You read this and you realise he is one in a billion;My hero Raila Amolo Odinga.
As shackled as ever
He refers
to Raila Odinga: An Enigma in Kenyan Politics, a book by Nigerian author
Babafemi Badejo published seven years ago, and says that what was said
about his role in the coup in that book touched off what he considers
inordinate umbrage.
“The publication of a biography of
me in 2006, where the writer intimated a peripheral role for me in the
coup attempt, caused a vindictive outcry — indicating that freedom of
speech is, at the time I tell this, my story, as shackled as ever in our
country,” he writes.
He then narrates where he was and
what he was doing on August 1, 1982, the morning of the coup attempt.
He says he was at a friend’s house in Parklands from where he followed
the updates broadcast on KBC (then Voice of Kenya) radio.
On
August 11, he was picked up from Prof Oki Ooko Ombaka’s house in
Caledonia, Nairobi, by officers led there by his driver, whom they had
picked up at Mr Odinga’s house in Kileleshwa.
What
followed were days of physical and psychological torture at the hands of
the Special Branch in their offices on University Way, across the road
from Central Police Station, and later at Muthangari Police Station, GSU
and CID headquarters.
Mr Odinga recalls the torture
meted out by an officer of the Special Branch named Josiah Kipkurui Rono
and his team, who were determined to extract from him a confession of
what he knew about the coup attempt.
Mr Odinga refused to give in.
He
says his adamant position that he knew nothing about the coup attempt
enraged Mr Rono, who broke off the leg of a wooden table and slammed it
repeatedly on to Mr Odinga’s head and shoulders.
“The
blows to my head dazed me and I fell to the floor, and as I lay there,
Rono and the others jumped on my chest and my genitals.
Through
the blinding pain, I heard them cock their guns, then Rono’s voice: I
was either going to speak and tell the truth or I was dead meat. I
waited for the end… But it did not come,” he writes.
The
beating stopped and Mr Odinga was returned to the cells. For the next
few days, he describes agonising torture — including jail in cold
water-logged cells, at the hands of the Special Branch. He would attempt
to sleep by leaning on the wall but soon the chilling cold — his
sweater and shoes had been taken away — would awaken him.
“That is when I learned how long the night is,” he writes.
When
he was later moved to the GSU headquarters, Mr Odinga would learn that
he had been incarcerated with the dean of the faculty of Engineering at
the University of Nairobi, Prof Alfred Otieno, and with Mr Otieno
Mak’Onyango, then assistant managing editor of the Sunday Standard.
The
interrogations continued and, to demonstrate the gravity of the matter,
the then Commissioner of Police, Mr Ben Gethi, came in person to
question Mr Odinga.
The author says that Mr Gethi
appeared to have had too much to drink and was “disgustingly” chewing
away on a roasted goat leg. He ordered the prisoner to write all he knew
about the coup attempt.
Mr Odinga slowly wrote out a statement,
drawn from a rumour he had heard implicating the then Attorney General,
Charles Njonjo, in the coup attempt. An angry Mr Gethi, who was Mr
Njonjo’s friend, tore up the statement and demanded another. When he
realised that Mr Odinga’s story was not changing, he left.
In
the dramatic fashion that characterised the Moi regime, Mr Gethi was
sacked two days after that interrogation and was himself detained for 10
months.
Mr Odinga would write more statements in the
hands of different interrogators, until six weeks later, when the State
decided it was ready to proceed with the case against him and Prof
Otieno and Mr Mak’Onyango.
The charges were served to
their defence lawyers and the suspects were remanded in custody to await
their trial and subsequent fate.
“Remand was a rude
awakening,” writes Mr Odinga. The suspects were issued with uniforms
that were old and torn, especially between the legs, as part of a
psychological scheme to humiliate the suspects. Their diet consisted of
no more than half-cooked ugali and what Mr Odinga describes as
“vegetable water with a few limp leaves floating around”.
They
were not allowed to see anyone or talk among themselves and the
uniforms they wore had a big ‘C’ printed across the front, to indicate
that they were charged with capital offences punishable by death.
They
each stayed in solitary confinement in cells with hardly any sunlight
and were issued with one blanket to sleep on and another with which to
cover themselves. The lightbulb screwed into the ceiling high above
burned 24 hours day.
