing about him? I was now out of the country. I lost everything that I had there, and so I continued writing. Shiraz kept writing. He kept collecting documents. Collecting letters written to Pinto, articles and memos written about him by people who knew him. Interviews with Emma. Ten years. Twenty years, he kept collecting. Thirty years. For almost forty years he worked on this. Just last year, in 2019, Shiraz Durrani published the book Pio Gama Pinto: Kenya’s Unsung Martyr. Then, in 2020, a young community organizer in Mathare was browsing at the Ukombozi Library in town, when he came across that book. He had heard of Pinto’s name, but he had never known Pinto’s story. He read it. He was blown away. This organizer’s name is Stoneface. The rest is history. [Stoneface] So, April. We’ve reached the end. [April]&nbsp;Mhm. This has been a journey. We’ve come far. I’m just thinking back to that first day when all of this started. Do you remember? We were at Ukombozi Library in town—actually that was my first time there, and you’d been saying for a long time that we needed to go, we needed to go—so we went. And of course it was wonderful. Yeah and your bro John Clinton was there. Then, after that, the three of us decided to walk from town to City Park Cemetery, to see the grave of Pio Gama Pinto and pay our respects. I can't remember why we had decided that? [Stoneface] Ah it was because the time before, I was carrying that book by Shiraz Durrani about Pinto. And we were talking about, we should do something, maybe a radio story or something... [April] Ah right yeah I remember. [Stoneface] So we went to City Park since it wasn't so far from town. [April] Yeah, and where was that? [Stoneface] Pinto's grave is at the Murumbi Peace Memorial, inside City Park Cemetery. You know, Joseph Murumbi never forgave himself for persuading Pinto to come back to Nairobi. You remember, when they were at the beach house? And Pio was about to flee from the country, but Murumbi told him to stay, that it wasn't a big deal. Murumbi blamed himself for Pio's death. He never forgave himself. Even years after Pio died, every time someone would even mention his name, Murumbi would break into tears. He was never the same after that day. Every year, on 24 February, 1965, Murumbi and his wife Sheila would go to City Park to lay flowers at Pio's grave. Often, there would already be flowers there, laid by other people. But, eventually, the flowers became fewer and fewer. The people who knew Pio fled the country, or died. Time passed. [April] Well, I guess that's why we were there, no? [yeah] This reminds me of a quote by Milan Kundera which is painted on the walls inside the Mathare Social Justice Centre. It's a quote from his book "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting." He writes: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Yaani [the quote, in sheng]. [Stoneface] Right, this is like what we talked about in Episode 2, the one about Mau Mau. History is sanitized. And history is sanitized by those in power. When we don't know the full history, and we only know the sanitized version, we forget. And that's how they hold on to power. [April] Say more. [Stoneface] So, for example, take Mau Mau. The sanitized version we all know is that they fought for freedom against the British, and then somehow the British left and Kenya is free, meaning they won. [April] Mhm. [Stoneface] But the unsanitized version is that Mau Mau didn't just fight the British. They fought and killed home guards. They fought and killed chiefs, Africans who the British had put in positions of power to control the population. The unsanitized version is that the Mau Mau fought for land—and they never got the land. The land went from white hands into black hands. And the way that wealth is generated from that land, that never changed at all. [April] And so, using your example, if we forget what the Mau Mau fought for, then when those in power, the elite, tell us that Kenya is independent, and to thank the Mau Mau for giving us that independence, we believe them. [Stoneface] —instead of pointing a finger at THEM and saying no, man, YOU are the new homeguard. The Mau Mau fought AGAINST people like you. And we are still going to fight against people like you. You are not our leaders. You are our oppressors. You are our enemies. [April] And that's so powerful. [Stoneface] Right. And this "remembering"—or knowing the truth—might seem like a small thing. Like, some people might say, can I eat truth? Will truth pay my rent? But, we need