Mashujaa day it was in Kenya yesterday. Full of fun and drinking parties. And the social media crowned it all with everyone giving long lists of their shujaas, and as people from some part of our country would call them, Sujaas. So I was left confused. Not that I don’t have Sujaas of my own, but only that it caught me by surprise that it was my day to celebrate them. I guess this is the only holiday in our whole yearly calendar which we have to celebrate different things on the same day. I mean, a holiday which everyone was telling a different story of whom or what they were celebrating.
Originally, on this day we celebrated our founding father, mzee Jomo Kenyatta. Somebody thought it wise and maybe it was, to dilute mzee’s party by including a list of all the men and women who fought for the freedom from slavery in these celebrations. The result of this idea included in our new constitution was that Kenyatta day became mashujaa day. Since by nature we are never fond of copying, we extended this hand of diluting the parties by including in the list of these freedom fighters our own sujaas. At the end of it all, the partying was great and the list of shujaas infinite in length. As for me, I left my long list which would probably have started with my late mother to that uncle who paid my fees in high school, and celebrated the Kapenguria six below. They are Shujaas of this nation, aren’t they?
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