Kenyan leaders owe it to the nation to write biographies

Henry Munene

On Tuesday, President Uhuru Kenyatta was in Murang’a for the burial of George Ndung’u Mwicigi, who served as Kandara MP for nearly 20 years and was assistant minister for Agriculture in the Kenyatta and Moi governments. While Mwicigi was well known in his time, younger Kenyans might not know much about the man who traversed the world seeking funds for the Kandara water project.

Personally, I did not know much about him until a publisher asked me for a second opinion on the old man’s autobiography.

Though I had long crossed over from books to newspapers, I promised to read the draft and give my opinion. When I read the draft, I was fascinated by the old man’s command of language and his ability to remember finer details of events that happened in his childhood.

For a man born in the early 1930s (he could not tell the actual date), I was almost sure he had written the draft much earlier in life. Until I met the old man and discovered that even at his age, he had an impressive sense of humour and an almost photographic memory.

Long after I had read his memoirs, we were still friends and once in a while he would suggest we have a chat at his favourite spot, Boulevard Hotel in Nairobi, where he could easily be wheeled in.

I felt guilty because often-times he got there before me and I would feel so guilty that I’d take the tab, despite his insistence to pay. He regaled me with tales about the Kenyatta days and the many things he knew about the inner circle.

He was a bit guarded when I asked pointed questions about certain things, like the controversial dairy cows project, the so-called Gema, Kiambu mafia and how he came to trounce freedom fighter Bildad Kaggia for the Kandara seat, and such stuff. I came to learn that his keen sense of detail rubbed off on him from Tom Mboya, a man who invited him to his house now and then. Though he glossed over sensitive things like tumultuous events in Kenya’s history, I liked the personal touch he gave to his humour-laced accounts of key events in history.

A case in point is the Lancaster Conference in Britain, which was to prepare Kenya for independence. Mwicigi was in Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s hotel suite. The phone rang and when Kenyatta lifted the handset, it turned out the caller wanted to talk to a man called Ngumbu, who was in the suite. It turned out Ngunjiri had given the caller the suite telephone number just to show his closeness to Kenyatta.

Towards the end of last year, I bumped into Mwicigi at a book launch in Westlands and asked him whether he had finished writing his memoirs. He joked that I’d not miss the news because he wanted it to be launched by the President. Then I told him he owed me a newspaper interview and he said that would come after the publication of his book.

So when I saw the unmistakable mugshot in the transition pages last week, for a moment I was stumped. Here was a man who watched on TV, from a hotel room in Rome, as a flight he had missed burst into flames in the skies.

He had cheated death four other times, as he narrates in his unpublished memoirs which we must not cannibalise in this column. Suffice it to say that for all his mistakes, he was an inspiring man.

And when I saw a TV clip of the President at Mwicigi’s burial, the unpublished biography came to my mind. Luckily for us, he had told his story. My worry is that there are many other Kenyans who spent years at the top and would rather be interred with the story of Kenya as seen through their eyes.