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While working at TI, John was also in discreet contact with the Kibaki team. He'd kept that side of things quiet, for the organisation was officially neutral, and had to be seen to remain above the political fray. But when Kibaki's aides approached, asking for concrete suggestions on how to build the opposition's anti-corruption strategy, he could hardly refuse. And in truth, at this stage in Kenya's history it was almost impossible to imagine that any idealistic young Kenyan could fail to wish NARC anything but success in the forthcoming contest.
In the wake of the 2002 inauguration I tracked John down with a fellow journalist, keen to hear his thoughts. We found him in frenetic mode, simultaneously hyped, exhilarated and exhausted. He had been part of the election-monitoring effort pulled together by the human rights bodies and advocacy groups that constituted Kenyan civil society, and was fielding a series of calls from reporters in search of quotes, repeating the same phrases again and again. Halfway through the conversation, he revealed another reason why he was so distracted. The Kenyan businessmen who sat on TI-Kenya's board, old friends of both his father and Kibaki, had been in touch. ‘The wazee [old men] have put my name forward as someone to lead the fight against corruption.’ His laugh was half-embarrassed, half-excited. ‘It looks as though the new team is going to offer me a post in government.’
My heart sank. I could see exactly why any new government would want John. No Kenyan could rival his reputation for muscular integrity, or enjoyed as much respect amongst the foreign donors everyone hoped would soon resume lending. In co-opting him, the incoming administration would be neatly appropriating a highprofile symbol of credibility, proof personified that it deserved the trust of both the wananchi and its Western partners. But I remembered all the other shining African talents I'd seen warily join the establishment they had once attacked, persuaded that finally the time was ripe for change, only to emerge discredited, beaten by the system they had set out to cure.
‘Don't take it,’ I said. ‘You'll lose your neutrality forever. Once you've crossed the line and become a player, you'll never be able to go back.’
He listened, but my advice, it was clear, was being given too late. Effectively, he explained, he wasn't being given a choice. The old guys – Joe Wanjui, former head of Unilever in Kenya; George Muhoho, head of the Kenya airports authority; and Harris Mule, former permanent secretary at the finance ministry – had done the deal in his absence, taking his acquiescence as read. He'd gone round to Wanjui's house and found the wazee drinking champagne, celebrating the forthcoming appointment. They had ribbed the young man over the fact that he probably didn't even own a suit for his meeting with Kibaki, offering to lend him one. ‘They'd all cooked it up together. I drove away stunned. It was a great honour.’ In later years, he would think back over that day and detect an unappetisingly sacrificial element to the whole episode. These men he had grown up with, who had known him when he was nothing but a small boy running around in shorts, had trussed him up and delivered him to his fate.
But it was obvious that John was more than a pawn in a deal done by his father's friends. He was the kind of man who believed it was up to every Kenyan – especially to someone blessed with his education and social advantages – to pull the country out of the mire. He had dedicated his brief career to fighting corruption. Now along came an administration that had won an election promising to do just that. It was asking for his expertise, inviting him into the inner sanctum, and he knew in his heart that there probably wasn't a single Kenyan better placed to wage that campaign. How could it be legitimate to criticise if, when you were explicitly asked to quit the sidelines and join the fray, you refused? ‘We discussed whether he should take it and concluded he didn't have a choice, morally speaking,’ remembers economist David Ndii, who had worked alongside John at TI. ‘If he didn't, he would always wonder if he could have made a difference.’ There comes a time in a man's life when fate offers him a chance to do something significant. It is rarely extended twice. Accepting the job was not just an exciting career opportunity, it was a patriotic duty.
Leaving John that day, I felt a deep tinge of melancholy. 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'. When visiting a former Congolese prime minister, sitting in a villa whose bougainvillea-fringed gardens stretched across acres of prime real estate, I knew better than to ask if his government salary had paid for all this lush beauty. Staying with a friend in Nigeria, whose garage alone dwarfed the family homes of many Londoners, I took it for granted that his business dealings wouldn't stand up to a taxman's scrutiny. And when I shared a beer with a Great Lakes intelligence chief befriended in a presidential waiting room, I knew that one day I'd probably come across his name in a human rights report, fingered as the man behind some ruthless political assassination. Life was complicated. The moral choices needed to rise to the top were bleaker and more unforgiving in Africa than those faced by Westerners. It was easy for me, born in a society which coddled the unlucky and compensated its failures, to wax self-righteous. I had never been asked to choose between the lesser of two evils, never had relatives beg me to compromise my principles for their sakes, never woken to the bitter realisation that I was the only person stupid enough to play by the rules. If I was to continue to like these men and women – and I did like these men and women – it was sometimes necessary to focus on the foreground and wilfully ignore the bigger picture.
But not with John, never with John. Through the years of knowing him, I had never caught a glimpse of any sinister hinterland, territory best left unexplored, and God knows I had asked around. What you saw seemed to be strictly what you got, and he was the only one of my African friends of whom that felt true. I looked at him that day and thought: ‘Well, that's over. In the years to come, I will pick up a Kenyan newspaper and spot an item in a gossip column about his partnership with a shady Asian businessman, the large house he is having built in a plush Nairobi suburb. Then there'll be a full-length article, a court case in which the judge finds against him but which goes to appeal, so I'll never know the truth. And one day, I'll be chatting to someone at a diplomatic party who will say: “John Githongo – isn't he completely rotten?” and I'll find myself nodding in agreement …’ Oh, I would still like him – who could not? But what had once been clear-cut and simple would have become qualified and murky. And already I mourned our mutual loss of innocence.
There was one last hoop to jump through before his appointment was confirmed – an interview with the man who had just become Kenya's third president. At that first encounter on 7 January 2003, watched over benevolently by the wazee, his three mentors, John listened, humbled, overawed, as Kibaki outlined his ambitions and expectations. But he plucked up just enough courage to make a remark that went to the heart of the matter. If his time at TI had taught him one thing, he said, it was that since corruption started at the top, it could only effectively be fought from the top. ‘Sir,’ he told the president, ‘we can set up all the anti-corruption authorities we want, spend all the money we want, pass all the laws on anti-corruption, 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.’
Among the many calls John received in those hectic days, as excited friends rang to congratulate him, one was more sobering than the rest. It was from Richard Leakey, the palaeontologist who, after years in opposition, was taken on by Moi in the late 1990s to reform Kenya's civil service. Leakey was no stranger to adversity – he had been hounded by the security forces, bore the scars on his back from a vicious police whipping, had lost his legs in a plane crash some suspected of being a botched act of sabotage. An experienced scrapper, his efforts to clean up the public sector had nevertheless eventually been rendered futile by Moi's Machiavellian strategies. ‘If you can pull it off, wonderful,’ Leakey told John. ‘But be careful. This is a tough one.’ The appointment was announced in the following days, to much media fanfare.
After that, we rarely met. I was busy writing a book in London, John was a man in a hurry. After a lull, I started getting the occasional, worrying bulletin: he had made some powerful enemies, and travelled around Nairobi with two bodyguards; new scandals were surfacing; John had been moved sideways, then reinstated. That didn't sound good. It got worse: a journalist friend returning from Nairobi said John had told him that ‘if anything happened’ he had left instructions for both of us to be sent certain packages, an ominous sign if ever there was one. And his hitherto unblemished reputation was taking its first hits. Nairobi's chattering classes were complaining that the anti-corruption chief wasn't delivering. Whether through ignorance or impotence, they said, he was complicit in the new government's misdemeanours. He was going down the route the cynics had always traced for him, from superhero to flawed mortal.
