LAST WORD
On Historical Injustices
O
chieng cannot think of his child-
hood without wondering how
a child managed to survive the
extremely harsh environment as navi-
gating through life seemed to be a series
of events that centered on a child going
from one correctional institution to the
other.
Ochieng’s father, those days you called your
father sir, not dad, was the local chief and
with his many wives and football teams for
children his main concern seemed focused
on maintaining law and order in the boma
and dispensing justice.
Ochieng does not remember ever seeing
any of the wives exercising what he later
learnt was called freedom of speech or
even voice their opinions loudly in front of
the absolute ruler of the boma. There was
an unwritten code of how things worked.
Children were organized in work gangs
and according to their respective mothers
and they supplied free labor to the boma
as there again wasn’t what Ochieng later
learnt to be the children bill of rights and
of course pocket money had not been
invented yet.
Family life was a military drill and the day
stated at four in the morning and before
sunrise the cohorts in family formation
got busy to organize the day in their
respective areas. Ochieng may have been
right in assuming that his father married
labor supply.
Ochieng later learnt that his family was
rich and was the envy of the neighborhood
but of course he never saw any evidence of
it as all he remembers is that everyone in
the family seemed occupied in an endless
production line that mapped his early
mornings.
Ochieng was to also later learn that there
was something called consultative family
settings and that there was a strange
concept called parental love that was
apparently indispensable for a child to
94 MAL21/17 ISSUE
grow up as a balanced human being.
Interestingly when Ochieng checks the
family score card, the family seemed to
have done pretty well as all the children
went to school, this was apparently a great
achievement as there were those who firmly
believed that sending children to school,
especially girls, was an abomination.
The primary school had a headmaster that
Ochieng and friends called Hamurrabi,
the law giver. He also doubled up as the
history teacher and it is to him that the
onerous job of opening their minds to the
outside world was placed.
Somehow there was always something
wrong with us irrespective of how
much Ochieng and classmates tried to
conform to the many rules that made
up the school system. Sometimes it was
easier for the headmaster to mete out
corporal punishment in advance of future
misdemeanors.
Ochieng learnt about the ancient
civilizations starting from the Egyptians
who were apparently African but somehow
never got to find out where they went as
the present Egyptians look very Arabic
and there is nothing civilized about the
way they drive.
There was the fabled Babylonians and the
Assyrians and the Sumerians who seemed
to have somehow figured how to write
and also had very wise kings. Ochieng has
yet to figure out how titles of kings were
assigned as his father was not called a king
yet had all the trapping he read in history.
Then history got very interesting when
Ochieng was introduced to the fascination
of the Greek civilization and discovered
that there was more than one god as
the Greeks had many and they seemed
to spend their time getting naughty and
messing up human beings.
Then there was the Roman Empire which
conquered the world and was credited
with the stabilization of nations and
introducing the Pax Romana. Of course
Ochieng later learnt that the world was
basically Europe and the near east.
Ochieng however noted that the one thing
that was sanitized out of the romanticized
histories was that all these empires
were built on violence and bloodshed.
The objective for the conquest was not
civilization as was read but an economic
subjugation.
What Ochieng experienced in school was
perpetual violence and what he read was
violence and began to wonder if the world
ever operated without violence. Yet in
all the histories there was claim that the
people of those nations lived in peace.
On Sundays the family trooped to the
local church which was a CMS mission
and was run by a tough priest of Irish
extract, whose wife run the Sunday school
“Ochieng however noted that the one thing that
was sanitized out of the romanticized histories
was that all these empires were built on violence
and bloodshed. The objective for the conquest
was not civilization as was read but an economic
subjugation.”