Читать книгу You Will See Fire - Christopher Goffard, Christopher Goffard - Страница 10

IT WAS A prescient assessment. The violence, and the fears it unleashed, proved useful to Moi, who justified his tightening grip as a safeguard against further anarchy. Paranoia became entrenched as national policy. Because it was dependent on Western aid and tourism, Kenya required the barest simulacrum of democracy and the rule of law. This did not prevent him from outlawing opposition parties and expanding the secret police. He eviscerated judicial independence at a stroke, pushing through the parliament a law giving him the power to sack any judge at his whim. The entire justice system fell into his grip; no one would be prosecuted, or spared prosecution, if he decreed otherwise. The courts, stacked thick with his stooges, were spiraling into a morass of corruption so universal that there was little effort to hide it. Three out of four judges, by Gathenji’s estimate, expected bribes; clients expected to buy their way out of trouble. More than once, he found himself preparing a case meticulously, building it airtight, only to lose on the flimsiest pretext. Everyone knew: Somewhere, money had changed hands.

To Gathenji, a portal into Moi’s nature—a suggestion of his tactics and how he would employ them—came in 1983 when he destroyed his ambitious attorney general, Charles Njonjo. Moi accused him of being a traitor in thrall to a treacherous foreign power attempting to overthrow the government of Kenya, stripped him of his power, and consigned him to political limbo. He was allowed to live, technically a free man, but as a nonentity. It was a lesson to potential rivals not to climb too high.

Gathenji could sense the president losing his mind. He watched as Moi systematically purged Kikuyus from positions of power. Journalists who asked questions found themselves in lockup. In one case that particularly infuriated Gathenji, he represented a woman who had been charged with possessing Beyond, an Anglican church magazine banned for its critical remarks about the regime. It had been found in her coffee table, and she was taken into custody with her newborn baby in her arms. He argued she hadn’t known the magazine was there; people were known to work out grudges by planting a banned publication on an enemy’s premises. The case was dismissed. Police had lost their interest in it anyway; it had been enough to scare the woman. That was the dynamic of dictatorship. To create an all-encompassing chill, you needed to lock up only a few.

“Foreign devils” and Marxists, said to be plotting constantly against the nation, became the convenient pretext Moi trundled out to crush enemies. “Bearded people”—intellectuals—were deemed suspect in their loyalties. Members of Amnesty International became “agents of imperialists” after they criticized his human rights record. He employed a colonial law called the Public Order Act, which forbade nine or more Kenyans from assembling without a government permit. As his search for enemies intensified, Moi dispatched people to “water rooms” under a Nairobi high rise called Nyayo House, where they were forced to stand in excrement-filled water for days. Moi expanded police detention powers so that those accused of capital crimes, such as sedition, could be held for two weeks without a hearing, ample time for torture squads to extract confessions. Scores of such prisoners were hauled before judges who accepted their guilty pleas and handed out four- or five-year sentences.

Moi carried a silver-inlaid ivory mace and wore a rosebud in the lapel of his Saville Row suits. With his claim on legitimate authority so flimsy, he mastered the tactics of large-scale bribery and intimidation. He made a practice of wholesale land stealing, using vast tracts of seized public land as payment to ministers and military officers; this was meant as a hedge against another attempted coup. He handed out stacks of cash to State House visitors and to the masses he met across the country during rounds in his blue open-topped Mercedes.

“I would like ministers, assistant ministers, and others to sing like a parrot after me,” Moi said. “That is how we can progress.” His subordinates vied to outdo one another in cringing sycophancy, their speeches hailing his mastery of foreign and domestic affairs, his deep compassion—yes, one declared, even the fish of the sea bowed before the Father of the Country. Parliament passed a law declaring that only Moi could possess the title of president, in any realm. Ordinary souls who ran charities and businesses would have to content themselves with the title of chairman. To his worshipers, he was “the Giraffe,” an admiring nod both to his height and farsightedness, or “the Glorious.”

