Conversations with A Freedom Fighter

On the wall directly opposite the door, above a fireless fireplace, is a china plate embedded with the ubiquitous image of Dedan Kimathi. He lies stiffly on what appears to be a makeshift stretcher, hands in chains, head in dreadlocks, bare chest, defiant eyes. On another wall, to the left, is a framed reproduction of a black and white image that has graced the pages of Kenyan newspapers often since Independence: Field Marshall Muthoni at the Ruringu Stadium in Nyeri on December 16th, 1963—almost 40 years ago—where some Mau Mau had gone to give up their weapons after the declaration of Independence 4 days previously. Her chin is up, her jaw is tight, her eyes are hard. Dreadlocks flow untidily onto the middle of her back. She is clad in a cloak of animal skin.

Forty years later, we are seated in her house, suitably awed.

We are grateful for the opportunity. We had hovered outside her gate anxiously for a few long drawn out minutes while our more savvy companion went in to persuade her to give us audience.

Field Marshal Muthoni does not speak English, she did not go to school. She speaks a smattering of Kiswahili. We, on the other hand, are Kikuyu challenged. We can understand it, for the most part, but we are wary to speak it. So we pose our questions through an interpreter and then listen to intently her answers. Her intelligence strikes one immediately. She has an unquestionable air of authority about her. It is not difficult to understand why she rose up to the rank of Field Marshal in the Mau Mau Movement.

With customary African hospitality, she offers a cup of tea. In customary African fashion, we accept, thank you very much.

The interview begins tentatively: Why did she go into the forest? To fight, of course. Then she elaborates: My father worked for a settler. I was brought up in a settlers’ farm. Once you had lived with them, you knew you had to fight. And also, ‘we felt it was better to die in the forest fighting them, than to live without our freedom. We wanted our land, and we wanted our freedom, that is what we wanted.’

Slowly she warms up to our interrogation and begins to carry the story. We interject less and less. When she mentions Dedan Kimathi, her eyes cloud over. There is depth of feeling there, one can tell. When she talks about the fate of freedom fighters after independence, there is a choke in her throat. She paints a haunting analogy. ‘It’s like a competitive match she says. We were the team. We played valiantly, sacrificially, against the opposing team. We sweated. We gave our lives. Then, at the end of the match, when we had won, the spectators ran away with the trophy. ‘

This is a familiar theme among the Mau Mau ex freedom fighters still living today. Their bitterness with their treatment in independent Kenya is nigh palpable. Forty years on, Field Marshal Muthoni is still incredulous about the turn of events. The former freedom fighters around her, (and there are many), appear to still be reeling from the effects of what happened forty years ago. But she is by far the most eloquent. We listen, enthralled, to her account:

We were in the forest fighting for our freedom. Our fellow black man was not our enemy, not even those who collaborated with the white man. Those who collaborated we knew did so because of their ignorance. The white man was not our enemy because of the colour of his skin. No. It was because of what he had done. He had come and taken our land and was oppressing us in our own land. That is what we fought for: Our land and our freedom.

While they fought in the forest, another strategic war was taking place in the political arena. Parties were being formed after the fashion of western systems to fight for the rights of Kenya all the way to Lancaster house. Educated Kenyans were agitating for the rights of the black man in the legislature, through constitutional means. There was a parallel non violent movement campaigning rigorously for the end of British rule. Their goals were the same, their methods, starkly different. Nonetheless, there was a hazy overlap. Some Mau Mau we spoke to said their inspiration was Kenyatta. Kenyatta himself, although he later strove to distance himself from the Mau Mau, was allegedly arrested on account of their activity.

In her view:

Come independence, 1963 is when the injustice of the system began to set in. Mau Mau readily gave up their weapons and returned to their villages. The struggle, after all, had been won. Reality proved somewhat less than ideal. They found that, while they were in the forest fighting the enemy, land consolidation had taken place in 1960. Those who were absent had had their land taken away from them and given to others. They found that, while they were fighting, those they had left in the villages had been educating themselves and educating their children. The fledgling government needed this educated cadre as it began to establish itself. So therefore, it was the children of those who did not fight who were offered positions of influence in government on account of their experience and education.

The Ex Mau Mau, who at this time were an outlawed terror organization under Penal code Cap 108 (whose repeal may I add is long overdue), trickled back into society and found themselves in the Emergency Era Villages. These were villages constructed in the emergency era, after 1952 when the Mau Mau guerilla warfare had wreaked havoc in colonial circles. They were designed to bring people into enclosed, restricted spaces so that their movements could be more easily monitored and they could no longer help the Mau Mau with provisions and ammunition. At independence then, people went out to the farms that had been allocated to them during the land consolidation and the ex Mau Mau went into the villages and awaited their fair share of what they had fought for. For the most part, they are still waiting and waiting has bred in them a bitterness to the core.

