It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  The Kikuyu, in the popular mind, account for both the best and the worst in Kenyan culture. On the one hand, the vast majority of the ambitious youngsters who join the African diaspora each year, heading to the United States, Britain and Canada in search of business degrees and professional training, are Kikuyu. On the other, they make up a bigger share of the Kenyan prison community than any other ethnic group. ‘Where you find Kikuyu, there you find thieves,’ goes the saying.

  When I asked an urbane Kikuyu banker, John Ngumi, for a summary of Kikuyu qualities, he produced, at machine-gun speed, a list of characteristics which juxtaposed unabashed ethnic pride with a clear insight into just why so many of his fellow countrymen found the Kikuyu irritating. ‘We’re thrusting, we’re loud, we’re hard-headed and we’re everywhere. We’re too many, we’re greedy, many of us lack finesse, even our table manners leave a lot to be desired. We’re Africans in the raw, we don’t make apologies for what we are. We’re the ones who keep Nairobi fed and watered and provide a host of small services that keep the country running. The problem is there aren’t enough of us to dominate, yet we’re too large to ignore. We are at once both obnoxious and indispensable.’

  Travelling Kikuyuland, a common note emerges, whether one is interviewing a snaggle-toothed ninety-year-old farmer in the Kiambu hills or an elegantly suited banker in a Nairobi bar, and it is one that swiftly becomes wearing. It’s the note of entitlement: a sense of being special, different, better–and therefore more deserving. ‘If you did an experiment and took five Luos, five Luhyas, five Kambas and five Kikuyus and gave them the same amount of money to invest, the Kikuyu would be far, far ahead,’ a Kikuyu businessman will say without embarrassment. ‘We simply work harder than other Kenyans.’

  The great irony is that over twenty-four years of Moi rule, a community viewed as a national bully by the nearly 80 per of Kenyans who were not Kikuyu would come to think of itself as put-upon victim. For despite all Moi’s efforts to redress the post-Kenyatta dispensation, Central Province and Nairobi, a heavily Kikuyu city, still do better than any other region of the country.26 ‘The notion that the Kikuyu have been marginalised is total baloney, a persecution complex,’ says economist David Ndii, himself a Kikuyu. ‘If you look at any indicators–health, education, access to piped water, access to electricity–the Kikuyu always come out on top.’ He is equally scathing about the notion that the community contributes more than its fair share economically. ‘When you examine the data it turns out to be bullshit. The most productive people in Kenya, in terms of output per head, are pastoralists. One pastoralist can own two hundred head of cattle. The Kikuyu don’t understand geography and they don’t understand mathematics. These myths have to be exploded.’

  Perhaps that sense of superiority is rooted in the peasant’s wonderment at being blessed, in a largely arid country, with the miracle of moist and fertile soil. Spooning up githeri, a mixture of beans and maize kernels, on the shambas, residents will cite Isaiah 18, which speaks of a land beyond the ‘rivers of the Cush’, and a people ‘tall and smooth-skinned…feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by rivers’, as proof that the Promised Land, far from being located in Israel, is actually to be found between the blue foothills of Mount Kenya and the misty mountain ranges of the Aberdares.

  The men around Kibaki assumed that, as a Kikuyu, John Githongo would share that sense of entitlement. He would know that certain matters were best kept from those outside the House of Mumbi. Secretiveness had always come naturally to the Kikuyu, takers of terrible oaths: it was one of the traits the British had singled out for criticism, and the lean Moi years, when ethnic solidarity was the only defence possible against a rigged system, had underlined the importance of discretion. ‘Matters of the heart are not like the palm that greets everyone,’ goes a Kikuyu saying.

  In addition, they knew that John would have imbibed a deep respect for his elders as part of his upbringing. In rural Kikuyu villages it was unheard of for a child to criticise or interrupt an elder. Directly addressing a parent was regarded as unacceptably brazen–‘How are things on the mother’s side?’ was the polite, if roundabout, way of saying, ‘How are you, Mum?’–and children were expected to stand when an elder entered a room, or to step into the bushes if they met an adult on the road.

