Monthly Archives: February 2022

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The recent blockades in Canada were not about COVID-19. They were about white supremacy and extremism. The blockaders are not patriots nor are they oppressed. The blockaders are an irrational mob of thugs upset about injury to their individual entitlement and panicked about the erosion of their white privilege.

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Attending a protest to whinge about job loss resulting from a refusal to meet fitness to work requirements (i.e. vaccination against COVID-19) is the ultimate in privileged griping. Those who attended the blockades merely to bring about the end of COVID-19 were absurd one cannot protest a global pandemic to a conclusion. The blockade was never about COVID, vaccines, jobs, trucks, public health measures or anything remotely tangible. Worse, the blockaders, in my personal view, behaved like domestic terrorists.

Those paying attention will observe that the 2022 Freedom Convoy resembled and had similar participants as the 2019 United We Roll Convoy. That convoy, complete with yellow vests, chants of Make Canada Great Again, Confederate flags, hate speech and on-stage appearances by Faith Goldy and then-Opposition leader Andrew Scheer, rolled up to Ottawa to shout at the government about carbon taxes and other grievances. In Calgary, the United We Roll Convoy was preceded by regular Saturday protests throughout 2018. Those protests were characterized by signs that read Trudeau for Treason, some with a picture of the prime minister and a noose, and others with misogynistic, sexually violent language about Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus mother.

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Down in Coutts, Alta., the blockaders barked their grievances and demands for respect of their rights from their truck cabs, recreational vehicles and pickup trucks. Things these blockaders professed had been violated were not rights but rather entitlements. White privilege, while the norm for many since birth in Calgary, is not actually normal. It is, rather, the outcome of long-standing, legislated, racist norms that have existed for so long some now believe that a life lived under the benedictions of white privilege is indeed normal and that the resulting entitlements are God-given rights.

Anti-vaccination, anti-mask, anti-public health measures, anti-adulthood and white supremacist marches have occurred every weekend in Calgary since March 2020. Every weekend for 101 weeks. In some of the earliest marches, Calgarians saw tiki torches, yellow stars, Nazi flags, f*ck Trudeau flags, Confederate flags, anti-Asian coronavirus conspiracy posters, posters that disparaged the mayor, posters that disparaged the provincial chief medical officer of health, and deliberate displays of alt-right extremist and hate insignia. The marches featured hate speech and the physical presence of terrorist groups like the Proud Boys, Soldiers of Odin and their ilk. These marches continued and grew for two years and were policed by the Calgary Police Service at a cost of approximately $2 million in 2021 alone. This excludes the costs of investigating hate crimes and hate incidents that were inspired by each of the rallies.

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Canadians dont treat this white nationalism and alt-right extremism with the same pressing urgency as we treat terrorism that may manifest in racialized communities. Police across Canada try to avoid the radicalization of youth into terrorism, however, little focus is paid to white children being radicalized into known terrorist groups like the Proud Boys. Frankly, its all about youth engagement to prevent crime until a bunch of privileged white kids with full entitlement rock up to city hall with their f*ck Trudeau flags, Nazi flags, Three Percenters white nationalist flags and Confederate battle flags. Thankfully, in Calgary, the polices ReDirect program has increased its focus on preventing youth radicalization into alt-right extremism and white nationalism.

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The blockaders were treated differently than any other group that had marched for racial or social justice. When did Black people ever, in the history of Canada, while marching in the streets for racial justice, receive pamphlets and multiple notifications from the police kindly advising them in advance of their potential arrest? In contrast, Black people marching for racial justice, having experienced centuries of actual oppression, police brutality, street checks and inequitable application of the law, are met with police officers wearing Thin Blue Line patches on their uniforms, a visible challenge to a racialized community who are then left feeling unsafe and unserved.

Police officers across the country will react to this column with assertions that policing is really hard right now. Yes, it is, but so is nursing and nurses arent seen clanning together in solidarity and wearing racist insignia on their scrubs or uniforms while working to save the lives of the provinces COVID-19 patients. It is rather the opposite, given that front-line nurses with boots on the ground in Alberta were faced with the potential of both layoffs and pay cuts while continuing to work in debilitating conditions on the front lines of the pandemic.

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There is a distinct culture in policing and that culture was exposed in a transparent fashion during the blockades. Academic research has found that core pieces of police culture include suspicion, isolation, solidarity, conservatism, machismo, racial prejudice, pragmatism, sense of mission, cynicism and pessimism. This culture is further reinforced by the political ideology in Alberta.

The Critical Infrastructure Defence Act came into force in 2020 after some Indigenous people were protesting a pipeline. This legislation was therefore available to police for enforcement during the blockades. Police, aware that the blockaders were by all reports known agitators, majority-white, and pleading a cause that may have aligned with the shared values and culture of police members seemed hesitant to enforce the act, perhaps, I believe because of those same shared values and culture. It was not surprising when it was reported that the blockaders had negotiations, entente cordiale style, with the Alberta RCMP in the warmth and comfort of the Smugglers Saloon in Coutts.

