Patriotic tourism can propel Kenya to G20 club by 2050

As the 49th G7 summit winds up in Hiroshima, Japan, only one of the countries—the United States—in the fete will qualify to attend the club’s meeting in 2050. Power is shifting from the global north to the global south. Five of the 2050 G7 countries — China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico — and 14 of the G20 states will be from the global south, according to a recent report by the professional services giant, PwC.

Sadly, Kenya will be the only major African regional power— including Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa—missing in the G30.

Many ‘development’ experts preface their exposés on Kenya’s (under)development by describing melancholily how the country was left behind by Dr Mahatir Mohamed’s Malaysia and Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore in the post-colonial maendeleo race. 

I am likely to partly agree with them. But what kind of leadership is Africa missing? 

I would like to differ a little with the acclaimed Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe that the trouble with Africa is “simply and squarely a failure of leadership”.

Every leader can have a million billboards on their successes — or can’t they? Simply put, the trouble with Kenya, 60 years after independence, is a glaring dearth of ‘strategic leadership’ in our highly competitive world. 

The strategy has given way to crude ‘economism’—the prosaic art of reducing every aspect of our lives to material gains, strategies, incentives and rewards. I posit that this is why we have lost our souls and the moral arc of our nation bends towards injustice. 

The burial of Mukami Kimathi—the widow of the Kenyan freedom fighter, Dedan Kimathi wa Waciuri, who died on May 4 aged 96 years— in Njabini, Nyandarua County on May 13, 2023, revealed a blotch in Kenya’s national conscience. The unfinished burial of Dedan Kimathi. 

Modernisation agenda 

As Mukami’s burial got underway, I travelled to China. This was not my maiden visit to China, but my first down the superpower’s patriotic tourism sites, which are producing the next generation of Chinese leaders and partly funding its modernisation agenda. 

The first patriotic tourism site I visited was the enchanted Xibaipo village Memorial in Pingshan County, Hebei Province, eulogised as “the destiny of new China”. Between May 1948 and March 1949, the village was the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and the last command post before Chairman Mao and the Party’s Central Committee entered Beiping and liberated the whole country. Every year, an estimated 500,000 people, mainly children, visit the site.

The second site I visited was the fabled Zhengding county, where President Xi Jinping worked as deputy chief and chief of the Communist Party of China committee from March 1982 to May 1985. Some of the poor villages where Xi worked are now ultra-modern suburban enclaves. 

Zhengding, a bustling patriotic tourist attraction and learning site for China’s children and future leaders, is the anvil on which his economic thoughts on local governance were forged. 

Back to Kenya. As Kenya celebrates its 60th anniversary of independence, Kimathi—Kenya’s Mao Zedong, the supreme leader of the Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), known widely as the Mau Mau, in the 1950s until his capture in 1956 and execution by the British on February 18, 1957—is still ‘imprisoned’ in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. 

Fearing that Kenyans would turn Kimathi’s grave into a shrine, the colonialists dumped his body in an unmarked grave in the good old Western ritual of denying the subjects of former colonial territories the chance to celebrate their heroes and heroines. 

But Mukami kept her vow to keep Kimathi’s name alive. “They will kill me, but do not let them kill my name Kimathi wa Waciuri.” These were Kimathi’s last words to her widow. She begged both the British and the Kenyan authorities to show her where her husband was buried— in vain and in tears.

Like their colonial predecessor, the governments of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi regarded Kimathi and Mau Mau with disdain and as terrorists. Upon his swearing-in as prime minister, Mukami asked Jomo Kenyatta to help her find the remains of Kimathi.

More than three generations of Kenyans have demanded Kimathi’s release and decent burial. The ‘release Kimathi’ mantra was an integral part of the second liberation. 

High-profile advocacy 

I remember as a research fellow working under Willy Mutunga, who was then Executive Director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission in the 1990s when every February 18 was a day of high-profile advocacy for the “unchaining” of Kimathi, his release from Kamiti and burial as a hero.

The unfinished burial of Kimathi, who is held in high regard by all liberation heroes in Africa, has been a source of diplomatic embarrassment. 

During his public address at the Kasarani Stadium in Nairobi in July 1990, Mandela was effusive about his admiration for Kimathi and other Mau Mau leaders who inspired the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK). His public request to see Kimathi’s grave and meet his widow Mukami embarrassed Moi but went unheeded. 

President Mwai Kibaki changed all this. Disregarding the colonial-era legislation that had outlawed the organisation and branded its members ‘terrorists’, on November 11, 2003, his government lifted the 40-year-old ban on the Mau Mau and formally registered the movement.

In 2007, Kenya’s third President unveiled a new statue of Dedan Kimathi at the junction of Kimathi Street and Mama Ngina Street and named a University and location after him. Kenya’s 2010 Constitution calls for the recognition of national heroes.

In the wake of the publication of Caroline Elkins’ book, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya in 2005, even the British recognise the Mau Mau. In June 2013, Britain decided to compensate more than 5,000 Kenyans who were tortured and abused during the Mau Mau insurgency. 

On September 12, 2015, it funded and unveiled a Mau Mau memorial statue in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park “as a symbol of reconciliation between the British government, the Mau Mau, and all those who suffered”. 

Building burial sites for Kimathi and other freedom fighters across the country will spur patriotic tourism as an alternative to debts to fund the country’s industrialisation and produce the next generation of strategic leaders to propel Kenya to the G20 by 2050. 

This article draws from remarks by Prof Peter Kagwanja, former Government Adviser and Chief Executive at the Africa Policy Institute.