Nowhere to hide: When the State struck back against Mwakenya

Former Constitution of Kenya Review Commission Chair Yash Pal Ghai (right), Ndungu Githuku, poet and activist (centre) and James Karanja, former member of Mwakenya Movement, interact during Human Rights Defenders Mashujaa Festival organised by Defenders Coalition of Kenya in Nairobi on Sunday, October 20 2019 [David Njaaga,Standard]

 For members and sympathisers of the Mwakenya movement, 1986 was the year of the crackdowns. Dozens of them were arrested, detained and subsequently jailed.

“When the crackdown began I was at the District Agriculture Office in Kakamega,” Kangethe Mungai, an agriculturalist says.

 At that time, he had been a member of Mwakenya longer than he had been a civil servant.

“I walked into the office one day after a lunch break and colleagues told me there were strangers who looked like policemen looking for me,” he recalls.

 “I had heard of other arrests and I knew it was only a matter of time before they got to me.”

That day, Kangethe left the office and never went back.

“Many people were going into exile but when I reached out to two of my cell members, we decided we would not leave the country.”

The three, Kangethe, Tirop Kitur and Nduthu Karimi were seized with an idealism that blinded them to some harsh realities of the time. 

Kangethe says the three of them were excessively idealistic and confident that among them, they had what it took to bring change to Kenya.

“We believed that if we started a war, Kenyans would join in. We wanted to start a guerrilla war to fight Moi and his military until victory. We wanted to fight the Museveni way. We had read in books that Museveni went into the bush only with three rifles,” he says. “

These three rifles were what we were looking for and victory would be ours.”

 

Economic sabotage

The radical wing of Mwakenya was so committed that it had members cross over to Uganda to train with Yoweri Museveni’s forces.

“We were so committed that I even tried to purchase a machine gun. We wanted to fight here and die here.”

But when they failed to get their hands on arms, they opted for other forms of resistance - economic sabotage.

After living from town to town and being on the run, the three men from the Western Kenya Cell found themselves in Gilgil Town. They had hatched what they thought was a fool-proof plan to sabotage the Kenya-Uganda Railway.

“Although we were radicals, we never really intended to take any human life,” he says. One night in March 1986, after carefully studying the train manifest, the three men waited for the passenger train from Mombasa to go past Gilgil and embarked on the arduous task of uprooting parts of the railway line at Kariandusi.

“Sure enough, the goods’ train derailed. We left so many pamphlets at the scene to make sure everyone know it was our work but the following day there was no mention of Mwakenya anywhere in the media,” Kangethe says.

Bernard Chunga the prosecutor who nailed Mwakenya members. [File Standard]

The trio’s imagination was that an act of sabotage of this magnitude would raise awareness around the world of the problems Kenyans were facing at the time. 

After their mission, the three retreated to their single-roomed mabati house in Gilgil Town and continued with life under the cover of being second-hand clothes sellers.

This was not to last.

On June 13, 1986, a special crack team from Nakuru would kick down the door to their house, forcing them to escape through a back door and windows into the cold night semi-naked and blind.

 One ran straight into the surrounding bush, the other found himself falling off a nearby cliff while the third found his way into a nearby railway workers' quarters naked with glasses on his head. 

And even as they reckoned with the unforgiving bush and injuries from falling off a cliff and the embarrassment of being found naked in a neighbourhood, the law hadn’t given up on them. Authorities were closing in and soon, each of these three young men would find themselves behind bars.

 When the police came for Prof Maina Kiongo at his house along Nairobi’s Denis Pritt Road, his wife had already left. 

She had swept the house clean leaving behind only the professor’s clothes and books. She had carted away everything including the children and the house help.

“They asked me where my wife was and I told them they knew better,” says the professor.

He wasn’t taken to any police station first. He was bundled into a police vehicle and driven to his mother’s house in Kangema.

“They were very rough,” Prof Kiongo says. “They went into my mother’s bedroom and ransacked it. She was in her nightgown. By 3:30 am they were through and we travelled back to Nairobi. I was locked up in Jogoo Road Police Station with instructions that nobody should see me.”

The next day he was picked by an officer he recalls as Opiyo, taken to his office at the General Post Office where he served as Finance Manager. He witnessed his belongings being turned upside down before he was taken Nyayo House.

 

Torture

“I was in Nyayo House for close to 30 days. It was a terrible experience,” he says. 

“I cannot even tell you some of the things that were done to us because you would shudder the whole day.”

