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Members of Generation Z during special Saba Saba day prayers at Holy Family Basilica in Nairobi to commemorate the lost lives in the struggle to make Kenya a better country. [Denish Ochieng, Standard]
Saba Saba Day, the unofficial anniversary of Kenya’s so-called second liberation, came and went this week, setting the stage for a quiet reckoning that never came.
Apart from a few noisy incidents and the now-routine overreaction by the police, there was little to mark the day. There was no national introspection, no serious remembrance, and no honest reckoning with what Saba Saba was supposed to mean.
That police still felt compelled to patrol the streets on Saba Saba says one thing: The current political order understands, perhaps better than ordinary Kenyans do, the power of the memory it is trying to contain. It knows that Saba Saba was not just a date but also a reminder that the people once stood up to a state that had mistaken silence for fear.