Major Gray, one of Field Marshal Muthoni’s myriad visitors, personified that bitterness most starkly. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face hard, her expression unyielding. She spat out her words and hissed more than she talked. General Karangi vocalized it most virulently. In his anger, he almost managed to dissuade Field Marshal Muthoni from speaking to us. ‘What is in it for us?’ he asked repeatedly in a thinly veiled allusion to monetary compensation, and, ‘Where is the land we fought for?’

Muchemi, the soft spoken journalist who has his finger on the Nyeri pulse and who has been an invaluable source of background information told us, later, about trouble in the ranks.

Another group of ex Mau Mau fighters we met was hostile to Field Marshal Muthoni and her posse. Their explanations were fuzzy and inconsistent, and I was tempted to conjecture that it was inspired by some level of envy-she managed to fashion a decent living for herself after independence.

She recounts how she approached Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta and managed to secure a license to trade in ivory on account of the fact that while they were in the forest, they used to kill elephants for food and hide the ivory and she knew where they had buried it. After that supply was exhausted, she traveled the breadth and depth of the country, looking out for elephant carcasses where she might reap some ivory. It was back breaking work, but she did it. She also transported farm produce to Nairobi to sell. Slowly, out of sheer force of willpower it would seem, she empowered herself economically. When Moi’s government came into power, he helped her set up a security firm in Nyeri. In her compound in a posh surburb of Nyeri Town are two cars parked, an old Mercedes Benz, and a Peugeot 504. Compared to those ex Mau Mau fighters squatting on government land in Emergency Era villages, she is living the American dream.

It is these rival groupings within the Mau Mau that are apt to say that she went into the forest in the first instance because her husband got into some trouble in the village and risked severe punishment. Muthoni in her ingenuity is purported to have suggested that they join the armed struggle at that juncture. Once in the forest, they stirred some rancour. In order to protect her and her husband, she sought favour with Kimathi and received it. She rose to be second to none but Kimathi.

That is the alternate version of her story, the path that we did not follow, this time around.

Muthoni pauses often in her account, cringes, and shuts her eyes tightly as though battling with tears. She invokes the name of God on behalf of those who have been cheated of their rightful place in history. God, she says, will surely do them justice someday. Even when they are dead and buried, their bones will cry out to him and he will arise in his time and serve justice on their behalf. God pops up surprisingly often in her discourse. When they were in the forest, they cried out to God for their land. When Dedan Kimathi died, they prayed to God and knew that they must continue with the struggle, even if they deeply felt his loss. And she is not the only one. As we prepared to interview another group in Nyeri, they called a pause for prayer. On the face of it, it was a Christian prayer, crying out to Jehovah for help and provision. There was one stark difference: they all turned and solemnly faced Mt Kenya.

Of Field Marshal Muthoni we ask, to which God does she refer so often? She answers us with a question laced in incredulity, ‘isn’t there only one God? Does that God belong to any one person and not the other?’ Her question leaves us tongue-tied. For an unschooled person, she is possessed of superb understanding. Life has endowed her with knowledge and understanding that a university could not.

She speaks of president Kenyatta’s compensation to settlers for the land they were leaving with disbelief. They snatched the land from us, they got paid. We to whom the land belonged were not given back our land, and we were not compensated. How can this make sense?

(In President Kenyatta's defence, the compensation of settlers was financed by the British government on a willing seller willing buyer basis as agreed in the lead up to independence.)

Kenya, Muthoni says, will be judged for the way it treated its heroes. That Kimathi has lain buried in a prison cemetery for so many years after independence is beyond comprehension.

General Karangi has a controversial word to put in here. He acknowledges Kimathi’s role in the struggle but wonders why we celebrate only those who died and ignore those who are alive. He is hard put to understand why those who successfully evaded bullet, bomb and grenade are less praiseworthy than the one who got caught. His question about about Dedan Kimathi’s eminence is echoed in other quarters for other reasons.

Recently, an article in the Daily Telegraph indignantly vilified those who would celebrate Dedan Kimathi when the Mau Mau were terrorists. How dare anyone celebrate terrorism? We put this challenge before our erstwhile hostess. Muthoni sees it somewhat differently. Who is the terrorist, she challenges. Is it the one who fights back for his land and dignity through whatever means are available to him, or is it the one who forcefully takes that which belongs to another and treats them like dirt?

Nonetheless, her feathers are not unnecessarily ruffled by a ‘white man’ calling her a terrorist. They lost the war, she says, almost indulgently, what else do you expect them to call us? And then she smiles a triumphant smile and shrugs. But she is less forgiving toward her fellow Kenyans. How can they take on that definition of us? Don’t they realize that we laid down our lives for this country? How is it that we when the struggle was over, we got nothing? Not a needle, nor a handkerchief, nor a piece of land the size of a stool? Does that make any sense to you?

New York New York

I draw in a long, nervous breath. This is New York. I expect to be, well... intimidated.

