I am at my local hangout, Maisha Pub, reflecting on many things after slaving all week, selling my labor for almost nothing. On weekends, you’ll find me and a few others seated around Mzee Muregani, listening to tales of the hunt from the perspective of the prey. The old man is such a talented storyteller. My favorite of his many anecdotes are his father’s escapades in Burma as a member of the King’s African Rifles, defending India from Imperialist Japan. Mzee Muregani often narrated to us stories of  destruction and dispossession in Burma that his father had told him decades before. Tired of enduring the pain and death caused by ‘Muthungu’ (the white man) in their country, his father and other ex-British soldiers, armed with their military training, knowledge and dreams of an independent nation joined fellow patriots in the forest to fight against British colonialism. He would later join his father in the forest.

Mzee Muregani’s favorite sitting spot at the pub is unoccupied today. This master storyteller transitioned yesterday to join our ancestors. He perished escaping flash floods occasioned by intense rainfall associated with the El Niño climate pattern. Despite dedicating himself to the independence struggle, he lived like most of us, a life devoid of dignity and died poor. It’s a disappointment to pour one’s best years in service of the country, only to be abandoned when most vulnerable. Though the system frustrated and humiliated Mzee, he never lost hopes for a better nation. Like the late ndugu Onyango Oloo, Mzee always preached that a new Kenya was possible.

Mzee and I had a friendship that extended beyond these rusty sheet walls. I often accompanied him to church on Sundays. He would narrate to me how the church had been a thorn in the flesh of colonial and neocolonial administrations in yesteryears. That unlike today’s religious charlatans that support populist politicians and anti-poor people governments, church leaders had in the past preached the message of political liberation. Through these stories, I learned about the Independent churches – Dini ya Kaggia and Elijah Masinde’s Dini ya Musambwa. I learnt about Rev. Henry Okullu, bishop of the Maseno South Diocese of the Anglican Church; Rev. Alexander Muge, the Anglican bishop of Eldoret diocese who was assassinated in 1990; Rev. David Gitari, the Anglican Bishop of Mt. Kenya East diocese; Rev. Timothy Njoya of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA); and Archbishop Ndingi Mwana‘a Zeki of the Catholic Church. Mzee told me that these religious leaders had represented the moral voice of the voiceless in the face of oppression and injustice, completely transforming my attitude towards the church. 

It was in church that Mzee met the love of his life, his dear wife Aketch. He used to joke that if I ever wanted to marry a good woman, I should look for one during the midweek service in church. Perhaps that was his clever way of convincing me to accompany him to the Wednesday evening church service. Together, the couple engaged in subsistence farming on the small portion of land that he had purchased after the war. Mzee and his father had been victims of land alienation and land consolidation in the colonial era, and again victims of the marketization of land reforms in the post colonial era. Instead of the redistribution of their previously alienated lands, landless Kenyans had to buy land from departing British settlers after independence.

After Aketch was diagnosed with Cancer,  Mzee’s material condition took a turn for the worse. He sold everything, including the place they called home, organized harambees (fundraisers), and went into debt because they could not afford Aketch’s treatment at the big public hospital they were referred to in the city. Like tens of thousands of our fellow compatriots, Aketch died not from the disease, but from a cancer of betrayal by the state. They denied Mzee her body to bury because of the pending medical bill. Even in death, they still wanted to make money off her!

After going bankrupt because of Aketch’s illness, he moved to the city to slave in factories and construction sites in search of a better life.

I’m seated far away from the television, trying to avoid any further devastating news. I nearly shattered my radio this morning when I heard the Deputy President dismiss individuals like Mzee who died trying to flee the floods as ignorant. Lately, apart from listening to a few great news items like updates on the progressive coups in the Sahel region and my favorite Saturday night Rhumba show, these gadgets come bearing depressing and devastating news. If it’s not a news item about deaths of innocent civilians in imperialist wars and conflicts, then it’s news about government officials outdoing each other in the race to empty national coffers, another fascist elected into office somewhere, hundreds of faith’fools’ killed in the Shakaholla massacre, extrajudicial executions, and even more updates on how the puppets managing the neo-colonies are further entrenching their countries into the death traps of the World Bank and the IMF.

I just want to listen to Rumba tonight. But this is not the day I dance to one of my favorites ‘Omona Wapi‘, a song that brought together the biggest musical rivals in the Democratic Republic of Congo – Franco and Tabu Ley – in 1985. This Saturday night, I will request the radio presenter to play me ‘Immigration Fatale’ by the lovely songbird M’bilia Bell. In that magnificent song, she sings about the death of Africans trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of a better life in Europe. That deep blue sea has today become a cemetery for African immigrants! Mzee made me love Rumba through his endless disagreements with the pub owner, a Congolese woman, about which Lingala singers and songs were the most outstanding. They never seemed to agree on anything.

I’ve come to learn so much about our people in this modest bar than I ever did in school. I have gained a clear understanding of the genocide happening in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its underlying motives through conversations with the lady who owns the pub. She once shared how she and her parents escaped when a militia violently evicted and massacred people in her village to enable a multinational corporation mine Coltan in that area. I had read and heard stories of her homeland before on mainstream media. All these reports blamed the ‘backward’ people of her country for fighting amongst themselves and having no regard for democratic principles. The mass media continually manufactures content designed to immerse our senses in the reactionary pit of false consciousness.