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The blockades were never about COVID. These protests were laced with extremism, white nationalism, populism and racism. The blockaders, privileged and entitled, were nourished, nurtured and coddled in Canada. The blockaders are my neighbours and your colleagues and family. The alarm has been sounded for everyone to urgently eradicate white nationalism to restore peace, order and good government in Canada. And its loud and clamouring, like a deafening wailing truck horn.

Heather A. Campbell is a Calgary-based licensed professional engineer with a masters degree in energy law and policy. Ms. Campbell is a board director with Arts Commons, a member of the Advisory Council for Western Engineering, a commissioner with the Calgary police commission and the peoples warden at St. Stephens Anglican Church. She is the former co-chair of the Alberta Anti-Racism Advisory Council. The views expressed in this column are her own.

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Campbell: The Freedom Convoy blockades were never about COVID-19 - Calgary Herald

SOUTH Herefordshire MP Jesse Norman has backed the governments actions amid the horrendous and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia today (February 24).

Mr Norman said he wholeheartedly supports the governments promise to impose sanctions on Russia, after Russian forces launched a military invasion of Ukraine in the early hours of this morning after weeks of growing tensions.

And in standing behind Ukraine, Mr Norman said the country is standing up for the most fundamental principle of freedom.

This afternoon Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the UK and allies will launch a massive package of sanctions to hobble Russias economy.

Mr Johnson is due to outline the further economic sanctions against Russia in the Commons later today.

We are standing up for the most fundamental principle of freedom

Jesse Norman MP

Many years ago I ran an educational project giving away brand new medical textbooks to doctors across Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, Mr Norman told the Gazette. So I recall very vividly the bleakness and oppression of life under the communism imposed by the Soviet Union.

In standing behind Ukraine against this horrendous and unprovokedRussian invasion, we are not only supporting a sovereign, free and independent European state. We are standing up for the most fundamental principle of freedom:that people should be able to mix, to speak, to worship, to be educated, to bring up their families and to prosper as they see fit under the rule of law, without threat or tyranny.

So I wholeheartedly support the Government in building international alliances against Russia, imposing sanctions, and taking whatever other measures may be required to make clear that this crime of aggression will not go unpunished and uncorrected.

Read more:

MP Jesse Norman backs government to clamp down on Russia after 'horrendous and unprovoked' invasion | rossgazette.com - Ross Gazette

Following the launch of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and after months of endless pro-war propaganda by Western governments and the corporate media, a chauvinist anti-Russian campaign is now underway in the US and Western Europe. Its targets include Russian musicians, conductors and singers.

Late Thursday, management at New York Citys Carnegie Hall announced that acclaimed Russian conductor Valery Gergiev would no longer be conducting the Vienna Philharmonic at the famed venue on Friday. Management also canceled a performance by respected pianist Denis Matsuev, who had been scheduled to perform Sergei Rachmaninoffs Piano Concerto No.2.

Gergiev, 68, is among the most accomplished and respected figures in world classical music today, a field in which Russian and formerly Soviet artists have excelled. His international career began during the Cold War with a performance in Britain in 1985, at a time when the Reagan administration had ratcheted up tensions with the Soviet Union to the extreme. A quarter century ago, Gergiev was made principal guest conductor of New Yorks Metropolitan Opera.

No reason was given for the removal of Gergiev from the program, but it was clearly carried out in retaliation for his support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Gergiev met in St. Petersburg in the 1990s shortly after the dissolution of the USSR. Protests were evidently planned to take place in front of Carnegie Hall during the performance, prompting management to buckle to pressure. The New York Times, one of the chief clearinghouses for CIA propaganda, noted the cancellation with cynical satisfaction, labeling Gergiev not a musician but an agent of Russian soft-power politics, a cultural ambassador who has built a busy international career while maintaining deep ties to the Russian state.

Gergievs other international engagements are also threatened as well, and the continuation of his international career is being made subject to modern-day loyalty oaths. Milans La Scala opera house has threatened to drop a March 5 appearance if Gergiev does not publicly denounce Russias invasion of Ukraine. Munichs mayor has given him three days to issue such a statement or face removal as chair of the Munich Philharmonic. Rotterdam is also reportedly considering canceling a Gergiev Festival scheduled for September.

There is staggering hypocrisy behind this campaign. It goes without saying that not a single figure in American music has ever faced any retribution for supporting the wars in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and the list goes on. The Times and the Democratic Party also make no attempt to reconcile their support for banning Russian musicians with their opposition to boycotts of Israeli intellectuals and academics for that countrys oppression of the Palestinians and recurring mass atrocities in the tiny Gaza Strip.

The claim is being made that Gergiev is being singled out not because hes a Russian, but because of his backing for Putin. Should every US musician, artist or scientist who ever visited the White House, or served on an advisory panel on cultural or scientific affairs, have his or her career ended because of the American governments vast crimes? Is every Hollywood celebrity who publicly endorsed Barack Obama responsible for his Terror Tuesday meetings where the president and other officials went over kill lists of potential drone strike targets?