They would be escorted twice a day to the
toilets and back, individually so that they saw and spoke to no one. The
warders spied on each other to ensure that no one helped the prisoners
to break the rules.
The three men spent two weeks on remand before
they were allowed to have a shower. “The fact that we were on remand
and, under the law, presumed innocent, mattered not at all,” Mr Odinga
writes.
He captures the humdrum tedium of life in remand, which he calls the “endless sameness of the daily routine”.
“We were continually counted to make sure we had not absconded – counting, counting, counting, all day long. It never ceased.”
Engaging
in risky adventures, they designed ways of writing notes to their
relatives on the outside, concealing them in their socks or under their
tongues, or in other other ingenious ways, with anyone going outside for
a court appearance being a contraband courier.
Smokers,
writes Mr Odinga, went to extreme lengths to smuggle in cigarettes. He
says that, from what he saw, had he been a smoker, he would have quit
rather than practise such desperation.
After the warders had gone to
their stations at night, the remandees would shout to inmates in
neighbouring cells, and in this way Mr Odinga discovered that some of
those locked up nearby were Kenya Air Force men who had been arrested
over the coup attempt and who faced courts martial for treason.
These
prisoners firmly believed in their action against dictatorship and
corruption, and they were willing to die for it. Mr Odinga writes that
many of them were sentenced to death and that “It was terrible –
terrible and heart-breaking.
“They would be taken to
court in the morning and would return in the afternoon to tell us
quietly that they had been sentenced to death. A few were acquitted and a
few imprisoned but many paid the ultimate price.”
Finally the day came in January 1983 for Mr Odinga to face 13 charges in relation to the abortive coup of August 1, 1982.
The
trial was then delayed and postponed by the prosecution several times,
while Mr Odinga’s relatives and friends worked to set up for him the
best defence team they could.
The day of the trial was finally set for March 24, 1983.
The prosecution was led by lawyer Sharad Rao (now chairman of the Judges and Magistrates Vetting Board).
Suddenly,
the day before the trial was due to begin, Mr Odinga and his two
co-accused were asked to collect all their belongings from their jail
cells. They were driven to the courts and taken before the then Chief
Justice, Sir James Wicks.
Mr Rao announced that he had
orders from the Attorney-General to enter a nolle prosequi – that the
State no longer wished to prosecute the three.
What
followed was dramatic. The three men were released and all the papers
were signed, but police officers never left their sides, and as the
three exited the court they were bundled into a waiting Special Branch
vehicle. The thought of detention immediately crossed Mr Odinga’s mind.
They
were driven via a roundabout route to Langata Police Station. At day’s
end, they were taken to the Nairobi area police headquarters, where the
then provincial police chief, Philip Kilonzo, served them with detention
orders signed by then internal security minister, Justus Ole Tipis.
“We
three detainees arrived at Kamiti about midnight, back where we had
started the day – but now we had a new home: the isolation block, the
detention camp, the prison within a prison. The next phase of the
struggle had begun,” writes Mr Odinga.
He would remain
in detention without trial, which was lawful at the time, until February
5, 1988, when he was dramatically released by President Moi.
He
would survive the solitude by exercising when he could and reading
numerous books that his wife Ida sent him (but which had first to be
censored by the authorities). He writes that he extensively studied the
Bible, the Koran and other religious material, in addition to numerous
other types of books, any kind, he could lay his hands on.
He
would also do some gardening in the prison plot when the authorities
allowed, growing different vegetables. He would serve in Kamiti,
Manyani, Naivasha and Shimo la Tewa prisons, all of which had gained
brutish notoriety since colonial days.
Mr Odinga’s
mother died while he was in detention and he would learn of this and of
other deaths of relatives painfully, sometimes months after the event,
and he would never be allowed out to attend their funerals, a grim
testament to the torture meted out by the regime of the day."
The book is to be released on Sunday 6th October 2013.This is a must read for everyone.
Research also from;
http://mobile.nation.co.ke/News/-I-was-kicked-in-the-seat-of-my-pants-/-/1950946/2018326/-/format/xhtml/-/152n6qb/-/index.html