to realize that "remembering" and truth are the foundation of any kind of freedom. You cannot take even a single step forward towards liberation, if you cannot see that you are oppressed. [April] Hm, ok, say more? [Stoneface] So there was this time that I was just walking around and these youths called me over. They were like, Stoneface Steonface, come here. I went and saw that they had received a mkokoteni from some MCA or whatever. This guy gave them a mkokoteni and some jerry cans, and they were so happy. They said, look, now we can go fetch water! I looked at them and said, how dare you. Why didn't you sit down with this MCA and ask him why Mathare doesn't have water in the first place. In this modern age, in our city of Nairobi, where we are not in a desert, why must people still "fetch" water? Where he lives, there is water for sure. For an MCA to have the audacity to "buy" you with a cheap mkokoteni? You should have chased them out! [April] Sorry! [Stoneface] But, the bottom line is, these youths didn't even see that they were oppressed. They were blind. They had, in a way, "forgotten." It is only when you understand history that you can understand power. And ONLY THEN—only then—can you begin to rise up and fight for true freedom. Otherwise you'll continue to run in circles, celebrating and thanking your oppressors for throwing you crumbs. [April] By the way. That is an important point: "remembering," the way that we're talking about it here, a political "remembering," isn't just a passive process. Like sitting in a chair with your hands on your lap, closing your eyes, and thinking far back into history. No, Remembering is an active process. Us producing this podcast was an act of remembering. Hours spent at the library. Researching. Interviewing people who lived through it. Using your mkokoteni example... if the youths understood the history of Mathare, or the history of Eastlands in general, then they would understand why water does not reach Mathare. Then they would understand why the poor in ghettos actually pay ten to twenty times more for water than those who get city water in rich places. Then, if some MCA tried to bribe their support with a mkokoteni, they wouldn't celebrate him. Maybe they would spit in his face. [Stoneface] There are many different ways to get to freedom. But, before we can make a single move, it begins with "remembering." Consciousness. "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." [April] I feel that knowing history can also expand people's imaginations. [Stoneface] What do you mean by that? [April] Like, I'm thinking about the Nairobi General Strike of 1950. From Episode 5. And how that's been almost completely forgotten. Like when you talk to people about, oh we should organize or we should resist, or we should do this or that, they'll often say, oh but you know. This Kenya. This government. It is not possible. [Stoneface] Yeah. [April] But then, you look at what people were able to do in 1950. A time before there was internet. Imagine, the messages being passed around were being relayed by cab drivers! And workers were able to come together and bring the city to a standstill. For almost two weeks. [Stoneface] And not just workers, actually. Most of the people who took part in the strike were the unemployed, the landless, the Africans who lived in Eastlands. Outcast Nairobi brought the city to a standstill. [April] Exactly. So, what I mean by expand imaginations is, if this was possible in 1950....well, things are different now in 2020. A lot of things might make something like that more difficult. But a lot of things might make it easier. At the very least, we can't say, oh something like that could never happen in Kenya. It did. It happened, and it was Outcast Nairobi that made it happen. [Stoneface] I think we forget too how, even in the 1960s, there was so much collaboration happening between people struggling for liberation all around the world. Like, remember, Malcolm X came to Nairobi. This was in Episode 6. He came to Nairobi, and when he went back to the US, he told Black Americans about Mau Mau. And how they needed to have their own Mau Mau. [April] Right, at that time, there was so much that people were learning from each other across continents—at a time before internet. Imagine now, with the tools we have... what we could do. [Stoneface] If organizers here in mathare were talking to organizers in the US, or Hong Kong.... [April] Exactly. We can't say it is not possible. But it's not as if, up until 1963, Kenya had all of