“Kenya is a one-man state, and that man is the president,” Smith Hempstone, the former U.S. ambassador to Kenya, wrote in his memoir, Rogue Ambassador.

Paranoid Moi was, but also skilled at shuffling and reshuffling his underlings to keep them forever off balance. “You know, a balloon is a very small thing. But I can pump it up to such an extent that it will be big and look very important,” he said. “All you need to make it small again is to prick it with a needle.” Under his command were more than one hundred state-owned companies, or parastatals, that did business only with “patriotic” firms; the slightest dissent meant one’s contracts evaporated. The British system of pith-helmeted chiefs was gone, supplanted by a vast network of chiefs and subchiefs that provided Moi with intelligence and control all the way to the village level.

The Soviet foothold in Angola and Ethiopia seemed, to American eyes, a harbinger of continental Communist designs, and Moi reaped massive U.S. aid by positioning his country as “a pro-Western, free-market island of stability in the midst of a roiling sea of Marxist chaos,” Hempstone would write. “Moi’s one-party kleptocracy might not be a particularly pretty boat, but it was not to be rocked.”

Here and there, Kenyan clergymen raised their voices, with harsh results. After a Presbyterian minister named Timothy Njoya called for “dissidents, malcontents, critics, fugitives and anyone with a grievance” to speak out, Moi swiftly summoned Protestant and Catholic leaders to State House to warn against such “subversive” sermons. Njoya was defrocked but won back his position. During marches for constitutional reform, he endured bayonet-wielding soldiers, beatings, tear gas, and jail. Once, attackers doused his parish house with gasoline and set it ablaze. He seemed to feel that it would have been worse if the president had not been a churchgoing man. “Moi’s Christianity is our protection,” he said. “That’s our secret as pastors in Kenya.”

Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi became one of Africa’s longest-reigning dictators. Photograph by Francine Orr. Copyright 2003, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.

Under Moi, brutality walked hand in hand with farce. When Ngugi wa Thiong’o published the novel Matigari in 1986, Moi ordered the arrest of its fictional hero after receiving reports that “peasants in Central Kenya were talking about a man called Matigari who was going round the country demanding truth and justice,” Ngugi would write. The dictator was forced to settle for confiscating the books.

After the National Council of Churches, a mainstream Protestant body, objected to the abolition of secret balloting, Moi accused an Oregon-based missionary group, which had been digging water wells in northwestern Kenya, of plotting against the government. Police confiscated pellet guns the missionaries used to fend off snakes, a cache of uniforms sewn for local students, and shortwave radios used to communicate in a remote region without telephone service. These, by the state’s account, were armaments, military uniforms, and sophisticated communications equipment, all intended to “cause chaos,” Moi said, adding this complaint: “Why don’t they use their resources to build churches and bring in related things—like Bibles?” He later deported seven American missionaries accused of “sabotage and destabilization.” The evidence: a sloppily fabricated letter revealing their scheme to overthrow his government in collaboration with the Ku Klux Klan.

Once, during a spat with Hempstone, Moi sent police to seize a package of school textbooks—they included Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—that the U.S. ambassador had donated to a poor rural school. Moi’s men denounced the books as “sinister” and said they were designed to “pollute the minds of peace-loving wanachi [masses].”

The president’s dour countenance glared from the walls of every shop on every block; his name was plastered on uncountable roads and bridges, stadiums, and schools. He put his profile on coins and a full-frontal close-up on bills. His prosaic daily pronouncements inaugurated the evening news on state-run television: “His Excellency the President Daniel arap Moi proclaimed …” He invented Moi Day, a holiday on which his people could express gratitude for his leadership. To celebrate his first decade in power, he commissioned an Italian marble statue in downtown Nairobi’s Uhuru Park that depicted his enormous hand, clenched around his ivory mace, rising triumphantly out of Mount Kenya toward the sky. (Considering the mountain was both the nation’s namesake and the Kikuyus’ most sacred site, no less than the dwelling place of God, the monument carried a certain nasty symbolism.)

