The Rise of Ideologically Driven “Boomers” Who Comprised a Colossal Part of the 1960s Protest Movements in the United States: They Changed America Forever!
But All Was Not Well in America
From the Internet
October 16, 1962
For thirteen days in October 1962 the world waited—seemingly on the brink of nuclear war—and hoped for a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba.
America Under Siege by Student Movements
Popular music became a powerful instrument of youth radicalization across the US and the world at large.
The Republican Party National Convention, July 15th through July 18th, 2024
The Widening Polarization of the United States
Contrary to their rhetoric of “national unity”, the Republican Party is driving deep division across the United States.
A white police officer shoots a Black man 7 times in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In ensuing trial, the police officer is acquitted. Riots break out and destroy businesses in the central business district.
Wisconsin Papers: “He has been hailed as a hero. He has been feted by politicians, including Donald Trump. He has been compared to John Wayne as a symbol of law-abiding people fighting back against lawlessness. When he took a rifle to a protest over the earlier police shooting that left Jacob Blake paralyzed, Rittenhouse said his intention was to protect property against violence.”
The Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya was instrumental in radicalizing many of us who came of age in the 1950s. The British colonial regime in Kenya facilitated this by creating the “color bar” that racially stratified Kenya along very similar lines as the South African “apartheid”. Segregation was carried to the extent of segregating even toilets, with “African toilets” constructed with two huge blocks of cement and a pail in the middle in which you deposited your “stuff” as in “Shit”!
Housing: European, Asian and African estates
Education: European, Asian and African schools
Trains: European (first class), Asian (second class) and African “third class” coaches
Under these existential circumstances many Africans came to hate “Europeans” and “Indians”, just as they despised and looked down on Africans.
When the “State of Emergency” was declared in Kenya, thousands of Africans were sympathetic to “Mau Mau” insurgents and Dedan Kimathi was their hero.
Here is a story: We were playing soccer in our neighborhood in 1950s and suddenly we heard that Dedan Kimathi was “sighted” in a tea room in Majengo. We abandoned our game and ran to Majengo. When we got there we did not find Kimathi! There were so many of such pranks by some naughty young men!
Who was Dedan Kimathi?
From Wikipedia
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Dedan Kimathi Waciuri (born Kimathi wa Waciuri; 31 October 1920 – 18 February 1957) was the senior military and spiritual leader of the Kikuyu rebels involved in the Mau Mau Uprising. Widely regarded as a revolutionary leader, he led the armed military struggle against the British colonial regime in Kenya in the 1950s until his capture in 1956 and execution in 1957.[1] Kimathi is credited with leading efforts to create formal military structures within the Mau Mau, and convening a war council in 1953. He, along with Baimungi M’marete, Musa Mwariama, General China and Muthoni Kirima, was one of the Field Marshals.
Mzee Kenyatta vs. Jaramogi Odinga
In his fight with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Mzee Kenyatta resorted to demanding an oath of allegiance that the “Flag of Kenya Shall Not Leave the House of Mumbi”. Mumbi is the mythical ancestor of the Kikuyu clans. Mzee Kenyatta went further than that in his reference to the Luo people as “kihii”—a term that is equivalent to “juvenile”, applied to an uncircumcised youth. Traditionally while the Kikuyu’s rites of passage required circumcision, Luo practiced the procedure of knocking six lower front teeth to mark the transition to adulthood. The Luo people stopped this practice years ago. In fact a disproportionate number of Kenyan doctors today is made up of Luo physicians and they know better than anyone the African cultural “idiocy” of many of these practices, including “female circumcision” that many African tribes of Kenya practice.
Mzee Kenyatta used the brilliant Luo son of the soil Tom Mboya to marginalize and eliminate what he considered as the “menace” of Jaramogi Odinga in Kenyan politics. He succeeded in doing that. After that, many expected Tom Mboya to assume the mantle of leadership after Mzee Kenyatta’s reign. But Tom Mboya was shot to death in broad daylight on a busy street in Nairobi.
In the course of time, Mzee Kenyatta formed a strong alliance with Daniel arap Moi who had the allegiance of the huge voting block of the Kalenjin in the Rift Valley.
