By Rasna Warah
Nothing can make you fall more in love with Kenya than a visit to another country. I came to this realisation after a recent long trip abroad, where I found myself frantically counting down to the days left for my flight back home.
As any Kenyan who has travelled out of the country for a significant amount of time will tell you, the best part of the trip is usually when the plane touches down at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. When I got out of the plane, I felt a sudden urge to kneel down, kiss the earth and weep.
This sentimental nostalgia for a country that I had spent years critiquing through this column and other platforms left me quite disoriented. Why was I yearning for a country that had stolen so much from my generation, that had stifled creativity among some of its brightest, that had jailed and tortured those with a conscience, and that had seen so much violence and displacement in recent years?
Was it because, despite the years of shame, guilt and paranoia, Kenyans had managed to rise above petty politics and shown the world that it could make the right choices when it comes to constitution-making? Or was it something more intangible, like the fragrance of humid red soil or the sweet aroma of roasted maize?
Or perhaps it was because, as the Kenyan writer Yvonne A. Owuor said after the troubles of 2007/8, despite everything, Kenyans love their country more than anything else and that “the kernel of our homeland is warm, alive and profoundly loved”? On the plane to Nairobi, I listed all the things that I had missed, even those that annoy me: the warmth of people with ready smiles topped my list, as did fresh air and samosas.
I missed the cosmopolitan nature of our cities, the diehard tenacity of our civil society activists, and the resilience of our hardworking people. I even missed the peculiar Kenyan habit of chewing toothpicks endlessly long after a meal is over. I realised that even in the worst of times, there were people like the late Wahome Mutahi who could satirise his own incarceration at the hands of the Moi regime and continue writing books that were both entertaining and thought-provoking.
Who from my generation can forget Mutahi’s popular and seditious column, ‘‘Whispers’’, or his darkly humorous book, How to be a Kenyan? Mutahi, like many Kenyans, could have easily left the country and sought asylum in the West on the grounds that he was being politically persecuted or that intellectuals and writers such as himself were being targeted by the repressive Moi regime. He didn’t.
Even John Githongo eventually returned home after self-imposed exile, as did many others, including the former political prisoner, Onyango Oloo, who now fights injustice from within our borders. Which is why the claim by President Barack Obama’s aunt, Zeituni Onyango, that she will suffer persecution if she returns to Kenya, rings so hollow with Kenyans and makes them so angry.
Apparently, Zeituni, who had been living illegally in the United States for years, convinced an immigration judge that her relationship with the US president made her a target of Kenyans opposed to the Obama Administration. Kenyans are incensed because they feel that Zeituni is being dishonest and is tarnishing the name of Kenya, where political persecutions have become a thing of the past and where a nonentities like her would hardly merit surveillance.
Last week, a Nation editorial even chided Americans for being “completely ignorant about Kenya” and stated that the ruling was indicative of “a relentless attempt to paint President Obama’s genealogy in a bad light”. But I believe the facts are much less complicated.
I believe that Zeituni, like many Kenyans who seek greener pastures abroad, made up a story that would allow her to stay in the United States. She is among those Kenyans who seek asylum on flimsy or false grounds when they are threatened with deportation for being in a country illegally.
Zeituni has become an embarrassment to the American president, whose book, Dreams from my Father, gained her some fame and credibility, which she has now sadly lost with her asylum-seeking antics. Kenyans will not be awaiting her return home (if ever) with joyful anticipation.
rasna.warah@gmail.com
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