Ideographs of Resistance and Identity Construction in the Kenyan Political Autobiography

Abstract

The avalanche of autobiographies that are produced in postcolonial Kenya calls for sustained interrogation and analysis of the narratives created to elucidate those murky aspects of the colonial past and post-colonial present which may resolve the conundrum of failed independence. As the past studies on autobiography have shown, the autobiographical genre, and especially the political strand, has become a strong statement for resistance against hegemonic discourses that continue to inform national discourses in Kenya. This paper interrogates the Kenyan postcolonial leadership and the ways in which it is dramatized in the Kenyan political autobiography. Specifically, the paper interrogates Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s Not Yet Uhuru, Raila Odinga’s The Flame of Freedom and Bildad Kaggia’s Roots of Freedom to show that there is a discursive shift in the Kenyan political autobiography; a concerted effort to move away from themes of failed independence to constructing ideographs of resistance within the frameworks of class suicide espoused by Antonio Gramsci. The paper argues that Jaramogi, Kaggia and Raila use these ideographs of resistance to construct their senses of selves as Moses (Jaramogi), Joshua (Raila) while Kaggia sees himself as the black Messiah. The paper rides on textual analysis to contend that the authors of these texts negotiate and challenge terrains of history, ideology and class to present their authors as unparalleled nationalists. Leaning on a critical look at the production of such narratives, which are largely based on personal participation and observation, this paper interrogates and preserves authoritative data of the Kenyan past and present which is more vivid and accurate, than the annals, chronicles and other forms of modern historiography. Historians from earliest times have recognized that the closer such records were to the phenomena described in both time and place, the more their potential value as reliable sources for information.