If you were in Kenya around the 1980s, you must have followed the classic court case odyssey of S. M. Otieno, upon his death. He’d been a smart Luo lawyer married into a Kikuyu tribe, something of a taboo in his community then.
His was a simple case of death and burial, really. But the combination of prominence and intermarriage turned everything into something of a tinderbox! Was he to be buried at his “house” on a farm in Upper Matasia, suburban Nairobi, or at his “home”, Nyrarugunga, a village in western Kenya?
That contention, termed a “cause célèbre”, carried on for five long months in a verbal-sparring between advocates for the clan and those for Otieno’s wife. It was reported verbatim by ‘The Daily Nation’, which kept us all glued to its pages every day for the whole duration.
Particularly, none wished to miss late Chief Justice Cecil Miller’s dexterous, sharp and rib-tickling interventions.
But mine is not to sing praises to that “cause célèbre”, a landmark though it was. In the end, it was established that customary laws were “not repugnant to justice and morality”.
What it meant, search me, but anyway, the ancestors had carried the day.
Nyarugunga for “ancestral home” and Upper Matasia for “urban house” became the buzz word for Kenyans. A village home or a town house, none called it that again.
However, the case represented a knife in our wound, as refugees. It sharply brought into focus our homelessness; our feeling of being drifters torn away from our ancestral roots.
So, mine is to recall how “house” or “home” didn’t mean much to us. What counted was the vital value of a collective homeland; an identity as one people, leading a dignified life and charting a common destiny.
The rest, we saw as “much ado about nothing”; comic stuff to pass time.
Or so we thought!
Six years later, 1993 to be exact, I realised, through a casual conversation with a friend, that ours had been delusional wishful-thinking. Deep down our hearts lay that same closed-mindedness of “clan-land” first, “homeland” later.
The liberation struggle of this land was at a critical stage and we were receiving positive dispatches that signalled a likely triumphant conclusion……
Of course, none envisaged the death that the same mentality would plunge us into, the following year……
Before all that we were hopeful and bubbly that the divisive regime that had polarised its citizens inside Rwanda and scattered others to the four corners of the world was bending towards reason: the reunion and reintegration of its people.
It was in anticipation of that that we had been reading every available literature, including any tourist guide booklets, on the home we had never been given a chance to know.
I thus remember one time my friend and I discussing one of those booklets and imagining where we’d be rendezvousing on our return to our country.
You see, my friend’s “Nyarugunga” is in an area that was known as “i Gisaka”, in eastern Rwanda. Mine is in what used to be known as “i Murera”, at the foot of Mt Muhabura.
So we decided that from our different “ancestral homes”, our rendezvous in Kigali would be Chez Lando. As we’d read in a “Rwanda Aujourd’hui” booklet, it was a good and spacious restaurant that was popular with tourists as well as local socialites.
That, mind you, meant that neither of us wanted an “Upper Matasia” in any other part of Rwanda.
Today, whenever we meet we laugh at ourselves and bend in shame, for that!
For one thing, today when you talk of “spacious”, Chez Lando does not feature, despite lots of expansions. For “good”, it sure holds its own but is one dime in dozens upon dozens.
For another, and most crucial thing, sadly we were as narrow-minded as those we mocked.
Without our knowledge, we were not at all thinking of ourselves in terms of a national agency. We held that agency as a hypothesis because we were in reality not sure we’d regain the country. Once we had our nationality at our fingertips, we literally went native.
The fact of belonging to Rwanda as one people was an ideal we’d not fully imbibed.
Yet, wherever any Rwandan community was, within the country or without, the RPF had formed us into a Rwanda, in her national agency. It’s here that the idea of being one as Rwandans was inculcated into us.
The way we were organised is more or less the same way you see Rwanda organised today.
From Cell (Akagari) to Branch (Akarere) to Region (Intara), the national level convened as a Congress. Interestingly, there was a Rwanda within this Rwanda but, for understandable reasons, the ‘smaller Rwanda’ convened outside with other ‘Rwandas’, as a Congress.
It’s only now that we are truly together in unity, barring a few ‘unbendables”.
Removing those “Nyarugunga and Upper Matasia” sentiments is a task that the RPF has worked on painstakingly from the 1980s – maybe from infancy for one individual!
It’s the near-total eradication of this selfishness of seeing ourselves in prisms of ethnic, religious, regional or any other similar identity that now stands Rwanda in this good stead.
As we talk, even the cremation of a prominent Rwandan in cross-marriage would not raise any Rwandan ancestor’s hackles!
