On the Mob Justice Mentality of Progressive Kenyans

Some Reflections on Witch- Hunting by Onyango Oloo in Nairobi


There are several things I want to ponder in this posting, but let me kick things off with a real story from the mid-1990s.

It is early December 1994 and a young man- actually he is thirty years old-is loitering around the Bus Stand in the western Kenyan town of Kisumu.

He is having a furious conversation-with himself.

Amidst the usual hustle and bustle of this crowded milieu, a commotion breaks out behind him.

Oblivious to all this cacophony, he continues chattering away in his very voluble, somewhat internal monologue.

"Mwizi huyo! Mwizo huyo!" are the strident shouts of a baying crowd closing in on a suspected pick pocket frantically dashing for dear life, knowing full well what will befall him should his pursuers overtake him and overwhelm him.

In a split second he makes a decision that diverts the crowd and spares him his life at least for today.

Spying the disturbed individual talking to himself ahead of him, the suspect catches a brain wave, switching from hunted to hunter.

He now jabs an accusing finger at the person in front of him:

"Ndio huyu! Ndio huyu! Ua! Maliza yeye!"

He then deftly melts into the nearby market stalls.

Meanwhile the frothing, baying mob catch up with who they are convinced is the suspect- the disturbed young man jabbering and yammering to himself.

They accost the man who is quite bewildered by the sudden hostility from a crowd he had not noticed before.

Blows rain down on him accompanied by kicks.

Somebody picks up a rock and tries to smash it over his head.

Blood is oozing from all over.

He is crying for mercy but the vengful crowd must mete out their crude street justice.

Suddenly, luckily, a trio of policemen on patrol happen on the bloody lynching ceremony.

They have to struggle to wrestle the bloodied and maimed man from the screeching wild eyed mob executioners before bundling him onto a Land Rover packed not too far away.


Pause.

That thirty year old man was called Joseph Ochieng'.

He had grown up in Mombasa before relocating to Kisumu with his siblings- his younger brothers Washington and Otieno and his three sisters Beatrice, Sarah and Ruth.

After his arrest, the police took him to the station and charged him with committing violent robbery, known in prison argot as "Stroke Two" after section 296 (2) of the Criminal Procedure Code with a mandatory sentence of death by hanging.

By the time his siblings found him, after scouring the hospitals, morgues and other macabre places, the cops had broken his jaw and several of his ribs, leaving him confined in a wheel chair.

The outraged siblings produced a hefty sheaf of his medical records to attest to his history of mental health problems. They found that he had been deliberately starved and denied urgent medical attention.

They made frantic efforts to release him from custody and get a doctor to treat him.

It was too late.

On Friday December 9, 1994, he breathed his last- ironically exactly fourteen years after his mother had died of breast cancer in Mombasa.

That young man was also my brother, the third oldest in our family of eight after me and my younger sister Janet who is currently domiciled in Durban, South Africa.

From the above tale of woe, some of my readers can perhaps guess why I have a deep aversion for lynch mobs and their version of "street justice".

Incidentally, my brother's mental health difficulties started almost immediately after my incarceration in November 1982.

Given the paranoid conditions at the time, the Moi-KANU dictatorship fostered a climate of fear, silence and suspicion among the citizenry.

Anybody who sported a beard was a potential Marxist on his way to destablize the Nyayo regime in a clandestine nocturnal meeting stacked with dissidents in the pay of foreign masters.

It was illegal to own a copy of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book or any of the publications from Beijing.

Special Branch operatives and two bit informers infested every bar and street corner on the look out for Pambana distributors and Mwakenya recruits.

KANU louts like the late unlamented Shariff Nassir, Ezekiel Bargentuny, Mulu Mutisya, Okiki Amayo, JJ Kamotho and others had a field day parrotting their loyalty to Mtukufu Rais and singing KANU Tawala Tawala!

Then here was my brother, only four years younger than I, with a striking resemblance to his older brother and quite influenced by his radical ideas.

Something snapped after I was sent to Kamiti Maximum Security Prison for five years.

My brother started hearing voices in his head telling him that they were the Special Branch and that, he , Joseph Ochieng' Oloo MUST REPORT any "suscpicious activities" to the nearest police station.

And that is what he did, or rather, attempted to do.

In a very short while he was quite well known at Makupa and Central Police Stations in Mombasa with his "regular reports"of spying on suspicious Mwakenya characters who sold out his brother, Onyango Oloo (never mind the fact that I was jailed in 1982 a full three or four years BEFORE the emergence of Mwakenya).

What did the police do to him?

After ascertaining that he was mentally ill, they beat him mercilessly every time he ventured near the police station. Sometimes he was locked up.

There was a time when he was flung into the overcrowded Industrial Area Remand home where he was brutalized by the hardcore felons behind bars.

What happened to my brother?

All I know is that when I finally reached Mombasa on May 12, 1987 having been released from prison I could hardly recognize my own brother who was hyper, hardly sleeping, chain smoking and jabbering away at the speed of light over some incoherent things which were clear only to him.

Suddenly, a few days after I came home, he stopped smoking, started sleeping and became the old Ochieng that I had known.

The only thing was, he could not let me out of his sight,following me everywhere, asking me to tell him in detail what I had gone through all those years away from home.

He was quite lucid and was able to analyze political currents as if he had a post graduate degree in political science (he never ventured beyond high school).

To my born again sisters, this was a miracle from God.

