It's Our Turn to Eat (17 page)

But in Kenya, where Opus Dei first set foot in 1958, the organisation has made little effort to cover its tracks. Since the British colonial administration traditionally left education to the churches, whether the White Fathers, the Methodists or the Scottish Presbyterians, few eyebrows were raised when Opus Dei set about opening educational establishments in Nairobi. Today it runs several private schools and has won an official charter for Strathmore University, a neat grey-stone college built in the middle of a tatty housing estate. Hoping to transform Kenya by churning out generations of disciplined professionals, Opus Dei specialises in courses in accountancy, business studies, technology and management–dry disciplines suited not to the country's future political movers and shakers, but to the technocrats who help those with crowd-pulling talents realise their dreams. What more perfect fit could there be than the Githongo family?

John began attending Hodari Boys, an after-school club organised by Opus Dei. It offered trekking, cycling and camping holidays to energetic youngsters, preaching a practical message of self-discipline and moderation. For the Opus Dei clergymen who ran Hodari Boys, guzzling four cans of Coca-Cola on a hot day was no better than getting swinishly drunk: both actions showed a lack of self-control. John never became a member of Opus Dei or signed up as a ‘cooperator'–one of those who help the organisation via charitable donations or prayer. But when he spoke as a guest lecturer at Strathmore University many years later, he attributed his working methods to his time at Hodari Boys, which he said had taught him how to plan and prioritise. The source of those little black notebooks in which John recorded his days, transcribed important conversations and listed tasks to be completed becomes clear. It was at this age that he set about meticulously recording the details of his existence. It was almost as though, in some strange form of predestination, he began in childhood honing the skills, the compulsive keeping of accounts, that the Anglo Leasing affair would demand of him in later life. After the years of adolescent searching, Opus Dei bestowed the sense of moral order his kaleidoscopic personality craved.

If the intensity of Mrs Githongo's religious beliefs created a divide between the family and other members of the Karen set, so did another family peculiarity: Joe did not drink. Kenyan socialising, like its British equivalent, rotates around alcohol. Joe's teetotal habits made him a bit of an odd man out, an impression furthered by his lack of interest in golf, that obsession of the Kenyan elite. Joe certainly belonged to the Karen Country Club–he could hardly afford not to, given the networking his job demanded–but he was never one to prop up the bar over a clinking collection of Tusker bottles. He had attended the same school as Kibaki, Mary had been taught at nursing training college by Kibaki's wife, and the couple's political affiliations were clear, with Joe hosting several Democratic Party fundraisers on the villa's front lawn in the run-up to the 2002 elections. But John's siblings nonetheless remember an isolationism that seemed to filter down from the head of the family. ‘My dad is a
single child, a loner, not a social person,' says Mugo. ‘People have considered the Githongos to be snobbish.' At evenings with other successful Kikuyu families, the Githongos were always the first to leave. Inside the villa's walls, it was easy for the family to feel like a universe unto itself.

When the time came to head for university, John once again benefited from advantages his farming ancestors in rural Kiambu could barely have imagined. His parents offered to fund a course in Britain: a BA in Economics and Philosophy at the University of Wales in Swansea. The Githongos' faith in the value of a Western education was absolute, and each child would acquire at least part of their education abroad. The economics part of John's course left him sceptical, but philosophy was another matter. He gobbled up Plato and Socrates, Leibnitz and Descartes, Russell and Wittgenstein.

Those three years in Wales brought home to John, just as St Mary's had done, the realisation that the world extended far beyond Kenya's parochial horizons. But he also became aware that not everyone responded as he did to this widening of perspectives. Student life in rainy Wales could be grim and lonely. For his fellow Kenyans, amongst whom the Kikuyu predominated, homesickness brought out an ethnic chauvinism John had not glimpsed before, a nervous retreat into the bunker of the tribe. ‘Being outside Kenya is the moment where you discover your African roots.' He had gone through a phase of intense interest in Kikuyu culture, dragging Mugo off to listen to ‘one-man guitar' performers from Central Province, whose plaintive melodies are East Africa's version of country and western. Possessed of a keen ear, John spoke far better Gikuyu than many of his contemporaries, a Gikuyu picked up listening to his grandparents on the
shamba
. But he was too astute not to notice the negative aspects of this ethnic nostalgia. Noting the way the various ethnic cliques in the Kenyan diaspora sniped at each other, the jokes–supposedly ironic–about the need for the House of Mumbi to stick together, John pondered just how Kikuyu he felt, and whether such bonding was quite the positive experience his fellow students seemed to believe.