these freedom fighters and now we just have normal people. There have always been people who fought for freedom. [Stoneface] We should not look at these fallen heroes and shake our heads saying, “This Kenya,” as if it was always meant to be this way. As if being Kenyan means being unfree. No. It is the opposite. Even before Kenya was a country, from the time that there were people who were not free, there were people fighting for that freedom. We are a people of freedom fighters. Not only the Mau Mau who engineered their own guns in the forest and spilled their blood for this country. But also Outcast Nairobi, who brought the city to a standstill in the 1950 Nairobi General Strike, to demand better. Or the Kikuyu mbari whom Pinto helped to fight to get their land back through legal means. Or the Africans who started their own newspapers in Kikamba, Gikuyu, Maragoli, Dholuo, and many, many other languages, to give people the language for their oppression—in their own language. All of these people were freedom fighters. Not all of them fought with weapons. But all of them reached a moment that made them realized that they were not free. That they were suffering. And they realized that those in power were not going to save them. Rather, those in power were the ones responsible for their suffering. No one was going to save them. They had to join together and organize themselves. Our oppressors will not save us. All we have is each other. All we have is each other, and yet, all we need is each other. Pio Gama Pinto’s fight continues... until everyone is free. We are not free….until every single one of us is free. Special thanks to Linda Gama Pinto. It was an honor to share space with Emma Gama Pinto before she passed in October 2020. ReferencesDe Souza, Fitzval. Forward to Independence: My Memoirs. 2018.Durrani, Shiraz, editor. Pio Gama Pinto: Kenya’s Unsung Martyr. Vita Books, 2018.Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission, "Final Report - TJRC Report" (2013). Odinga, Jaramogi Oginga. Not Yet Uhuru. Heinemann Educational Books, 1967. https://untileverypod.com/Home Mon, 09 Nov 2020 19:19:46 +0000 Until Everyone Is Free https://untileverypod.com/Home <img width="800" height="800" width_o="800" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/703bb9f468981ab54899dfc6f46f9fae88f6460fde402bea34dd878d879ca4f2/until-everyone-is-free-head-01.png" data-mid="88399890" border="0" data-scale="78" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/703bb9f468981ab54899dfc6f46f9fae88f6460fde402bea34dd878d879ca4f2/until-everyone-is-free-head-01.png" /> ︎&nbsp; &nbsp; Blog ︎&nbsp; &nbsp; About This Project︎︎︎ ︎&nbsp; &nbsp; YouTube︎ ︎&nbsp; &nbsp; Twitter︎ ︎&nbsp; &nbsp; Facebook︎ ︎&nbsp; &nbsp; Instagram︎ Less than two years after gaining independence, Kenya began killing its own freedom fighters.One of the first political assassinations in the history of independent Kenya was in 1965. They killed a man who knew too much. He knew that oppressors will not stop oppressing you if you ask politely, that the only way to defeat British colonizers was through organized violence—so he routed weapons to Mau Mau forest fighters. He knew that stolen land was the root of colonization—so he fought, both before and after independence—to take it back from elites. He knew that colonization was not just economic control, but also mental control—so he supported small, radical newspapers in vernacular languages to spread conversations about freedom. He knew that the struggle of Kenyans was the same as that in India, Angola, South Africa, or in the U.S.—so he created bridges of solidarity across all continents. In other words, this man knew what freedom was. And he knew how to get it. This man was Pio Gama Pinto. “Until Everyone Is Free” is a Sheng’ podcast/radio show about Pio Gama Pinto: socialist, political detainee, Member of Parliament, and martyr. Over several episodes, host Stoneface Bombaa, producer April Zhu, and reporter Felix Omondi tell the story of this forgotten freedom fighter to answer one important question: How did the country of Kenya become free... without the people of Kenya getting free?Anyone can listen to all of our episodes for free on this website, as well as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you can find podcasts.&nbsp; Episode 1 Wapi Uhuru? Episode 3 Land Justice Advocate Episode 5 Trade Unionist&nbsp; Episode 7 Shujaa Georgetown University Doyle Seminar Lecture Transcript Episode 2 Mau Mau Ally Episode 4 Radical Journalist Episode 6 Political Mastermind