Kenya’s chambers of shame

One afternoon in May 1986, Kamonye Manje, a senior lecturer at Kenya Science Teachers’ College, Nairobi, was called to the deputy principal’s office. Thinking it was routine business, he was instead met by four police officers, perhaps the same ones who had raided his home days earlier looking for ‘seditious” materials to prove that he was opposed to the Kenya Africa National Union (Kanu) government.

The officers asked Manje to accompany them to their offices ‘to ask a few questions”. They promised to return him to the college by 6pm. Little did the deputy principal realise that it would be years before Manje would again resurface in public.

On February 11 2003 Manje joined a sombre group — including prominent lawyers and politicians — as they toured a series of prison cells painted black or red and recalled, with tears running down their faces, the time that they had spent there.

Most, like Manje, had been unjustly accused of plotting to overthrow the former government through their alleged membership of a ‘secret organisation” called ‘Mwakenya”.

Bernard Njiinu, police commissioner from 1982 to 1988, has recently revealed that several officials in the former government, headed by former president Daniel arap Moi, led the Mwakenya crackdown following an abortive coup in August 1982.

Those who were alleged to have belonged to Mwakenya — and anyone who was openly critical of the Moi administration — were rounded up and taken to the cells located in the basement of Nyayo House, a government building in downtown Nairobi that houses several ministries. The 26th floor contained the interrogation room. Manje himself spent two weeks in what is now dubbed the ‘torture chambers”.

On that May afternoon the police officers took Manje to their station. At midnight a ‘special squad” of policemen beat him, blindfolded him, made him lie on his stomach in their car with a gun shoved in his back, and drove around for three hours before they entered a building. They removed Manje’s blindfold in the interrogation room, asked him questions about Mwakenya, repeatedly beat him, and finally took him to a cell in the basement.

While civil servants were renewing work permits and performing other clerical duties on the floor above, Manje endured unbearable abuse.

‘My cell was waterlogged,” he recalls. ‘There were times that they would blow in cold air or hot air … I was completely naked,” he says, adding that the skin would peel off his feet and he would lose his voice because of the dampness of the

cell. He would go for three days at a time without food and was beaten regularly.

The psychological torture was even worse. ‘They would tell me how they were going to deal with my family,” Manje says. ‘They would give me details of my little kids — how they were dropped off at school, their full names, the schools they attended.”

People detained in the cells would be forced to listen to the screams and cries for mercy from fellow inmates.

After two weeks of torture, Manje was forced to confess that he possessed a particular ‘seditious” document, and, at an after-hours kangaroo court, was sentenced to five years in prison.

Although the exact number of people tortured is unknown, human rights activists put the number at 2 000. About 250 people died.

Until recently discussion of the torture chambers was a taboo subject. Most Kenyans did not even know they existed. But following the December 30 2002 swearing in of the National Rainbow Coalition, ending 39 years of rule by Kanu, those who survived the torture came forward to tell their stories publicly.

Groups such as Release Political Prisoners (RPP), People Against Torture and the Kenya Human Rights Commission urged the new government to recognise the years of abuse by former government members — some of whom are still in government — who denied that the Nyayo House torture chambers existed.

‘They [the new regime] have accepted that there’s been torture,” explains Njoroge Wanguthi, RPP’s founding member and former chairman. ‘From then, we started agitating for the opening of these torture chambers to the public.”

In response, Minster of Justice and Correctional Affairs Kiraitu Murungi officially opened the Nyayo House cells, saying that they would be turned into a ‘national monument of shame”.

‘This is the first step towards the healing process,” says Wanguthi, who was tortured at Nyayo House for three weeks before being jailed for six years.

Several torture victims are now suing members of the past and present government who were involved in the torture. Manje himself has a case before the courts in which he is suing Trade and Industry Assistant Minister Petkay Miriti and Kanu MP Noah arap Too — both members of the current government — for instigating his torture.

Manje has also requested that Attorney General Amos Wako prosecute former Special Branch head James Kanyotu and the senior police officers involved in his torture.

Activists have successfully pressured the new government to take other measures to right the wrongs of the past. These include investigating Chief Justice Bernard Chunga, who victims say conducted the after-hours kangaroo courts, and setting up a ‘justice, truth, and reconciliation commission” to deal with the injustice of the torture, corruption, the politically instigated ‘tribal clashes” that rocked parts of the country in the 1990s, and other political and economic crimes.

Murungi and church and human rights groups are in discussion about when the commission will begin and how it will deal with the injustices.

‘Unconditional amnesties in Kenya are unpopular,” says Mwalimu Mati, deputy executive director of Transparency International: Kenya, which held a public forum at the end of March about the commission’s formation. ‘Kenyans want some sort of conditional amnesty.”

Mati said that there have been 27 truth and reconciliation commissions held around the world over the past decade or so and that ‘it’s only South Africa that offered blanket amnesties in return for confessions”.

However, it is widely felt that a truth process ‘may open up such a

divide in our country that could tear it apart”, says Mati.

This is largely because ‘there have only been two tribes [Kalenjin and Kikuyu] which have supplied heads of state. A process like this, incompetently managed, may ascribe blame to two particular communities and do we want to set the Kalenjin and Kikuyu up as the bad guys, or the good guys?”

Mati says the situation is compounded by the fact that there have been ‘patronage” governments based on family and ethnic lines. Churches are warning that the commission should not become a ‘witch-hunt”.

The commission probably will not be established until Kenya’s National Constitutional Conference, set to begin on April 28, completes its work of

reforming the country’s Constitution.

The priority, as Mati says, should be to ‘set up a constitutional arrangement that secures us against future abuses of power and then deal with the past later”.