The lady believes that her country is doomed to eternal conflict over the bloody minerals as a punishment for forsaking god. She also loves this country so much. She can’t believe that not only is our President a believer, but that the first lady and the Deputy President’s wife are both ministers of the gospel, and that we even have a national prayer day! She firmly believes that god has a soft spot for this country. She is always praying for a ‘god fearing Pan-African leader’ like ours to deliver the Congolese people from bondage. She even says that our president, the western stooge, reminds her of their first democratically elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. Yes, comrade Lumumba, dear reader! Such are the insults to one of history’s greatest men!

I’m convinced the lady has forgotten that she had to downsize her bar a few months ago and fire our friend Mwikali, the bartender, in order to balance between the rent and additional taxes inspired by the punitive IMF/World Bank policies. Wasn’t she here at the pub when the godsent leader was seen on this TV advocating for the privatization of more government-owned entities and public goods? Have we not seen him leading the continent in pushing for a market-based approach to the climate crisis on this very television?

The media recently reported that he supports foreign-owned conservancies that continue to kill indigenous populations and seize their lands to trade on bloody carbon credits and build high-end hotels for the rich minority. We were seated in this pub, watching this television, when we heard in the seven o’clock news that our leader had consented to the deployment of our police to be used as black faces to brutalize the people of Haiti and safeguard US interests in that Caribbean island.

Last week, reports emerged that our police forcefully disrupted a pro-Palestine march in the city center. This brought back memories of our debates at the bar after the October 7 acts of resistance against apartheid Israel. I recall Mzee’s overwhelming sadness and anger when the god chosen president declared support for the murderous state of Israel and labelled Hamas a terrorist organization. I’ll never forget that day! I had never seen Mzee so irritated and emotional. He even broke his liquor glass as he painfully reminisced about this age-old colonial trick that was used against them during Kenya’s independence struggle. They were branded Mau Mau terrorists to diminish their movement’s capabilities and achievements, delegitimize their struggle and justify the human rights atrocities committed against them.

At this club, I was able to understand the suffering that people in Palestine are going through. The state of Israel, with the support of the United States and other Western countries, is not only dropping bombs and using chemical weapons on innocent civilians, but has also imposed collective punishment on the Palestinian people by weaponizing food, medical supplies, water, electricity, and fuel supplies. Palestinians are today in grave danger of mass ethnic cleansing. The mass media calls it a genocide when women and children are killed in Ukraine – but when blood thirsty Israeli forces slay tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza,  they applaud and justify zionist actions as acts of self-defense.

This new year comes bearing no good news! As I write this, our brothers and sisters in Sudan are living through the whistling bullets of death. We every-other-day receive heartbreaking news of women and children massacred and civilian facilities attacked. The people of Sudan face death by the minute through the bullets and bombs of the reactionary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) who have both sold their souls to foreign capital. There additionally exists a direct connection between the civil war in Sudan and the imperialist aggression in Yemen. The RSF has sent thousands of Janjaweed fighters to cause more destruction and civilian deaths, to die in a proxy war against the AnsarAllah government in Yemen.

Although Yemen is in the midst of its worst humanitarian disaster in 100 years as a result of a war unleashed by the imperialist alliance of the United States, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to destroy their resistance, they continue to demonstrate unflinching solidarity with Palestine. I’m deeply moved by their humanity, compassion, bravery & empathy with the Palestinian people. They continue to brighten the global axis of resistance against the imperial death machine.

Mzee’s demise is inextricably linked to the murder of innocent civilians in Palestine, Africans drowning in the Mediterranean in search of a better life, Aketch’s death, deaths from hunger in Yemen and the Horn of Africa, extrajudicial killings of young men in Nairobi’s Mathare slums, massacres in Congo and Shakaholla, and a worker in the United States killed by extreme heat waves. They all face death at the hands of a system that doesn’t recognize their humanity, a system that’s only interested in extraction and oppression.

Every day, they who build the roads and houses, run the factories, work the farmlands and tend to the animals live miserably and face death in the most undignified manner.

The dominant capitalist economic system has created so much wealth yet caused so much pain to the wretched of this world. Imperialism and neocolonial dominance have condemned the poor majority to eternal slavery, suffering, and weeping over the loss of loved ones sacrificed on the insatiable altars of capitalism. There exists overwhelming evidence to prove that this system is a death cult incapable of ending the misery, senseless deaths and destruction of all life on earth.

As I pen this, I can’t stop thinking of the poet Claude McKay and the thoughts he harbored as he wrote “If we must die”.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

As this amazing poem plays in my mind, I am reminded of our people’s historical and present suffering. Death is nothing more than what they experience on a daily basis. For a majority of them, it is the ultimate freedom from the struggles of life. We must, however, educate them to refuse to be condemned to a life of misery and death at the whims of their oppressors. During their life, they must struggle against this inhumane system in order to proudly face death.

The most precious weapon oppressed people have in their just struggle is organization. These organizations must be anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist at the very least. Mzee understood this well; he was not only dissatisfied with the current situation, but also was a member of a revolutionary political organization. His party membership card was one of his most prized possessions.

We will dearly miss Mzee Muregani at Maisha Pub! In his memory, we will cherish Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi’s words, which Mzee always reminded us about, that “it is better to die on our feet than to live on our knees”. We will channel our deep sorrow towards organizing the masses to build socialism in our lifetime. The sooner we organize to oppose the status quo, the sooner we will reclaim our dignity.