Although, enroute, the dilapidation, the trash littered along the highway, humanized it. Shrank it from larger than life to ... life.

First things first, New York has characters. Or. In other words. Every native New Yorker is a character. All over. All sorts.

I find that I stop. I stare occasionally. I can't help it. No one minds me.

Also, New York is one big ego, and we have all flocked here to stroke it. This is a city in love with itself. I'm just saying. Not necessarily a good thing. Not necessarily a bad thing. Just a thing.

From now on, in my vocabulary, love of self will be spelt, NYphilia.

And, I understand why New York is so written. It's bulging with stories. They are leaking messily out of it.

I could write New York.

I loved the T-Shirts, razor sharp with sarcasm. Now that's the New York of the movie director's imagination. I however, bravely resisted the temptation to buy one at Time Square. Those prices are criminal. Or tourist. Or both. No way am I going down like that.

Speaking of which, that's a thing this city is highly skilled at. Sneaking its grubby little fingers into your pockets and greedily, gleefully, emptying them.

Ahem. I did not appreciate walking around for circa half an hour looking for a public restroom. (Earth to Mayor Bloomberg. Do your read me?)

Also, FYI, I did not appreciate being stashed into a corner at TGI Fridays.

Gasp. (Is this not the capital city of the Solo Act? C'mon TGI Fridays. C'mon.)

Or is mine a determined case of East, West, Home Best?

(Give me my Nairobi
Give me my Java
Give me my own booth
(imagined to the tune of Video by India Arie)).

People say you can get lost here, but me, I stick out like a sore thumb.

First, someone who looks vaguely familiar boards the tour bus I'm on, smiles and says hello. She sits behind me and we chat a little. She's Kenyan. We know we've met but we can't figure out where, how, courtesy of whom. We run through the list-high school, primary school, uni, neighbourhoods, nada.

Pleasant enough, as conversations in a tour bus with an overzealous tour guide labouring to drown you out go.

And Then. And Then. And Then.

On 46th and 8th, in crowded Manhattan, this guy stops me and asks me if I'm Kenyan. Gobsmackerationization. How how how? He's not even Kenyan. He's, wait for this, Togolese.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I can run, but apparently, I cannot hide.

I'm what Kenyan looks like.

(Once, way back, in Pretoria, I walked into a Hair Salon and one of the hairstylists broke out in animated Kikuyu in my direction.

Another time, in Cape Town, I'm standing at a bus stop in Rondebosch (I think), when all of a sudden this Mini Van Taxi draws to a halt right in front of me and the tout proceeds to address me in Kiswahili.)

Kenyan is a look. And, tag, I'm it.

Sigh. If you can't beat it, you might as well try to milk it for all the money it's worth.

I should probably approach the government to use me as a Postergirl for some Quintessential Kenya advertising campaign. Or some such. I wonder how much I'd get paid.

Anyhoo.

Something else I love about New York: how it unabashedly imagines itself into being. It will be whatever it wants to be and you can have your cow if you want. And milk it.

Brilliant.

Book Review: It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

A New Beginning?

Kibaki’s inaugural declaration: “corruption will now cease to be a way of life in Kenya” made to roaring applause one hot December day at the tail end of a dramatic election year back in 2002 now reads like a line of pure comedy penned by a cynical scribe scripting the great African leadership farce. If they replayed that clip on television today, you would likely choke on a chortle for how far the present reality is from that lofty ideal to which we attached our national hopes.

This was not always so.

Once upon a time, we were true believers, high to delirious on hope.

Michela Wrong begins by reminding us of that time, a time when we polled as the most optimistic people in the world.

I remember the time. I remember the feeling. There’s a word for it: euphoric. We were euphoric.

Enter into this euphoria a relatively young man, a couple of years shy of his 40th birthday, invited to be a part of shaping the new Kenya by taking up the position of anti corruption tsar. His name: John Githongo.

It was a momentous task to be sure, but in the end, there were a number of reasons that compelled him to take the job. One, he was an idealist, understandably seduced by the opportunity to be the change he hoped to see. Two, his acquiescence was practically taken for granted by the men who nominated him, his father’s contemporaries, men he held in high regard, men he trusted. Three, we were in a state of euphoria, remember?

So he took the job.

It was an auspicious beginning.

During his confirmation interview with President Kibaki, Githongo had been forthright with his future boss:

“Sir,” he had said, “we can set up all the anti-corruption authorities we want, spend all the money we want, pass all the laws on anticorruption, but it all depends on you. If people believe the president is ‘eating’, the battle is lost. If you are steady on this thing, if the leadership is there, we will succeed.”

He was certain he had been heard.

Same Old, Same Old

There was every suggestion of 180-degree change in direction in those early days. As Permanent Secretary in charge of combating corruption, his office was located within State House, down the corridor from the president’s office giving him unprecedented access to the president and making him extremely powerful in the scheme of things. He formed his team, drawn for the most part from civil society rather than from the ranks of the civil service. He said ‘thanks but no thanks’ to the dark-blue BMW assigned to him as an official car. He set to work enthusiastically, participating in the new government’s effort “to carry out a detailed public tally of Kenya’s corruption problem.”