  Admittedly, John’s ancestors originated not from Kibaki’s Nyeri but from Kiambu, an area whose inhabitants were regarded by Kikuyu further north as sneaky and deceitful. But what really mattered was that he was a Kikuyu. His father, accountant for Kenyatta, was privy to the Kikuyu elite’s financial secrets. Joe Githongo had paid a personal price during the Moi era, and proved his credentials during the rumbustious multi-party years, working as a fundraiser for Kibaki’s Democratic Party. The Githongo family had prayed and played with other Kikuyu families, and John had gone to school alongside the scions of the country’s leading Kikuyu dynasties. If he could not be trusted to take the interests of the clan to heart, to instinctively grasp what mattered to the House of Mumbi, then who could?

  At this point a question poses itself, one that may never be satisfactorily answered. When the elderly members of TI’s board put John Githongo’s name forward for the post of anti-corruption chief and their friends in government enthusiastically agreed, did they do so anticipating that one day they would need to appeal to his sense of tribal solidarity? Was his appointment, which originally seemed so well-intentioned, in fact the most cynical of political moves, the propelling of an impressionable young man into a position where, should a crisis develop involving his own community, he would find it virtually impossible to resist outside pressure? Did they name him intending to compromise him?

  John certainly tends to that view. His feelings towards members of the group, with the exception of Harris Mule, are far more bitter than those towards any players in the Anglo Leasing affair. In his view, the old men he had trusted with his fate behaved like Abraham preparing his son Isaac for sacrifice. ‘The wazee…’ He shakes his head in wonder. ‘They set me up. I was the puppet, and they the puppeteers.’

  My own suspicion is that they possessed no such clarity of vision. They chose John chiefly because he was the obvious candidate. The instinct to entrust a potentially sensitive post to a fellow tribesman was certainly there, but it was not particular to this clique or period. It is the bane of Kenyan life, skewing employment patterns in every sector of the economy. At the back of their minds, the old men may have vaguely sensed that having ‘one of ours’ in this key post might one day prove helpful. ‘The assumption must have been, “If he gets out of line, his father will have a quiet word,”’ guesses Wycliffe Muga, columnist for the Daily Nation. ‘But when you feel someone is part of what you are, you simply take it for granted he will go along with what you do.’ Flush with post-election ambition, incapable of imagining a time when things were not going their way, they were more slapdash than cynical in their strategising.

  In the film The Godfather there comes a moment when, with his father lying wounded in hospital and trusted allies being picked off by a rival mob, Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone must decide whether to rally behind the clan or walk away. The former black sheep, who until that moment has shown nothing but disdain for his Mafia heritage, never wavers. Without waiting to be asked, he jettisons a lifetime of liberal values, personally executes his father’s enemies and takes charge of the family, going on to become the most ruthless godfather of all. If they ever bothered to think about it, the Mount Kenya Mafia must have assumed John Githongo would do likewise. Oh, he might squawk and fret a bit, given his university education and professional credentials, just to show he was a man. But he would simply know, without having to be told, exactly where his duty lay.

  8

  Breaking the Mould

  ‘The hope of a secure and liveable world lies with disciplined nonconformists.’

  MARTIN LUTHER KING

  In assuming their secrets were safe with a reliable insider,
the ruling elite had simply not done its research. To John Githongo, being Kenyan, being Kikuyu, did not mean what it meant to his colleagues. If they were not aware of that awkward fact, he certainly was.

  The Githongo family home is in Karen, a suburb twenty kilometres south-west of Nairobi which looks across the knuckled ridge of the Ngong Hills, formed–legend has it–when a giant who had tripped over Mount Kilimanjaro pressed a fist into the ground to right himself. The area lay a full afternoon’s ride outside the capital when Danish baroness and writer Karen Blixen, to whom the suburb’s name is mistakenly attributed,* tried and failed to make a go of her coffee farm in the 1920s. Nowadays, forest still separates Karen from the city, a stretch of woodland crossed at speed at night by nervous drivers braced for car-jackings and hold-ups. But the spate of new building is so rapid, with each week seeing another expanse of yellow scrubland transformed into a construction site, that soon the trees will be gone, the stables supplying the glossy horses clip-clopping along the lanes will close, and Nairobi will have pulled Karen permanently into its cement embrace. In colonial days, this used to be a white area, and many of the name plates peppering the high bougainvillea hedges are as British as empire itself: Hardy, Roberts, Hughes, McRae. This is still a haven for the breed known locally as the ‘KCs’–Kenya Cowboys–rakish descendants of Kenya’s original white settlers, who are proud of their fluent Kiswahili, refer to their staff as ‘the watu’, drive their Land Rovers into town as rarely as possible and try to ignore the urban development creeping steadily towards them. But colonialism’s remnants are now outnumbered. The black elite long ago made Karen its own, and the faces on the eighteen-hole golf course of the Karen Country Club these days are overwhelmingly brown.

