In his autobiography The Flame of Freedom, Raila Odinga says he played
only a “peripheral role” in the attempted coup designed by then Kenya
Air Force officers to depose President Moi
. PHOTO | AFP
By The Citizen Correspondent
Posted Tuesday, October 8 2013 at 00:00
Posted Tuesday, October 8 2013 at 00:00
In Summary
Nairobi. Raila Odinga was tortured and held in horrid conditions after the aborted 1982 coup.
He says in his autobiography The Flame of Freedom
that he played only a “peripheral role” in the attempted coup designed
by then Kenya Air Force officers to depose President Moi.
He would be detained again in 1989 and 1991 but his detention from 1982, following the attempted coup, lasted nearly six years.
He says of his role in the failed coup: “...we had
been quietly engaged in operations designed to educate and mobilise the
people in order to bring about the necessary and desired changes in our
society — not through violence but through popular mass action. The
full explanation of our efforts to bring about popular change will have
to wait for another, freer, time in our country’s history”.
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, Mr 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 them. 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 a 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 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 court 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.
SOURCE: THE CITIZEN
SOURCE: THE CITIZEN