By the late 1980s, criticism was growing louder, even from within the superpower that was sponsoring him. Edward Kennedy publicly urged Moi to “pull back from the darkness of torture and repression and return to the bright sunlight of freedom, tolerance and the rule of law.”

Faced with such talk, Moi had a typical response: Look at my neighbors. His record, he pointed out again and again, was much better than that of Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda. Why should Kenyans expect democracy? he asked, invoking the West’s tormented history of race relations. The country had only gained independence in 1963. After breaking from the Crown, he argued, it had taken the United States two hundred years to achieve democracy.

Moi avoided interviews and wrapped himself in enigmatic silence. His authorized biography portrays him as a man who loved his Bible and simple country living, a ruler whose one-party state represented a bulwark against civil war in a cobbled-together nation of forty-two tribes and thirteen languages.

A more plausible glimpse of his psyche can be found in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Wizard of the Crow, which proceeds from the moral premise that only fantasy can capture the absurd nightmare that is existence under a Moi-like dictatorship. It describes a megalomaniacal ruler who has been “on the throne so long that even he could not remember when his reign began,” and who yearns to erect a tower that stretches to heaven, the better to call on God. At the core of this personality is a corrosive, all-consuming anger, an “insatiable desire for humiliating the already fallen.” Having cringed beneath endless abuse during his rise to power, he now demands endless groveling from others. He foments pandemonium and then postures as “a Solomonic prince of peace.”

JOHN KAISER WAS beginning to glimpe the scope of Moi’s cruelty as early as 1986 and 1987. He was living in Nyangusu, on the border between the dense farming area of the Kisii and the sparsely populated vastness of Masailand. For years, he’d watched the groups skirmish over cattle and boundary lines, staging elaborate—and mostly harmless—face-offs that Kaiser viewed “more as recreation than a serious war.” He’d watched as combatants assembled on either side of the mission football field, hurled menacing insults at one another through the night, and unleashed high arrow volleys that rarely proved fatal. If killing had truly been the aim, Kaiser reasoned, they would have charged with their spears.

But what he witnessed now, in the mid-1980s, had a different feel entirely. Thousands of Kisii peasant farmers were streaming through the countryside with their belongings. Political bosses had ferried in gangs of Masai warriors to burn their homes and destroy their schools. Informants told Kaiser the attackers belonged to the private mercenary army of William ole Ntimama, then the regime’s most powerful Masai. Investigating the refugees’ claims, Kaiser witnessed government paramilitaries and police evicting farmers from their land en masse as the police stood by passively, intervening only when the Kisii fought back.

In early 1988, Kaiser took the news to his bishop, Tiberius Mugendi, an aging Kenyan whom he regarded as a spiritual father. Mugendi had assumed the violence reflected “the usual fights over cattle rustling” and dismissed the possibility of government involvement: “Impossible!” That would mean the sanction of Moi, and Moi was the country’s benevolent father.

Little would be written about the mid-1980s clashes, and Kaiser would later castigate himself for his passivity. Concerning the violence, he believed himself “the best informed Christian” and “the best placed to take effective action.” He shared his findings with superiors, as well as with the Church’s Justice and Peace branch, but regretted that he didn’t go further. He could have contacted Western embassies, human-rights groups, or Bishop Raphael Ndingi of Nakuru, Kenya’s most outspoken Catholic human rights champion. “But I did none of these things. Like Pontius Pilate I washed my hands on the grounds that I had plenty of other work in a busy parish,” Kaiser would write. “In so doing I stored up more fuel for a long hot purgatory.”

