It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  Then Kenyatta died, and the firm’s fortunes turned. ‘When Moi saw Kikuyus doing well, he would intervene. He actually openly attacked our company in Nyeri in 1984 when he discovered we represented a lot of the tea factories in the country, saying some of those jobs should be taken from us,’ remembers Joe. Audits for state enterprises were systematically channelled elsewhere. ‘We lost more and more of these jobs and had to take on more and more work with private companies.’ The impact on the family was swiftly felt. Mugo is the only Githongo child without a university degree. He was forced to cut short his education in his late teens, when money suddenly got tight.

  It was ironic that Githongo & Company should fall foul of the Moi regime’s ethnic hostility. For the one characteristic acquaintances and friends all remark upon when discussing Joe Githongo is his loathing of tribalism. Perhaps his visceral horror at the excesses of the Emergency, when ethnic chauvinism devastated his community, explains the sudden force that comes into his voice when quizzed on the subject. ‘I hope people come to associate tribalism with corruption and throw it out completely.’ Many Kenyans of his generation would ostensibly agree with such sentiments, without acting upon them. Joe put his principles into practice, scrupulously appointing members of other tribes to the board of Githongo & Company to dilute the Kikuyu quotient.

  At home, the five Githongo children–the last two were born in Nairobi–were brought up to be proud of their nationality, not their ethnicity. ‘The Kikuyu thing is of no consequence. My children were brought up as Kenyans, not as Kikuyu,’ insists Joe. He tells with pride the story of how when John visited friends in western Kenya, his dark skin led many to assume he was a local. A more hidebound Kikuyu might have found the idea offensive. ‘John was happy to be an honorary Luo.’ Neither parent would object when their children befriended, dated and eventually, in some cases, married non-Kikuyus.

  The cosmopolitan message was reinforced by John’s secondary school, St Mary’s. Founded in 1939, this private school was one of several established in Kenya for white settlers determined that their children should receive an education on a par with anything available back home. With the passage of the years, the white boys were replaced by the children of Kenyan permanent secretaries, special branch chiefs, army generals and government ministers. For a nouveau riche who had only just knocked the clinging red mud of Central Province from his shoes, schools like St Mary’s were an aspirational dream, offering legitimacy in one swift generation.

  Located in the well-heeled suburb of Lavington, built on the site of Kenya’s first coffee farm, St Mary’s–or ‘Saints’ as it was nicknamed–was structured on lines any fan of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts would recognise, so bent on reproducing the traditional British public school experience the effort verged on parody. There were prefects and head boys, uniforms (blue blazer and tie) and houses, a Latin school motto (Bonitas, Disciplina, Scientia–‘Goodness, Discipline, Knowledge’) and assemblies, and the year was divided into Michaelmas, Lent and Trinity terms. Set up by members of the Holy Ghost Fathers, an Irish order, with a full-sized Catholic chapel on the premises, the school’s emphasis was spiritual and religious, even if a certain leeway was permitted on the question of precisely which faith was involved. ‘We accept Sikhs, Protestants, Hindus. The only thing we don’t allow is atheists,’ explains headmaster Henry Shihemi.

  While state-funded schools like Alliance or Starehe Boys were rigorously meritocratic, the demands placed on St Mary’s boys were simpler. Mr Shihemi gives me a slightly sardonic look, rubbing finger and thumb together, when I enquire about entry criteria. The school lies at the pricier end of the independent market, and does not offer scholarships. In return for the hefty fees, Saints pupils enjoyed facilities that would leave even Western children blinking in envy: how many schools boast a golf course on the premises, can muster a full orchestra, or routinely lay on end-of-term musicals and performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas? While state schools in Kenya were mad about soccer, the great equaliser, St Mary’s prized rugby, the upper-class ball game.