  The Githongo house is an old colonial villa, red-tiled, solid, timber-framed. At six acres, its grounds are large enough to hold outhouses at the front and a small livestock farm at the back. The Githongos may belong to Kenya’s aristocracy, but the house feels more like a working homestead than a showpiece residence. It has the utilitarian feel of a family home that sees a regular throughput of children and grandchildren, colleagues and in-laws, girlfriends and schoolmates, servants and hangers-on. In the front compound several ageing cars await a mechanic who may never arrive; the veranda overlooking the lawn is used for hanging laundry, not serving gin-and-tonics, and the swimming pool was drained long ago.

  The paraphernalia on family mantelpieces usually reveals what people regard as important in their lives. On this one, below David Shepherd’s classic painting of a bull elephant, sits a framed photo of the three Githongo boys, taken, to judge from the flared white suits, puppy fat and semi-Afro hairstyles, sometime in the mid-1980s. Nearby perch two snaps showing John’s parents shaking hands at the Vatican with Pope John Paul II. The religious theme is even stronger in the dining room. Portraits of Kibaki and Kenyatta–no Moi–compete with images of a doleful Messiah, bleeding heart exposed. ‘There is surely a future and hope for you and your hope will not be cut off,’ reads the message on one blue-tiled plaque. ‘CHRIST is the HEAD of this house, THE UNSEEN GUEST at every meal, THE SILENT LISTENER to every conversation’ warns another, with a touch of menace. This, quite clearly, is a household in which fork is never lifted to mouth without grace first being recited and chests respectfully crossed.

  Joe and Mary Githongo have lived here for thirty years. Theirs was a relationship forged against the odds, for it straddled the divide that fractured Kikuyu society in the 1950s. Both came from Kiambu, the province abutting Nairobi. But their families were from opposite sides, in more ways than one.

  Joe was born a Catholic, his father a well-travelled truck driver and cattle rearer prominent in the Mau Mau. A member of the Ndege age-set that formed Mau Mau’s ideological core, John’s paternal grandfather was a hardliner who administered the dreaded oath, raised funds for the movement and was arrested by the British and beaten more than once. In old age, he would recount with chortling relish his role in the garrotting of a loyalist chief. ‘He was right in it, very deep,’ remembers his daughter-in-law.

  Mary, in contrast, was a Presbyterian and her father was a member of the Home Guard, his loyalist credentials impressive enough to win him a senior chief’s appointment from the British. Growing up in a guarded village, complete with spiked moat, watchtower and armed sentries scouring the horizon for ‘terrorists’, she remembers the tension when night fell, bringing with it the fear of attack by the men in dreadlocks, seen not as heroes but as bloodthirsty marauders. She also remembers being jeered at when she went to the river to wash clothes by children whose parents were Mau Mau. ‘I was too young to know what they meant, but later I understood. If you belonged to a person like my father, no one would like you.’ Today, she believes her father hedged his bets by taking the oath in secret–many Home Guards did exactly that–and that he was ‘playing double’. But in the absence of any evidence–and Mary Githongo admits she never discussed the matter with him–it’s hard to see this as much more than a wistful attempt to paper over the awkward fact that one side of her future family once regarded the other as colonial toadies of the most loathsome kind.

  As the son of a suspected terrorist, Joe Githongo did not escape the Emergency unscathed. Aged twenty-five, an employee for Kenya’s Post Office, he was arrested, categorised as a ‘grey’ detainee (not entirely trustworthy, but not a hardliner either) and held for three months at the infamous Manyani Reception Centre–‘a terrible, terrible place’. The authorities’ assumption that he had taken the oath was not misplaced. ‘I had taken it because I believed we had to fight for our own government.’ That opinion was put to the test as camp organisers set about destroying Mau Mau’s hold on Kikuyu inmates. White missionaries were called in to reverse what was seen as Mau Mau brainwashing, telling the prisoners they could still be saved if they admitted what they had done. As a devout Catholic who nonetheless believed in home rule, Joe was pulled in opposing directions: ‘It was a time of terrible turmoil.’