Then, on a visit to Kenya in late 2004, John joined a meal I was having in a French restaurant with four Western correspondents, veteran Africa writers all. His arrival was a welcome surprise, for John – always prone to the last-minute cancellation – had become outrageously unreliable since joining government, as notorious for his no-shows as a Hollywood diva.
‘So, John, when are you going to resign?’ asked one of my colleagues, and John chuckled ruefully, shaking his head in defeat.
As we prepared to leave, I turned to him on sudden impulse. He had not said as much, but under the ebullient cheerfulness that was his customary public face, I thought I glimpsed a certain dismay. He seemed buffeted, a man no longer in control of his destiny.
‘I've just moved into a larger flat in London, John, with a separate guest room. If you ever need a base’ – the phrase ‘bolt hole’ was on the tip of my tongue – ‘somewhere to rest up, just give me a call.’
The response came a few months later. A call from Davos, where John was attending the World Economic Forum. ‘I was wondering if I could take you up on that offer of a room?’ He gave no hint of how long he planned to stay or why he needed a place for the night when presumably, as a government VIP, he enjoyed the pick of London hotels. When he called again, this time from Oslo, where he was attending a conference, I asked whether his visit was something I could mention to journalist friends in London, always keen to see him. ‘Er … Probably best not. If you don't mind, just keep it to yourself for now.’
Something, clearly, was up. And on the morning of 6 February 2005, when the capital was wrapped in a cold white cocoon, he arrived on the doorstep of my London flat, let in by a genteel elderly lady from down the hall who seemed, to John's quiet amusement, to find nothing remotely suspicious about a huge black man in a KGB-style black leather jacket, herding a pile of luggage so large it was clear that this would be no weekend stay. As he deposited the various bags in my guest room, which suddenly looked very small and cramped, John's mobile phones trilled and vibrated, like a chorus of caged starlings. How many did he actually have: three? four? more? He asked for a glass of fruit juice, took a deep breath, and gathered his thoughts.
‘One of the first things I need to do,’ he said, ‘is resign.’
He was on the run, he told me. In best espionage style, he had summoned two taxis to the London hotel where he had been staying with Justice Aaron Ringera, head of Kenya's Anti-Corruption Commission, paid one to drive off in any direction and taken the second. Whatever I might have fondly liked to think, his appearance on my doorstep at this moment of crisis was scarcely a tribute to the intimacy of our friendship. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was there precisely because so few people in Kenya knew we had ever been friends.
‘They told me it was them,’ he said, pacing the floor. ‘These ministers, my closest colleagues, sat there and told me to my face that they, they were the ones doing the stealing. Once they said that, I knew I had to go.’
2 An Unexpected Guest (#u072cbbd2-cf52-5ddb-abbe-01b0b188aad4)
‘If you're walking in the savannah and a lion attacks, climb a thorn tree and wait there for a while.’
Kamba proverb
He came bearing toxic material. A nervous tremor scurried along my spine as he explained that he had done the unthinkable, wiring himself for sound in classic police informer style, taping the self-incriminating conversations of the ministers who were supposed to be his trusted workmates. The explosive contents of those recordings had been systematically downloaded onto his computer, which now sat quietly in my spare bedroom. ‘It might be an idea,’ he said, ‘for me to find a third party to take the computer while I work out what I'm going to do.’
Suddenly, I was plunged into an unfamiliar world – of covering my tracks, watching what I said. In this world of subterfuge, even the simplest procedure grew vastly complex. Sitting at my computer, John wasted no time in typing out his resignation letter. He drafted it slowly and carefully. While he did not want to give anything away that might constrain his actions later on, he was also determined to make it clear to the careful reader – and he knew State House, the intelligence services and the media would be analysing every word – that he was not leaving happy in the knowledge of a job well done. There would be no ‘spending more time with my family’ clichés. The circumstances of his resignation alone, announced on a one-way trip into exile, must at this stage do the rest for him, sending a damning message about the true nature of the NARC regime.
He was in a hurry to cross that Rubicon; the letter needed to be faxed immediately to State House. But whose fax machine to use? If I used my own, his location would immediately be revealed. My parents' fax would be no better – given my family's unusual surname, it would immediately lead anyone with half a brain back to me. Nearby Camden Town was full of little newsagents willing to fax documents for customers. But in my experience, most were run by sulky Asian shopkeepers who had no truck with international calls. In any case, a Camden Town telephone number would once again point Kenyan investigators in my general direction. In the end, despairing of getting it right, I walked into an independent bookshop I regularly patronised and asked the owner – a laid-back, gently humorous man who had done me many favours over the years in return for my loyal custom – to fax the letter, hoping he wouldn't notice its recipient (‘President's Office, State House, Nairobi’) as it passed through his hands. He was a Jewish émigré's son. His father had fled the Nazis and saved himself from the concentration camps; I told myself he should understand about life lived under the radar.
The resignation was splashed across the front pages of Kenya's newspapers in three-inch capitals the next day, the only topic of conversation on the FM radio stations, morning chat shows and Kenyan websites. ‘STATE HOUSE SHOULD BE CONDEMNED NOW! PARLIAMENT SHOULD BE CLOSED! TAXPAYERS, STOP PAYING YOUR TAXES, IMMEDIATELY!’ ran one typical blogger's entry. The one that followed quietly summarised the national feeling: ‘Shit.’ Even the international media ran hard with the story, realising this was an event likely to damage relations between the Kenyan government and its new-found foreign friends. After only two years in his post, the living, breathing symbol of Kibaki's good intentions had thrown in the towel, the shining white knight had fallen off his horse. Who could remember a similar event in African, let alone Kenyan history? Permanent secretaries never surrendered their jobs, they were either ignominiously sacked or, if they were lucky, allowed to present token resignations. Had John resigned in Nairobi, it would already have been remarkable. The fact that he had chosen to do so from self-imposed exile – indicating he believed his life would be in danger if he stayed in Kenya – made it one of the hottest African stories of the year. In Britain's House of Commons, a Labour MP tabled a private member's motion expressing his ‘deep concern’, while the missions of the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Japan and Switzerland called in a joint statement for Kibaki to take swift action to restore his government's credibility.
In the days that followed, the Kenyan government mounted a quiet manhunt. As Special Branch descended on John's house in Nairobi – ‘It was just like the old days,’ a friend who lives in the same district later told me, ‘with police cars drawing up in the night, neighbours woken, dogs barking’ – staff at the Kenyan High Commission in Portland Place scoured London. They checked the addresses of John's known friends, people he had grown up and gone to school with. Nothing. They canvassed the roads around Victoria Station, an area of cheap lodgings patronised by Africans who can't afford the top hotels. No luck. No one thought to check the home of Michela Wrong, former Africa correspondent of the Financial Times.
But the pitfalls inherent in a life of deceit were swiftly becoming obvious to me. I'd had colleagues who had crossed the invisible line of journalistic neutrality and become part of their own story, giving succour to African asylum-seekers, paying their legal fees, sneaking money and papers across borders. But it had never happened to me. And, it turned out, I wasn't much good at this stuff. David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, a veteran of subterfuge, later told me that a cover story only works if prepared ahead of time, its structure and corroborative detail laid down well in advance. But I had had no time to prepare my ‘legend’. I was reacting on the hoof, and within hours, not days, I was tripping myself up.