  The Irish, Indian, Goan and African priests who taught there drummed the notion of public service into their pupils. But it was made clear that the people who would actually lead the country in future, as opposed to dutifully ensuring its efficient running, would come from schools like Alliance. St Mary’s was the Ampleforth of Kenya, and boys from the state schools did not hesitate to rub home the difference when coming into contact with Saints pupils who, for their sins, even spoke with a distinctive, cut-glass accent. ‘When we played them at rugby, I’d go out of my way to hurt the St Mary’s boys,’ remembers writer and analyst Martin Kimani. ‘In our eyes, those who hadn’t made the grade but had money went to St Mary’s. To us they were soft, spoiled, privileged. It was ironic that St Mary’s taught the importance of public service, because the rest of us looked at them as the kids of crooks.’

  The priests’ lessons, it seems, ended up being digested in radically different ways. It is one of the curiosities of St Mary’s that while the school–whose alumni quip ‘Once a Saint, always a Saint’–produced the most famous government whistleblower in Kenyan history, it also simultaneously produced its most notorious wheeler-dealers: Gideon Moi, who built a business empire on his father’s name; Jimmy Wanjigi, one of the businessmen at the heart of Anglo Leasing; and Alfred Getonga, State House insider, were all contemporaries of John’s.

  In the latter years of the Moi regime, when even education would become embroiled in the country’s tribal tussle, St Mary’s came to be labelled a ‘Kikuyu school’. Leafing through the annuals from the late 1970s and 1980s, prominent Kikuyu names leap from the squash and hockey team lists. Eric Wainaina, pop star and human rights campaigner; Jeff Koinange, former CNN anchorman; David Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta, the sons of two Kenyan presidents; Raymond Matiba, son of the opposition leader: Kikuyus all. But that’s not the way it felt to former pupils, who remember schoolmates from western, eastern and coastal Kenya, and making friends with pupils from Uganda and Tanzania, Denmark and the Philippines.

  In fact, the education offered at this private school was almost quixotically international in its outlook. ‘There was a strong Western tinge to it,’ recalls John Gethi, one of John Githongo’s old school-friends. ‘But of course, when you were there you thought everywhere was like that.’ English and Kiswahili were spoken, but Luo, Kikuyu or Kamba were frowned upon. ‘We don’t encourage groups to form on ethnic basis, and we don’t encourage pupils to speak in the vernacular. We are proud to say we are citizens of the world,’ says Mr Shihemi. The school authorities regarded education as part of a nation-building project which would ultimately do away with tribal differences. ‘We will eventually reach a time where we will no longer say “This is a Kikuyu or a Luo.” If more schools were like St Mary’s, it might happen faster.’ Friends would later trace John’s extraordinary ability to mix with people from radically different milieux to his school’s heterogeneous approach. ‘We were a generation that didn’t know about tribes,’ recalls Gethi. ‘I don’t think we’ll ever get back to that. It was a golden era.’

  In the process of opening up to the world, certain cultural baggage had to be jettisoned. In Kikuyu tradition, circumcision looms large. The Githongo boys certainly went under the knife, but for them a rite once staged on the banks of a river, with only cold water to numb the pain, was performed in hospital. Ask John and his contemporaries about traditional Kikuyu concepts such as wiathi–becoming master of one’s destiny–and like many urban Kikuyu their age, they will hesitate, shrug and look awkward. They prefer a Robert Ludlum thriller to the latest academic work on Mau Mau, and while they might visit ‘shags’–slang for the upcountry ‘shamba’–at intervals and hold their grandparents in tender affection, that doesn’t mean they know a great deal about their roots.

  As the eldest son, John carried huge expectations on his shoulders. First-born children always face a tougher battle carving out their territory than children who come
later. Role model to his younger siblings, more was always expected of him, less forgiven. But along with those responsibilities went an awareness of the princely importance a son enjoys in a patriarchal society. Under Kikuyu tradition, the husband commands a family’s respect, then the first-born son, and only then the mother. From the first breath he drew as a premature baby, with all the extra concern that vulnerability entailed, John knew he was special.

