This was not the only resistance to British rule in Kenya as the Nandi had staged a protracted resistance of the British colonists between 1890 and 1906 . The Nandi were also unhappy about the forced takeover of their land by the British colonial administration .
There was also the famous female freedom fighter Mekatilili who in the early 1900s defied the British and organized the Giriama people in the Kenyan coast to resist and demand for the British to leave Kenya . The British were unwelcome guests at best .
Yet today , the Kenyan President joined a host of other world leaders to bid farewell to a lady who has been around for so long that many have forgotten that she was the embodiment of the so called Pax Britannica where there was actually no peace .
It is actually much simpler to enumerate the global leaders that did not attend the burial ceremony , which to Ochieng really symbolized the burial of an empire that no longer exists but all the trapping and rituals of their past grandeur still exist .
It is hard to figure out if one should be mourning the passing of an historical icon or to bemoan the existence of an anachronistic institution that has long passed its sell by date period . The monarchy symbolizes a past that many would like to forget .
If one was to strip away the pomp and ceremony that accompanied the internment of the Queen one would start to see the hollow nature of that institution and see what it is , a modern day reality show whose actors are born into the role rather than by audition .
The Queen like her successor King Charles III had no political power and their honorary title of head of state is a nominal title . The prime ministers they appoint wield all the power and the Queen was singularly the greatest brand asset that the British had .
The Queen and the monarchy are fabulously wealthy and there are those that remember that that wealth was acquired through the sweat , blood and tears of those the empire enslaved to produce the wealth and that fact cannot be wished away .
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 .
One would have imagined that after most of the territory under the former empire gained independence that the British government would have returned the stolen artifacts since some had religious and spiritual significance to those they were removed from .
A really sticky bone of contention is the fact that the Queen never actually ever apologized for the untold misery her country caused to those that were colonized . In effect the Queen did not think that there was any wrong doing and the principle of ‘ finders keepers ’ was at play .
The Indians look with particular irritation when they realize that Britain actually underdeveloped India and reduced a once thriving empire into a groveling peasant nation and to see a precious diamond stolen from them adorning the Queens crown is really galling .
The Kingdom of Benin was so advanced and organized but the primitive Britishers dismantled a society which was way ahead of them and in the process stole priceless sculptures and other African artifacts and proceeded to call the vanquished primitive and ignorant .
Kenyans woke up one day and found out that they had become third class citizens in their own land . The British arbitrarily drew borders that separated ethnic groupings , internal cohesions and sustainability hence forcing millions into hunger and dependency .
These types of stories are replicated around the globe and it is actually a wonder that countries did not gang up against Britain to demand reparation and compensation . But one is soon reminded that they were the originators of the divide and rule practice .
The empire apologists like to point out that the British Empire gave the world a lingua franca and did a great deal to spread education and religion . It is however a well-known fact that the pen and the bible were just tools of imperialism and governance .
The stories and scandals of the British Empire are a story for another day but suffice to say that there was nothing godly about a country that could take a whole subcontinent of Australia and turn it into a penal colony to contain convicts within a far-flung territory . The whole country was a vast jail .
Ochieng is alive to the notion that people would rather romanticize a past rather than come to terms with the criminal past of a nation . Those who attended the burial must recognize that they are part of those romantics that worship grandeur however earned .
The British Empire was a business enterprise and they went out to burn and pillage and convert freemen into slaves to create wealth for the motherland . They then saddled the world with a complicated opaque bureaucracy and an unwieldy class system designed to belittle and denigrate .
The same apologists like to speculate about where Kenya would be if the British never came , somehow suggesting that the selfloathing that was instilled in Kenyans so that we abandoned our culture , languages and our names but were never accepted in theirs is somehow positive .
Kenyans were never assimilated into the British Empire , Kenyans were just disenfranchised and scattered to the four winds and left rudderless adopting British mannerisms and language in the hope of appearing superior to our neighbors but permanently kept off the high table .
Ochieng ’ s last word on this unfortunate colonial era is that when Kenyans were singing God Save the Queen they should actually have been singing for our gods to save the African people who were manipulated and outmaneuvered by a crafty and unscrupulous foe .
Africans should have been running at full speed away from that novel god that used a bible that admonishes a person to treat another as they would like to be treated themselves but that somehow managed to dehumanize the African and enslave him .
Ochieng finds it impossible to forgive such duplicity and actually finds it preposterous that an African would participate in lauding and magnifying the Queen without a bitter taste in their mouths . Imperialism was a crime against humanity and many are still awaiting reparations and apologies .
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