After Kenyatta’s demise, Moi took over and promised to follow the footsteps of Mzee Kenyatta. He coined the term of “Nyayo” to legitimize his trajectory to power. Moi was ruthless. He left the suppression of dissidents to henchmen like Amos Biwott, the most feared man in Kenya for many years. During the reign of Moi, another prominent Luo leader, Robert Ouko, the Foreign Minister in Moi’s government, was brutally murdered in a most gruesome manner.
Kenya became a “one party” repressive state until the advent of multi-parties born out of the struggle by prominent Kenyans across the tribal divide. The current era of multi-parties has seen the recreation of the voting block of “Mount” Kenya tribes and Kalenjin tribes—a two tribes political formation that simply co-opted the support of other major tribes, particularly the Luhya and Kamba. The long time nemesis of the “two headed political monster” in Kenya has always been the Luo! That was so during Mzee Kenyatta’s time and remains so, today after what we have seen in this election: 2022.
Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga and the Handshake
To the credit of these two “political youngsters”, they tried to break the “curse” laid by Uhuru’s father by bridging the political divide through a symbolic gesture of a handshake that became known as the “Bridging of the Bridges Initiative”.
The “Bridging of the Bridges Initiative” was never received well by Kikuyu and Kalenjin leaders and king makers. It threatened to rupture the “two-tribe hegemony” of the Kikuyu (Mt. Kenya) and the Kalenjin.
The Kenya General Elections of 2022 was a critical test of whether the country would move beyond the “traditional fault line” of a “two horse monopoly” of power represented by Ruto, one side, and the group that represented the new era of politics in Kenya: Raila Odinga and Martha Karua. The naming of William Ruto as the winner means that Kenya has sunk once again into the putrid politics of the past. There are many people in the Kikuyu/Mount Kenya communities who defied their “own” Uhuru Kenyatta and voted for Ruto. Even in Kiambu, the domicile of Kikuyu “royalty” saw the abandonment of Uhuru Kenyatta and support for William Ruto.
It is pointless to litigate the process of vote tallying, because the elephant in the room is the “primitive” political process that is used by ruthless leaders to capture state power and protecting the corrupt and looting government coffers.
When I woke up this morning I was reflecting upon the announcement by the World Health Organization about the outbreak of “monkeypox”. Like HIV/AIDS and Ebola, the infectious disease is once again being attributed to African countries, now labeled as “ENDEMIC COUNTRIES”.
Just consider this:
From Center for Disease Control (CDC)
“Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is defined as illness caused by a novel coronavirus called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2; formerly called 2019-nCoV), which was first identified amid an outbreak of respiratory illness cases in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China.”
No one labeled China as an “endemic” country. So why does “endemic” and “non-endemic” labels being applied to some African countries?
“Endemic” in English language implies: indigenous to, original to, natural to, etc, you get the meaning.
The stench of RACISM IN MEDICINE is inescapable here. If you have credible evidence to attribute the origin of “monkeypox” to some African countries, simply focus your interventions on those countries without the additional baggage of introducing the “mark of the beast”, or the “original sin” of Biblical stories!
We know that in a number of African countries labeled as “endemic”–Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, several communities eat monkey and baboon meat. These “meats” are referred to as “bush meat”. Could the origin of “monkeypox” be traced to handling and consumption of such “meats”?
The Search For the Original Sin
At the height of the HIV/AIDS, monkeys that were infected were said to be the disease vectors (transmission mechanisms) that became the “bridge” to human infections with the deadly disease. This is the same logic that is being applied to “monkeypox”.
What the negative labels do is to complicate public health disease interventions by rendering millions of people as “suspects” in the infection of the “world at large”–Europe, in particular, where people from “endemic countries” will be subjected to intense scrutiny. Beyond what they are carrying in their luggage, WHAT ARE THEY CARRYING IN THEIR BODIES?
On the night of November 26, 2019 the BBI report was officially presented to Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga in State House, Nairobi. Kenyans found out that this initiative was truly a step forward, very much in the same vein as the “sacred” political history of the United States of America: a step in crafting a “more perfect Union”. Democracy is always an incremental process of moving forward through the dialectical process of the “union of opposites”. American democracy is the outcome of several critical events, ranging from the Civil War, World War I, Suffragettes (Women’s Movement), World War II, to the Civil Rights Movement spearheaded by Martin Luther King. By the same token in Kenya, we have had the Anti-Colonial movement led by Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, to the quest for democratization of political life after independence, led by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga (Not Yet Uhuru).