  Family opportunities came his way first, and they were always of a kind to expand a lively boy’s horizons beyond Kenya’s borders. In 1978, when he was only twelve, American friends of the family invited him to spend a month in Chicago. At that age, a month seems like an eternity. The trip gave John his first taste of independence. It also alerted him to the reality of racial segregation. The blacks he met in Chicago found the fact that he was staying with a white family bizarre and inappropriate, and told him so.

  Aware of how his experiences abroad had changed his vision of the world, Joe Githongo set about passing those insights on to his children. On foreign trips, he would go to a video store and buy up the best Western movies of the day. ‘These were films that weren’t available in Kenya at the time. We would stay up till two in the morning, watching one after another,’ remembers John’s brother Gitau. Joe’s patronage of a school back in Mangu had a similarly stimulating effect. He set up an exchange system with Western students interested in serving as teaching assistants. Each year a new youngster would arrive, to be welcomed into the Githongo household during vacation time. ‘They were slightly older than us–seventeen-to-twenty-year-olds–and we would quiz them about the world. One wanted to join the SAS, and it was the time of the Falklands war–that caused a lot of family discussion. Another set off for Khartoum, was caught up in the Sudanese civil war, and returned full of stories. They were all fascinating people and I think that had a very profound influence on us all,’ remembers Gitau.

  It’s easy to forget the sheer dreariness of Moi’s Kenya, when the system sought to crush the debate that leads to political challenge. The country’s small group of intellectuals felt besieged. ‘Books were incredibly important, things to be cherished,’ remembers Rasna Warah, a columnist for the Nation. Nairobi bookshops would not officially stock works deemed to offend the presidency, but they could usually be bought discreetly under the counter, hidden amongst a spray of magazines, if you knew the right code word. ‘You never knew for sure what had been officially gazetted as a banned book,’ says Warah, ‘so you stashed your entire library under your bed. If you owned a book that might have been banned, you photocopied it and it circulated in A4 form, person to person, because then it was easy to hide amongst your ordinary papers. You felt watched all the time. When you went out, you would look for the shiny shoes. They were the dead giveaway, the very shiny shoes of the National Intelligence guy who was following you. I remember ducking under the table in restaurants to check out the shoes around me.’

  The country’s television and radio network was firmly in state control, private FM stations a distant dream, and the bravest independent newspaper, the Nation, rarely penetrated remote areas. Frustrated writers like Kwamchetsi Makokha, who wrote a radio soap opera for several years, had some fun sneaking political messages into his saga of a humble office messenger called Lameck. ‘The censors were incredibly stupid. As long as you didn’t name people or institutions directly, you could get away with the most obvious analogies and withering criticisms.’ That still left millions of Kenyans hungry for more information than was offered by the universally distrusted Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, which began virtually every news broadcast with a kneejerk ‘His Excellency Daniel arap Moi today…’, while feeding its audience a steady diet of lip-glossed, shoulder-padded schlock: The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, The Rich Also Cry. Those curious to know what was going on in their own country relied on the BBC’s World Service–the 6.30 p.m. news in Kiswahili was a must–or, as a last resort, on the so-called Machakos Express: a week’s worth of political gossip from the capital relayed in person by Nairobi workers on weekend visits upcountry. In that torpid context, few Kenyan families can have enjoyed wider vistas than the Githongo family.

  John soaked it all up, then passed his enthusiasms on to his siblings. ‘He was always a maverick,’ remembers Gitau. ‘He would pick up a book and talk about it for days. He was the first one to explain the word games in the Asterix the Gaul comics to the rest of us. He was a great fan of Richard Pryor. I remember seeing Martin Luther King on television for the first time. I was trying to work out why this guy was half singing and half praying, but John said: “That’s Martin Luther King. He’s incredible.” He was trying to decipher these things long before us.’

  At school, John swiftly excelled. Physically, he might seem ill-at-ease in his oversize body, but intellectually he was a Renaissance man in the making. History was a favourite, a precursor of a later fascination with politics. He was a talented draftsman and also loved zoology, becoming near-obsessed with the minutiae of animal behaviour. English literature brought him into contact with the works of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiongo. A born storyteller, he poured out plays and short stories. And he was liked, both by the priests and the boys, as his election as one of the school’s first black head boys attested. He already possessed a charisma not evident in his bespectacled photograph in the St Mary’s annual, a snapshot as stolid and uninspiring as all his official portraits.