The main problem was that I didn't want to mention John's presence over the telephone. I had always vaguely assumed that, whatever the British authorities might say in public, any intelligence service worthy of its name routinely bugs its small resident community of journalists, particularly in the wake of 9/11. British intelligence, I knew, had an information-sharing arrangement with its Kenyan counterpart. If asked by Kenyan intelligence to help track down a missing anti-corruption chief in London, would the Brits refuse? I wasn't counting on it. So how to explain to the various girlfriends of mine who rang, expecting an intimate natter, that this wasn't a good time for our usual gossip, without explaining why? They immediately sensed the awkwardness in my voice, and the less I divulged, the more curious they became. ‘Do you have someone there? Why are you being so secretive? What's going on?’ If I'd been listening in on those conversations, my limp ‘I'll explain later’ would immediately have alerted me to the fact that something had changed in the Wrong household.
I found myself in a similar predicament when John asked if I could book lodgings for a Kenyan contact passing through London who he needed to meet. Suspicious of everyone in these tense, early days, he preferred his visitor not to know where he was staying, which raised the awkward question of how to pay for the room. If the guest were to ask at reception who was covering his bill, my credit card details would give the game away. If I went to the bed and breakfast in person and paid cash, I risked making myself memorable by that very act. I rang my brother-in-law – same family, different name – and asked if he would mind charging a room in north London to his card. ‘Er, I could, but why can't you just pay for it yourself?’ ‘I can't explain why now, but there's a good reason,’ I muttered. ‘Well, if you're not going to tell me, I don't want to be any part of this,’ he said, turning unexpectedly priggish. The exchange made me scratch tentative plans to hand John's ‘hot’ computer to my in-laws for safekeeping. It was surprising how little you could get done, once frankness was ruled out.
And then there was the outright lying. The Kenyan government wasn't the only organisation trying to track John down. Even Kenyan bloggers momentarily turned amateur sleuths, swapping notes on their websites as to which London hotels had confirmed he wasn't a guest. There were calls from the BBC World Service, emails from Kenyan journalists who had caught a whisper of something in the air; an ambassador left cryptic messages on my answerphone, sending his best wishes to ‘our mutual friend’. Did I happen to know, the journalists asked with deceptive casualness, where they might get hold of John Githongo? It really was most urgent that they talk to him. He might be in possession of some very interesting information. As John pottered around in the background, doing his laundry and preparing his lunch – no macho African nonsense about him – I'd breezily debate his possible whereabouts and motivations with hacks I'd known for decades, hoping he wouldn't blow his cover by saying anything in that distinctive baritone.
In theory, I should have been pestering him for an interview myself. In fact, I held back. While I was clearly sitting on a fabulous story – Africa's Watergate, by the sound of it – sitting John down with a notebook and tape recorder would have felt like a cheap trick, his host joining the manhunt rather than offering the safe haven he clearly desperately needed. Perhaps a less noble instinct also lay behind my uncharacteristic discretion. In the world John had entered, it seemed, knowledge made you a marked man. Once I too knew whatever it was he'd learnt, maybe I would face the same predicament. I wasn't sure I was ready to catch that particular infection. So I mentally stored the nuggets of information that came my way, while allowing the overall picture to escape me. He talked of ministers, he mentioned a naval vessel, the words ‘Anglo Leasing’ came up repeatedly. But he never joined up the dots. I wondered, once or twice, what I would actually be able to say to the police if something sinister happened to him. I'd have no coherent tale to tell, and they would surely refuse to believe that an intelligent journalist, harbouring a political fugitive, had never bothered to fit the various pieces together.
Out on the street, I scanned black faces with a paranoid new attentiveness, trying to spot the undercover Kenyan agent attempting to blend in. But Camden has an awful lot of Africans living in it. From my new and wary perspective, almost everyone looked suspicious. At night I lay in bed, pondering how far the Kenyans might go. I was aware that I was thinking exactly like a character in a thousand Hollywood thrillers, but this fear was surely rooted in cold logic. I ticked off the various factors on my personal risk assessment. Did the material on John's computer have the potential to bring down a government? From the little he'd sketched out, yes. Were the reputations and livelihoods of Kenya's most powerful men – possibly the president himself – at stake? It seemed so. Did Kenya have a history of ruthless political assassination? Absolutely – I could reel off the names: Pio Pinto, Tom Mboya, J.M. Kariuki, Robert Ouko, Father Kaiser – and those were only the most notorious cases. Kenya had always been a venue for the well-timed car crash, the fatal robbery in which both gangster and high-profile victim conveniently lose their lives, the inquiry that drags on for decades and then sputters out without shedding any light on what had really happened.
Were the stakes this time high enough to be worth killing a man? Clearly, John believed so, otherwise he wouldn't have fled. So the only question that remained, from a selfish point of view, was whether the Kenyans would be foolhardy or desperate enough to try something on British soil. Which meant my flat. After triple-bolting my front door – I was glad now that I'd bought the most expensive lock on the market when I moved in – and slotting the chain into position, I'd fall asleep in the early hours, stressed and fraught. In my dreams, a huddle of burly figures in formless grey overcoats with blurred, dark, hatchet faces, battered their way in to shoot us both in our separate rooms.
In the morning, after a restless night, I'd wake feeling embarrassed by my melodramatic thought processes. If I was finding John's stay a bit of a psychological ordeal after only a few days, what must it be like for him? How had he endured the last few years, living with that anxiety day by day? Yet he seemed astonishingly cool. For the most part he ignored his collection of mobile phones as they constantly vibrated and shrilled. Occasionally he'd pick one up, disappearing into his room to hold a quiet, intense conversation in Gikuyu or Kiswahili. But usually he would just look at the display, check who was trying to make contact, then put the handset down. The one that rang with most persistence was his line to State House.
‘It's very interesting,’ he mused. ‘They haven't cut off my State House mobile phone. My safe in the office hasn't even been opened. And my secretary is still at her post.’
‘It's their way of telling you that you can still go back,’ I suggested. ‘They're saying,“It's not too late, the lines are still open.”’
Yet even by that stage, I had begun to recognise what constituted signs of stress in the Big Man. His booming, seemingly carefree laugh was the equivalent of most people's titter – a sign of tension, not relaxation. The more nervous he became, the more heartily he laughed. He wasn't sleeping well either – I gave him some of my sleeping pills when he mentioned the problem – and his mental fatigue was evident in his tendency to tell me the same things over and over again. His sentences were like ripples on the surface of a pool – they gave a hint of the thoughts churning obsessively in the depths below. I could guess what those might be: How on earth had it ever come to this? Was this the right path? Where did he go from here?
The best way of relieving the stress was exercise. John was the kind of dedicated workout enthusiast who knew which machine targeted exactly which muscle group. One of the first sorties we made from my flat was to tour the local area scouting out which gym had the best weight-training facilities. Working out – a three-hour process – was not just a hobby, he needed it, needed to feel the adrenalin coursing round his body if he was to stay focused and sane. Other men might have started working their way through my drinks cabinet, but my fridge filled up with cartons of fruit juice. John, iron-disciplined in this as in so many things, had turned teetotal during his time in State House, when he had noticed that winding down from a stressful week with a bottle of whisky had become a habit, and that the habit was becoming increasingly hard to break. It was typical of him that he wouldn't let himself slip back, not even now, when he had the best of excuses for needing the odd stiff drink.