One of the things he remembers was something the torturers called a Japanese Breakfast.

“The policemen would tell you to go round in circles until you got dizzy while someone walked behind you, beating you with a stick. At times all of them would descend on you, beat you until you pass out then carry you away. 

When you came back to your senses they’d flood your cell with about two feet of water and dump you inside. There was someone in a control room regulating the temperature between very hot and very cold. The same water you stood in would be your toilet and your drinking water.”

Death was just a heartbeat away," he recalls.

Adds Prof Kiongo: “I questioned many things during that time. I even asked God to forgive me if he thought whatever I was doing to free his children was wrong,” Prof Kiongo says.

Survivors of Nyayo House say there were only two places one could go to from the torture chambers. The first was jail and the second one was the mortuary. Each destination had its distinct road.

Those who went to jail did so via a confession often obtained after days of beating and coercion. Those who went to the morgue did so via a stubborn idealism that saw them stick to

truth and honour.

Freedom

Prof Kiongo initially thought he would create a third destination- freedom.

“One morning the then Director of Public Prosecutions Bernard Chunga came to my cell and played out three scenarios to me: deny the charges the State had against me and go into detention, get charged for treason and be hanged, or accept the charges of sedation and get a seven-year sentence,” he says. 

“I looked at him and reminded him he had forgotten one other choice- to set me free because I had not done anything wrong.”

“What was done to me got me wishing I had agreed to his charges. When they were done with me I signed a confession and pleaded guilty to sedation and went straight to jail.”

 ***

 Nobody believed Kangethe’s story of being attacked by robbers in the night. Robbers who stole everything from him, without harming him and leaving him only with his glasses. 

But the Kenya Railways workers were sympathetic enough to lend him a few tattered clothes and old shoes to restore some of his dignity.

Then next thing he wanted to do was get his way back to Kabete from Gilgil. Even if by foot, he had to get home.

But, it didn’t take long for him to meet police officers who took little time in discovering he was not who he was saying he was. He had told them he was a quarry worker. But his language and demeanour betrayed him.

“I knew what they would do to me. I was not going to make it easy for them to arrest me,” he says.

The chance meeting happened at an overhead train passing somewhere in Nakuru County. The train passing was some 20 feet high. Below it was the busy Nairobi-Nakuru Highway.

“As they approached me, some with guns trained at me I jumped to the road below,” he says.

He landed on his side, fracturing his arm in multiple places.

“As I regained consciousness from the fall, I could hear them say that I wasn’t dead. They threw me in their lorry and drove me to a police station. Then they brought in Tirop and Karimi who had a badly hurt leg from his fall off a cliff.”

Nduthu Karimi (right) and family members. His is comrades say he was the most radicalised Mwakenya member. [Archives, Standard]

Of the three, Karimi was the most radicalised. Even in captivity, he still believed there was something extra he could do. He argued. He refused to corporate. Anybody who interacted with him saw valour and revolt. He was resolute. Uncompromising.

When they brought him to that police station in Nakuru, they could not cope with him. The only way they knew how to deal with him was to beat him.

“They kicked him. Beat him. They were savage on him. Even when he was down they still went at him. Tirop and I couldn’t understand why they were doing this.”

After the beating stopped, they too were shipped to Nyayo House where confessions and more details about the movement were tortured out of them.

“I was in Nyayo House for 18 days,” Kangethe says. “They told me that if I cooperated they would take me to hospital where a surgeon would have a look at my arm but if I refused they would break my other arm and legs,” he says.

Eventually, the three were taken to court and charged with an array of offences. Tirop was sentenced to 15 years in jail. Karimi got 14 and Kangethe 12 and a half.

 In 1992, when multiparty democracy was restored to the country, many of the Mwakenya members that had been illegally detained had either gotten out of prison or were about to get out. The years lost in jail will never be recovered.

The torture that most underwent caused untold mental and physical harm. The excesses of the state meant a disruption to normal life for individuals such as Prof. Kiongo, Tirop, Kangethe and the thousands of other members of the Mwakenya movement who have never got a chance to tell of their experiences.

Prof. Kiongo says he forgave a close family member who betrayed him.

Some chose silence, others, like Karimi went silent forever.

“Karimi was killed in 1996 [four years] after we left prison in 1992,” Kangethe says. 

“He continued with activities that were dangerous to him. Karimi believed that we can revive Mwakenya and started recruiting people for membership in a new Mwakenya.