  A bit of a goody-goody in the eyes of his siblings, this younger version of John Githongo was a far bossier character than the adult, who would learn the value of self-effacement. ‘He would bring his friends home from school, sit at a table and just talk. That was his own space and no one could interrupt,’ remembers sister Ciru. When a handful of friends at St Mary’s got together to form a gang–the Bundume Boys–John fought for pole position. ‘He was very forceful, overbearing. He wanted to be the boss,’ remembers gang member Gethi. ‘We had our “spot” on the golf course, under a tree, where we had lunch together every day. No one who valued their lives would venture in.’ Despite its macho nickname–‘dume’ means ‘bull’ in Kiswahili–this was no band of radicals. ‘We’d get together and revise like mad, really tearing the books apart.’

  By his mid-teens John was, in typical adolescent fashion, searching for an identity, trying on various personalities. He flirted with Islam, buying a Muslim cap and reading the Koran with typical singleness of purpose. ‘John never did anything just for the heck of it. There was always a reason,’ says his sister. When that belief system failed to fit, he swung the other way, in a direction less calculated, this time, to outrage family and friends.

  In upwardly mobile families, sociologists say, it is the mother who serves as moral and spiritual compass. The Githongo family was no exception. Statuesque, grave and as imposing as a granite outcrop, Mary Githongo had always played a steadying role in the partnership, slamming the ethical brakes on when Joe, the flighty, less scrupulous one, showed signs of getting swept into one of his businessmen friends’ dodgier schemes. Her conversion to Catholicism had been no marital stratagem, but a life-changing event. It’s virtually impossible to find an African family which doesn’t take its religion–whether Christian or Muslim–extremely seriously. But even by these standards, Mrs Githongo stood out amongst her contemporaries as exceptionally devout. She observed mass every day, a Spanish priest regularly arriving at the family house in Karen to conduct the service. And Father Alphonse Diaz was no ordinary Catholic priest. He was a member of Opus Dei.

  Established in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá, a Spanish lawyer-priest who experienced a divine revelation, Opus Dei–Latin for ‘the Work of God’–holds that each individual, however seemingly humdrum or materialistic his walk of life, can be redeemed through work. ‘God created man to work,’ Monsignor Escrivá preached. ‘Work is one of the highest human values and the way in which men contribute to the progress of society. But even more, it is a way to holiness.’ T
he sinister presence at the heart of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Opus Dei has long been regarded in Europe with suspicion. Its critics denounce it as a secret society, whose furtive ways border on Christian Freemasonry. Pointing to historic links with reactionary regimes in Europe and Latin America, they accuse it of preaching a form of Catholo-fascism. The movement certainly makes no secret of its practice of targeting a society’s elites for recruitment. ‘If we don’t start at the top we’ll never reach the bottom,’ one member in Nairobi unabashedly told me. ‘The snow is at the top of the mountain. Unless it melts, you cannot irrigate the countryside’. The tactic has prompted accusations of infiltration plans and hidden agendas. Why so secret? Why so focused on the rich and successful?

  But in Kenya, where Opus Dei first set foot in 1958, the organisation has made little effort to cover its tracks. Since the British colonial administration traditionally left education to the churches, whether the White Fathers, the Methodists or the Scottish Presbyterians, few eyebrows were raised when Opus Dei set about opening educational establishments in Nairobi. Today it runs several private schools and has won an official charter for Strathmore University, a neat grey-stone college built in the middle of a tatty housing estate. Hoping to transform Kenya by churning out generations of disciplined professionals, Opus Dei specialises in courses in accountancy, business studies, technology and management–dry disciplines suited not to the country’s future political movers and shakers, but to the technocrats who help those with crowd-pulling talents realise their dreams. What more perfect fit could there be than the Githongo family?