Many other Russian classical performers now face similar threats, and the campaign has even expanded beyond individuals with any connection to Putin, to Russian music and culture in general. The Eurovision Song Contest has announced it will not accept entries this year from Russia, claiming the presence of musicians who happened to have been born in that country would bring the competition to disrepute. Various orchestras have even begun removing pieces by Pyotr Tchaikovsky and other Russian composers who died a century or more before the war in Ukraine began.

This disgusting spectacle is the product of war fever whipped up by the US government with the help of the pliant capitalist press, including the Times, the Washington Post and other pillars of what once passed for American liberalism.

This campaign to promote anti-Russian hatred has little popular support. It is largely centered in sections of the privileged middle class. Polls have consistently shown that the vast majority of the US public opposes war with Russia, or even significant American involvement in Ukraine, but one would have no sense of this by reading through the comments sections of the Times. The latter are dominated by furious statements blaming Putin for every conceivable social ill both foreign and domestic. Shamefully, hardly a single major academic, writer or intellectual can be found to oppose this.

This social layer has proven extremely vulnerable to this type of manipulation. For years, the affluent petty bourgeoisie has been in the grip of one witch-hunting campaign after another, which have destroyed innumerable careers on the basis of allegations and innuendo. This includes the #MeToo attacks on opera singer Placido Domingo and Metropolitan Opera director James Levine.

Dominating these campaigns are appeals to emotion, attacks on due process, the denigration and falsification of history and a worldview dominated by race and ethnicity, which have led to a shocking deadening of democratic consciousness within this milieu. But this outlook also reflects the class interests of this social stratum, which long ago made its peace with world imperialism.

Such people write and speak as though they lived the past three decades in a parallel universe in which the Global War on Terror and numerous wars of choice by American imperialism, all of them based on a torrent of lies and misinformation, never took place.

The attack on Gergiev and other artistsand this is only the starthas disturbing historical parallels. Some of the worst political crimes in 20th century US history were preceded by the creation of this type of frenzied jingoistic atmosphere. Vicious attacks on German immigrants occurred during World War I, including the murder of socialist coal miner Robert Prager in Collinsville, Illinois in April 1918. World War II witnessed the infamous mass internment of Japanese Americans by the Roosevelt administration.

These chauvinist campaigns also created the conditions for a wide-ranging assault on socialist opponents of war, including the arrest of Eugene Debs in 1918 and the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party in 1941.

There are currently 2.4 million Russian-Americans living in the US, including nearly 400,000 born in Russia or the former Soviet Union. Are they to be treated as well as potential enemy agents, organized and directed by Putin through RT and other Russian media outlets? Will they also be forced to publicly denounce the Russian government and its actions as a condition for keeping their jobs? Indeed, on Thursday Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell floated the possibility of expelling Russian international students from the United States as a form of collective punishment for the actions of theKremlin.

There is a disturbing similarity between the campaign against Gergiev and the attack during World War I on Karl Muck, the German-born director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Muck was forced out of his position, arrested at night and interned for 17 months as an enemy alien after a press campaign over his supposed refusal to perform the Star Spangled Banner before concerts.

In response, Muck pointed to the universality of music and rejected its subordination to nationalism, declaring, Art is a thing by itself, and not related to any particular nation or group. Therefore, it would be a gross mistake, a violation of artistic taste and principles for such an organization as ours to play patriotic airs. Does the public think that the Symphony Orchestra is a military band or a ballroom orchestra?

The campaign against Russian musicians is aimed at poisoning public consciousness and depriving people of the sensitivity and human solidarity that great music always encourages.

The exchange of musicians between the US and the Soviet Union played a role in alleviating tensions, and inculcating mutual respect for the cultural achievements of both countries, largely limiting the spread of the most visceral forms of anti-Russian hatred to the extreme right. This history includes tours by great Soviet musicians in the US and the renowned international tours by American jazz musicians. In 1958, Texas-born Van Cliburn made an enormous impact on the Soviet public when he won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

Within the working class, a different attitude prevails. Decades of US invasions and wars, whose victims include American working class youth, have produced a deeply ingrained skepticism about Washingtons claims to be fighting for national sovereignty and human rights. Workers have learned through bitter experiences that behind such rhetoric lie the interests of the ruling elite. And they know, as always, it will be the workers of the world who will be made to pay the price.

The greatest danger, however, is that this latent opposition remains diffuse, unorganized and politically inarticulate. If the drive towards World War III is to be stopped, the working class must mobilize on a socialist, internationalist basis to stop it.

See the article here:

The campaign against Russian conductor Valery Gergiev: Middle-class hysteria in the service of war - WSWS

The fortuitous discovery of the court transcripts of the trial of freedom fighter Dedan Kimathi pierces the deliberate official silence of many years and thrusts this important historical figure right to the centre of British imperial history in Kenya.