When Vice President Moi took over from Kenyatta, he followed the footsteps of Kenyatta (Nyayo politics) and perfected the art of absolute control of political power in a “one party” state. This triggered the struggle for multi-party democracy whose aim was to democratize the political space. The triumph of multi-party democratic struggle ushered in the emergence of the less “noisy” President Kibaki, an economist by training. It was in this period that Kenya enjoyed some measure of economic prosperity. Kibaki’s rein came to an end in 2012 and the subsequent two general elections, 2013 and 2017, once again ushered in ethnic violence, threatening the very existence of Kenya as a “nation”.
It was then that Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila came together in 2018 to explore ways in which the Kenyan democracy could be moved to a more “perfect union”. Kudos to these two sons of the soil, who happen to be the sons of the two principal players who kicked off the process of moving the country towards a more “perfect union”: Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. Now the entire country will debate on the merits of the BBI and hopefully isolate critical ingredients in crafting a more “perfect union” in the present historical conjuncture.
As much as “Hip Hop” tradition has become a global “standard” of rendering popular music, it is the “jazz tradition” that is the greatest gift of African Americans to the world, as far as I am concerned. It all started in the World War II years, when several of the African American “Big Bands” were sent to Europe and the Far East to entertain American and Allied troops. The impact was immediate, especially in view of the fact that African American virtuosos provided a robust antidote for the vicious form of racism that Fascism and Nazism represented. In 1950s some of us British colonial “subjects” in African countries like Kenya, were influenced by the same “bug” as we danced the “jitterbug” to the “big band” sounds played by African musicians. In Kenya, there was the “Mzungu” (white man), nicknamed “Bwana Kiko” (Mr. Pipe Smoking), who organized one of the first African jazz bands in Nairobi.
The Cuban Influence and Heritage
African “Big Bands” that were organized in the post World War II years, combined the Latin American jazz heritage of Cuba with the African American “big band” jazz tradition of the US to produce new music played by the Cuban Marimba Boys in Nairobi. It turns out that there was actually a Cuban Marimba band in Cuba! This is jazz heritage that formed the background of the Congolese music that became the standard for producing “popular music” in Africa–welcome to the world of Congolese music of OK Jazz and Franco! In the 1950s, Congolese rumba had an unmistakable influence of the Latin rumba. But over the years, very complex musical compositions have been developed by the Congolese global superstars such as Kofi Olomide, Fally Ipupa and Frerre Gola. The background musicians who play instruments like the guitars, saxophones and drums/percussions, are simply incredible. Unlike a “true jazz” stage, they are not afforded the space of showcasing their talents during live performances!
Coast Bands in Kenya
It was in Mombasa that some of the greatest bands in Kenya took root and with that came the popularization of the jazz “rumba” tradition of Cuba and South America. Bands were big time stuff with saxophones, trumpets, drums, guitars, bass, and several vocalists. ECO (East Coast Orchestra) Band led by Badi Juma, were a household name at the Coast. Both “white” joints such as big hotels and popular clubs such as the African Railway Club in Mombasa, provided the much needed revenues to sustain these bands. Then came African weddings. These were all-night affairs that became rooted in the African musical culture at the Coast. You could not pay the musicians for playing all night. Rather, it was the pomp and circumstance of the occasions and wider public appreciation that motivated the musicians to play all night! Welcome to the world of Bango Music!
Mzee Joseph Ngala and the Bango Tradition
After the passing of “big bands” of yester years at the Coast, it is Mzee Joseph Ngala who has kept the jazz rumba tradition alive at the Coast. In the musical rendition of the clip “Nione Raha” (So I may be happy), I combined my favorite song of Mzee Ngala with images of my relatives to celebrate Mother’s Day. This is complex music by any measure and it is a far cry from the “hip hop” popular music that you hear today throughout Africa. Bango musicians have achieved mastery over the instruments they play: drums, regular and bass guitars, alto and tenor saxophones, trumpets, and accomplished male and female vocalists. The critical question that I would like to end with is: how will Bango bands survive economically beyond wedding venues and a following of those who bill themselves as “Bango addicts”?
DON’T BE A SUCKER, SO KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN AND ASK FOR HELP IF YOU NEED IT!
Prof. Ronald Edari