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The passing on of a ‘reluctant academic’

Saturday May 23 2015
kipkorir

The late Dr Benjamin Kipkorir. Historian, administrator, banker and diplomat, Dr Kipkorir was the epitome of that first post-Independence generation of African intellectuals and public servants that shaped and were shaped by the early dramas of nation-building. PHOTO | FILE

The death of Dr Benjamin Kipkorir on May 20, 2015, is the end of the journey for another of the fading generation of Makererian nationalists.

Historian, administrator, banker and diplomat, Dr Kipkorir was the epitome of that first post-Independence generation of African intellectuals and public servants that shaped and were shaped by the early dramas of nation-building.

In perhaps the last interview he gave, in March this year, Dr Kipkorir, who died at 75, recalled the accelerated events leading up to Independence — how the “Congo Exodus,” the abrupt granting of independence to the Congolese by the Belgians, the flight of settlers from Leopoldville through Uganda and Kenya, hastened the realisation in colonies such as Kenya that Independence was not just inevitable but almost immediate.

“Kenya is a creature of European colonialism,” Dr Kipkorir said in the interview. “There is no nation called Kenya that is historical.”

It was a line he had consistently maintained from his days as a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Nairobi in the late 1960s.

Without the benefit of “organic nationhood,” it would take the talents of individuals such as Dr Kipkorir to breathe intellectual life into what was, in effect, an experiment to forge diverse ethnic nations into a coherent republic.

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Returning from his studies at Cambridge, Dr Kipkorir joined the new University of Nairobi’s History Department led by Prof Bethwell Ogot. His DPhil thesis had focused on his alma mater, Alliance High School, and the creation of an African educated elite.

At Makerere University, he had researched the history of his Marakwet community; his first book, The History of the Marakwet: A Preliminary Study, places him as one of the early pioneers of Kenyan oral history, presaging later oral histories that from the 1970s became an established part of African historical examination.

Dr Kipkorir writes in his memoirs that he thought his years at the University of Nairobi were “wasted.” The assault on academic freedoms by the first Kenyatta government deeply polarised academic life at the university.

The scholar felt that by the time he was leaving the university in 1983, he had suffered from several problems. He had lost interest in teaching in the Department of History; there was too much politics in the university, especially in the early 1980s due to anti-government feelings among university teachers.

When he joined the Kenya Commercial Bank as the executive chairman, Dr Kipkorir believed that he would be doing something that was practical.

But the question that lingers, as we celebrate Kipkorir’s life, is why would a man who had charted such an academically illustrious journey from Kapsowar, in Marakwet, Tambach, Alliance High School, Makerere, to Cambridge University, back with a PhD to teach at the University of Nairobi, define himself as a reluctant academic?

Why would someone who wrote his thesis on the production of an African elite at Alliance have such a dim view of intellectual work?

Could Dr Kipkorir have been saying something significant about the culture of anti-intellectualism in Kenya? Isn’t this the culture that has haunted East Africa since the early 1970s, when governments in the region began seeing universities and academics as opposed to them?

Yet, Kipkorir’s argument should be taken with a heavy dose of irony, for this is a man who was very intellectual. This was an individual who, even in his last days, could hold an intensive and extensive conversation on any topic.

Reading Kipkorir’s memoirs, Descent from Cherang’any: Memoirs of a Reluctant Academic, reveals a man who was a very keen observer of his environment. With a historian’s acute eye for detail, Dr Kipkorir summons up his early life in the book, vividly describing life in Kapsowar, where he grew up in a Christian family.

This Christian heritage, coupled with the Western education that he was exposed to all the way to Cambridge, seems to have produced a thorough humanist.

One encounters several anecdotes in Descent from Cherang’any that paint Dr Kipkorir as a people’s person, as someone who listened to other people’s stories, which he retells to illustrate some point, such as the effect of Christianity on his and his family’s lives; the value of education in a modern society; and bad governance. He seems to be obsessed with adducing evidence, from human encounters, to explain whatever it is he discusses.

Indeed, in the interview with him at his home in Spring Valley, Nairobi, on March 21, 2015, Dr Kipkorir clearly appeared to still have a punch in him; the punch to be a public intellectual, regardless of whether the academy had disappointed him.

For someone who struck one as self-effacing, Dr Kipkorir relentlessly discussed what and who betrayed Kenyan nationalism, right from 1963; what was done right; what could still be corrected; and why Kenyans should remain focused on nation-building. He fiercely defended the devolution of government — something that was close to his heart, as he had worked for Sirikwa County in 1965-1966 — insisting that the notion of a central government is inimical to democracy.

His was a full life devoted both to academic examination and to public service. In one of our last conversations with him, he was still postulating new pathways for academic inquiry; an idea that perhaps it was time to begin looking at Kenyan and African societies from their fundamental origins, in family and clan.

Even at the end, the discipline of relentless inquiry kept him active. Unlike so many of his generation who have passed on with their story, their secrets buried with them, Dr Kipkorir’s legacy will remain the determination to document both the private and the collective experience of being Kenyan.

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