This Is Me: The Kenyan Political Autobiography as A Quest for Salvaging the Self.

Abstract

The seemingly failure of the first independent African leaders to put an end to poverty, illiteracy and disease, and thus to open the gates to all-round development in their countries has elicited a flurry of scholarly debate. This paper is a continuation of this debate. It aims to account – in yet another way, for the stubborn reality of largely unfulfilled aspirations of the anti-colonial struggle in Africa, and Kenya in particular; to explain from a possible new perspective Kenya’s deficient post-independence. Particularly it examines Oginga Odinga’s Not Yet Uhuru (1966), Bildad Kaggia’s Bildad Kaggia: Roots of Freedom 1921-1963 (1975), Raila Odinga’s, The Flame of Freedom (2013) and joseph Murumbi’s Path Not Taken (2015) to show how, in this literature, they employ specific literary strategies to absolve themselves of all the postcolonial blame, in the process portraying themselves as defenders of nationhood, democracy, and as forces against negative ethnicity. The paper argues that, in this self-refashioning, these leaders advance the very same escapism employed by the founding fathers. Focusing their attention on concealing their ambition-deformed personalities behind the masks of the positive self-identities they construct, the opportunity for genuine leadership and genuine service to nation-building is largely lost.