Without a doubt, especially given the historical significance and centrality of Kimathi in the struggle for independence, there is a real possibility that the publication of this archival find (in the 2017 Julie MacArthur edited volume, Dedan Kimathi on Trial) could fling open the door to a grim and an uneasy past and bring into question not merely the skewed sense of British colonial justice but also the entire imperially inaugurated order and related issues of social and historical injustice. After all, the subjugation, domination, and social control of Africans, and the exercise of power in the allocation of resources and services under the colonial order, was through a flimsy and dubious cloak of legality.

Throughout human history, when the legal process establishes a right of one particular person, group, or institution, it simultaneously imposes a restraint on those whose preferences impinge on the right established. In this particular case, in the name of the law, the rights of white settlers were assured and their privilege entrenched even while the just and legitimate aspirations of millions of Africans were delegitimized, repressed, and extinguished without contemplation, with arbitrariness disguised as legality.

Moreover, the colonial order was contrived through legal prestidigitation. From the outset, the imperial legitimacy of power was, therefore, contested, and most segments of the African population in Kenya understood that the colonial order had been possible only through the legal production of illegality, that, indeed, colonial law cloaked illegitimate power.

Kimathi was convicted on two chargesunlawful possession of a firearm and unlawful possession of ammunitioncontrary to the Emergency Regulations of 1953, under which it was found that he threatened public safety and order, contravening a colonial order that rested on the rickety stilts of the legal production and social construction of illegality, which is what had inspired the Mau Mau threat in the first place.

It is, in fact, curiously surprising that Kimathis defence team never once argued, in entering its plea, as Mandela and Walter Sisulu, among other defendants, had in the Rivonia Trial. Making a formal plea, the former had courageously stated that it was the government that should have been in the dock and not him. The latter had stated, It is the government which is guilty, not me, adding, after being rebuked by Quartus de Wet, the presiding judge, who asked him to plead either guilty or not, It is the government which is responsible for what is happening in this country.

The oppressive colonial order resting, as it did, on the social and legal construction of illegality, was not on trial, which, in retrospect, casts a shadow of doubt on this case. In other words, it was a blatant miscarriage of justice.

As if this was not enough, as British colonial authorities were wont to do, Kimathi, the embodiment of anti-colonialism, and by extension, a fighter against all that was evil in the heady, violent 1950s, was ignominiously executed and buried in an unmarked grave, his remains forever lost. With this physical, psychic, and existential erasure, it must also have been hoped that his memory was evermore expunged from the face of the earth. He was not only to be humiliated and dehumanized but also to be forgotten.

As Ngg wa Thiongo observes, this can be seen as part and parcel of, generally, European, and specifically, British imperial dismembering practice of power intended, at once, both to pacify colonial subjects, and as a symbolic act, a performance of power, intended to produce docile minds. The commutation of capital punishment was an integral aspect of colonial networks of power and violence. In addition, Kimathis execution was a stark enactment of colonial power intended to reinforce an imperial order and impose the authority of the colonial state. And this enactment of power over Kimathi as a colonial subject meant even more: this feared and hated terrorist was dismembered from memory, what he stood for now choked off, and the dangerous ideas and memories that he carried, buried.

The man that colonialists wanted Kenya to forget became a byword for contempt and derision spoken only in hushed whispers. Kimathi, his image now besmirched, like that of many others whose lives were shamefully ended on the gallows, and his memory all but wiped from the public eye for at least half a century, was an ambiguous historical figure unlike self-styled but celebrated fathers of the nation. Even after independence, a street named after him was only a token honour. But the significant military role he had played in the fight for freedom stubbornly remained a part of the national metanarrative and of the school curriculum. For most people, he remained an unspoken hero.

But, as Simon Gikandi points out, there was a gradually spreading ripple of public acclaim emanating from Karunaini, Kimathis birthplace, which naturally became the epicentre of the sustained memorialization of the man and what he stood for, despite years of neglect in the Kenyatta and Moi years. In the immediate neighbourhood of Karunaini, numerous elementary and secondary schools are named after him, the highest honour paid to him by the Nyeri elite led by Mwai Kibaki, who in 1972 established the Dedan Kimathi University of Technology. After assuming the presidency, Kibaki then took the memorialization a notch higher by commissioning the Kimathi statue that stands at the head of the street named after him in the centre of the countrys political and commercial capital, Nairobi.

All this came at a time when Kenyans were witnessing a distantly related reincarnation of Mau Mau, the growing Mungiki movement among Gikuyu rural and urban youth. This then is what explains why, in an intimate conversation, in 2006 with two close friends from my church in Nairobi, one concerned observer expressed fear that the Kimathi statue would send the wrong message in the country and signal the return of his spirit. Whatever that might have meant, it was not far from the truth.

In my belated rejoinder to my friends remark and, appropriately using Biblical imagery, this recognition that came late in the day, was Kimathis haunting blood bitterly crying out to be remembered, and for justice, from an unmarked grave. His voice joined at least a thousand others whose micronarratives are effectively detailed by David Andersons Histories of the Hanged and thus continue providing witness to British colonial political oppression, exploitation, injustice, and police and military brutality from their graves.

