By Daily Nation.
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, 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 autobiography, The Flame of Freedom, is currently being serialised in the
Daily Nation.