He immersed himself into the system and applied himself wholeheartedly to the task as he envisioned it. He grew fond of his new boss, President Kibaki, might have been star-struck even.

Alas the honeymoon was doomed to be shortlived.

Soon, he became painfully aware of an ethnic polarisation taking place around the seat of power. Whereas Kibaki had won his handy election victory surrounded and supported by people from diverse parts of Kenya, slowly his inner circle distilled into one constituting mainly fellow Kikuyu and their allied tribes. The State House became increasingly mono-ethnic. Although Githongo was a Kikuyu, he was young and urban-bred, his ethnicity was far from his primary identity and this scenario discomfited him greatly.

Further, it dismayed no end that this new grouping was almost singlehandedly responsible for delaying the process of drafting a new constitution, despite a clear election promise to deliver a new constitution to Kenyans.

Then, persistent rumours of “new graft, of dodgy procurement contracts and lavish spending by members of the NARC administration,” began to waft his way, corroborated by a sophisticated network of informants he had cultivated. It turned out that the high level operatives within the NARC government were responsible for the signing or approval of 18 procurement contracts which would cost the taxpayers three quarters of a billion dollars, easily outstripping aid to Kenya in that year which was pinned at circa half a billion dollars.

Valiantly he tried to do his job—to identify the culprits and help bring them to book. Miserably he failed. Sensing resistance from his boss and fearing for his life, he fled.

Anti Corruption Tsar Turned International Fugitive

On 6th February, 2005, he showed up at Michela Wrong’s doorstep in Camden Town, London, lagging a load of luggage, come to stay a while. The anti-corruption tsar had turned international fugitive.

He had determined to resign. His life, he felt, was in danger. He had with him a secret arsenal of documents, diaries and recordings meticulously accumulated in the course of duty. They were highly damaging to the government in general and to specific highly-placed individuals in particular. They were also his reputation insurance policy. If he had attempted to make the claims he made about what he had seen and heard without this indisputable evidence, he would have been dismissed a madman.

This book, “It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower” turns on these somewhat dramatic events, hovering over them broodingly, occasionally darting backward a generation or two in an attempt to gain perspective and forward a few years to show context and consequences.

All the while it forces us to retread painfully familiar, garbled territory: the “unbridled greed” that comes accompanied by an irrational sense of personal entitlement at the expense of all others and what it has wrought in Africa and why it has wrought it in Africa. The central theme as suggested in the book’s title, then, is the politics of consumption. To hold the reins of power in Kenya is to be custodian to the key to the national pantry. (I wonder whether Amartya Sen meant a double entrendre with his assertion that “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” or that’s just the way the chips happened to fall.)

In the end, in this book, tribalism and corruption stand together as two vices that hover ominously over Kenya’s future, threatening her wellbeing, indeed shaking her very foundations. We always knew that these were our most pressing problems, but what Wrong has succeeded in illustrating is the way in which they are inextricably intertwined. If we create a system in which equitable access to national resources is guaranteed regardless of any form of affiliation, then people will no longer feel the need to fall back on these affiliations either defensively or offensively and political leaders who then seek to exploit our differences for their own ends will find themselves without followers. If the system is fundamentally flawed, malevolent, then people will be forced to look for crutches to help them navigate its turbulent waters. One such crutch is tribal patronage.

The Man Behind the Drama

I had always wondered what made Githongo tick, why he chose to do what he did in exactly the way he did it. This book attempts to provide answers to these questions.

The Githongo depicted here is hardly all saint and no sinner. He may be the hero, the protagonist, but he is humanised by his flaws. For prominent example, he has the irritating knack of overpromising himself and then under-delivering—he is well-known for standing people up. So much so that in his circles, the synonym for being stood up is being Githongoed. He is also, per Wrong’s description of him, an “inveterate conspiracy theorist intrigued by tales of plots and subterfuge.”

Wycliffe Muga, a journalist, disparages him a coconut, black on the outside, white on the inside, while, David Ndii, prominent in the Kenyan civil society, muses in retrospect that, he was patently unsuitable for the role to which he was assigned by dint of his personality: “he probably didn’t have the right character for the job,” and “he went in with a lot more idealism that I thought warranted.”

Opinions abound about how Githongo should have responded to the circumstances in which he found himself. Perhaps he should have persevered, been more pragmatic—African politics are what they are. How did his dramatic exit serve, in the end?

On the other hand stand those who wonder at how long it took Githongo to catch on to the fact that he was being used.