This moment in Mau Mau history in general, and the commemoration of Kimathi in particular, marked the zenith of the retrieval from near oblivion of one of the most violent periods in Kenyas history that a few would rather not remember. That a small ripple could have reached such a national crescendo, and from the Nyeri region, which was particularly hard hit by the divisions and the violence that arose in the 1950s, and without the slightest demur from so-called loyalists, would warrant an urgent re-evaluation of what it meant to be a rebel or a loyalist in that decade.

It is quite remarkable that a young peasant of Kimathis humble background could have taken such a militant stance against the British, becoming such a formidable imperial headache. This did not happen simply because he, as then alleged, was a demonic, bloodthirsty rebel or a deranged psychopath hell-bent on violence. This sort of offhanded criminalization and obvious dismissal has clouded a clear view of the man.

Kimathis stature and resistance was achieved through an ever-widening circle, starting from self-identity to his relationship with, and organization of, key figures that he knew face-to-face (read: Mau Mau forest fighters). This was followed by his keen understanding of, and appeal to, a solidaristic collective organization from which he drew upon the consciously organized resources of a social movement in pursuit of his individual agency.

Furthermore, although this is also where he floundered, he did attempt to involve the organizational capacities of generalized agencies such as other global liberation movements, and exemplars of revolution and their publications, and local and international media, which he read or knew only remotely through their representations.

In the first concentric circle of Kimathis organization of resistance was a deep-seated resistance consciousness the spring of which was sufficient self-cognizance to enable him to act as a coherently organized individual or to exercise reflexive agency in power relations. Moreover, his inclination to join the nationalist movement; to become a member of the Kenya African Union (KAU), for which he served as the Ol Kalou branch secretary; and his subsequent involvement with the militant outgrowth of the Anake a 40 (Young Men of the 1940s)the Muhimumade up of ex-servicemen, urban gangs, and frustrated political activists from whose ranks he rose quickly to become a respected oath administrator and organizer, all must have stemmed from a solid base of intensive self-organization.

This sort of political activity demonstrates that Kimathi, as an individual, was organized enough to be able to seek to enrol, translate, interest, or oppose others in state-making as a public project of power. This demonstrates his existence under conditions of well-framed reflexivity. Kimathi well understood how power relations constituted his identity, which is what ignited reflexivity that propelled him to pursue possibilities of what he could be(come). This reflexive self-organization of himself as a resistant subject was based on framed knowledge about who he was and what he could or should be, which is what enabled him to take a stand against the established colonial order.

Kimathi lived at a crucial period of transition from African traditional ways to a racially hierarchical colonial modernityat a time, therefore, when the very private experience of having a personal identity to discover, and a personal destiny to fulfil, became a subversive political force of major proportions.

Moreover, he knew about and sought to exploit the deep, fertile soil of brewing African dissent and real grievances, and naturally, the latently explosive transcript of indignation hidden beneath it. Kimathis ambition was to animate the collective cultural fantasy and dreams of violent revenge of subordinate but long-suffering Africans who, however, never gave their personal hidden transcripts expression, even among close friends and peers.

At the level of analytical understanding, this is what should matter to us most. It matters little, then, the idiosyncrasies attendant to the pursuit of his stand or whether that stand was an act of outrage or rebellion, or an existential gesture. Equally, important as they are to our full understanding of the man, it matters little what ascriptions or variable representations and multiple interpretations his image attracted contemporaneously or thereafter.

Next, at the level of social organization, Kimathi was able to implicate other important players, some of whom he knew through face-to-face relations. Put differently, he was able to draw upon resources of social organization greater than, or beyond, himself, such as ecologies of local community networks, and, by extension, the forged alliance of ethnic kin- ship and enlarged moral imagination of the Gikuyu.

This level can be said to have been reached when Kimathi took to the Nyandarua Forest, where he rose to become one of the most important leaders of the Mau Mau rebellion. It is in the forest that he would found the Kenya Defence Council, and a freedom fighters Kenya Parliament as attempts to bring order, hierarchy, and centralization to the scattered Mau Mau forces. This could well have been the time when Kimathi, contemporaneously, started to attract and embody all manner of competing ascriptions and symbolize many of the contradictions represented by Mau Mau, Kenyan anti-colonialism, and nationalism writ large.

It is while in the forest that a relatively well-prepared Kimathi, as a resistant subject, a man of courage and practical power, launched his career properbefore, of course, taking the reins of state power. Having experienced, first-hand, misfortunes that he rightly attributed to the colonial structures of domination that resulted in systematic oppression, and having witnessed the wishes of the people, and judging himself to be a formidable man of will, Kimathi thought he knew how to come to their end, and, whispering to this friend, and arguing down that adversary, sought to mould society to his purpose.

Looking upon people as wax for his hands, he started to take command of them as the wind does the clouds, in order to lead them, in glad surprise, to the very point they would be. And as a leader of men, he was, for a time, followed with acclamation. But this stage also marked the beginning of his undoing.