Through the 1980s, his life remained a largely anonymous one of baptisms and herculean building projects, of confessions and sick calls, of rugged trips on his Honda motorcycle down crenellated laterite roads, across mapless valleys and hills. Fever and malaria, dysentery and pneumonia and rabies sent him again and again bearing bodies to ancestral burial plots deep in the bush, praying people into the earth as the clustered women sent up their stylized wailing and the men stood around the grave with spears and pangas, their faces blank and hard. He built tractors and oxcarts, planted crops, demonstrated Western methods of fertilizing. He bought second- and thirdhand trucks, not just to save money but because buying new ones would have enriched government men. He made a wooden wheelchair for a crippled boy and bought the family a donkey to pull it. He took confession in the shade of eucalyptus trees and threw up churches across the countryside, quick, crude structures of red earth and river-bottom sand. He earned a nickname, “Kifaru wa Maskini”: Rhino for the Poor.

As often as possible, he vanished into the bush and returned with meat to distribute. The landscape of his missives teemed with animal carcasses, and he took a raconteur’s pleasure in recounting close calls. One day near dark, walking along the edge of the woods, he heard “the grumbling of what I was sure were giant forest hogs in the bush,” he wrote in one letter. “I loaded up with 00 Buckshot, put some dirt on my face (something it’s not used to) & slipped into the bush as quietly as Hiawatha. I could hear the ‘pigs’ clearly & thought I would easily get one. But as I got deeper in the bush & closer to the grunting I detected a peculiar tone to their symphony & started getting apprehensive. When the grunting became growling the dirt on my face was being washed away by the sweat. I had come right into a pride of lions, at least 9 of them. One huge male stepped out from behind a bush about 15 yards away; he was very angry & nervous & his tail was whipping back & forth; by this time I was backing up full speed in reverse & they were all gentlemen enough to let me pass unmolested.”

At one point Minnesota friends supplied him with jacketed bullets, a tin of rifle powder, and an H & R single-shot .30-30 rifle with a mounted Redfield scope. This allowed him to strike an animal from eighty yards. Now, entering the bush, he carried this “lovely little gun” slung on his back, along with his twelve-gauge double-bore shotgun with double-ought buckshot in his hands “in case of something unexpected like a lion or bad buffalo.” Once, he tallied up a year’s worth of rifle kills:

“12 impala—about 150 pounds….

9 topi—350 lbs & over

8 oribi—40–50 lbs

6 grey duikers—30–40 lbs

2 Reedbucks—100 lbs

2 warthogs—120 lbs

1 waterbuck—300 lbs

That is 40 animals in a bit over a year which is not bad—about 3,560 pounds of meat after butchering.”

Another letter from the mid-1980s described the abiding exhilaration of missionary work. “I have just come back from a sick-call which I was lucky to sneak in just before dark & not get rained on,” he wrote. “The sick-call was for a young girl who is dying apparently having returned from hospital where the doctors have given her up. She is a very beautiful girl of 18 who received the Sacraments most beautifully and serenely. At such times I would not trade being a priest for any position.”

THEN THE SOVIET empire collapsed, and with it the West’s justification for reflexive support for Moi. In May 1990, soon after his arrival, Hempstone, the improbable U.S. ambassador—a blunt-spoken former editor of the conservative Washington Times who’d parlayed connections in the Bush administration into a diplomatic post—galvanized a weak and demoralized Kenyan opposition with a speech at the Rotary Club of Nairobi. From now on, he said, the United States would steer money to nations that “nourish democratic institutions, defend human rights, and practice multiparty politics.” The regime’s mouthpiece, the Kenya Times, answered his challenge with headlines like this: SHUT UP, MR. AMBASSADOR.

Dissidents took courage, even as the regime characterized the call for democratic pluralism as the latest thrust of white domination. The year was full of grim and portentous spectacles, including the murder of Robert Ouko, the country’s urbane foreign minister, who had been compiling documents on high-level corruption. He was discovered on a hill, shot twice through the head, his body charred, a .38 revolver lying nearby. Suicide, announced police. The president promised that “no stone would be left unturned” in finding answers. To demonstrate his commitment to the truth, he called in New Scotland Yard, which took four hundred depositions over four months and discovered that Ouko had been at odds with Nicholas Biwott, Moi’s widely feared right-hand man. The investigation also pointed to Hezekiah Oyugi, the secretary of internal security.

