History,Our Story

 

By Kevin Kogo

Ian Herdason thought he was immortal.

And that his father’s 3,000 acres of Kahawa in Nyeri were all the world needed to survive.

So he taught himself Kikuyu and spent his life building what would become today’s National Intelligence Service.

While Ian was busy smearing mud on his face to blend in with the locals in Mathira,

Dedan Kimathi's impatience had morphed into full-blown paranoia.

He was a man trying to glue together an army that had given up the cause.

It was too much.

Jomo Kenyatta had been gone for three years now.

Everyone Kimathi had started the fight with was dead.

Even the legendary Stanley Mathenge.

The spirit was broken.

Dedan was now a man pointing a gun at anyone who dared disagree.

It was August 1955—three years since Governor Baring declared a state of emergency.

When the gun didn’t work, Dedan turned to the only two things a lonely man can cling to:

Religion and cigarettes.

A General now self-declared Prime Minister,

spending six hours a day on his knees beneath a Mugumo tree,

seeking clarity from Mumbi—

in a forest drowning in Lincoln bombs,

guarded by twenty-something hotheads who didn’t fear death,

because they’d already died inside.

Eventually, Herdason’s psychological war machine, through the recruitment and betrayal of Mau Mau generals,

netted Dedan Kimathi.

October 21st, 1956—captured.

February 18th, 1957—hanged.

His crime? Possession of an illegal firearm.

That marked the end of Kimathi’s reign.

A man who had carved crude village boys from central Kenya into an army bold enough to rattle the British Empire.

A man who spent his prime years fighting for racial equality in the land of his birth.

Today I stand on Kimathi Street.

Shoe vendors give me directions to buildings named after people who matter beyond belief 

And I ask myself:

Do they even know what Dedan represented?

Or what the 23,000 boys died for—

because Dedan said freedom wasn’t given, it was taken?

This story ends with a boy named Theuri.

He died on October 20th, 1956.

He was 23.

He had joined the war at 20.

And when General Kabuku betrayed Dedan,

Theuri fired the last bullet that killed Ian Herdason—

the father of psyops and abductions in what became NIS.

Theuri’s dad—yes, Dad, not father—because the man was tender and emotional—

had been hanged in 1952 for administering Mau Mau oaths.

That same year, his firstborn joined the war.

December 18th, 1952—Agnes, Theuri’s 16-year-old sister, was raped by KAR soldiers.

In retaliation, she killed one.

And ran to the forest.

To the frontlines.

Where Mathenge, Kimathi, Kabuku, Kago, China, Blue, Wairia…

were making guns, bows, and bombs

to fight oppression and apartheid on stolen land.

We remember all that—through a monument in Nairobi.

A slab of concrete.

A street name.

A curve in stone thrown around by people who know geography,

but not pain.

Not purpose.

Not the cause that sent 18-year-olds to die for homes they’d never return to.

A war fought by boys who hadn’t even agreed that this was Kenya.

Who didn’t know Kitale from Dadaab.

They just fought.

Because Ian Herdason and Richard Macmillan could walk into a village,

pick Wambui or Wanjiru like it was Christmas shopping,

rape them, leave them pregnant,

and not care that December 26th even existed.

It burns me that it’s been 119 years, 9 months, and 16 days

since Koitalel Arap Samoei was shot at point-blank range by Meinertzhagen.

His skull sits in a museum in Pitt Rivers, London.

And yet, we pretend to be a government—

a democracy—

that respects history.

We haven’t even buried Dedan Kimathi.

Let alone the thousands who were swallowed by the wheels of neocolonialism.

Over the weekend, my friends and I visited Kariri Njama.

His poetry is written into Dedan’s history.

An Alliance High School alumni,

Kimathi’s personal secretary.

He’s 99 years old now.

But too many men with cameras have come before us—

promising stories and vanishing at the scent of fame.

So his family has learned to say no to cameras.

From a distance, we took pictures of his termite-eaten timber house.

This is where a man lives who had stood on the frontlines of war—

watched freedom turn into mirage

as Jomo Kenyatta’s black government became Herdason’s

with a different shade of skin.

The abductions stayed.

The psyops stayed.

The betrayals stayed.

Only the white men left.

The black men became the new white men.

Dedan Kimathi became a statue.

Or a street name.

Or a university name.

Theuris, Wambuis, Mathenges—

got buried under new religions and the "education is the key" narrative.

We've had our share of the fight.

Now I ask you, comrades—

30 years from now,

will Rex Masai's name be remembered?

Or will he be a single line in a Social Studies textbook?