John returned to Kenya in 1987 to face the full onslaught of paternal expectation. Joe Githongo had never made a secret of the fact that his ultimate ambition was to turn ‘Githongo & Company' into ‘Githongo & Sons', and as the eldest son, the duty fell to John. He tried. But mathematics had never been his strong point. And there is no fussier taskmaster than the ageing founder of a family business, aware his powers are fading, yet constitutionally incapable of handing over the reins. ‘It's a nightmare working with an entrepreneur who is past his creative peak. My father wanted to bequeath the firm to a loyal son, but once you got into the office you were expected never to disagree with him,' recalls Gitau. There were noisy clashes, quarrels, with Joe sacking both John and Gitau, only to take them on again. ‘John worked for him about three years, but he hated accounts.' It was a defection that left his father bitterly wounded. In the West, a bright graduate's decision to turn his back on a family firm and try his luck in a huge jobs market causes little surprise. In Africa, where opportunities are so much more limited, the choice astounds. John's failure to respect his father's wishes constituted the first in a series of jarring acts of revolt. ‘It was always clear to me he was a renegade,' a Kenyan journalist friend once commented. ‘I couldn't understand why others were surprised. I mean, he refused to join the family firm, didn't he?'

It might seem quixotic that at almost the same time as he was chafing at his father's heavy paternal hand, John should briefly sign up as a police reservist, the force's youngest. But for John, it was a perfect way of satisfying his inquisitiveness about his own society. At the weekends he would borrow his mother's car, pick up two armed police officers and drive at night into parts of Nairobi where the criminal gangs had their lairs and an upper-class Kenyan like him never normally ventured. He found himself driving towards armed robberies while the bullets were still flying, chasing a runaway truck through the Nairobi traffic, picking up the human debris from drink-drive accidents and ferrying the dying to hospital and the dead to the morgue. Looking through a policeman's eyes, he became aware of a previously invisible underclass. ‘I found that in Karen there were
huge slums which I had never even seen. In Lenana, there are thousands of people living on a rubbish tip. I'd been there thousands of times and I'd never even seen them.' He quit when the police force started using reservists for crowd control. Beating up fellow Kenyans demonstrating for greater political openness was not what he had envisaged on joining.

Another small rebellion was John's announcement that he was leaving the family home. He rented a bachelor pad in Nairobi's Riverside Drive, where first Gitau and then Mugo joined him, the three determined to demonstrate their financial independence. In this all-male set-up, John could establish his own routine. His frenetic networking would always need to be balanced by long hours of solitude in which to muse, to read, to be himself. And it was easier, living with his brothers, to structure his day in the way that suited his decidedly unconventional body clock–working till the early hours when a job needed doing, then sleeping into the afternoon, so soundly it seemed impossible to wake him. It was an anti-social routine that drove girlfriends mad, and more than one walked out, declaring him too eccentric for her tastes.

‘I don't want to live the bourgeois life,' John declared, and with his role as heir to the family business rejected, he threw himself into his own projects. He saw his future in creative writing. Along with a friend, Martin Khamala, he had already set up a company dubbed ‘Mank and Tank', which produced a cartoon strip set in the offices of a multinational company. John wrote the dialogue, Khamala drew. It's easy to imagine how Mr and Mrs Githongo must have felt about their first son, prodigy, star pupil and former head boy, wasting his energies on a lowly comic strip. But then, Mr and Mrs Githongo were not consulted. The strip came to the attention of
Executive
, a glossy business magazine which had won itself a reputation as a cauldron of progressive opinion.
Executive
commissioned Ali Zaidi, an Indian subeditor, to run a feature on the duo. John's first appearance in the Kenyan press would be as ‘John Githanga'–Ali got the spelling wrong.