His other recourse was religion. Having spent so much time in Britain, John had registered the scepticism, if not downright antagonism, of his European acquaintances when it came to matters religious. His Catholic faith was something he never talked about with his mzungu friends, I noticed, turning instead that side of himself with which they felt most at ease. Only the Virgin Mary medallion around his neck and the rosary ring on his finger – one metal bobble for each Hail Mary to be recited, removed only during weightlifting – gave the game away. But one of his last visits before leaving Nairobi had been to call in on the Consolata Shrine, where troubled minds went in search of solace. And in those fraught early weeks in London he did a lot of praying.
As he quietly came and went, reuniting with girlfriend Mary Muthumbi – an advertising executive who flew to London to see him – officially registering his presence with a Foreign Office that expressed only polite interest, a silent question mark was forming. Fleeing the country, in a way, had been the easy part. What, precisely, was he going to do next?
As far as I could see, there were only two options. Option One: Leave government employment and keep quiet. Give the tapes and computer material – your insurance policy against assassination – to a British lawyer, along with firm instructions that should anything happen to you, they will be released to the press. Make these arrangements clear to those in power, and assure them you will never give another media interview in your life and will never go into politics. Work abroad, go into academia, get married to your long-suffering girlfriend and wait for the affair to die down. Eventually, maybe five years down the line, you will be able to return to Kenya, and while ordinary folk will look at you with a certain cynicism and think, ‘I wonder what he knew?’, most will respect your discretion and commonsense. No man can single-handedly transform a system, and you will be joining the ranks of former civil servants with clanking skeletons in their cupboards. Your conscience may occasionally trouble you, and you will have to acknowledge that you tried and failed. But you will have got your life back.
Option Two was bleaker, more dramatic, and fitted straight into that Hollywood thriller genre. Lance the boil, go public. Blow the government you once passionately believed in out of the water and say what you know. People who matter may hate you for all eternity. You may never be able to go home again, your family and friends may suffer by association, your colleagues may regard you as a traitor, but you will have done the right, the upstanding thing, and lived up to the principles that have governed your life. You will have shown the world that others may do as they please, but as far as you are concerned, ‘Africa’ and ‘corruption’ are not synonymous.
Most journalists, I suspected, would urge John to choose Option Two – it made for a fantastic story. I urged him to choose Option One. Those journalists would not have to live with the consequences. My old friend, it seemed to me, had already done his share, and his country's fate was not his burden to shoulder alone.
Initially, he'd planned a press conference. The speculation and allegations being published in the Kenyan press irked him, he said, and he felt he owed the Kenyan public an explanation. I quailed at the thought of the bun-fight that would follow.
‘If you're going to hold a press conference, you have to be absolutely clear in your mind what you're prepared to say. Are you going to spill the beans now? Are you ready to explain what actually happened?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Then don't do it. The most infuriating thing you can do to journalists is to hold a press conference and say nothing. It'll drive them crazy. They'll either force you into making admissions you don't intend or rip you to shreds for wasting their time.’
Another idea he considered, urged on him by the few friends in London who were gradually discovering his whereabouts, was to record an ‘in the event of my death’ videotape in which he named names and explained his departure. If he were killed, it would remain as devastating testimony. He toyed with the idea, but held off once again. Perhaps he was wary of creating such an incendiary tape – who could be trusted to keep such red-hot footage under wraps? But it was also a question of strategy. John's modus operandi, perfected over the years, was to painstakingly think through every eventuality, harvesting the insights of well connected insiders, visualising every possible scenario before moving to action. ‘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!’ The approach slowed him down, but he needed to feel he had set his intellectual house in order. If he taped an interview so early on, he'd be skipping the methodical preparation of the ground that felt like a necessity.
A fortnight later, with the key questions unanswered, John moved out. He headed first to the home of Michael Holman, another British journalist whose friendship with him was as little known as my own, and then to a scruffy flat next to a north London fish-and-chip shop.
I didn't like to admit it, but his departure came as both anticlimax and relief. There was no denying that my brush with a man at the vortex of a major political crisis had provided me with a vicarious thrill. But there had been a few close shaves, close enough to make me uncomfortable. My parents' flat happened to be situated around the corner from the Kenyan High Commission. Once I'd caught a bus that stopped just outside the building and two Kenyan women employees, leaving for the day, had boarded after me. To my alarm, they had ridden all the way to my bus stop. These women, who would certainly know John in his official capacity and recognise him if they bumped into him on the street, lived in my local area. Another time, John had been using a local cyber café and a Kenyan customer had suddenly started chatting to him in Kiswahili. It was not clear whether he'd been recognised, or this was just a case of one East African being friendly to a fellow abroad. Had I been working for Kenyan intelligence, I would have simply toured all the London gyms with good weightlifting facilities, asking if a large black Kenyan had recently signed up. But John warned me that his emailing would be the activity that would eventually lead his pursuers to him. By analysing the emails he sent back to Nairobi, he said, it would be possible to eventually work out the geographical location of the terminals he'd used. Sure enough, a Kenyan newspaper editor who liked to show off the extent of his intelligence links would later drawl when I walked into his Nairobi office, ‘So I hear John Githongo has been holed up with Michela Wrong and Michael Holman in London.’
A few weeks after finding his own place, waiting on a London Underground platform, John realised he was being followed by two middle-aged Kenyan men who looked exactly what they almost certainly were: undercover agents. He sprinted down a passageway and hopped onto a train to lose them. Then one day, emerging at his local tube station, he was confronted by a Kenyan man, standing coolly watching him, making sure John registered his presence. They had tracked their prey down to his lair, and were showing off the fact that they knew where to find him.
Yet they did nothing. There was no attempted break-in to verify what, if any, material he held in his new lodgings, no raid to confiscate the incriminating laptop – still in his possession and containing plenty of unbacked-up material – no overture, no whispered threat, no attempt to lure him back to Kenya. They were hanging back, waiting. Waiting for what, exactly? Presumably for the same thing as the rest of us: waiting for the Big Man to make up his mind.
He moved yet again, this time to Oxford's St Antony's, a college with a history of offering sanctuary to those in political hot water. Professor Paul Collier, an expert on African economies, had come to the rescue with a not particularly demanding senior associate's post on its East African Studies programme. It was exactly the kind of academic berth John needed at this juncture, offering him accommodation, a work space and – crucially – the time in which to gather his thoughts.
One of his first acts there was highly symbolic. Just as his government experience had been at its sourest, he had been named Chief of the Burning Spear, Kenya's equivalent of the Order of the British Empire. Coming when it did, the award had felt part consolation prize, part bribe. Now he arranged for it to be sent to an old Kenyan friend, Harris Mule. Mule, a former permanent secretary at the finance ministry, had been a loyal civil servant who had refused to play the political game. When he had fallen into disfavour, he had quietly accepted his fate. John had consulted him when things got difficult, drinking in his wise advice. Now he sent Mule a medal he believed he himself did not deserve, and which Mule should have been awarded decades ago. If State House was ever made aware of that small gesture, it would have been well advised to take notice. There was a touch of the boat-burning about it.