It is on this side that Wrong appears to stand. At the outset, the portrait of Githongo that she paints gives off more than a whiff of the naïve. We read a barely concealed incredulity in the subtext:

“Tracking John’s itinerary, there’s something mystifying about the sheer time it took him to recognise the obvious. The dossier he eventually produced can read like a log of a year-long refusal to face the truth. How many times did John Githongo, a man of no mean intelligence, need to be told that his closest colleagues had hatched Anglo Leasing on the pretext of election fundraising before he believed it?”

This bent is particularly striking because not more than six months before Githongo showed up at her doorstep, Wrong had written an article for the New Statesman brimming with her own enthusiasm, celebrating a new Kenya. The ugliness that came to blight the NARC administration was already bubbling to the surface, and while she acknowledged these flaws, her tone was determinedly optimistic. She too had embraced this notion of ‘a new wind blowing.’

I mention this to lead into the fact that I too was duped, in the beginning. Many of us were. And perhaps on account of the high hopes that we held, we were frozen in a particular place of disbelief for a moment too long.

Like Githongo, as things fell apart at the beginning, I too was reluctant to lay the blame squarely at Kibaki’s feet. He was not himself, following the accident and the stroke, I rationalised. In my mind, therefore, someone else was taking advantage of his weakened state, to wreak havoc on the country. Wait till he got better, I told myself, reminiscent of my adolescent days when the do-gooder’s last resort was always, “wait till daddy comes home.”

So I read with a sense of resignation Githongo’s damning indictment made in retrospect: as he (Kibaki) got better, things got worse.

Soon enough, Githongo had to bow to a different wisdom:

“If a leader is surrounded by shifty, money-grabbing aides and family members, it’s because he likes it that way. These are the people he feels at ease with, whose working methods he respects. Far from being an aberration, the entourage is a faithful expression of the autocrat’s own proclivities.”

I reach back in memory and have to concede that certainly things did not get better.

So, again, why did it take him so long to jump ship when at last it dawned on him beyond reasonable doubt that the government for which he worked was hopelessly dirty? The answer, we find, is twofold:

One, it is about the circumstances he was in.

He “had been too close.” As Wrong paints it, once he was in his job, he became a prisoner to it. He could not do his job, but he could not easily quit it. So the option available to him was to stay as token, “a pet monkey performing tricks to reassure the regime’s critics,” or to flee as he did.

Two, it is about who he was.

In this instance, character proved to be destiny. “When John trusted someone, he did it completely. And when he was disappointed, he flipped completely.”

And then when he finally admitted to himself that something was horrible wrong, he procrastinated, but then again, “John was always ready to admit that procrastination, which follows on from the need to control events as night follows day, was one of his character flaws.

The Swing of the Pendulum

Once, however, a certain bridge had been crossed, there could have been no doubt that he was going to leave. David Ndii describes Githongo as having a “conviction” type of personality, one prone to “emotional volatility” and prone to the “melodramatic.”

Githongo’s style, it appears, harkens unto Obama. He confessed of himself: ‘I try and dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s. I do this excessively, it’s been my style throughout. And then, when I move – BOOM!’

His initial inaction could be attributed to a propensity to over-examine. Mwalimu Mati, another civil society luminary in his own right explains it with: “No mistakes are tolerable to him, and that accounts for the inaction.”

But when at last the pendulum swung the opposite direction, it was a dramatic and complete swing. He burned his bridges as he advanced. There was no going back.

No matter if you think it took inordinately long or he was too quick to judgment, there can be no diminishing the significance of what he did:

“I thought for a bit, but couldn’t recall a single occasion in which a government official of John’s stature had blown the whistle on an African administration,” Gitau, Githongo’s brother remarks to Wrong. Wrong agrees. Not that she can think of, there isn’t.

In my experience, earth has no torment like an idealist disillusioned.

Wrong puts it this way:

There is such a thing as “the fury of frustrated zeal,” and unscrupulous persons seeking to misuse the idealist to achieve their own ends ought to be very wary of its manifestations. When at last he was done with the NARC government and all its cheating ways, he was done with it, he was furious at it and he was bitter.

Judging the Book by More than Its Cover

The story itself is definitely worth telling, and Wrong has proved a worthy custodian.

I approached the book with a defensive scepticism, antennae up, mind braced, expecting a predictable caricature of an African nation in broad strokes of pitch black and sparkling white. She makes no sweeping indictments in the tradition of Kapuscinski and Naipaul before her. Where she feels a need to cluster, and a number of times she does, she goes to reasonable extents to corroborate, to defend, to illustrate. I do not always agree with her, but I recognise the effort she makes to deliver nuance, and applaud her effort. Except that one time when she ruefully remarks: “Working in Africa, I’d grown accustomed to compromised friendships, relationships premised on wilful ignorance on my part and an absence of full disclosure on my friends’.” But I chose to forgive her that.

This does not mean that I did not find much that was wince-worthy. It’s hard to read about all the different ways in which a thing that you cherish is broken. Even when you know full well that it is broken. To think that Kenya, in the early days of the NARC government, was the first country to ratify the UN Convention against Corruption. Irony of the highest order. Irony that ought really to be feted and knighted. Maybe even crowned.

