Thread by @Owaahh

The law Miguna Miguna has been charged under was passed to fight, not surprisingly, the peasant irredentism known as the Mau Mau.

It was passed in 1955 but other laws had already been used to charge people with 'administering an illegal oath' in the years before.

A thread.

To understand just how far back into the colonial model we have sunk, check the dates on the sections on oaths GOK is using. They were all passed after 1950, and seem to have been modified as our colonizers learnt more about the oathing process.
ilo.org/dyn/natlex/doc…

Their survival after 1963 wasn't accidental. Jomo retained the colonial attitude to peasant revolutions, except of course if it was 1969 and busloads were being forced to take the oath in his name.

The exhaustive colonial laws against those who take them (even under threat), those who administer them, and those who are merely present tells you just how much the government feared the symbolism and uniting power of the oath.

Of all the tools the Mau Mau had in their arsenal, the oaths (three main levels) was the most potent. In all Mau Mau memoirs it symbolises rebirth and freedom. It was a moment, as '69 showed as well, when a people could be bound to a single cause.

Oathing didn't stop simply because these laws were in place and people suffered for them. It didn't stop even after Louis Leakey tried to design a counter-intuitive, hoping to break the 'demonic' and 'barbaric' hold it had on those who had taken it.

That such a colonial law survives to this day, and is being used in the way it is, tells you alot about the thinking of the elite who took over this country and have ruled ever since.

"Any oaths for us is fine, anything else and you are not above this very old law."

The use of the ritual ideology (of a binding oath) by the Mau Mau was demonized by colonial psy-ops and later, by the clergy in '69. There's proof, in D. Ndegwa's memoirs, that Jomo knew about the oathing (it was happening in his compound anyway) despite denials.

Perhaps it's important to see why oathing resurfaced among the Kikuyu in 1969. Kenya was a 'free country' by then, but Odinga and Kenyatta had fallen out on land and social justice in 1966.

By '69, there was a new enemy to fight (the Luo), and now Mboya and Kodhek were dead.

Among the first things Jomo and his men did is to isolate the Luo by isolating KPU's non-Luo support such as Bildad Kaggia and Joseph Mwasia Nthula. The opposition to the wily old man, as his son has clearly learnt, then just became one people, apparently led by one man.

To the Kikuyu home base then, Jomo and his cronies made their political problem an existential one for an entire people, and reached out to the most potent tool the Mau Mau had ever deployed, the oath of unity.

The downtrodden of the 1950s, who had lost even more people, more land, and liberties, were recruited into the villainy of the '60s and '70s (and oathing laws conveniently forgotten, while detention without trial ones were updated).

Jomo and his men kept the laws intact in case the natives ever got restless again.

His son must be grateful to have such a worthy inheritance (and men willing to break laws on his behalf).

That Uhuru's inherited support base, descendants of a brave generation for whom this law was designed to subjugate, are defending its use just six and a half decades later tells you how power dynamics shifted. There's a new slave class, a native people to be subjugated.

If you think about it, our postcolonial attitude to irredentism, of which the Somali secession and 'tribal clashes' have been a huge part, have been answered with measures ripped right out of the colonial playbook.

Even our laws on hate speech and incitement don't make much sense. In a cyclical way, they are meant to maintain the slave-master patronage system we've built since 1895, deliberately keeping majority of Kenyans as natives/peasants in need of discipline and convenient truth.

The sad thing it is even in our attitude to press freedom. What, pray tell, constitutes a 'responsible media?' Is it one that deliberately censors itself from covering an event attended by tens of thousands, and with symbolic meaning to half the electorate?

End of particular thread.

Long Live the Prince!