Ensconced in his new lodgings, John was nothing if not methodical. Now that he had caught his breath, it was time to pull everything together: the contents of the diaries he had kept throughout two years in office – well-thumbed, numbered black notebooks transcribed in neat fountain pen, the sloping handwriting squeezed as close as possible to make maximum use of space – the documents he had copied and quietly sent abroad, the digitalised tape recordings downloaded onto his computer. If he was ever to make head or tail of it, all this information needed to be scanned, logged, written up and placed in some logical order. To date, he had turned down every interview request, made no statements, held no press conference. He had marked his fortieth birthday, that psychologically significant moment in a man's life, with the start of a new, uncertain existence in a foreign country. All paths still lay open to him. But he would only know what to do next once he had understood exactly what had happened to him. And to Kenya.
3 Starting Afresh (#ulink_ea1cbd23-c7a5-5269-b01c-e63e44977d2f)
‘Youth gives all it can: it gives itself without reserve.’
JOSEMARÍA ESCRIVÁ, founder of Opus Dei
There's a certain sameness about presidential lodgings in Britain's former African colonies, and Nairobi's State House, the former colonial governor's residence, is no exception. Fall asleep in the waiting room and on waking you could, in that bleary moment of confusion, think yourself in State House, Zambia; State House, Tanzania; or State House, Uganda. Behind the white-pillared porticoes they present to the world, these buildings are resolutely dowdy, content to remain stubbornly out of touch with modern trends in interior design. No stark minimalism here, no streamlined vistas, no clever games with reflection and light. The décor is dark wood panelling, chintz sofas, red carpets and thick velvet drapes. The taste in pictures will usually be execrable: an anaemic watercolour of an English country scene, an uplifting motto urging the reader on to greater Christian efforts, an oil portrait of the incumbent so approximate it could have been sat for by someone else entirely. The carpet will be worn through in places, a clumsily carved piece of animal Africana will take up a great deal of space. The overall impression is of a dusty members' club crossed with a gloomy British country pub, and the effect is to make those indoors pine for the fresh green of the formal gardens outside, the only real area of beauty.
One of the peculiarities of Nairobi's State House is that it is invisible from the road, the only hint of its existence a formidable checkpoint and a challengingly high metal fence. Puzzlingly, this fence has repeatedly failed to do its job. In the wake of Moi's unceremonious exit, several solo intruders were discovered wandering the presidential grounds in the early hours. One was an Australian tourist, another a Ugandan. Arrested by the GSU, they could not satisfactorily explain what they were doing on the premises. After some initial headlines, they were never heard of again. Word spread amongst Nairobi's more superstitious residents. These mysterious visitors had been able to pass through State House's supposedly impregnable fence, then evaporated into thin air, because they were not men at all, but spirits. Jomo Kenyatta had refused to spend a single night in State House, convinced it was haunted by vindictive ghosts of the white administration. Moi, it was now said, had also left a malign parting gift behind, an evil genie, a curse which explained not only these night-time visitations but the variety of misfortunes – from Kibaki's near-fatal car crash to the death of his first vice president – that were to befall its new incumbents.
It was here, in an old bedroom converted into a study, that John set up base in early 2003. On his desk he placed a framed picture, a present from Bob Munro, a Canadian friend who ran a slum-based soccer-club scheme. It was a copy of a Charles Addams cartoon, showing a skier whose parallel tracks in the snow surreally divide and rejoin on either side of a pine tree. ‘That's going to be you,’ Munro joked, anticipating the impossible demands that would be made on the future civil servant. John had initially established an office outside the main building, within the State House compound. The president was having none of it. ‘No, no, no, I want you inside this building,’ Kibaki had said, insisting that the newly appointed anti-corruption czar should be virtually within shouting distance of his own office – just two doors and a foyer separated them. ‘Don't brief anyone but me, don't bother making appointments, just check that I'm free and come straight in.’ It seemed the president had taken John's message on board.
That physical proximity alone ensured John extraordinary influence. In a strong presidential system, being in a position to brush against the head of state in a corridor is worth a score of weighty-sounding titles. Whatever John's nominal grade, being granted free licence to update the president whenever he wished effectively placed him above many cabinet ministers in the pecking order. And Kibaki was true to his word. By the time he left, John calculated that he had given his boss sixty-six briefings, some of them stretching over two or three separate meetings. That walk-in access made him a player of huge interest to anyone wanting to cut through the layers of bureaucracy to reach the core of power. ‘People would give me information because they knew I could easily pass it on to the president.“You need to know this,” they would say.’
The first thing John did was to eliminate the traces of Kibaki's predecessor. Moi's official photo came down, replaced by a large one of Kibaki – ‘I was very proud of the president’ – and a calendar from the Japanese embassy. The civil servants assigned to the department his office replaced – run by a former Moi speechwriter – were sent packing. ‘I got rid of all the staff, with the exception of the driver. These guys' loyalties were clear. And in any case, I wanted to get some members of civil society in to lend a hand.’ John had an inkling of how institutions and structures can end up insidiously moulding behaviour, rather than the other way round. When the administration assigned him one of Moi's official cars, a dark-blue BMW, he tried driving it around for a day and then returned it, too ill-at-ease to continue.
In came the new team: seven specialists in human rights, governance and the law, picked to roughly reflect Kenya's ethnic diversity. ‘Our office was very young. John was the oldest, and he was barely forty,’ remembers Lisa Karanja, a barrister and women's rights expert recruited from Human Rights Watch's New York office. With youth, recalls Karanja, came irreverence, absence of hierarchy, and a deliberate adoption of the informal working practices of the non-governmental world from whence so many of the staff hailed. ‘We were like an NGO at the heart of government. People would get very shocked, coming into the office, to see John making me a cup of coffee. Here was this powerful man – because he did hold a position of huge influence – and we were calling him “John”.’ The contrast between these new arrivals' breezy directness and other government departments – male-dominated, obsequious and bound by etiquette – was swiftly felt. ‘You'd go to meetings with government officials and it would be “your honourable this”, “your honourable that” and “all protocols observed” before every speech, all this bowing and scraping,’ remembers Karanja. ‘I was ticked off at one point for not showing enough respect when I corrected someone who made a legal point I knew was wrong. John had to intervene and say, “Look, she's not here just for decoration. She's not a child.”’
The NARC government, in those heady early days, was ready to try something new, opening itself up to its traditional critics. With Moi's departure, thousands of well-qualified Kenyans were returning from the diaspora, ready to put their professional skills at the service of the state. Transparency International, the newly established Kenya National Commission on Human Rights – headed by the outspoken Maina Kiai – civil society groups and human rights organisations were all invited to State House to exchange ideas and offer advice. ‘We were sitting down with ministers, and discussing laws. It was unprecedented,’ says Mwalimu Mati, who worked at TI-Kenya at the time. ‘The only other time there had been anything remotely similar was after independence, when returning students came back to help Jomo Kenyatta's government.’
But there were risks inherent in John's approach, which he would only later learn to appreciate. By surrounding himself with outsiders and failing to cultivate the old guard, he separated himself from the system. When State House colleagues slapped him on the back and joked about ‘you and your crazy NGO wallahs’ they were underlining a difference that would come to bother them. The policy might insulate John from the sleaze of the previous era, but it also left him dangerously exposed.