After all, there are obstacles and limits to the construction of any collectivity, or people as a body. There is nothing automatic about the emergence of a people. With him were people who, while sharing certain substantive values, consisted of multiple selves, people constituting their identities in a plurality of subject positions. Although aspiring to forge the wishes of the people into a new polity of citizens, an ordered, lawful, and progressive society, as a leader of a loose coalition with divergent interests, Kimathi easily became a blank canvas upon which were inscribed various political demands and ends.

In addition, he was a suspended hegemon in the making without firm or well-established authority, a floating signifier rather than a fixed one that was pinned down, ordering the form of debate, irrespective of the content. Not having achieved fixity that avails hegemonic power, his authority was subject to the harsh audit of his peers. It comes as no surprise then that Kimathi was less known for his prowess as a field general than for his motivational speeches and his legendary obsession with the output of bureaucratic prose, a discursive practice that is a constant site of struggle over power.

In his power stratagem, Kimathi believed the pen was mightier than the sword. The power struggle was not just within the movement and its top leadership but also within the wider political frontiers of the colonial state. Ultimately, this is what defused the violent forest struggle for land and freedom, arresting the momentum of Mau Maus militant demand for independence. Competing loci of personal authority impaired collective action and blunted the first impulse of social obligation, muddling the core and shared substantive value between all Mau Maus as encapsulated by their central argument about moral economy.

Confrontations and divisions between forest fighters, and, specifically, challenges to Kimathis authority, no doubt affected the stories that these opponents of colonial power wanted to tell Kenya and the world. Furthermore, this fragmentation of resistance lacked all vital centralization and a shared quantifiable strategic objective. As a result, while initially successful in tapping into the energy, general mood of dissent, and resources of a movement that had discrete but wide support of the majority of people in Central Province, solidaristic organization there and elsewhere in the colony and beyond did not quite take root.

In spite of his prowess at drawing on global exemplars of revolution and political thought, Kimathis predicament was exacerbated by lack of success to connect with generalized others like such rvolutionnaires elsewhere in the world and media organizations. In the long run, the colonial state caught up with this central figure whose personal resistance had become the keystone upon which the struggle to defeat tyranny, imperial hegemony, and regime of colonial normalcy or order rested. Once the influence of the person at the centre of the Mau Mau rebellion was snuffed out, the back of the resistance was broken.

Thus ended the ambition of a man of courage and measured practical power to mould society to his purpose. But it is important to turn to the fulcrum on which this personal ambition and carefully cultivated identity turned: that is, various technologies of self-expression and, therefore, self-inscription and self-formation. Specifically, this refers to Kimathis identity-shaping disciplines and discursive practices through which he sought to transform himself into a formidable man of will and a practical man of action and power, and which also enabled him to assume, as a personal mission, the alignment of ordinary peoples everyday projects with authoritative images of the colonial social order.

As Derek Peterson has observed, Kimathis ensemble of representations and disciplines necessitating incessant writing, bureaucratic recording and record-keeping materials, typewriters, printing machines, and so forth were ways of imagining a counter-state. More than being a hobby or obsession, it does seem that Kimathi understood the nature and inner workings of powerabove all, that it is textual, semiotic, inherent in the very possibility of textuality, meaning, and signification in the social world. Moreover, his letter writing and record keeping can, and should, be seen as discursive resistance or discursive articulation of resistance that informed Kimathis sense of self-identity and purpose.

Kimathis identity-shaping disciplines and discursive practices were a way of engaging with social reality, which cannot be known unequivocally but only through its representation in language. He was exercising discursive consciousness by putting things into words or giving verbal expression to the promptings of action. His use of speeches, text, writing, cognition, and argumentation can, and should, be seen as reliance on language to represent possibilities, and to position possibilities, in relation to each other. In other words, he used language to define the possibilities of meaningful existence.

Although he was known to have written profusely, however, there is precious little that exists of Kimathis records to shed light on his thinking, what he understood his cause to be, and his stand. Nevertheless, it is worth making a gallant effort to reveal his thoughts.

For all his disrepute, Kimathis sharpness, illustrated in his few surviving historical records, is not in doubt. Indeed, there has not been a more comprehensive testimony to the mans intellectual acuity until the recovery of transcripts of his trial. Although meant to argue for the prosecution, an expert witness, a medical doctor, stated that Kimathi was a reasonably intelligent man, intelligent above the standard of a man of his education. This rings true in the pages of his scant writing. His is a feeble and isolated prophetic voice crying out from the wilderness of colonial oppression, that of socioeconomic neglect of African reserves and exploitation.

Nor was it a voice that was taken seriously. But what one deduces from the little writing available, and specifically that selectively adduced in the trial as evidence (Exhibits Nos. 22A, 23, and 24), is a person of more than average intelligence and a man wholly committed to a just cause, something that is echoed in Maina wa Kinyattis The Papers of Dedan Kimathi, the veracity, provenance, access, and translation of which, in academic circles unfortunately, is still much in doubt.

