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{
    "id": 682985,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/682985/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 191,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. (Dr.) Oginga",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 194,
        "legal_name": "Oburu Ngona Odinga",
        "slug": "oburu-odinga"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker for this opportunity to contribute to this noble Bill. I knew Mzee Jomo Kenyatta personally. He was a very humble and kind man. He was a very great friend of my father. I am very sure that this mausoleum needs to be opened to the members of the public. This is because a lot of things need to be included in that mausoleum so that it epitomises the history of struggle for independence of this country. Jomo Kenyatta actually represented the optimization of the struggle for independence for this country. He was a pioneer. He struggled for the land rights of our people. While abroad studying he continued to agitate for our land rights and also for the independence of our country. When I went to Russia in 1962, I thought we were the pioneer Africans visiting Russia. Little did I know that Jomo Kenyatta had been there before us. He was in Moscow University in 1947. Therefore he was the second black man to have stepped on Russian land. They did not know how black people looked like. Up to the time we went there, they were quite curious to see how a black man looked like. Why are the hands a bit whitish and so on? Mzee Jomo Kenyatta was one of the black pioneers in Russia. He studied Anthropology. He was an anthropologist. When he went back to England he continued to convene meetings at the Trafalgar Square. Those meetings became very popular and a lot of people attended them. I know some of the people who did that became very great people in their countries like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. The mausoleum we have here is small. It needs to be expanded to be much bigger so that the history of Kenya can be seen. I have visited Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Ghana. It actually gives you the whole history of the struggle of the Ghanaian people and even the books he wrote, the speeches he made and even some videos are shown in the mausoleum. Therefore, we need to make this mausoleum magnificent and show us all the history of our country on how we struggled. Jomo Kenyatta never spoke on a daily basis. He used to speak once or twice a year but his speeches were very significant because he spoke to the point and he was an orator by nature. He was a very big orator. Some of those speeches need to be shown live so that people can see Jomo Kenyatta not as a dead man but in his mausoleum speaking to the people of Kenya. This will ensure that people recall and remember the history of what used to happen those days, the type of vision he had for our country and the type of development he wanted for our people. This is very important and we need to reflect it. When my father died in 1994, there was a big debate as to whether he should be placed next to Kenyatta because he was the first Vice-President of the country. He was a very emotional person when it came to Kenyatta. He was a big supporter of Kenyatta at Independence. What happened later on is history which we do not want to go into now. I can mention that the differences between him and Kenyatta were not tribal, the way people have interpreted them to be a Kikuyu-Luo affair, it was ideological and it had nothing to do with tribalism. People have misinterpreted it to be tribalism - that Luo and kikuyu will never see eye to eye. The debate about place of burial was so heated that some of us who were members of the family did not know where to start; whether to take Mzee home or to put him next to Kenyatta."
}