There was another failing which John would come to regret: the ambiguity of his job description. ‘The first mistake I made was not to sit down and draft precise terms of reference.’ He would try repeatedly to pin down his exact role, going to see the president on three separate occasions with ever more explicit definitions, but the initial error could not easily be rectified. His job, as envisaged by Kibaki, was not to formally investigate suspected corruption, nor did he have any powers to prosecute. Those tasks remained with the police force and the attorney general. His role was purely to advise the president – an interesting insight into the extraordinarily centralised nature of power in Kenya – but that duty, in his own view, gave him both the right and the obligation to prod and to poke, to nudge and to pressurise, in any area that seemed to merit attention. ‘When people asked about my remit, I would say,“The president asks questions, and I answer them.” My job was to pick up the phone and call ten people who could put together a picture allowing me to tell the president what was going on. Essentially, my job was to act as a catalyst.’ Such vagueness would be an advantage when he enjoyed the boss's blessing. But it would leave him adrift when things were no longer moving in his direction.
Abandoning lodgings on Lower Kabete Road, in Nairobi's Westlands, John rented a house in the woody suburb of Lavington, close enough to State House to be able to get to work at a moment's notice, however congested the Nairobi traffic. He probably could have claimed a government property – he now had a bodyguard and a small fleet of cars assigned to his office, after all – but he did not want to go down that route: ‘If you live in a government house, they own you.’ Instead, he found his own place, an elegant villa with a large garden perfect for a pack of bounding, scruffy mongrels he had acquired, specimens of the breed ironically dubbed ‘Kikuyu pointers’.
But he never really spent enough time there for it to feel like home. Always a workaholic, John now paused only to sleep and eat. ‘We have an eighteen-month window of opportunity before the old, shadowy networks re-establish themselves,’ he told reporters, and he was constantly aware of the clock ticking. Here was the chance of a lifetime, the opportunity to put everything he had preached into effective practice, and if it failed, it would not be for want of effort on his part. ‘He worked all the time,’ says Lisa Karanja. ‘It wasn't just late nights, or part of the weekend. He worked all the time. So much so that I worried about his health, because he'd had some problems with high blood pressure, and the way he was living didn't seem likely to help.’ The dividing line between work and play blurred as John methodically extended an already enormous social circle to include any players with the insights and experience that might help him in the Herculean task of cleaning out Kenya's Augean stables.
Since childhood, John had possessed a talent for bonding with people from different spheres. Thrusting Kenyan yuppies and world-weary Asian lawyers, doddery white leftovers from the days of colonial rule and impassioned activists from Kenya's civil society, lowly taxi drivers and puffed-up permanent secretaries: they might not be able to talk to one another, but they could all, somehow, talk to John. He might not have the hormonal magnetism that allows a man to electrify a crowd, but when it came to the one-on-one encounter, few were more beguiling. Researching this book, I would at first be taken aback and then quietly amused to discover just how many people I spoke to were convinced they enjoyed a special bond with John, sharing unique intimacies and confidences. ‘Take it from me, it's you and a thousand others,’ I was tempted to tell them. But in a way, they were not fooling themselves. The Big Man had a Big Reach and a Big Appetite. His interest, affection and trust in them were only rarely exaggerated or faked, as far as I could see. It was just that they weren't on exclusive offer. Like a woman of astounding beauty, John was always more loved and desired than he could ever love in return.
It was an instinctive sociability that served his masters well, turning him into a form of national mascot, the acceptable face of the Kibaki regime. John's State House office became a magnet for foreign ambassadors, whose governments picked up its incidental running costs. ‘They made it very clear John and our unit were their darling. There wasn't a donor group that came through Kenya that didn't drop in on the office,’ remembers Lisa Karanja. For aid officials who had decided to throw their weight behind the Kibaki government's good governance programme and the Western investigators assigned to help it recover Moi's looted assets, a visit served as a refreshing pick-me-up. ‘When I came out of my first meeting with John, I felt like I was walking on air,’ said one, not normally the type to gush. ‘With someone like that in charge of anti-corruption, working for the government, what could possibly go wrong?’
It was impossible to engage with the man and not be won over. Like all charmers, he held up a mirror to those with whom he interacted, and in it they saw a version of themselves. Meeting Kenyan friends his own age he showed his African side: boisterous, loud, irreverent. With the wazee, you would think him a son of the soil. When he met with foreign donors, he was more analytical, he knew how to talk the development language of empowerment, benchmarks and governance. ‘I never cease to be amazed by the love affair you wazungus all seem to have with John Githongo,’ Kenyan businessman and columnist Wycliffe Muga once sardonically remarked. But why should he be surprised? John was the perfect dragoman, the go-between who held a pass into two very different universes, Africa and the West. He had lived in both, and could explain Africa's ways to Westerners and the West to Africans. Of course the wazungus lapped it up. And State House, looking to donors for renewed funding, was happy to encourage the love affair.
During this period John's family virtually lost sight of him. His parents' hearts might swell with pride every time they saw him on television, but they were worryingly aware that these glimpses afforded their only real insight into what he was doing. ‘You wouldn't see him from one month to another,’ remembers younger brother Mugo. And when he did turn up, he might as well not have bothered, so seriously did he take the need for professional discretion. ‘John is usually a great gossip and storyteller. But at family lunches he would sit and say nothing, just raising one eyebrow,’ remembers Ciru, his younger sister. ‘It was unbearable. We lost him then, we lost him to the state.’
Old friends still invited John round, but now did so automatically, never expecting him to turn up. His acquaintances, in any case, had long ago coined the term ‘to do a Githongo’, or ‘to be Githongoed’, to encapsulate the frustrations that went with being one of John's friends. ‘Being Githongoed’ meant to be stood up by the Big Man. It meant to be given heartfelt assurances that he would be there, to realise with dawning horror that one had been played for a sucker (again), to sulk a bit, and finally to forgive all when the Big Man resurfaced, so contrite would be his apologies, so rewarding the conversation. ‘Githongoing’, an area in which all who knew him agreed the otherwise impeccably behaved John regularly performed disgracefully, puzzled me for a while. It wasn't possible, I thought, for a man as rigorous and disciplined as John to confuse his appointments as often as this. Then I realised that his unreliability was in fact the expression of a form of greed: the greed of the intellectual omnivore. When a refreshing new encounter loomed on the horizon, John could not bear to say no. He collected new acquaintances the way others collect stamps, and those joining the collection couldn't help but feel aggrieved on registering that, having once been objects of Githongo fascination, they had been relegated to the category of known quantities, whose exposure to the Big Man would henceforth be strictly rationed.
But John was too busy to worry about such bruised feelings. While overall responsibility for coordinating the anti-graft war rested with the Ministry of Justice, his office would be involved in virtually all of NARC's early efforts to carry out a detailed public tally of Kenya's corruption problem. It was a task only a team as young and absurdly optimistic as John's would embrace with enthusiasm, for it meant probing the roots of a dysfunctional African nation, from the haphazard creation of a British colony to the tortured foundation of an independent state.
