A daughter’s 40-year quest to resolve mystery of JM Kariuki’s assassination

Rosemary Kariuki with her husband, John Waithaka, and daughters, Melissa Wairimu (right) and Melanie Nyambura

By Machua Koinange

The piercing but compassionate eyes on Sister Thomas Moore’s face told Rosemary Kariuki that something awful had happened. It was early morning on March 12, 1975.

She wasn’t prepared for the heart wrenching revelation. She had spent the last few days listening to snickers and whispers behind her back as a Standard Seven pupil at Loreto Convent, Eldoret.

Ensconced in an avalanche of scenic beauty and cascading hills, the school had provided her with temporary refuge from the painful struggles she had endured as the daughter of Kenya’s most celebrated political icon and a champion of the poor.

Josiah Mwangi Kariuki (JM) was after all the flamboyant and colourful MP for Nyandarua North. The rumours had done the rounds and finally reached Rosemary that her father was missing. No family member had volunteered to directly share the news with her.

“I remember seeing the newspaper headlines that my dad was missing and then reported to be in Zambia. But when I looked at Sister Thomas Moore’s eyes, I knew something really bad had happened,” she recalls.

“We grew up in Rift Valley, there was nothing special about us. I was 11 and in Standard Seven. My mum felt we should be in a boarding school and we had been in this new school in Eldoret for a very short time,” says Rosemary.

“The school encouraged the students to write letters to their parents and we were allowed to read newspapers on Saturdays.”

One particular Saturday in February, Florence, a student at the school, asked Rosemary: “Is your dad so and so?”

“And I said yes,” she says.

Florence hesitated then asked: “Well, have you seen the article? They say he is missing.”

JM had been reported missing since Sunday, March 2, 1975.

Rosemary froze.

“My gut feeling told me there is something wrong, how could he be missing? He was the kind of person who used to tell everyone “I have gone here”, “I am doing this”. So there was a part of me that he really wished he was okay.”

Rosemary grew up with a sense that some people did not like him.

“One day he told me during my birthday party: “There are some people who don’t like what I am doing, so they want to come and stop your birthday”. He asked me to limit the number of guests, so we kind of had a sense that everything was not so good.”

For Rosemary, it was a burden that she has carried for decades, shouldering the responsibility of keeping the memory of JM Kariuki alive and burning among a new generation of young Kenyans whose parents grew up at the height of founder president Jomo Kenyatta’s frequent crackdown on dissenting voices.

Funeral home

JM was a palatine figure, he was intractable and fiercely loyal to the masses. He had grown frequently loud, criticising the gap between the rich and the poor and speaking loudest about growing corruption in Kenyatta’s government. He was colourful, he had money and he spent it on development projects that benefited the poor and rubbed the administration the wrong way.

It also made him a marked man.

JM’s stature had grown, a political luminary who belonged to the pantheon of Kenya’s heroes who had helped shape the destiny of the country.

At the school library Rosemary recalls seeing the newspaper headline announcing her missing father. She held on to faith that the worst had not happened, but was hanging on to straws that something ominous was coming. She says: “I was a prefect at the school and was busy making my bed when I was called and told the headmistress wanted to see me.”

Rosemary had walked into the headmistress’ office wondering why Sister Moore wanted to see her. Her gaze and body language spoke volumes. “She told me: “Remember the newspapers had said your dad is missing? Well, they found him and he is dead.”

She stood facing the nun, struggling to contain a geyser of pain and anger, her face frozen in a grimace of agony. The words had cut through her stomach like a hot knife going through butter.

The news was not coming from a family member but her headmistress. “It was a terrible way to deliver the news. I will never forget that. I cried. I remember rushing into her, hugging her and crying.”

After a brief moment of recovery, the headmistress needed her to help break the bad news to her sister, Mumbi. “And that’s when it hit me that there were other people involved in this, not just me.”

Rosemary insisted she would tell Mumbi the news.

“So I composed myself, I didn’t want the news to hit her as badly. When she walked (into the office) she was already crying. I knew they had told her. I told Mumbi: “Don’t worry, we are going to be fine.”

Rosemary does not remember who picked them up from school. She believes she went into some space and did not want to accept what had happened. Everything was a blur after that. “We got to Nairobi, to the funeral home (then city mortuary) and we did not even know what a funeral home was. We had never seen a dead person. There were so many people.”

“Actually I had a phobia for newspapers for a long time after that. There were certain words that came to life that I never knew existed. Words like “the late” “bereaved” and “mortuary”. All those things that as a child you never think you would have to deal with them.”

Later, it emerged that JM’s body had been lying at the city mortuary for ten days with an “unknown” tag to his toe.

When Rosemary went through high school, she sought to hide her identity.  She graduated high school and went to the US to attend the University of the District of Columbia in Washington DC. She graduated with a degree in political science and returned to Kenya in early 1990.

Rosemary’s mind never went into the process of why JM was killed. “It was so merciless and so terrible, but what my mind goes to is why God did not just let it be a mystery. It could have been a mystery.”

JM could have disappeared completely like others like Kungu Karumba or Stanley Mathenge before him who have not been found to date.

She says:” God allowed his body to be found. There were so many lapses. Where they found him after they did what they did in Ngong, the intention was for the animals to eat him. All those stories you hear about his body had acid, that’s not true.  The truth was that they left him in a place along an animal path. The animals had a choice. They chose not to eat him.”

His killing hurt the collective will and trust that Kenyans had in the Kenyatta government. Eventually JM became almost a pariah, a name you could not mention at the height of the old man’s repressive regime in his sunset years. “I felt caged being this person I could not be allowed to be. I can’t be his daughter yet I know I am.”

I felt caged

Rosemary has gradually gone through a transformation, from denial about his father, her heritage to an unquenchable thirst to know who he was and what he stood for. It is a journey that has taken her from Kenya to the US and back. Years later the journey has given birth to a book, I am My Father’s Daughter and a documentary In Search of My Father released in 2008.

“There was this fire inside me to remind Kenyans about my father.” The documentary and book best capture her quest to search for her father’s true identity which by extension was a journey into self-discovery, about a man loved by many and resented by a few.

JM’s iconic political journey had began with a stint in detention during the colonial era as a Mau Mau activist that morphed into a personal assistant to Kenya’s first president, a stint in National Youth Service and later a member of parliament and assistant minister.

“My motive was not to find out why he was killed but who he was as person because I had now grown up, gone out of the country and returned. I would meet people who would ask me, are you really the daughter of JM? And they would tell you things and you would be like, I really did not know him. I knew him as a father but I wanted to see him through the eyes of other people,” she says.

And she was fascinated by everything about JM. How tall was he? How did he laugh? How did he interact with people? Where were you when he died?

 Rosemary had hours and hours of tapes of interviews with people who knew JM and collected volumes of documents trying to recreate her father. It was the volume of material that gave rise to the documentary and eventually the book. She started with memorials services for JM and eventually started to engage with social activists and civil society.

After the new Constitution was enacted Rosemary took the issue of her father to the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission to find out the truth and took the Government to court over JM. “No investigations have ever been conducted over my father’s death. They had a parliamentary select committee look into it but that was it. I am not sure we will ever know the truth.”

Close to four decades later, Rosemary is still waiting for the truth.