Mythical hero or tragic failure? An interrogation of the Jomo Kenyatta ‘black people’s Moses’ mystique in two Kenyan patriographies

Josiah Mwangi Kariuki’s Mau Mau Detainee (1963) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Detained (1982) are political patriographies that represent two starkly different sides of Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, as a political father figure. Detained intertextualizes Mau Mau Detainee in a way that voices Kariuki, Ngũgĩ’s political brother, from beyond the grave. A discussion of pertinent background on patriography frames the interrogation of the constructedness of the Kenyatta myth embodied in the ennobled Kenyatta of Kariuki’s memoir and the heroic Kenyatta of Ngũgĩ’s early fiction. A defetishized Kenyatta emerges in Detained and we find echoes of him in the more life-like Kenyatta in Ngũgĩ’s recent memoirs, which present fraternal and maternal relational frames as alternatives to Kenyatta’s failed Messianism. I probe the ageing Kenyatta’s Sartrean bad faith and mobilization of state violence and detention, tools that link the Kenyatta state’s answer to dissidence back to its colonial predecessor. As I show, if surviving incarceration by the state is the test of heroism, Kenyatta failed that test but Kariuki and Ngũgĩ pass it and thus become their own men.