  Today, his memory of this period is clear-eyed. He retains a vivid mental image of one white sadist, a prison officer. ‘I would watch him from my office in Gilgil. He would stop by at eleven in the morning to chase a Maasai herdsman. He would stop his car and beat the man, for nothing, even if it meant soiling his nice khaki uniform. He loved it. I would watch and think: what is going on with this educated man?’ But Joe also singles out for praise ‘remarkable, outstanding’ British district officers who stood up for ordinary Kenyans while the Mau Mau were doing ‘unspeakable’ things. ‘During Mau Mau I saw the worst in the Kikuyus and the worst in the British. There were terrible excesses on both sides. Our politicians went too far. I approved the noble objectives at the beginning. But we didn’t need to do all that killing.’

  Little wonder that after being released for good behaviour, Joe felt an urge to leave the country. In 1959 he headed west, to the Congo’s Leopoldville, where he eventually got a job as an accountant for the United Nations force called in to stabilise a country in a state of post-independence ferment. After three years banking his UN salary, he moved to Hampstead in north London, whence he summoned the young woman he had wooed back in Kenya. For Mary, the decision to marry a Catholic, a member of a religion with which she found herself increasingly in tune, meant a break with her Protestant family. ‘When I first told my father I wanted to change my religion he said: “You leave this place.” So I waited until I got married and then I became a Catholic. The Lord just called me.’

  Modern-day Kenya is full of couples whose parents, had they encountered each other during the Mau Mau years, would gladly have killed one another–such is the nature of civil war. The Githongos were no rarity in this regard. But it’s easy to see how that divide could serve as the first in a series of small alienations weaning a young couple away from its roots. However tough life abroad might prove, it would always be easier to navigate than home, place of unacknowledged, bitter grudges and recent, incestuous violence.

  Finding
a job in 1960s London was not easy for Joe. ‘I remember turning up two, three, four times and being told “It’s already taken” because I was black,’ he recalls. He finally became a British Rail guard at King’s Cross station, an undemanding post that allowed him to study for ‘A’ Levels while on duty. Mary worked as a nurse for the National Health Service. John Githongo Muiruri, the couple’s first child, was born in London, premature and worryingly small. The future Big Man started out as the runt of the family. Siblings Gitau and Ciru swiftly followed. John was three when Mary Githongo, finding the task of rearing a young family single-handed in London exhausting, insisted on returning to Kenya.

  There was never any question of the family returning to Joe’s homestead near Mangu, seventy-three kilometres north-east of Nairobi. For a couple with their experience and Joe’s newly acquired diplomas, Nairobi was the place. Having left behind a country under colonial rule, they were returning to an independent African republic, where so many things once ruled off-limits for blacks had become possible. Lowly public-sector workers in Britain, they belonged to a fast-emerging middle class in Kenya, a class that had signed up for Kenyatta’s nation-building project and had no desire to look back.

  Joe joined the management of Kenya Railways, while building a client base for the accountancy firm he planned. By 1969 he was ready to launch it: Githongo & Company, one of Kenya’s first black accountancy firms. That alone ensured it a huge amount of work, as the Kenyatta government channelled auditing contracts for Kenya’s state-owned concerns towards a company seen as being ‘one of ours’.

  The role of accountant is a little like that of priest or doctor. Whether he wants to or not, the practitioner acquires an intimate knowledge of his clients’ less creditable affairs. Large, rotund–the Githongos don’t do small–scrupulously polite, Joe inspired the necessary trust amongst those with plenty to hide. He acquired a reputation as a man who, when sudden misfortune fell, could be relied upon to appear with a briefcase of cash to magic the problem away. With the presidential family as its most high-profile client, Githongo & Company handled the affairs of a large chunk of the post-independence elite. Joe was appointed secretary to GEMA, and many of the Kikuyu entrepreneurs at the heart of that movement passed through his doors. ‘Everyone who was anyone was audited by my dad’s firm,’ recalls Mugo, John’s youngest brother. ‘Our growth,’ remembers Joe with fond nostalgia, ‘was phenomenal.’