The head New Scotland Yard detective, John Troon, complained that he was not allowed to interview either of these two key suspects, who were briefly arrested and released for “lack of evidence.” Moi closed the investigation and refused to accept New Scotland Yard’s report unless Troon delivered it personally (a condition tough to meet, since Troon had already left the country). Moi appointed a commission of inquiry to take testimony, then dissolved it before it reached conclusions, sending the case back into the hands of the Kenyan police. By such methods, Moi could drag out an investigation forever. This would prove one of his signature moves. Memories would fade, and witnesses would vanish (within a few years after the killing, eleven people connected to the case, including Oyugi, would perish, some under strange circumstances).

The Ouko case would be etched in the national psyche as an illustration both of Moi’s ruthlessness and his wiliness. The U.S. ambassador, for his part, had no clear evidence of who had killed Ouko, or why, but “what did appear obvious was that the murderer was too highly placed and powerful to be apprehended,” Hempstone wrote.

It was a season of smoke and truncheons and proliferating dissent. Activists and lawyers launched a group called the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD). Moi rounded up dozens of opposition figures; police fired on protesters and raided an Anglican cathedral where they sought sanctuary. The country’s seventeen Roman Catholic bishops—representing Kenya’s largest Christian group—issued a pastoral letter denouncing the ruling party’s “unlimited authority,” and complained that “the least sign of dissent” was deemed subversion. Mild as this seemed, it represented relatively bold language for the cautious bishops. In late summer, a milk truck plowed into a car carrying an Anglican bishop named Alexander Muge, who had denounced corruption and land grabbing by unnamed regime potentates; a parliamentary commission ruled it “death by misadventure,” a verdict tough for many Kenyans to embrace. Moi’s labor minister had recently warned that Muge would “see fire and may not leave alive” if he strayed into his district.

Though Kenya remained the largest recipient of U.S. assistance in sub-Saharan Africa—it had received $35 million the year before in economic aid and another $11 million in military aid—American congressional leaders now urged a freeze. With the Marxist menace dead, Moi’s carte blanche had been yanked.

One day, the phone rang on Charles Mbuthi Gathenji’s desk. The man on the other end was a reporter for the state-run television station. He wanted to know the lawyer’s views on a recent controversy: The new chairman of the Kenyan Law Society, Paul Muite, was using his platform to denounce the president and call for reforms. Pro-government lawyers, for their part, had decried such “meddling” in politics.

Where did Mr. Gathenji stand?

He saw nothing wrong with Muite’s remarks, he said; they reflected the sentiments of a good portion of Kenya’s legal community, and nobody called it political meddling when lawyers praised Moi.

Gathenji hung up. Soon, he learned that his statement had made the nightly news. He realized that he’d been incautious. He knew this even before the letter came in the mail demanding payment for back taxes he supposedly owed, equivalent to more than six thousand U.S. dollars. He had ten days to pay, or his home would be seized. He knew other lawyers were getting similar letters. He called his accountant. Numbers were examined. He did owe money—about a fourth of the figure claimed. He paid up. He didn’t want to give the government any excuse to harass him.

Now he understood the reason for the reporter’s call. As dissent grew bolder, Moi wanted to know who was on his side.

