Can Ruto honour history and, at the same time, scoff at it?

President William Ruto is likely to decorate the late historian Bethwel Allan Ogot  during this year’s Mashujaa Day, when Kenyans pay tribute to their timeless heroes. But is Ruto competent to honour Ogot, or any other scholar in the liberal sciences?

A continental scholars’ conference in Kisumu last week heard that Prof Ogot’s name had been successfully proposed for this year’s Mashujaa Day decorations. The meeting, organised by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and Kenyatta University, was told that Ogot would be honoured for his contribution to the African archive and historiography.

Ogot not only argued the case for African historiography but also contributed to the archive through prolific writing based on his new canon.

He argued for African oral tradition as a reliable and rigorous source of history. His History of the Southern Luo (1967) was a test case for this methodological standard. Together with Jan Vansina, author of Oral Tradition as History, Ogot helped shift the global paradigm of knowledge production. The two scholars brought respectability to oral tradition as a historical source. Before that, Eurocentric scholars had dismissed Africa as a continent without history.

This column has repeatedly argued that history is memory. And those who have no memory are rootless. The rootless will be blown away by any wind that comes their way.

It is critical to know how you got where you are in order to know where you want to go and how best to get there. If you have no sense of history, you will end up anywhere — and usually never in a favourable place.

That is why we celebrate Ogot and others like Professors Ali Mazrui, Godfrey Muriuki, G.S. Were, E.S. Atieno Odhiambo, W.R. Ochieng, V.G. Simiyu, Maina wa Kinyatti, Simiyu Wandiba, Tabitha Kanogo, Chap Kusimba, George Abungu and Wunyabari Maloba.

There is also Kamoya Kimeu, the man who excavated the world-famous Turkana Boy Homo erectus skeleton.

These people, and many others, remind us that we have come from somewhere. Other people, like William Ruto, have diminished the intellectual world in which these scholars have worked.

Ruto’s criticism of the liberal sciences is well documented. In 2018, as Deputy President, he ridiculed the study of history, arguing that Kenya needed “people who can fix our sewerage system, or electricity, and not historians.” Contemporary reporting records the remarks in the context of his call for greater emphasis on innovation, science and technical education.

In more recent times, he has not lost the opportunity to minimise history. His narrow labour-market approach has seen him place emphasis on STEM subjects from what critics regard as a purely artisanal perspective. Like President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, Ruto has called for the abolition of history as a discipline in our schools and universities.

Even if Ruto has not succeeded in abolishing history, he has, in this columnist’s view, made it appear professionally marginal, economically unattractive and culturally irrelevant.

There is a naïve sense in which such a mind imagines that history is merely about “remembering that Vasco da Gama arrived somewhere” someday.

But history is more than a chronology of happenings and dates.

Who has told the story? Why? Whose interests does it serve? What has been conveniently forgotten or deliberately left out? Whose interests does the known account serve? And what does knowledge of the past allow us to imagine about the future?

With regard to Kenya’s recent history, for example, what do we remember of the post-election violence of 2007/2008? Who was involved? Why were they involved? What did the electoral authority do? What did the police do? What of the sitting president and those around him?

What happened at the Kiambaa church in Burnt Forest? What lessons are there for all of us? What of Naivasha, Kisii and Nairobi? Who messed up the railway line? What are the parallels between the railway in 2008 and another one in Nandi Hills in 1905?

The persistence of history asks very stubborn questions — uncomfortable questions.

Future historians will investigate the circumstances surrounding the honour Ruto wants to bestow upon Ogot. They will want to know why a leader who was so hostile to history elected to decorate a historian.

They will check to see whether he recanted his previous hostility to the discipline, whether he pumped more funds into historical research and whether he encouraged more learners to study history.

If they establish that none of this was done, they may conclude that the decoration was merely an attempt to posthumously co-opt Ogot into the Ruto political bandwagon for selfish, short-term purposes.

They will remember that Ogot was, in fact, already an Elder of the Burning Spear.