Kenyans are their distinctive selves, said Wahome Mutahi in his delightfully humorous book How to be a Kenyan: “They still defy warnings, imagine that there is nothing like a natural death and take rumours to be truer than the truth”.
Funny but true, although we would expect no less from the man whose weekly ‘Whispers’ column took a wry look at the trials and tribulations of Kenyan life for over a decade before his untimely but natural death in 2003.
There is however a less affectionate take on the Kenyan readiness to accept rumour over fact and the national fixation with “mysterious deaths”.
The elaboration of stories from few facts to fanciful conspiracy theory happens elsewhere (for example, the assassination of President Kennedy, or the death of Princess Diana) but when it comes to “mystery deaths” stories, Kenya is in a league of its own.
SOWING THE SEEDS OF SUSPICION
In April 2013 Senator Mutula Kilonzo (aged 64) was found dead at his Maanzoni ranch in Machakos County. In November last year Senator Otieno Kajwang (aged 55) died at his house in Runda. And in the early hours of January 4 this year, 41-year-old Fidel Odinga, son of ODM leader Raila Odinga, died at his home in Karen.
I do not know how Senators Kilonzo and Kajwang died, or Fidel Odinga, but others were quick to sow the seeds of suspicion which, this being Kenya, quickly grew into a veritable flowing shrub of “mysterious death” theories.
Kethi Kilonzo, the daughter of the late Senator Mutula Kilonzo, speaking at the funeral of Fidel Odinga, reportedly claimed that there were ‘poachers targeting Cord lions’, naming her father Mutula Kilonzo, Senator Kajwang and Fidel Odinga as the ‘lions felled’ by the ‘poachers’.
This is dangerous. In Kenya we know the consequences of post-election violence but it requires the presence of combustible material to burst into flames, such as the ill-founded grievances politicians and activists stoke up in communities which can ultimately lead to the people with the pangas and the petrol bombs running amok.
UNSOLVED MURDERS
Kenya regrettably has a history of unsolved murders of leading politicians — Tom Mboya, JM Kariuki and Dr Robert Ouko being prominent among them — usually referred to as “political assassinations” that have become part of the Kenya story to almost mythological levels.
Having spent some time, however, working on a book on the subject of the murder of Dr Robert Ouko, Kenya’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, who died 25 years ago this month, and researching through thousands of pages of evidence and interviewing witnesses, I can attest that Kenya’s “mysterious death” syndrome, has helped to hide the truth as to how and why he was murdered.
Forensic evidence and eye witness testimony proved that Dr Robert Ouko was murdered with a single shot to the head and his body set on fire using diesel fuel at the foot of Got Alila Hill, 2.8km from his Koru farm on the morning of February 13, 1990. He was killed where his body was found, not killed at State House and not on any other day.
The two main possible motives cited by the British New Scotland Yard Detective, John Troon, for Ouko’s murder, that there had been some sort of ‘row’ between Dr Ouko and other members of a Kenyan delegation to Washington just prior to his death, or that Ouko was working on a ‘corruption report’ over the Kisumu Molasses Project, have been be proved to be untrue.
RUMOUR, HEARSAY AND DUBIOUS TESTIMONY
Many people knew this a quarter of a century ago but their testimony and the facts flew in the face of what rapidly became part of the “mysterious death” scenario as rumour and “hearsay” once again became truer than the truth, based on “tenuous” evidence from highly dubious sources.
The principal source of the Kisumu Molasses Project corruption theory, for example, was a German-Swiss woman Marianne Briner-Mattern who was never able to substantiate her claim and never faced cross-examination.
Briner-Mattern went on to change her testimony, alleging that the real reason for Dr Ouko’s murder was that he had found out about the provision of Ugandan prostitutes to President Moi. She claimed too to have had an affair with Moi. Later still she made public and lurid allegations against TV presenter Jeff Koinange.
She also claimed to have ‘scuttled’ Raila Odinga’s chances of becoming Kenya’s president in 2002. Raila reportedly told a newspaper: “If that is what she is saying then her entire story may be fake.”
WITNESSES ‘MYSTERIOUSLY’ DEAD?
The Ouko murder story has also led to ludicrous “mysterious deaths” of witnesses stories that defy rational and objective study.
In March 2005, Gor Sungu, the chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee tasked to investigate the murder of Dr Robert Ouko was quoted as saying: “More than 100 key witnesses linked to the unresolved murder have also died in the past 15 years”. His report listed 18.
One of those was Dr Iain West, the British pathologist who accompanied the New Scotland Yard team. West actually died aged 57 of an aggressive cancer in a UK hospital in July 2001, over 11 years after Ouko’s murder.
The PSC report (which was never accepted by Parliament, or indeed several of those who served on the Committee) also included former Commissioner of Police Philip Kilonzo as a witness “who had died mysteriously”. Kilonzo, aged 60, died seven years after the Ouko murder. He collapsed in a bar having ordered a kilo of meat to be prepared for his lunch. Earlier in the day he had been jogging. After his collapse it took three men, including his bodyguard, to carry him to the ambulance. Kilonzo died of a heart attack.
The teenage herdsboy, Shikuku, who initially found Dr Ouko’s burning body on the morning of February 13, 1990, was said by more than one ‘journalist’ to have mysteriously disappeared straight after he had told the Kenyan and British police what he had seen. In fact he gave the same testimony a year later to the Gicheru Commission of Inquiry and was positively identified by his former employer as being alive a few years later.
Dr Ouko’s maid, Selina Were, the witness who said she saw a “white vehicle” at Ouko’s Koru farm gate in the early hours of the day he disappeared, was said by to have died many years ago, taking her secrets to the grave. In fact she died in 2012, over 22 years after Ouko’s murder. Her family held a press conference. They begged the media not to report her death as being mysterious. She was 68, they said, a year before she had been bitten by a snake and had never recovered. Two years later the TJRC report listed her under “mysterious deaths”.
OUKO’S REAL KILLERS REMAIN FREE
Why did no one ask the question, “Why would you kill these witnesses?”
Why kill the British pathologist after he had made his report and later given his testimony at the trial of Jonah Anguka? Why kill the Police Commissioner seven years after Ouko’s murder? Why kill the herdsboy who initially found Ouko’s body after he had given his testimony at least three times? Why kill Ouko’s maid 22 years after his death and according to Professors Odhiambo and Cohen (authors of ‘The Risks of Knowledge’) after her testimony had been given or reported at least 29 times? You wouldn’t and they weren’t.
What is mysterious about the Ouko witnesses “mysterious deaths” story is that it was ever told this way. The vast majority of those in any way linked to the story are still alive, including most of the central characters.
Kenya’s “mysterious deaths’ syndrome has, in part, led to a quarter of a century of chasing the wrong culprits for Dr Robert Ouko’s murder and allowed his real killers to remain free and at large.