I did not know what to make of this transformation.

When I was forced into exile four months later, I heard that he relapsed into his mental illness.

Earlier I had consulted the psychiatrist he was seeing, who told me that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and he was on a heavy dose of psychotropic prescription drugs.

My brother could rattle off to his doctor all the side effects of each pill he was on. Like me, Joseph read widely and did his own extensive research about anything that he was interested in.

Yes, this is the same Joseph Ochieng Oloo who died on December 9, 1994 a victim of mob justice, police brutality and official state neglect.

I was thinking about my brother a lot when I was reflecting on the vicious mob justice campaign to drive Ambassador Bethuel Kiplagat out of his job as Chair of the TJRC.

I thought about those former students of the "Other Airlift" , not the Mboya one which was to lead to the birth of the 44th US President but to the East bound airlift organized by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga taking Kenyan students to study medicine, engineering and other science oriented degrees in the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary and other socialist countries.

Do you know what happened to them after they came back armed with their degrees ready to serve their young nation?

Because of the Cold War hysteria and association with Odinga and the KPU, these young Kenyan professionals were BLACKLISTED.

Everywhere they went, they were turned away.

Dozens of them wasted away in Nairobi before being forced back to their rural homes, unemployed and unemployable. Some became lumpenized and drowned their considerable sorrows in kegs, drums and vats of changaa, busaa and other illicit brews.

Others committed suicide.

Some still linger on even today in the year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Ten, bitter, cynical raconteurs in the seedy bars of River Road in Nairobi reminiscing about the lives they could have led were it not for the vindictiveness of the Kenyatta dictatorship.

Fast forward a couple decades later and you accost remnants of the former Kenya Air Force.

Because of the 1982 attempted coup, hundreds were rounded up, herded to Naivaisha and Kamiti prison, horribly tortured before being sentenced to long prison terms.

The ones who were not convicted were nevertheless dismissed from their jobs.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many of these ex Kenya Air Force personnel- whether they had been to prison or not- found that they could not get a job anywhere despite the fact that the majority of them, in sharp contrast to their Kenya Army counterparts, were highly skilled in a number of highly competitive technical fields.

Again, their only crime was to have once belonged to an outfit that tried to threaten the Moi-KANU dictatorship.

Even some ex Kenyatta and Nairobi university lecturers found out after leaving detention and prison that they could not be absorbed back into ANY academic institution.

On the other side of the state repression were the dozens of Kenyans who organized quietely in underground and semi-clandestine conditions for a new dispensation in the country.

These are the ancestors of the contemporary civil society actors.

I remember when we were still locked up behind those massive penitentiary walls in the 1980s we-and here I mean specifically people like Maina wa Kinyatti,Oginga Ogego ( now Kenya's envoy to Washington), Mwandawiro Mghanga, Omondi K'abir and Opondo Kakendo (the latter two ex military)- we debated furiously on what we would do on Day Three of the Revolution, after we had taken over state power in Kenya (it is still a dream waiting to unfold dear readers) .

What would we do with the Mois, Njonjos, Oyugis, Mulu Mutisyas, Oloitiptips and Angaines?

Some like Ogego (yes the very same Peter who is today such an ardent sycophant of Kibaki) were too impatient with such cumbersome niceties like trials and courts:

" We will just take them outside and shoot them at City Stadium, kwani what are we waiting for?"

Some of us, reflecting on how the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutionaries had treated their prisoners of war and other reactionary elements insisted that

WE MUST BE TEN TIMES BETTER THAN OUR OUR OPPRESSORS WHO TORTURED US,WHO RUSHED US THROUGH KANGAROO COURTS ON TRUMPED UP CHARGES AND FLUNG US INTO FILTHY OVERCROWDED PRISONS WHERE WERE KEPT IN SOLITARY CONFINMENT.

For those readers who have been perplexed as to why a former political prisoner like Onyango Oloo is "defending" a senior former official of the Moi-KANU regime like Ambassador Kiplagat, the above paragraph in UPPER CASE provides a clue as to my motivation.

Comrades and friends, brothers and sisters in the civil society sector, especially those of you at the forefront of baying for Ambassador Kiplagat blood and possibly neck here are my questions to you:

1.Do you believe in due process?

2.Do you believe in natural justice?

3.Do you believe in presumption of innocence?

4.Do you believe in the right of an accused person to a free and fair trial?

5. Are you aware, or more properly,have you forgotten the long history of mob justice perpetrated against us?

6. Why are we using essentially the same tactics that were used against the Mau Mau, KPU, DTM, Mwakenya and everyone the state considered dangerous from the 1950s to the 1990s?

7. Ten years from now, how MANY OF YOU will look yourselves in the mirror and confidently say, we did the right thing over the Kiplagat Affair?

Do you remember the Njonjo Traitor Affair?

How different are you from those who orchestrated that elite conflict over who controls the neocolonial Kenyan state of the 1980s?

8. Where did you get the license to speak ON MY BEHALF without CONSULTING ME?

Who gave you the permission to speak on behalf of all Kenyans when we have not had that conversation?

9.Finally, after you have hanged, drawn and quartered Ambassador Kiplagat, will you then turn your NGO vengeance to alleged "quislings" "traitors" and "sell outs" like one ONYANGO OLOO?

Well in anticipation of your answer to Question Nine, I say:

BRING IT ON COMRADES!

Onyango Oloo
Nairobi, Kenya