HAITI COMES TO KENYA
Sending Kenya’s police to Haiti is worrying, reckons Okello Oculi
Kenya became independent on 12th December, 1963. It was born of horrendous brutalities by British troops and Police against fighters for freedom from looters. Britain’s immigrants had seized the most fertile agricultural land from Kikuyu, Kissi, Kalenjin and Taita peoples.
On 22nd June 1964, Papa Doc Duvalier, a murderous ruler of Haiti got his military generals, legislators and Attorney General, to change the country’s constitution to declare him ‘’PRESIDENT FOR LIFE’’.
That new status was born from the blood of over 300 persons suspected of being critical of Papa Doc. His former ally, Clement Barbot and supporters (who had fled into a sugar cane farm following a failed coup attempt), were driven out of hiding by setting the canes on fire. They were all gunned down.
Papa Doc, a medical doctor, died after a second heart attack. He left behind a population that was 90 per cent illiterate and trapped in poverty. While claiming that Haiti had won freedom for Blacks, he ruled over an economy dominated by a minority of descendants of French slave-owners who routinely raped Black women.
These mulatos had been sent to be educated in France and returned to a Haiti which had slaughtered their parents in the 1801 revolution by African slaves. Trapped in mental disorders, they adopted sexual indulgence as opposed to service for the people.
In Kenya, children of ‘’chiefs’’ created by British officials were killed by MAU MAU guerrilla fighters as ‘dogs’’ of colonial oppressors. Unlike rootless mulatos of Haiti, they held on to their ethnic identity while rejecting the MAU MAU ideology of returning land to poor victims of colonial economic violence.
An alliance between Jomo Kenyatta, Arap Moi a Kalenjin school teacher sponsored by Bruce Mackenzie (a British immigrant land-grabber), chose to rule by the use of economic and police violence.
Papa Doc Duvalier came from a poor family. On entering politics, he combined the exploitation of superstition, manipulation of poverty and American financial support to run a machine of terror against potential challengers among Blacks who could channel frustration and rage from poverty into revolt by Black masses.
Kenyatta, a trained Anthropologist, got Kikuyu followers to take oaths to defend their ethnic control of power against elites from other ethnic cabals.
In 2023, the United Nations Security Council received a pledge by Kenya to supply 1000 police personnel to help in eroding the power of violent gangs desecrating life in Haiti. John Nottingham, a former colonial administrator in Kenya during the war against MAU MAU fighters, once observed that Kenya’s Police wore on parade ground on Independence Day uniforms stained with the blood of tortured Kenyans. They hold criminal legacies for export to Haiti’s killing streets.
A judge in Kenya has declared the project illegal and without constitutional legitimacy. Opposition politicians have supported the judicial ban; a development which rouses curiosity. As an ally of Britain and the United States who support the export of terror, William Ruto’s government accepted the challenge.
The Opposition in Kenya recall that Ruto was tutored by the Jomo Kenyatta and Arap Moi culture of locking critics in prison without trial; torturing to death, and sinking victims under the Indian Ocean. Yvonne Rimpel, a fearless woman journalist in Haiti, who was raped to death by Duvalier’s thugs, became a model for torturers in Kenya who resented journalists who conduct investigative journalism and expose rings of corruption.
Sending Kenya’s police to Haiti may be to be students of professors of political horror. Idi Amin was alleged by racist Euro-American media of keeping the head of an opponent inside a refrigerator and mocking his spirit each time he felt like celebrating his own fortunes. Duvallier had held similar conversations earlier. Kenya’s police have a notorious record in killing women in today’s clime. Exposure to Haiti’s use of police murders as an ancient tool of governance would confer post-graduate diplomas.
Ruto has shown much enthusiasm in welcoming Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) into membership of East African Community. His enthusiasm is very commercial because he sees a new frontier for Kenya’s traders’. DRC’s minerals get him lyrical about Africans crossing a wicked border from hawking raw minerals to local industrial processing.
His critics draw a list of businesses he has accumulated during his SAFARI from a herder of Kalenjin ethnic livestock to waving wands of foreign currencies as a business tycoon dressed in alleged ‘’eating’’ with political office.
What is worrying about rejecting efforts to put badges on Haiti’s wounds, is failure to link them to historic conspiracies against Haiti by American, British, French, and Spanish political leaders who feared its revolution of 1801 fanning African rebellions in the Caribbean and South and North America. REPARATIONS are due. Africa must demand them, NOW.
Prof Oculi writes from Abuja