Ali Zaidi presides over Nairobi's version of a French
salon
. Anyone with something of interest to say, preferably carrying a bottle or two,
is welcome to sit on his veranda and meet whoever else has decided to pop round. He bonded with John, getting drunk with him, swapping books and ideas. It was Ali who gave John his first taste of journalism, commissioning him to write a book review. He was impressed by the young man's earnestness and idealism. ‘He used to tell me: “You should be more ambitious, you can change this world.” We used to joke that one day John Githongo would be president of Kenya.'

For Ali, John was remarkable for his attempt to get to grips intellectually with his stagnating country's predicament. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had ushered in a period of tumultuous change in Africa, in which a generation of post-independence autocrats faced increasingly strident calls for multi-party democracy. It was a drive Moi was doing his best to ignore, banning demonstrations and jailing opponents. ‘Here was someone thinking his way out of a society that was tyrannically stable, a police state. There'd been a long period where the Asians, the
wazungu
, everyone had struck this compact with the political classes, comfortable accommodations had been made, everyone had his place in the system. In the 1990s people's heads changed. What drove John was the awareness that this society was on the crux of change, and the realisation that it is within your power to make things happen.'

Soon John was working as a columnist for
Executive
. His ‘Political Diary' was published under a byline sketch that somehow managed to make a man in his mid-twenties look like a portly fifty-five-year-old. He was part of a small stable of irreverent young journalists with whom Ali experimented, pushing the boundaries of what had been until then fairly formulaic political coverage. ‘He was someone who could say new things well, and provocatively. Sometimes he'd ramble a bit, but I'd cut him back.' John was among the first journalists to register the importance of the unfolding Goldenberg scandal, and also brought himself to the notice of the authorities by writing about the controversial decision to locate a bullet factory in Moi's home town. His phone was tapped, intelligence agents tailed him around town. But one of his biggest coups, in Ali's eyes, was to nudge the
leaderships of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania into agreeing to revive the East African Community, the region's defunct economic and customs union, by raising the issue during a series of interviews with the various presidents. It was a tribute to John's ability to draw his interviewees out. ‘He could listen to you, and listen to you, and listen to you,' remembers Ali. ‘He would quietly egg his interview subjects on until they ended up saying anything.'

Visiting Tanzania, John had come away impressed by former socialist president Julius Nyerere's success in forging a sense of nationhood amongst the country's disparate ethnic groups. Economically, Tanzania trailed Kenya, but its people seemed far more sure of their common identity. The opposite process seemed to be on display in Kenya, where, in the run-up to the 1992 multi-party elections, the opposition divided on tribal lines. What was worse, Kikuyu in the Rift Valley became the targets of a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing. Not since the days of Mau Mau had the community felt so assailed. Kikuyu leaders gathered to raise money for the homeless, defence militias were pulled together, there were calls for the revival of GEMA. Driving through a tense Rift Valley, where the army roadblocks suggested a country under military occupation, John was shocked to be abruptly hushed when he addressed some women by the roadside in Gikuyu. ‘Don't speak that language here!' warned a terrified hawker. ‘We don't understand it here. Speak the national language!' Moi had always justified the one-party system on the grounds that Kenya was too potentially fractious, too ethnically diverse, to withstand the strains of multi-partyism. The clashes seemed designed to prove his thesis correct. ‘Kenyans are now keenly aware of their ethnicity in a negative, destructive sense,' John wrote. ‘We voted largely along tribal lines. We sowed the wind; I earnestly hope we shall not soon be reaping the whirlwind.'

Then, in April 1994, the genocide in nearby Rwanda brought Kenyans face to face with the full horror of what ethnic hostility, stoked by unscrupulous politicians, could do. While many Kenyan journalists, baffled by the bloodletting, preferred to ignore what was happening a mere hour's flight from Nairobi, John followed events
closely. Could it happen in Kenya? This was not, he realised, a spontaneous flare-up rooted in long-running tribal hostility. It was an expression of top-level corruption, as political elites pushed competition over limited state resources to obscene lengths. ‘Collective madness only happens by design,' he wrote in his column. ‘Evil lies dormant, like a smouldering ember, in the human soul, and it can be fanned into flame by the most ordinary human passions–the passion for power, for wealth, for a good life for myself and my family.' If his education and upbringing hadn't already drummed in the point, the Rift Valley clashes and Rwanda's genocide highlighted the perils of a community withdrawing into an ethnic bunker.