MEANWHILE, IN KISIILAND, Kaiser, already in his late fifties, was feeling the effects of age. He described himself as “the chap who never got malaria for 20 years”—he’d been able to banish the early symptoms with a course of chloroquine—but in early 1990 the disease sent him to the hospital for a five-day course of quinine, incapacitated him completely for three days afterward, and stripped twenty pounds from his frame. “Malaria is no longer a minor nuisance & from now on wherever I go the net goes along,” he wrote. Soon he was racing around on his Honda motorbike—a piki-piki in Swahili—joking, “I use a motorcycle every day but at a sedate & dignified pace such as befits my age & position.” There had been some bad spills in recent years. Once, as he rode after dark, the blinding light from an oncoming bus sent him off the tarmac, and a sharp edge of asphalt opened a big gash in his shin. Another time, doing forty as he headed down a narrow gravel road to a sick call, he swerved to avoid a cow, breaking his collarbone and two ribs. Alone on the empty country road, he’d been forced to pull himself to his feet and find his way to the hospital without fainting from the pain.

The culture of corruption was making itself felt at every level. To repair his motorcycle meant paying a 200 percent bribe for the spare parts. The corrosion of the rule of law was increasingly painful and personal. That March, he learned that a friend named James Ongera had been working on his farm when three agents of the General Services Unit attacked him, for reasons that were unclear. His spine was broken, and his body was dragged to the Masai border and mutilated, apparently to convince the Kisii that the Masai had been responsible. The family brought suit against the three agents; the courts threw it out.

“There are almost daily murders in the Nyangusu area and the real culprits are the various government officials who use the army and police to drive out settlers in Masailand so that the land can then be grabbed and sold for huge profits,” Kaiser wrote in the summer of 1991. He added that his bishop, Tiberius Mugendi, now in his early seventies, “looks old & worn out and I suppose it is no wonder considering the chaos of his ministry.” Kaiser’s own energy was ebbing. Even a proud man had to concede the toll. A year would pass without a hunting excursion, apparently a record hiatus. “I have quite a bit of building to do in finishing up the convent & it poops me out in a hurry; in a few years I’ll have to find a rocking chair,” he wrote. Reminders of his mortality sometimes seemed to ambush him. Looking at himself, he glimpsed a reflection of his father, Arnold, who had died five years back. “I got a haircut a week ago & the guy had a mirror in front & another one in back & so I could see him trimming the back of my neck & I said, ‘Hey, that’s not John that’s Arnold Kaiser.’ Look at that grey hair & the wrinkles in the neck; it was a shock.”

An avid newspaper reader and BBC listener, he was closely following the unfolding political drama. International donors kept turning the screws on Moi’s increasingly desperate and beleaguered regime. The United States slashed nearly a quarter of its assistance, including fifteen million dollars in military help. In November 1991, an array of Western benefactors voted to suspend World Bank aid until Moi embraced democracy and curbed corruption.

Considering foreign aid comprised 30 percent of the national budget, this was no small blow. Days later, Moi hastily assembled party delegates at a Nairobi sports stadium and stunned them with an announcement. He would rescind Section 2A of the constitution, which had made Kenya a de jure one-party state nine years earlier.

He made it clear that the West was forcing his hand. “Tribal roots go much deeper than the shallow flower of democracy,” he would say. “That is something the West failed to understand. I’m not against multipartyism but I am unsure about the maturity of the country’s politics.”

What followed fulfilled his warning—or, as many understood it, his threat—that in an ethnically fractured nation, democracy would lead to bloodshed.

Facing ruin, he sought insurance in the usual playbook: the exacerbation of ethnic antipathies. To ensure party supremacy, militias descended on opposition strongholds, purging rival voters from areas where they were registered.

Village after village erupted in flames; within several years, more than 1,000 people would be killed and 300,000 displaced. Moi banned public rallies and sent helmeted agents plowing into defiant crowds on horseback and on foot, firing tear gas, swinging truncheons and pickax handles. By early 1992, even Kenya’s cautious Catholic bishops were uniting to accuse the government of complicity in the brutality. Regime hard-liners publicly urged the eviction of groups that had settled in the Rift Valley after independence. The Kikuyus were “foreigners” there, and the land they’d occupied for decades constituted madoadoa, or “black spots,” on the map: they needed to be erased.