Today is a national holiday in Kenya, celebrating the heroes of the country's independence.
This year the date is even more important symbolically (and numerically) because it falls on the 60th anniversary. But October 20 is one of the dates that any Kenyan cannot ignore anyway because it has many meanings in their nation's history.

In addition to being the birth date of Father of the Fatherland Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first leader as an independent republic, it is also the date on which Kenyatta himself, along with other political activists believed to be the masterminds of the Mau Mau liberation movement, was imprisoned in the village of Kapenguria, on the Turkana Road, in 1952.

While "Kenyatta Day" was celebrated until 2010, for the past ten years both dates have been combined under the celebration of the country's national heroes.
While at first the focus was on those who fought and often gave their lives for Kenya's independence, year after year the number of national heroes has increased and "Mashujaa" has become a kind of honor meant for anyone who carries the country's flag high internationally.

In the past, for example, the title of "National Hero" went to marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge, who as an Olympic competition record-holder fell below 2 hours after an epic solo ride watched live by more than a billion people around the world. But these are detour, or rather enlargements, of our media times.

Let us go back to the historical "Mashujaa."
The first heroine Kenya can boast of was Mijikenda and she came from the hinterland of Kilifi. Mekatilili Wa Menza fought against the harsh conditions to which farmers in and around Malindi were forced, going so far as to slap a British officer in public. For this and for planning an attack on a settlers' vehicle, she was twice locked up in the detention camp (a kind of concentration camp) in Kisii, Maasai land. Both times she managed to escape, and while the first time she was captured, the second time after nearly 1,000 kilometers on foot saw her return triumphant to her people, welcomed as a queen. Eventually, after World War I, the coastal governors of the British Empire came to terms with her and the local peasants and granted them better treatment.

National hero is also politician Harry Thuku, leader of the Kikuyu Youth Association, founded in 1921. In fact Kenya's first national party. For this in 1922 he was arrested and that action led to the first major street protest of the Kenyan people. Thuku was exiled to Somalia for nine years. He later resumed political activity though always in moderate and appeasement tones, becoming a coffee farmer and the first African member of the Kenya Coffee Growers Union.

During Mashujaa day, the six Kenyan leaders who were arrested and deported to Kapenguria on October 20, 1952, are particularly celebrated. Along with Kenyatta were Bildad Kaggia (later a politician in the first Kenyatta government), Kung'u Karumba, Fred Kubai, Paul Ngei (an important institutional figure always at the leader's side) and Achieng' Oneko.

The heroes of the Resistance include revolutionary Dedan Kimathi, leader of the Mau Mau, an extremist and violent wing of the Kenyan liberation movement. Kimathi was executed by the British army in 1957. So too deserve mention two brilliant politicians who were victims of mysterious assassinations in the 1960s, the "African Kennedy" Tom Mboya and the socialist Pio Gama Pinto.

Recently the title of Mashujaa, in addition to Nobel Peace Prize winner Wathari Maathai, the first African woman to receive this recognition, was also given to the great Mijikenda spiritual leader Katana Kalulu, who was barbarously murdered later in 2014, to Mau Mau veteran Kitu Wa Kahengeri and lawyer Joseph Karisa Mwarandu, who after suing the British government for torture suffered in the 1950s by their own countrymen, through a years-long trial in London managed to obtain anything but symbolic compensation.