KENYA IS HOME

KENYA IS HOME

By Njonjo Mue

Every morning, our 20 month old daughter, Naserian, cries from her cot to signal that she is ready to start her day. I pick her up, we say a short morning prayer, and start our short walk from her bedroom upstairs to join the rest of the family for breakfast in the dining room.

As we pass the map of the world on the wall of the corridor at the top of the staircase, I point to a particular spot on the map and ask, "Naserian, What is this?"

"Kenya," she says, her eyes lighting up with pride at being able to remember. She then looks at me eagerly with a ready answer for the follow up question that she knows is coming.

"And where is Kenya?" I ask, knowing that she will not move from where she stands, less still have her breakfast, before she can answer that question for all to hear.

"Kenya is home!" she says with pride and joy combined, as if in that simple sentence belongs the answers to all the hidden mystries of life.

Earlier this week, as we performed this ritual with my daughter, I imagined Miguna Miguna doing the same with his mother in Nyando sometime in 1964.

This was at a time when he and his family, along with the entire population of a young nation looked forward with hope to claiming all the promises of independence. On top of that list must have been the fact that, after a century of enduring the humiliation of slavery and the abuse of colonial rule, they would never again be called the children of a lesser god.

This was before Miguna grew up to become a restless youth who was unwilling to make peace with injustice.

This was before he was thrown out of college, detained, tortured, jailed, exiled and forced to temporarily acquire the citizenship of a foreign country in order to survive the hostile life of an exile.

On the morning after the night before, Miguna's voice would not leave my troubled mind, his screams at the door of Emirates EK722 haunting me, "I am not boarding! I know no one in Dubai! I don't have my luggage, I don't have my passport. I'm going nowhere!"

On this day, I tried to distract my daughter as we went down for breakfast, hoping to escape the ritual whose meaning was not so clear to me any more.

However, she too seemed to have heard Miguna's screams in her sleep. For she would not take one step beyond the map along the corridor. Like Miguna at the door of Emirates EK722, she demanded to be heard.

"Naserian," I finally called her, trying this time to avoid looking directly at the twinkle in her innocent eyes. "What is this?" I asked, pointing to the familiar spot on the map.

"Kenya," she said with excitement, then waited, sensing my conflict.

"Where is Kenya?" I asked, unable to hide the conflicting emotions that now threatened to boil over.

"Kenya is home," she whispered tentatively for the first time, confused and unsure that she had given the right answer.

end/NM/30.3.2018