By TEE NGUGI

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There is a context in which the adage “Do not speak ill of the dead” makes sense.

First, every person who departs the world deserves a dignified send-off, for the simple reason that he or she is a human being. Second, the departed person is a beloved mother, father, brother or sister to someone, and to speak ill of them, especially publicly, would be insensitive to the feelings of their loved ones.

However, if the departed were public figures, it would be amiss for us in our capacities as historians or commentators on the human condition, not to evaluate how their actions or inaction influenced the course of history for better or worse.

Over the past couple of weeks in Kenya, we have seen, almost in quick succession, the deaths of key figures in the Kanu regime, from natural causes. What has struck me has been the tendency by the Jubilee government to use the adage explained above as a licence to engage in alarming historical revisionism.

From the perspective of the regime, the departed gentlemen were Mandela-like colossi, championing the cause of justice for Kenyans, and making unprecedented contributions to their socio-economic wellbeing.

Really? Then why, we must ask, were the Kanu years as dehumanising as the colonial era? How could the gentlemen remain active members of a regime that tortured, detained, murdered or exiled those who exercised independent thought?

Competing versions of history

The fact that we are now implementing a new Constitution that seeks to extricate Kenya from the socio-economic and political nightmare wrought by the Kanu dictatorship contradicts the well-orchestrated attempt by Jubilee to revise history.

But why do a people have competing versions of history? Or, more fundamentally, why do we compete so viciously in order to tell our history?

Some years ago, Charles Njonjo, a key architect of the Kanu regime, appearing on a TV show, mentioned his heroes as being former Kanu spy chiefs, army generals and commissioners of police. Would, say, Timothy Njoya, an outspoken opponent of the Kanu regime, who came close to death more than once on account of his stance, agree with Njonjo’s notion of history ?

Telling history from a particular perspective does two things. First, it legitimises the actions taken by the one telling the story or taken by his ideological and class colleagues. Second, it removes from those on the receiving end of that history the psychological and conceptual ability to imagine another historical trajectory.

So, like Candide, the eponymous character in Voltaire’s book, who despite the decay of 18th century France wrought by the religious and political class, could only see these conditions as being “the best of all possible worlds.” So Njonjo wants to justify the actions he took as a key Kanu figure, but more crucially, to convince us that the Kanu era was the best “of all possible worlds.”

Acceptance that the Kanu period was the best of all possible worlds has implications for restorative or punitive justice. Acceptance means that there will be no calls for individuals who committed human-rights abuses to be held to account.

It will mean that there will be no calls for repatriation of the stolen millions stashed abroad. For instance, Jubilee is opposed to the implementation of the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission report. The report contradicts the notion that the Kanu period was the best of all possible worlds. It documents gross human-rights violations and massive theft of public monies and lands during that period.

Acceptance of the TJRC report has implications for justice. So naturally, Njonjo and Jubilee will insist that the Kanu period was the best of all possible worlds. Let sleeping dogs lie, we are told.

But it is by looking back that we can find out, as Achebe would say, when the rain started beating us. Questioning official truths will lead us to ask why we got so short-changed. Refusing to accept that the present or past conditions are the best of all possible worlds will allow us to dream of other more just and prosperous words.

Every human society that has made socio-economic progress has done so when it refused to accept that its condition was the best of all possible worlds. Therefore, it demanded justice over past wrongs.

And by doing so, it demonstrated that it would not be wronged again. So looking back is important. History is important.

And those seeking to change their oppressed condition must appropriate the telling of their history.