Sometimes, I bristled. As against her contention that tribe and tribal affiliations define the Kenyan landscape and predominate. But I concede that she is justified and that in light of recent of events, it is hard to argue now: we as a nation do suffer from “an acute ethnic self-awareness”.

In the end, Kenya’s recent political history can be summarised thus:

The ethnically-based white settler tribe was kicked out (or reluctantly relinquished power, depending on who’s writing the history) to be replaced by a Kikuyu president who inherited a system and abused it to serve his own people, and then when he died, was replaced by a Kalenjin president who promptly followed in the footsteps of his predecessors and so on and so forth. What saddens is that everyone plays this as a zero sum game in the name of “restoring balance” by overcorrecting past partisanship.

While she’s at it, Wrong finds the time (and space) to insert her voice into the aid debate, appearing to side with Dambisa when she notes that “Western donor governments, their media and their expatriates, had become the ultimate, trusted arbiters of Kenyan reality.” By this she means that aid was a stick that western governments had and they could use it and that their money bought them the right to an opinion that could be heard whereas “ordinary Kenyans, thinking the same thing, with a hundred times more intensity, could do nothing about it, and there lay their ultimate emasculation.”

Wrong also contends that aid is self-serving. Realpolitik. It is not free. There are reasons that funds flow to certain coffers. But then she turns the corner, perhaps in a quest for balance, and suggests that there was also the case of the gaze trained brutally on the long term, because instititutions, checks and balances, civil society, etc, take time to build.

There are other questions that arise around aid in this particular story that should give us pause. For example, how, even after Githongo’s damning dossier had been made public, the aid for the most part, kept flowing:

“Demonstrating a truly remarkable sense of timing, the World Bank chose to announce $145 million in new loans to Kenya – the first credits approved by the executive board for fifteen months – just three days after the leaking of John’s dossier, signalling that, as far as this institution was concerned, a $750-million procurement scandal was no grounds for querying the wisdom of re-engaging with the Kenyan government. The same emollient message came from DfID, which had announced a £58-million grant a few days before John’s leak, and saw no reason to reconsider.”

I sent a text message to one of the people I do life with who also happens to work with a World Bank affiliated institution asking her what she thought of how the World Bank had been portrayed in Wrong’s book. She responded by conceding that oftentimes, they murk up implementation and they end up botching things seriously, but nonetheless, the people she works with are some of the most idealistic people she knows, and they are honestly committed to make our world a better place.

(Which echoes a rising sentiment in me: it’s not the heart that is in the wrong place, it is the hand that is responding in the wrong way. In this respect, aid idealists and aid sceptics ought really to dialogue as on the same side, wanting the same thing, giving benefit of doubt, assuming goodwill unless proven absent. But that is another article, for another day.)

As for the writing: on occasion she gets mired in descriptive terrain but most times, she moves the narrative along at a brisk lyrical pace, drawing you into the vortex of the story. Her language is elegant and her imagery vivid, as when she writes that “centralised systems of power are like onions: each layer faithfully mimics the core,” or when she describes those who “belong to an international elite that automatically turns left on entering a plane.”

To her credit, she is astute at sending subtle signals that are bound to alert the Kenyan reader as to her intimacy with the context. She sprinkles her book with familiar anecdotes: I relate immediately to her description of how we Nairobians drive at nervous speed past the woodland on Ngong Road on our way to Karen for fear of carjackers. I smile as she remembers to me the first escalator in Nairobi, at Yaya Centre, in the eighties. (I remember taking two buses to get there to ride it.)

If these particular signals do not resonate, the book is replete with others, I am confident you will find ones that do. This is the detail, but it speaks volumes, as I’m sure she knew it would. (I was amused that she baptised South C as scruffy as against the more pristine parts of Nairobi, of course, Muthaiga and Runda for example). The message is clear: she is foreigner, but she is not stranger. She has reported on Kenya for a dozen years. She worked, once, at the Standard Newspaper.

Is There Only Elijah Left As A Prophet in Israel?

You will have to judge for yourselves, on the reading, whether indeed the forces shaping John Githongo were “calculated to produce the perfect whistleblower” as is Wrong’s contention. I for one am uncomfortable with the notion that some among us were predestined to blow the whistle, that there is a specialness, a set-apartness, a one in every ten million-ness about Githongo.

It carries a faint echo of Elijah’s episode of self-pity in the desert, cast as sole crusader in a world where Jezebel’s tentacles reach wide and deep and she had sworn to kill him.