Scattered throughout are gems of Gikuyu wisdom from a man moved to action, not out of flippant emotions but from the depths of the experience of colonial injustice and the pressing need for redress. One gleans appeals to the colonial authorities to rely less on coercion or fear and more on truth; appeals for mutual trust, respect, and friendship, and mutuality in giving and acceptance; appeals for truth and justice; appeals for shared prosperity while appreciating that all people cannot be rich; appeals for the need for reconciliation; and appeals for peace and mutual coexistence and the hope that blacks and whites in Kenya be of one heart.

One also finds, in these few pages, a stunning tenacity in the justifiability of the cause for which he was fighting. The reading of the three Kimathi letters also shows a clear understanding of his cause: Kimathi and others were fighting for the country and its people, for wathi (self-mastery) and for truth and justice.

And, in this worthy struggle, surrender was out of the question. It was something that could not get into the minds of intelligent people. Indeed, it was preferable to sell ones soul instead of having to surrender it. Surrender would also not bring about an end to the war. It was also quite clear, in Kimathis mind, who Mau Mau were, and it was not just a matter of white and black as the problems that beset Kenya affected both races. As such, justice could not be expected from the barrel of the gun.

Mau Mau was the cry of a people suffering from poverty and exploitation. It was a vehicle to liberate Kenya, to regain the Kenyan soil that Europeans had occupied by force. The poor man was Mau Mau, and therefore, bombs and other weapons could not finish the movement. In fact, if the exploitation of the Africans did not stop, Kimathi said, it was to be expected that the war in Kenya would continue for a long time.

Violent confrontation between the two sides could not bring about fairness or truth. Only peace could hold the Kenyan house together, as opposed to ruling Africans with the colonial whip in their faces. There was need for reconciliation (iguano), and mending of the paining part of the colonial body politic, beyond the rift occasioned by the war. The fight was not one of everlasting hatred but was, rather, a necessary but regrettable pause calling for the creation of a true and real brotherhood between white and black, so that the latter could be regarded as people, as capable and equal human beings.

All said, one may be forgiven for seeing, in Kimathi, a quite different kind of man from these letters. A Kimathi who was not a mastermind of evil and a militant man of violent action but also an understanding diplomat in his own right, especially considering his constant appeals for peace.

Nonetheless, Kimathis cause and what he stood for, his thinking about the colonial order and his action(s) against it, and his appeals, were not taken as seriously as he would have wished. Indeed, because of it, his letter writing and record keeping, and the content therein, even proffers of peace, were met with a closed double riigi (door)that of the colonial authorities on the one hand, and that of sections of the forest Mau Mau and their leadership on the other.

Kimathi faced opposition from his fellow forest fighters over strategy revolving around his peace efforts as well as challenges to his authority. This rift stemmed from literacy, which in the forest often became a dividing line, especially among the movements leadership. While exercising identity-shaping disciplines and discursive practices, Kimathi elevated himself over his peers, whom he was often given to criticizing as unlettered. They, in turn, accused Kimathi of having been poisoned by Christianity and Western education. It is not surprising that the modestly educated, like Kimathi, and the highly educated, like Karari Njama, were disturbed by traditional Gikuyu practices and superstitions, for instance, precolonial oath-taking elements, yet tolerated them for their utility.

In due time, those who clung to traditions and superstitions, deeming themselves to be authentic Gikuyus, retreated to the house of Gikuyu customs and closed the woven door (riigi) behind them. These Kimathi critics were weary of his bureaucratic Kenya Parliament with its incessant writing and record keeping and talks of making peace that they found untrustworthy. They accused Kimathi and other educated Protestant leaders of using their illiterate followers for their own selfish ends.

On the other hand was the riigi of the colonial authorities. The colonial authorities, and the court, chose to look beyond Kimathis motivations, what he stood for, and what he was fighting for. That mattered little. It is little wonder that Kimathi was tried within the narrow legal parameters of a court of Emergency assize. Why he was in possession of both an unlicensed revolver and six rounds of ammunition was not in question.

Kimathis proffers of peace and appeals for redress of pressing African grievances; for the colonial authorities to rely less on coercion or fear, and more on truth; for mutual trust, respect and friendship, and mutuality in giving and acceptance; for shared prosperity while appreciating that all people cannot be rich; for the need for healing and reconciliation; for peace and mutual coexistence, and the expression of hope that blacks and whites in Kenya be of one heart; and for justice and truth, came to naught. Indeed, what he represented, the truth of the weak spoken in the face of power, was inadmissible and unacceptable.

Kimathis insubordination against the constituted colonial order and its laws, and the insurrection that he had led, had breached the bounds of established rules of structured consensual interaction, including whatever conflict existed between the imperial authorities and their lawful African subjects. His war sought to reconfigure the socioeconomic formation of the state, the political order within it, and its power structure. The violence and its envisioned objectives went beyond ordered conflict within the structured rules of interaction that colonial authorities oversaw.

