Villagization, the innocuous name the colonial state gave to the forced internal displacement, was sprung on the Kenyan people in 1955, in the middle of my first term at Alliance, but living within the walls of the school, I had not heard about the agents of the state bulldozing people’s homes or torching them when the owners refused to participate in the demolition. Mau Mau suspects or not, everybody had to relocate to a common site. In some regions, the state forced people to dig a moat around the new collective settlement, leaving only one exit and entrance. The whole of central Kenya was displaced, and the old order of life destroyed, in the name of isolating and starving the anticolonial guerrillas in the mountains.

Some of you may have come across relatives or neighbors who have lost their memory, through either senility or a traumatic experience. They simply cannot connect anything to anything. They don’t even remember their own children and relatives or their past interactions with them. They have no stable reference point. To a smaller or greater degree, an entire people can also suffer the collective loss of memory. I am sure there are members of the young generation who don’t believe that soldiers of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, otherwise known as the Mau Mau, made guns in their factories in the mountains.

Colonial education and related practices tried to induce collective amnesia about Africa, about its technology and innovation.

A dictatorship is ruled through a culture of silence and fear, and the Moi dictatorship was no different.

In a way, the seeds of the dictatorship had been planted earlier in the regime of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of the newly independent Kenya. He had been a valiant Pan Africanist anticolonial leader, and had been imprisoned by the British for eight years. He had been falsely accused of managing the Mau Mau uprising, which had been led by Dedan Kĩmathi. Following the pattern of his friend and comrade in Pan-Africanism Kwame Nkrumah, who left prison to become prime minister of Ghana, Kenyatta also graduated from prison to presidency in 1963.

The situation— and this was the case not just in Kenya but throughout postcolonial Africa— is that described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, wherein the global vision that guided the anticolonial struggle gradually shrinks to the level of the continent, then the national territory, then down to the regional and ethnic level. The symbols of the nation left standing are the flag, the anthem, the nationalized colonial army and police force, and of course the Leader.

In the South African system, people see the bitter fruition of at least five forces that have bedeviled the development of human beings: classical colonialism, neocolonialism, slave wages, racism, and the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty through the denial of democracy.

But Black South Africans are not endlessly helpless victims of superior forces. Their history presents a people who have been pioneers in the struggle for communal survival, national liberation, and social emancipation. The ferocity of Black South African resistance blunted the determined efforts of European settlers to annihilate them.