For those not familiar with the story it goes like this:

Elijah had long been standing up against King Ahab for all his injustices against the people of Israel and finally Queen Jezebel, had had enough. She swore by all that she knew that she would kill him if it was the last thing she did. Elijah fled to the desert, with a death threat from no less than the King’s wife hanging over his head and in the days that followed, he became increasingly depressed. When God came by and asked him what the matter was, he was quick to grouse. He was being zealous for God, doing what God wanted him to do and everybody else had either abandoned the task or been killed on account of it but here he was, sticking with it, and now look, he too was in danger of being killed. God gives him a long answer, but the part of that answer that interests me is the “hey look, you’re actually not the only one left, there are seven thousand others out there.”

Talk about putting things in perspective.

The point I make is not that Githongo does not deserve our admiration, respect and applause. He does. I mean, he really does. He stood up against a formidable system that tried to bring him to heel. He chose to do what was right when there was tremendous pressure to do otherwise. In a country, indeed a continent, that suffers a dearth of political heroes, he stands out, and for good reason.

The point I make, though, is that we need to make every effort to identify Kenya’s seven thousand, to encourage them to continue to be strong and not to give up the good fight and to empower them to rise up and make their difference. That in the end should be the skew of this story at the re-telling. If there is an Elijah there must be seven thousand. The country that raised Githongo could not have raised Githongo alone. Ergo, there is hope.

Tomorrow Has Come

What has become of John Githongo? Well, these events have changed him. Life has happened to him. He has developed the cynicism of a jaded idealist. Words such as calculating and ruthlessness and self-serving pop up in Wrong’s description of the latter day Githongo, and indeed, are implied in his own evaluation of who he has become. Perhaps it is a good thing, a necessary thing.

But the idealist in him continues to lurk just beneath the surface. He has been back to Kenya for a visit since. He is considering relocating back to Kenya, to live in Mathare, to interact with the young people who are the country’s future and maybe to run for political office.

In the meantime, he has become the global courier of a sobering missive: “systemic corruption, is the most efficient poverty factor on the continent.” Like it or not, if they do not pay it heed, it is a message that threatens to ground the ship that ferries Bob, Bono and Blair’s determinedly sanguine Make Poverty History campaign, not because their hearts are not in the right place, but because they fail to diagnose the underlying condition correctly.

UPDATE: You can now buy a copy of the book at The Kenya Shop

If I Wallow, Let Me Wallow

I had a meltdown of sorts on Sunday. The friend who received my frantic, gibberish, melodramatic text message that sent her into her own spiral of panic will attest to this.

All these days, even as the situation has deteriorated, I confess that I have clung, against all odds, to the notion of a better Kenya, a Kenya where this cannot happen. A Kenya where it is enough that I am a Kenyan: a Kenya where my ethnicity is about where I come from, not who I am; a Kenya which had its fair share of problems, but which, despite these, was making progress.

Now, it is fast becoming clear that that Kenya is a figment of my overly optimistic imagination.

Now, doom and gloom predominate. I’m done betting my bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun. Clearly, I’m the deluded middle class, who used to live in a bubble. Somebody just stuck a pin in that bubble.

I just had a visit from a friend who used to live in Kapsabet, a student at Baraton. Attackers came to her home but her neighbours hid her. She lost everything. Because of the generosity of the neighbours who hid her when the assailants came calling, her life and her children’s lives were spared.

In Naivasha, a mob set alight yet another house with nineteen people, most of them women and children.

A friend tells me that her family in Nakuru has sent the women away to (relative) safety and the men have remained to fight. Because what else are they going to do? They have to protect what is theirs. Her father could be my father. Her brother could be my brother. I try to imagine them wielding pangas, defending their lives and their livelihoods. My heart grows faint, my knees buckle.

Another friend sent me a message the other day. The stories about Kenya in the international press made him very nervous. He said he was very afraid for me. He offered me the price of a ticket, said I should go stay with him and his family until the madness ends.

I said “no thanks.” I said I wanted to stay, to see if there was anything I could do, any part I could play in bringing us back from the brink. Surely there must be something I could do.

I’ve been to the meetings. Good ideas and solid plans. We’ve come up with the documents. We’ve passed them along. But Kenya is still burning.

Now, I don’t feel so courageous and patriotic any more.

Now, I watch myself walking around in a daze. I’m doing the routine things: getting up in the morning, going to work, going home in the evening, lying in my bed at night, getting up in the morning, going to work.

Now, I want to pack all my beloved in a box and ship them out of this country. I know they won’t stand for it, of course.

Yesterday, for the first time, I've thought seriously about running away, getting out of here while my visa is still valid. Just in case my family needs a place to run away to, someday. On the heel of that thought came the tears.

When I travel and meet people who want to know a little about Kenya, I insist that they must come visit, and see it for themselves. The world is littered with people I’ve harassed to visit Kenya. Because everybody knows that you haven’t seen God smile, if you haven’t been to Kenya. I tell these people not to worry, accommodation is on me, I have room enough in my house to fit an entire family. So, please come. Seriously, come.

Now, these very people are offering me refuge from this place I boast about.

Because suddenly, God is not smiling.