4 Mucking out the Augean Stables (#ulink_7e60940e-c8db-59b5-be8e-bff41d00cfc0)
‘The shocking rot of Nairobi's main market was exposed yesterday when it was revealed that 6,000 rats were killed in last week's cleanup exercise – and an equal number made good their escape. Wakulima Market, through which a majority of Nairobi's three million residents get their food, had not been cleaned for thirty years. So filthy was it that traders who have been at the market daily for decades were shocked to see that below the muck they have been wading through, there was tarmac. More than 750 tonnes of garbage was removed and more than seventy tonnes of fecal waste sucked out of the horror toilets.’
East African Standard, 4 January 2005
In his youth, John had written a Kafkaesque short story about a man who wakes one morning to discover a giant pile of manure has been dumped outside his house. Puzzled, he sets out to establish where it came from and, more importantly, how to shift it. Oddly prescient, the story was a harbinger of John's future task.
Rather than a pile of manure, corruption in Kenya resembled one of the giant rubbish dumps that form over the decades in Nairobi's slums. Below the top layer of garbage, picked over by goats, marabou storks and families of professional scavengers, lies another layer of detritus. And another. With the passage of time the layers, weighed down from above, become stacked like the pastry sheets of a mille-feuille, a historical record no archaeologist wants to explore. Each stratum has a slightly different consistency – the garbage trucks brought mostly plastics and cardboard that week, perhaps, less household waste and more factory refuse – but it all smells identical, letting off vast methane sighs as it settles and shifts, composting down to something approaching soil. The sharp stink of chicken droppings, the cabbagy reek of vegetable rot, the dull grey stench of human effluvia blend with the smoke from charcoal fires and the haze of burning diesel to form a pungent aroma – ‘Essence of Slum’, a parfumier might call it – that clings to shoes and permeates the hair.
As Kenya has modernised, so its sleaze has mutated, a new layer of graft shaped to match each layer of economic restructuring and political reconfiguration. ‘In Kenya, corruption doesn't go away with reform, it just migrates,’ says Wachira Maina, a constitutional lawyer and analyst. But under all the layers, at the base of the giant mound, lies the same solid bedrock: Kenyans' dislocated notion of themselves. The various forms of graft cannot be separated from the people's vision of existence as a merciless contest, in which only ethnic preference offers hope of survival.
If, in the West, it is impossible to use the word ‘tribe’ without raising eyebrows, in Kenya much of what takes place becomes incomprehensible if you try stripping ethnicity from the equation. ‘A word will stay around as long as there is work for it to do,’ said Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe of this taboo noun,
(#litres_trial_promo) and in Kenya, just as in so many African states, ‘tribe’ is still on active duty. Ask a Kenyan bluntly what tribe he is and he may, briefly, ruffle up and take offence. But the outrage dissolves immediately upon contact with daily life. ‘Typical Mukamba, useless with money,’ a friend mutters when a newspaper vendor fumbles his change. Another, arriving late at a café, explains: ‘I had to straighten up the car because the askari was giving me a hard time. Best not to mess with these Maasai.’ And when another is fined for parking illegally, he explains: ‘I begged with the policeman, but he wouldn't let me off. He was a Kalenjin.’
Any Kenyan can reel off the tags and stereotypes, which capture the categorisation of the country's society. Hard-nosed and thrusting, the Kikuyu are easily identified by their habit of mixing up their ‘r’s and their ‘L’s, the cause of much hilarity amongst their compatriots. When an official warns you, ‘There may be a ploblem,’ a member of civil society denounces ‘ligged erections’ or an urchin tries to sell you a week-old ‘rabradol’ puppy, you know you are dealing with either a Kikuyu or his Meru or Embu cousin. Their entrepreneurialism has won them control of the matatu trade, and they run most of the capital's kiosks, restaurants and hotels. A Luo, on the other hand, is all show and no substance. His date will be wined and dined, but she'll pick up the tab at the end of the evening. Born with huge egos, the flashiest of dress sense and the gift of the gab, the Luo excel in academia and the media. Luhyas are said to lack ambition, excelling as lowly shamba boys, watchmen and cooks. Stumpy, loyal, happy to take orders, Kambas are natural office clerks, soldiers and domestic servants; but watch out for potions, freak accidents and charms under the bed – these are the spell-casters of Kenya. Enticing and provocative, their women dress in eye-wateringly bright colours and often work as barmaids. In contrast, the cold, remote Kalenjin care more about their cows than about their homes. Macho and undomesticated, the proud Samburu and Maasai make for perfect recruits to the ranks of watchmen, wildlife rangers and security guards. And so on …
When they speak in this way, Kenyans show, at least, a refreshing honesty. Public discourse is far more hypocritical. In matters ethnic, newspaper and radio station bosses adopt a policy of strict self-censorship. Telling themselves they must play their part in the forging of a young nation state, editors have for decades carefully removed all ethnic identifiers from articles and broadcasts. But it doesn't take long to work out what is really going on, or why one VIP is throwing the taunt of ‘tribalist’ – Kenya's favourite political insult – in another's face. If a surname isn't enough to accurately ‘place’ a Kenyan, laborious verbal codes do the trick. A commentator who coyly refers to ‘a certain community’, or the ‘people of the slopes’, means the Kikuyu and their kinsfolk from the Mount Kenya foothills. ‘People of the milk’ indicates the livestock-rearing Kalenjin or Maasai. If he cites ‘the people of the lake’ or ‘those from the west’, he means the Luo, whose territory runs alongside Lake Victoria and whose failure to practise circumcision – gateway to adulthood amongst Bantu communities – prompts widespread distrust. The sly euphemisms somehow end up conveying more mutual hostility than a franker vocabulary ever could. Like the ruffled skirts which covered the legs of grand pianos in the Victorian age, they actually draw attention to what they are supposed to conceal: an acute sensitivity to ethnic origin.
The fixation shocks other Africans, who privately whisper at how ‘backward’ they find Kenya, with its talk of foreskins and its focus on male appendages. ‘There's no ideological debate here,’ complain incoming diplomats, baffled by a political system in which notions of ‘left’ or ‘right’, ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’, ‘radical’ or ‘conservative’ seem irrelevant: ‘It's all about tribe.’ Directors of foreign NGOs puzzle over the fact that political parties, born and dying with the speed of dragonflies, either don't bother publishing manifestos, or barely know their contents. But who needs a manifesto when a party's only purpose is furthering its tribe's interests? Tribe is the first thing Kenyans need to know about one another, the backdrop against which all subsequent interaction can be interpreted, simultaneously haven, shield and crippling obligation. The obsession is so pervasive, Kenyans struggle to grasp that it may not extend beyond the country's borders. ‘So,’ commented a Kikuyu taxi driver when he overheard me expressing scepticism about the likelihood of an Obama win in the 2008 US election, ‘I see you Westerners have problems with the Luo too.’
Yet, perversely, the strength of these stereotypes is in inverse proportion to their longevity. Rooted in the country's experience as a British colony, Kenya's acute ethnic self-awareness, far from being an expression of ‘atavistic tribal tensions’, is actually a fairly recent development. While no one would claim that colonialism created the country's tribal distinctions, it certainly ensured that ethnic affiliation became the key criterion determining a citizen's life chances.
Some time towards the end of the nineteenth century, the story goes, a great Kikuyu medicine man, Mugo Wa Kibiru, woke up trembling, bruised and unable to speak. When he recovered his voice, he issued a terrible prophecy. There would come a time of great hunger, he said, after which strangers resembling little white frogs, wearing clothes that looked like butterfly wings, would arrive bearing magic sticks that killed as no poisoned arrow could. They would bring a giant iron centipede, breathing fire, which would stretch from the big water in the east to the big water in the west, and they would be intent on stripping his people of all they possessed. His people should not fight these strangers. They must treat them with caution and courtesy, the better to learn their ways. The strangers would only depart once they had passed on the secrets of their power.
