TITLE: A Season of Blood

AUTHOR: Maina wa Kĩnyattĩ

PUBLISHER: Mau Mau Research Centre & Vita Books

REVIEWER: Tracy M. Ochieng

AVAILABILITY: Kibanga Bookstore

PRICE: Ksh1,200 (Print)

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“What are you gonna do when the tables they turn on you?”  That haunting line from Kenyan singer Cheif Matigari has taken on a chilling new relevance in recent weeks. The tables have turned indeed, and his song came full circle when the daughter of Chief Martin Kariuki Rienye in Nanyuki was killed in police custody—yet another death at the hands of the Kenyan police. 

Albert Ojwang, a teacher and blogger, had earlier faced an even more gory death when he was arrested for alleging corrupt dealings by Deputy Inspector General of Police Eliud Lagat. He was spirited from his home in Homa Bay and taken 357 kilometres away in Nairobi, where he met his death. Initial police reports sent out to the media were that he had committed suicide by banging his head on the walls of the police cells. Netizens poked holes into this theory, calling out foul play from the institution meant to serve and protect with the motto, “Utumishi kwa wote”.  The truth was far more disturbing: Ojwang had been tortured to death and was only rushed to hospital when his killers discovered he was unresponsive. 

As usual, firefighting, PR and propaganda arsenals were released on the masses when the postmortem showed that he had sustained a head injury, neck compression, and other injuries spread all over the body, as reported by government pathologist Bernard Midia. His death sparked nationwide protests, to which the police responded in the language they best understood:violence. Lagat, considered the prime suspect by the public having ordered Ojwang’s arrest, “stepped aside” from his duties to allow investigations; he has since been cleared by the courts and reported back to work. It is now emerging that the DIG had applied for an 18-day annual leave that was approved by his superior, Inspector General Douglas Kanja, and that he never really stepped down. For Albert’s family, like the Gen Z who lost their lives on 25 June, justice may well prove elusive. 

But Albert’s death and the state’s casual attempt at cover up is not an isolated moment. It’s part of a brutal continuum. Again and again, Kenya has recycled violence under new uniforms. To understand just how entrenched this culture of state cruelty is, we don’t have to look further than our own bookshelves. Literature has long warned us, archived for us, and outlived regimes that sought to silence the truth. One such work is A Season of Blood, a chilling collection of poems from Kenyan prisons by Maina Kinyatti written decades ago, but still frighteningly relevant today. Published in 1995, but written behind bars during Moi’s regime, it bears witness to a system that has long crushed dissent, criminalised thought, and brutalised the very citizens it claims to serve.

Prison torture

Kinyatti, who was himself taken prisoner for six and a half years in 1982 for writing on the Mau Mau movement during Daniel arap Moi’s regime, intimates the hard conditions and torture prisoners faced. Considering this was a time of high political unrest, political prisoners faced extremely dehumanising treatment or, as the author describes on the blurb of this book, barbaric treatment that teeters on the edge of disbelief. The prisoners would be woken up at  5 am, and ordered out of the cells stark naked for internal body searches (yes, internal). The warders had a peculiar way of doing these internal searches, details too disturbing to write down, but they involved the use of sharp sticks. Because words have always proved mighty in the face of guns as recently experienced in Kenyan protests, political prisoners were denied access to books, newspapers, pens or writing paper unless officially approved by prison authorities; writing poems or a book was considered a punishable offence. 

It is no coincidence that when the police descended on the 2,500 (as reported by human rights organisations) unarmed youth on 25 June, it was not just tear gas and bullets they deployed, but they also snatched away the words: placards and banners with powerful slogans inscribed on them like “armed with only my words” and “you cannot kill us and lead us”. The same state machinery that once feared Kinyatti’s poems now fears the placards of the youth. One poem from A Season of Blood, titled Mr President, feels almost prophetic in the context of recent weeks. It reads:

You can murder us

But you cannot succeed in suppressing

Our revolutionary writings

You cannot cage ideas

You cannot murder ideas

Ideas belong to the people

Indeed, the more the state deploys the police service that is now a force against its citizens, the more relentless and determined young people become in pursuit of good governance and accountability. Why would someone leave the comfort of their home to go out in the streets? They would deserve to be killed, abducted and tortured, right? When the top leadership of a country boldly speaks on live television and instructs police to shoot the legs of citizens, it feels as if Kenyans are living in a simulation. How did we fall so far from grace and from what was envisaged in the Constitution of Kenya 2010, especially in Chapter 4 of the Bill of Rights?

From the frying pan into the fire

Sixty two years later and we still bemoan that our systems are highly influenced by our colonial masters. Granted. But the idea of uhuru means that Kenyans would be left to govern themselves, ridding themselves of the brutality that the colonisers meted out to us value-wise, economically and morally. Yet as one poet from Kamiti Prison in 1987 wrote:

In the rain 

We waited at the gate for him

To deliver the fruits of Uhuru

Twenty-four years later

We are still in the rain 

But our patience has run out

What is painfully clear is that Kenyans, unbeknownst to them, jumped from the frying pan into the fire on 1 June 1963. Still, what Kenya’s youth are demanding is not new. It is what Kinyatti and other inmates wrote from their cells, what Cheif Matigari demands in song, and what Ojwang dared to question in real life: justice, dignity, and freedom. Because when injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. 

Tracy Ochieng is a staff writer with Books in Africa. Email: tracy.ochieng@ekitabu.com