Remember Mary Doria Russell’s book The Sparrow which I blogged about sometime ago? Well, in her version of the future, somewhere in the middle of the 21st century, Kenyans are being accommodated at refugee camps in Sudan. I still remember reading that and filing it away in the “Yeah Right” folder. As if such a thing could happen, I chuckled to myself, under my breath.

Today, yet another friend wrote for a faraway place and asked whether I was fine, what with all the horrible news coming out of Kenya. I replied saying,

“I am physically fine, but I’m nursing a wounded spirit.”

Likely tomorrow I’ll be back to my old self again: believing in and rooting for Kenya with all that I am and have.

But today, if I wallow, let me wallow.

A Land of Wounded People

I’m back to my 8 to whenever the work is done gig which means that, most of the time, I am preoccupied with any number of things.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

It is a good thing because, at least some of the time, I’m distracted by things other than the crisis in Kenya. Deadlines and reports and operating plans and bills to be paid at the end of the month have a way of distracting one. (And yet, in an odd sort of way, I see even my bills as a blessing now. They indicate to me that I have a roof over my head and access to basic amenities.)

But it is a bad thing because not keeping up with the news breeds in me a false sense of calm.

The truth is, there are still a good number of trouble spots all over this country. People are fleeing for their lives from Kipkelion, Molo and Kuresoi where the carnage persists. There was a news item on NTV tonight about a mob of stick-wielding youth attacking the Bata Shoe factory in Limuru demanding that people from particular ethnic communities be surrendered to them.

In Nairobi’s low-income eastlands estates, Huruma, Dandora and Kariobangi North, gory killings are reported every night. On KTN, the camera sweeps cautiously over the lower body of a man who was beheaded in Kariobangi North. There’s a critical mass of evidence to support the persistent rumours that ethnic based militia that have reigned terror on Kenyans in the past have been revived, in particular Mungiki and Taliban. It is they that are now reigning terror on the residents of these densely populated estates each in their turn.

At best our security forces are overwhelmed with the task at hand. At worst, they are culpable in at least some of the trouble spots. Mostly, they are on edge, in control, but barely.

David Makali of the Media Institute, speaking at a press conference called by editors to address the government’s ban on live coverage, claims that there’s “a virtual breakdown of the rule of law on a scale never witnessed before.” I’m very afraid that we’ve let our “inner monster” out of its cage and that now that it’s out, we do not have an appreciation of how very difficult it will be to round it back in again.

A political solution is only the beginning of the road to healing. We have deep social wounds that will need tending to. We may effectively have scarred the conscience of a generation. Can all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, put us back together again?

There was a feature on NTV news this evening called Voices of Children.

Anne is fourteen years old and she’s from Eldoret. She has nightmares every night. As she was fleeing from her home with her family, she saw a mob slashing an old woman and her grandchild to death. She cannot get this image out of her head.

John is sixteen. He saw his father hacked to death by his neighbour. His life was spared because he was a friend to the neighbour’s son, but he had to flee for his life nonetheless.

What is most striking about many of the stories that you hear is the common refrain: “It is people we know. It is people we lived with.”

It is true, what many have argued: this is not so much an ethnic as a class war. It is, in the end, a battle between the haves and the have-nots. But, we cannot deny that it has had ethnic manifestations. The scars born of this displaced aggression are evident all over this nation. In the end, none of us is exempt. We are all the victims. We are all the perpetrators.

But, credit where credit is due: twice this week, first in his address in Kisumu and then when he spoke at the Ligi Ndogo grounds, Raila appealed to his supporters not to attack their neighbours, explaining that, this is not a fight about ethnicity, it is a fight for justice.

Weep For This Place Called Home

I’ve woken up to war cries outside my window. Kibera has poured out into our neighbourhood, one rival group hunting down another, sticks and stones in hand. Cries of war rent the air.

The mob stops occasionally to ransack kiosks nearby. Gun shots interrupt the mayhem. My next door neighbour is inconsolable. Her sister was out walking in Riruta trying to get away from it all with her children and she ran into a mob. The last she heard from her, she was trying to beg someone to let her into their house. Our watchman says he ran into Mungiki on his way from Kawangware to work. If you glance out into the distance, there’s smoke rising up out of Kibera, testimony to what transpired there at night.

In response, army helicopters are flying menacingly low.

Now I agree with Ptochos. In re-reading it, I can see how my shell-shocked blogging has come off as glib.

Yesterday’s hasty enthronement in the face of unresolved issues is going to haunt this country for a long time to come. It’s no matter to gloss over.

Meanwhile, the grinches who stole the election are safe in their high-walled, heavily guarded compounds far far away from here.

Weep for this place called home. Something needs to be done. Or UNDONE.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It's calmed down now. We're venturing out tentatively. There are cars on the road, there weren't before.

Yet in the middle of all this, the people give me hope. My neighbour downstairs says she’s noticed children roaming around unsupervised. She’s gone out to bring them back, into her home if necessary.

Because they’re just children.