To Gathenji, a portal into Moi’s nature—a suggestion of his tactics and how he would employ them—came in 1983 when he destroyed his ambitious attorney general, Charles Njonjo. Moi accused him of being a traitor in thrall to a treacherous foreign power attempting to overthrow the government of Kenya, stripped him of his power, and consigned him to political limbo. He was allowed to live, technically a free man, but as a nonentity. It was a lesson to potential rivals not to climb too high.
Gathenji could sense the president losing his mind. He watched as Moi systematically purged Kikuyus from positions of power. Journalists who asked questions found themselves in lockup. In one case that particularly infuriated Gathenji, he represented a woman who had been charged with possessing Beyond, an Anglican church magazine banned for its critical remarks about the regime. It had been found in her coffee table, and she was taken into custody with her newborn baby in her arms. He argued she hadn’t known the magazine was there; people were known to work out grudges by planting a banned publication on an enemy’s premises. The case was dismissed. Police had lost their interest in it anyway; it had been enough to scare the woman. That was the dynamic of dictatorship. To create an all-encompassing chill, you needed to lock up only a few.
“Foreign devils” and Marxists, said to be plotting constantly against the nation, became the convenient pretext Moi trundled out to crush enemies. “Bearded people”—intellectuals—were deemed suspect in their loyalties. Members of Amnesty International became “agents of imperialists” after they criticized his human rights record. He employed a colonial law called the Public Order Act, which forbade nine or more Kenyans from assembling without a government permit. As his search for enemies intensified, Moi dispatched people to “water rooms” under a Nairobi high rise called Nyayo House, where they were forced to stand in excrement-filled water for days. Moi expanded police detention powers so that those accused of capital crimes, such as sedition, could be held for two weeks without a hearing, ample time for torture squads to extract confessions. Scores of such prisoners were hauled before judges who accepted their guilty pleas and handed out four- or five-year sentences.
Moi carried a silver-inlaid ivory mace and wore a rosebud in the lapel of his Saville Row suits. With his claim on legitimate authority so flimsy, he mastered the tactics of large-scale bribery and intimidation. He made a practice of wholesale land stealing, using vast tracts of seized public land as payment to ministers and military officers; this was meant as a hedge against another attempted coup. He handed out stacks of cash to State House visitors and to the masses he met across the country during rounds in his blue open-topped Mercedes.
“I would like ministers, assistant ministers, and others to sing like a parrot after me,” Moi said. “That is how we can progress.” His subordinates vied to outdo one another in cringing sycophancy, their speeches hailing his mastery of foreign and domestic affairs, his deep compassion—yes, one declared, even the fish of the sea bowed before the Father of the Country. Parliament passed a law declaring that only Moi could possess the title of president, in any realm. Ordinary souls who ran charities and businesses would have to content themselves with the title of chairman. To his worshipers, he was “the Giraffe,” an admiring nod both to his height and farsightedness, or “the Glorious.”
“Kenya is a one-man state, and that man is the president,” Smith Hempstone, the former U.S. ambassador to Kenya, wrote in his memoir, Rogue Ambassador.
Paranoid Moi was, but also skilled at shuffling and reshuffling his underlings to keep them forever off balance. “You know, a balloon is a very small thing. But I can pump it up to such an extent that it will be big and look very important,” he said. “All you need to make it small again is to prick it with a needle.” Under his command were more than one hundred state-owned companies, or parastatals, that did business only with “patriotic” firms; the slightest dissent meant one’s contracts evaporated. The British system of pith-helmeted chiefs was gone, supplanted by a vast network of chiefs and subchiefs that provided Moi with intelligence and control all the way to the village level.
The Soviet foothold in Angola and Ethiopia seemed, to American eyes, a harbinger of continental Communist designs, and Moi reaped massive U.S. aid by positioning his country as “a pro-Western, free-market island of stability in the midst of a roiling sea of Marxist chaos,” Hempstone would write. “Moi’s one-party kleptocracy might not be a particularly pretty boat, but it was not to be rocked.”
Here and there, Kenyan clergymen raised their voices, with harsh results. After a Presbyterian minister named Timothy Njoya called for “dissidents, malcontents, critics, fugitives and anyone with a grievance” to speak out, Moi swiftly summoned Protestant and Catholic leaders to State House to warn against such “subversive” sermons. Njoya was defrocked but won back his position. During marches for constitutional reform, he endured bayonet-wielding soldiers, beatings, tear gas, and jail. Once, attackers doused his parish house with gasoline and set it ablaze. He seemed to feel that it would have been worse if the president had not been a churchgoing man. “Moi’s Christianity is our protection,” he said. “That’s our secret as pastors in Kenya.”
Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi became one of Africa’s longest-reigning dictators. Photograph by Francine Orr. Copyright 2003, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.
Under Moi, brutality walked hand in hand with farce. When Ngugi wa Thiong’o published the novel Matigari in 1986, Moi ordered the arrest of its fictional hero after receiving reports that “peasants in Central Kenya were talking about a man called Matigari who was going round the country demanding truth and justice,” Ngugi would write. The dictator was forced to settle for confiscating the books.
After the National Council of Churches, a mainstream Protestant body, objected to the abolition of secret balloting, Moi accused an Oregon-based missionary group, which had been digging water wells in northwestern Kenya, of plotting against the government. Police confiscated pellet guns the missionaries used to fend off snakes, a cache of uniforms sewn for local students, and shortwave radios used to communicate in a remote region without telephone service. These, by the state’s account, were armaments, military uniforms, and sophisticated communications equipment, all intended to “cause chaos,” Moi said, adding this complaint: “Why don’t they use their resources to build churches and bring in related things—like Bibles?” He later deported seven American missionaries accused of “sabotage and destabilization.” The evidence: a sloppily fabricated letter revealing their scheme to overthrow his government in collaboration with the Ku Klux Klan.
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