they had been washed and curiously the inspection would include the ears and fingernails all the while reminding them that cleanliness was next to godliness .
At five minutes to six he would read a verse from his leather-bound bible and at six would give the signal for Hezekiah to belt out a strange tune on his bugle that sounded like it was meant to send the dead back to sleep while Ochieng unfurled the flag and began to hoist it .
The headmaster would then leave for his house and since it was too far for Ochieng and Hezekiah to go back home they would hang around the school until the rest of the school arrived and assembled in front of the flag which they called the Union Jack , perhaps Jack made the flag .
At five to eight the headmaster would materialize on top of a table next to the flag and intone a solemn prayer before the school in unison sang the first verse of ‘ God save the King ’ which Ochieng then thought was a hymn only to later realize it was the British national anthem .
Usually after the anthem announcements were made and then the students would scatter to their various classes . On that Monday the headmaster announced that a very distinguished couple was visiting Kenya to bring tidings of goodwill on behalf of his majesty the King .
The couple , a princess Elizabeth and her husband a prince Philip would inspect the empire and meet with the King ’ s subjects , and then he exhorted the school to be on exemplary behavior during this very auspicious and honorable occasion .
Ochieng didn ’ t quite understand why he kept on talking about the princess while her husband was there but he imagined that like in the fairy tales he had read the princess normally kissed a frog to turn it into a handsome prince so it probably wouldn ’ t be appropriate to keep talking about a frogman .
The following week , the headmaster gravely informed the assembly , before singing the anthem , that the British King had passed on and that from that day the school would sing “ God save the Queen ’ which made sense since God now needed to save his wife , the queen .
Ochieng was to go through a period of further confusion when the headmaster tried to explain to them that the queen that the school was asking God to save was not
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A casual visit to the British museums is like visiting global crime scenes since the museums are replete with stolen artifacts from every corner of the world . The imperialists took whatever they wanted and sent it back to Britain and have the temerity to charge people to view stolen property .
the King ’ s wife but the young lady who was then visiting Kenya .
To complicate the matters further her husband did not become the King , but remained a Prince but perhaps the princess did not want him to revert into a frog and therefore he remained a prince ; all this was too complicated to fathom .
Decades later and the then colony is today the independent state of Kenya and similar circumstances have come to again pass . The Queen has died and what is left of that empire called Great Britain , where the sun once never set is again singing ‘ God save the King ’.
In the intervening years , Ochieng came to learn of the calumny and the brutal history of that empire that as a child he so innocently celebrated his own subjugation and enslavement by proudly and joyfully singing while beseeching God to save the gracious queen .
Ochieng grew up knowing that all civilized people went to school and also to church . Going to school was reserved for the privileged few that had recognized the deficiency of their path in darkness and chose to follow the god of light by accepting the new church .
Ochieng was in no doubt that God was English as there were several depiction of god as a white person and the devil as black to convince many that the ways of the African were certainly erroneous . Speaking English was a step closer to the true god .
Their approach to empire building is well encapsulated in the second verse of their anthem whose lyrics are , ‘ O Lord our God arise , scatter our enemies , and make them fail , confound their politics , frustrate their knavish tricks , On Thee our hopes we fix , God save us all ’.
The God they invoked to help them is that God that the headmaster had Ochieng and the rest of the school bow their heads in prayer as they asked for their resistance to fail since imagining not being under British rule was deemed inconceivable and ungodly .
One needs to remember that the British monarch is also the head of the church and the defender of the faithful since the English in their wisdom decided to protest and operate outside the authority of the Roman Catholic Pope from the time he declined to grant a former randy King permission to divorce .
Learning English unfortunately also allowed the curious Ochieng to read that arrogant second verse and start to have a niggling doubt that all was not well with what the headmaster stood for and that they may have been receiving well curated instructions to undermine their African individuality .
Ochieng learnt to his amusement that those Kenyans born before 1963 were actually British subjects or Britons , actually one should cite 1964 since the Queen was still Kenya ’ s head of state until June 1964 when the instruments of power were handed over to the Kenyan president .
It is instructive that Princess Elizabeth visited Kenya as the Mau Mau uprising was exploding but the princess who left Kenya a Queen as fate would have it had not come to Kenya to reconcile her rebellious subjects but rather to commend the colonial tea growers .
Ochieng and his schoolmates never got wind of the uprising among the Kikuyu that saw the systematic repression , torture , detention and murder of around one hundred thousand people in central Kenya . The death count is estimated to have been over twenty five thousand .