His prophecy was an uncannily accurate description of the railway that would eventually stretch more than a thousand kilometres from Mombasa on the coast to Kisumu on Lake Victoria. It would never have existed had it not been for William Mackinnon, a Scottish magnate with an evangelical agenda and a romantic appetite for empire, whose imagination was fired by reports brought back by Livingstone and Stanley. The lush kingdom of Buganda, nestling on the shores of Africa's giant freshwater lake in what is today southern Uganda, was blessed with gum, ivory, copra, cotton and coffee. Opening up the hinterland would not only allow its riches to be tapped, it would also, Mackinnon maintained, mean the eradication of the vile Arab slave trade, saving the region for Christian missionaries.
The magnate and his politician friends applied a broad brush when it came to geopolitics, their rough imaginary strokes stretching across half the globe. The recently opened Suez Canal, they argued, held the key to the British Empire's all-important trade with India. If that waterway were to be guaranteed, then the headwaters of the Nile must be secured, and that meant establishing a link between Lake Victoria – source of the Nile – and the coast, controlled by the Sultan of Zanzibar. Above all, a railroad would shore up Britain's position in its long race for regional supremacy with Germany, whose agents lusted after the promised ‘new India’ just as ardently as Mackinnon.
In 1888, Mackinnon won Queen Victoria's permission to set up a chartered company, the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA), to develop regional trade. But constructing the ‘Lunatic Line’, as the railroad's critics dubbed it, proved beyond IBEA's capacities. By 1895 the company was bankrupt, and Mackinnon handed over responsibility to Whitehall, which announced the establishment of the British East Africa protectorate. Government surveyors set to work, importing hundreds of Indian coolies, thousands of donkeys and camels, and the millions of sleepers required for this monstrous engineering project. The colony that would come to be baptised ‘Kenya’ was created almost inadvertently, a geographical access route to somewhere seen as far more important.
The railway also played a role in ensuring that Kenya became a settler colony. As construction costs mounted, London became convinced it could only recoup its losses by developing the land alongside the track. ‘[The railway] is the backbone of the East Africa Protectorate, but a backbone is as useless without a body as a body is without a backbone,’ wrote Sir Charles Eliot, the protectorate's new commissioner, in 1901. ‘Until a greater effort is made to develop our East African territories, I do not see how we can hope that the Uganda line will repay the cost of its construction.’ The proposal seemed uncontroversial, for British officialdom saw few signs of systematic cultivation. Wildlife, in the form of the vast herds of wildebeest, zebra, buffalo and antelope, seemed to outnumber human beings. ‘We have in East Africa the rare experience of dealing with a tabula rasa,’ wrote Eliot, in what must qualify as one of the classic mis-statements of all time, ‘an almost untouched and sparsely inhabited country, where we can do as we will.’
Eliot's snap judgement was understandable – a territory the size of France only held around three million Africans at the time, and the activities of both the Kikuyu and the Maasai had recently been curtailed by rinderpest, smallpox and drought. But in fact, much of Kenya's best land was already in use. To the north of the mosquito-plagued stretch of marshy land that would become the city of Nairobi, the well-watered foothills of Mount Kenya were being intensively farmed by the Kikuyu; the nomadic Maasai drove their cattle the length of the Rift Valley; and on the western fringes of this natural cleft Nandi-speaking tribes – later to be rebaptised the Kalenjin – tended crops and livestock. Taming the locals would turn out to require a series of ruthless punitive military expeditions, in which homesteads were set ablaze, herds captured and chiefs assassinated.
But the settlers trickled in nonetheless. Fleeing overcrowded Europe, the new tribe dubbed the wazungu – ‘people on the move’ – headed in the main for the Rift Valley's grasslands, which felt more than a little familiar. On a drizzly day, when the chill mists crept stealthily down from the escarpment, they bore a striking resemblance to the rolling heaths of Scotland, a fact that seemed to confirm the settlers in the correctness of their choice. Much has been written about the antics of the dissolute aristocrats who made up the Happy Valley expatriate set. But most of the land-hungry British arrivals in ‘Keeenya’, as they pronounced it, were from decidedly modest backgrounds, grabbing the chance for a new start. In 1903 there were only around a hundred settlers; by the late 1940s the number had risen to 29,000, boosted by demobilised British soldiers. It would peak at 80,000 in the 1950s. And as the new arrivals marked up their farms, everything began to change for the more than forty local tribes.
Back in Britain, the citizen's right not to have his taxes raised or property confiscated on the whim of a greedy ruler had been recognised since the Magna Carta. But these fundamental principles did not apply to the British Empire's African subjects. A series of regulations passed at the turn of the century decreed that any ‘waste and unoccupied land’ belonged to the Crown, which could then dispose of it as it wished, usually in the form of 99-and 999-year leases to settlers. In order to force Africans to take paid work on white-owned farms, which were desperately short of labour, the colonial authorities levied first a hut tax and then a poll tax. In the new colony of Kenya, formally declared in 1920, the African citizen was also prevented from competing with white farmers, who alone enjoyed the right to grow tea, coffee, pyrethrum and other crops for export.
The fact that many of the communities the British encountered did not have simple hierarchical structures held up implementation of the new laws only temporarily. The British simply appointed their own chiefs from the ranks of the translators, mercenaries and other ‘friendlies’ willing to collaborate. It's surely no coincidence that so much power in Kenya today rests in the hands of seventy-and eighty-year-olds who were impressionable youngsters in the years when the draconian colonial regulations made their traumatic impact on African lifestyles. They absorbed vital lessons in how the legal system, the administration and the security forces could be abused to extract labour and resources from an alien land and its resentful people. The first layer on the rubbish tip of Kenyan graft had been deposited.
Inhabitants of pre-colonial Kenya had certainly been aware of their different ethnic languages and customs. But that awareness was a fluid, shifting concept. While sections of the Kikuyu, Maasai and Kamba frequently fought each other over women and cattle, they also traded with one another, intermarried and exploited the same lands, with the pastoralist Maasai, for example, often relying on the agriculturalist Kikuyu to feed their families when drought killed their herds. All that ended with colonialism. Not only did the boundaries drawn by Western powers in the wake of the Berlin conference of 1884–85 slice across the traditional migration routes of communities straddling what had suddenly been delineated as Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, the new colonies were themselves subdivided in new, awkward ways. By 1938, Kenya had been partitioned into twenty-four overcrowded native reserves – ‘Kamba’ for the Kamba people, ‘Kikuyu’ for the Kikuyu, and so on – and the fertile ‘White Highlands’ for exclusive European use, where Africans could not own land.
African males were only allowed to travel outside their reserve if they bore the hated kipande, an identity card carried around the neck in a copper casket. Introduced to prevent employees from moving to better-paid jobs, the kipande corralled Africans inside rigidly defined areas. Wary of anything that could mushroom into a national anticolonial movement, the authorities banned most political associations; the few allowed were restricted to their founders' ethnic territories. The settlers wanted Africans to act small, think local. It made them so much more manageable.
