Honour Makeba and Mekatilili by telling our children their story

By WAIRIMU NDERITU

The first time The EastAfrican published my piece was in May 2009. I wrote about the amazing work of drama therapy in prisons by Bantu Mwaura, a Kenyan performing artist, director, storyteller and poet. Bantu had just passed on.

Bantu often spoke of the liberation leaders who fought for Africa’s independence to whom, in their honour, he named his two children, Makeba, the South African freedom fighter, singer, actress and pan Africanist and Mekatilili, the heroine who led the Giriama in resisting invasion by the British colonialists.

When I saw Google had honoured Mekatilili with a doodle on the week of August 9 I thought about the foresight Bantu had, in giving his children such powerful names.

Bantu often said it was great to be reminded about the roles the two played in the struggle for liberation each time he mentioned his children’s names.

The google doodle came hot on the heels of a first of its kind comic produced by the Nest Collective, titled Mekatilili wa Menza, Freedom Fighter and Revolutionary.

Mekatilili was born Mnyazi wa Menza, becoming Mekatilili, mother of Katilili, on the birth of her son.

The National Museums of Kenya documents Mekatilili’s sense of justice as coming sharply into being when her brother Kithi, one of her five siblings, was captured by Arab slave traders.

Following hotly on the footsteps of the Arabs were the British, with new demands that included forcefully removing the Giriama from their land to make way for rubber and sisal plantations as well as imposing an additional burden of hut tax.

Mekatilili mobilised her people through the powerful Kifudi funeral dance to resist forced labour and taxation and demand their land back. Slapping a British administrator landed her in a prison in Kisii, 816km from her home in Ganze, Kilifi.

She escaped from prison and began the long walk back home, which took several years. When she arrived, she didn’t waste time but began, once again to mobilise resistance against the British. They sent her off to prison again, this time in Kismayu, Somalia, where she once again, escaped, came back home and continued to resist.

Miriam Makeba got into trouble with the South African apartheid government for performing in a documentary highlighting its racist practices. When she travelled out of the country, her music was banned and her passport was revoked, making her stateless. She couldn’t even travel back home to bury her mother.

Not to be daunted, Makeba embraced her new life in exile, not only singing to criticise apartheid but also testifying about the racial divisions in South Africa at the United Nations. She became a strong symbol against colonialism.

The American entertainment industry embraced her, and she won a Grammy award with her song Pata Pata which made her the first black woman to have a Top-Ten worldwide hit.

Her relationship with the US became extremely complicated when she got married to Stokely Carmichael, a militant black panther civil rights activist. Overnight, all her concerts in the US were cancelled.

President Ahmed Sekou Toure welcomed Makeba and her husband to Guinea and gave them citizenship after they escaped from the US to escape the harassment. Makeba represented Guinea as official delegate to the UN.

Makeba immersed herself in supporting the struggles for freedom for African countries. She even came to East Africa on the invitation of fellow pan-Africanist, Tom Mboya, to perform and help him raise money for orphaned children whose Mau Mau parents had been killed fighting for Kenya’s independence.

She had met Mboya in the US where he often spoke of the similarities between colonialism, slavery and the racism that had led to the civil rights movement in the US.

Kenya and Tanzania would become some of the countries that provided stateless Makeba with passports. Makeba got her citizenship back when Nelson Mandela was freed.

Mekatilili used the Kifudi dance and Makeba used her music as a potent medium to share their experiences as African women.

Both women utilised culture not only as a weapon of resistance but as the lens from which to frame an understanding of the nature of the relationship between races and the effects of invasions of Africa on African people.

They defined oppressions in ways African people understood. They generated artistic, political and social contributions and taught us to go beyond the confines of individual experience to lay the foundation for stories we must now tell our children, of acts of resistance that liberated the continent.

If you are looking for stories of good strong dynamic African women to share with our children, Makeba and Mekatilili are good choices.