What is more, Kimathis truth and knowledge were at loggerheads with the ideas and beliefs that had (re)produced the colonial political, economic, and social structure. Structurally, what Kimathi stood for was dangerous to the systemic colonial structure and had to be rooted out and crushed. What Kimathi stood for was, therefore, feared by, and undesirable for, the colonial authorities. He was the paragon of radical and revolutionary thought that demanded far-reaching reforms and fundamental decolonization.

The door to this dangerous road had to be firmly shut, even if it meant granting flag and political independence to Kenya. Indeed, independence was one way of preventing this possibility: it was a safety valve that ensured that the madding crowd of have-nots could not at any time leap over the barriers and invade the pitch of sanitized politics of law and order, as they had in 1952.

In death as in life, Kimathi represents the deep politics of moral ethnicity that continues to pit the haves against the have-nots, that is, at once a dynastic, factional, and generational game. This, then, is what explains why he continues to be the revolutionary touchstone by which radical politicians such as J.M. Kariuki, writers acutely sensitive to social and political forces and relations of production, and socially conscious musicians, evaluate politics in Kenya.

Kimathi remains, perhaps more than any other public figure in Kenyas history, the focal point of nationalism, the smouldering embers of which promise to glow brighter into an ever-shining dawn of the quest for popular statehood.

The emerging image of Kimathi is that of a simple man who acted with courage when he experienced systematic colonial oppression. It is this courage that propelled him to take a daring stand and to fight as a David against an imperial Goliath for basic human rights and shared prosperity, dignity, truth, justice, mutual respect, and coexistence. In so doing, he exemplified Ralph Waldo Emersons three qualities of greatness, which conspicuously attract the wonder and reverence of mankind.

First, Kimathi demonstrated a purpose so sincere that it could not be sidetracked by any prospects of wealth or other personal advantage. It is this virtue that steeled his nerves as he waited for his end and must have enabled him to embrace self-sacrifice. It is such self-sacrifice that made renowned heroes of Greece and Rome such as Socrates, Aristides, Phocion, Quintus Curtius, and Regulus.

Second, he was a man of practical power who sought to memorialize and, therefore, immortalize, the thoughts of powerless peasants in sculptures of wood and stone, brass, and steel.

Third, Kimathi excelled in courage, which no imperial terrors neither bombs from the sky nor the gallowscould shake. His own truth and knowledge were the antidote of fear. Kimathi had the conviction that the imperial agents with whom he contended were not necessarily superior to him in strength, resources, and spirit. A self-made field marshal, his speeches motivated his itungati (troops of young soldiers) reminding them that they were men and that their enemies were no more. It is this same sacred courage that steadied his pen as he scribbled his last letter, addressed to a Father Marino (from a Catholic mission in Nyeri). From a stoic pen flowed words of a man who was persuaded that he had attempted to accomplish the cause that he was put in colonial Kenya by the Creator to do.

Penning these last words, I wonder whether, as a professing Christian, Kimathi thought he was indestructible. Whether his only fear was facing his final judge, the Almighty, and not those who could kill the body but were unable to kill the soul or destroy his legacy. Otherwise, how could he have taken on the British unless he believed he was more than a match for his antagonists then and in the long sweep of history? Was death his final hope for escape from the imprisonment of an oppressive colonial architecture of legal strictures and exploitative policies; from the manacling of individual and collective wills; and from imperial spatial deletion and delimitation constraining the individual field and basis of action and, therefore, African agency? And how could he have been impenitently so busy and so happy preparing for heaven on the very eve of his execution (by hanging by the neck until dead) unless he was consumed by the best and highest courages that are the beams of the Almighty? Did he believe himself to have fought the good fight, to have run and finished the race and remained faithful to a just cause that had, for him, shone like the noonday sun?

We may never know the full answers to these questions. But one thing is without doubt: there was once a man in a leopard skin jacket and hat under a castor oil tree in the thick tapestry of sickly wafting mist of the Nyandarua Forest of the cold Aberdare Ranges of Central Kenya. A man who consigned himself there because he loved the idea of a free country more than anything in the world, even his life. A man who, aiming for neither wealth nor comfort, ventured all to put, in one act of violent resistance, the invisible thought in his mind. A man who is in anybodys eyes and for all times will remain, a liberator, for he sought the ideal of self-mastery and freedom stemming from the restoration of alienated African lands.

This man, Kimathi, must stand like a Hercules, an Achilles, a Rstem, or a Cid in the mythology of the Kenyan state; and in its authentic history, like a Leonidas, a Scipio, a Caesar, a Richard Cur de Lion, a Nelson, a Grand Cond, a Bertrand du Guesclin, a Doge Dandolo, a Napoleon, a Massna, and a Ney.

But this is now a matter before the court of public opinion, which must decide this now reopened case: one between what Kimathi stood for and his stated cause, and that of Mau Mau, versus an obsolete, and unjust and legally illegal British colonial justice system.

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