By Anderson Ojwang
A cocktail and mixed grill of events and moments. Traumatizing and at the same time fulfilling. Bittersweet. The month of July 1980 will remain etched in the heart of Kisumu Governor Prof Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o.
Nyong’o passionately talks about the events as if they happened yesterday and sublimely transports the audience into a double attack of tears and laughter at the same time as he humorously engages.
Nyong’o, the lyrical gangster, poet, writer, producer and political philosopher, has seen it all in the troubled Kenyan political waters and the halls of academia.
If anything, the month of July 1980 could have destroyed Nyong’o and wiped out his dreams, but the spirit of Never Die stood out, and the son of Cardinal walked out unscathed.
In that month, Nyong’o persevered frequent arrest and detention, the mysterious death of his brother, alcohol poisoning at a bar in Mombasa, and finally the birth of his first child.
From the lecture halls
In 1977, as a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta was in power, and there were concerns over the detentions of lecturers and other Kenyans.
“Kenyatta was in power. He had detained Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o among others. We said this man cannot be a good president. We must organize from the university and see how we can have a democratic system in this country,” he said.
Nyong’o said from his lectures he started telling the students the history of all existing societies and borrowed heavily from Karl Marx.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Have you ever heard that sentence from Karl Marx? In the Communist Manifesto, the history of all hitherto existing society is about the oppressors and the oppressed. Landowners and landless. The powerful and the powerless,” he said.
Nyong’o said they agreed that the powerless had to organize to change the government of the country, and that is where his problems began.
The cartons of books
Nyong’o said his first mistake was when he went to the Soviet Embassy to pick up books from Progress Publishers.
“A few days later, the Special Branch came to my house, ‘Bring the books.’ They took nine cartons of books, went and locked me up at the police station near Kenyatta National Hospital, and I was detained for three days under interrogation while they went through the books,” he said.
Nyong’o said one of the books was very interesting, by Edgar Snow, called Red Star Over China, which was a very harmless book.
“But they saw ‘Red Star Over China.’ ‘You are a communist.’ After three days, fortunately, they let me go, saying, ‘Go back to the university and don’t teach these things again.'”
The burning flame
Nyong’o said he disobeyed the order by the Special Branch about teaching Karl Marx and other progressive scholars.
“I became worse. I told the students all that had happened. Another one month, I was locked in again. This was in 1977,” he said.
Nyong’o said they celebrated the death of Kenyatta in 1978 and the incoming of President Daniel Moi, hoping he would be a better leader.
“We celebrated: ‘This Moi is going to be a better president.’ Little did we know that we were going from the frying pan into the fire. Within one year, Moi was locking up our lecturers,” he said.
The protest against the British
Nyong’o said in July 1980, they organized a peaceful and successful demonstration against the British sale of arms to South Africa and to protest the murder of the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney.
“The demonstration was peaceful. No stone was thrown. This annoyed the government immensely. So when we went back to the university, it was on Thursday. On Friday, there was a glowing editorial in the Nation: ‘The university has come of age. We thank the lecturers who organized this.’ We were very happy,” he said.
The journalist’s call
Nyong’o said on Saturday, while he was working in his office, he received a telephone call from a journalist, Peter Kareithi of the then Nairobi Times.
“He calls me and says, ‘Prof, we have been told you people are organizing a coup against the government.’ I asked him, ‘Where? We are not.’ But he alleged, ‘It is said you people are planning to overthrow the government.’ I told him, ‘Well, if there is such a plan, I do not know about it,'” he said.
Nyong’o said the next day, a huge headline in the Nairobi Times read: “Lecturer Denies Plot Charge.”
“My wife read that and said, ‘Oh no, we are finished.’ On Monday morning, I saw four long blue Peugeot cars, which belonged to the Special Branch. They came into the house, collected another lot of books, took me to the CID headquarters, and detained me for four days, being interrogated on a daily basis,” he said.
But his salvation came through the students, who went on strike, and so he was eventually released.
Nyong’o said he went back to the university, and the students resumed classes.
He said the journalist was called by the DCI over his story, and he further implicated him.
“I was re-arrested, back to the same place. Again the students went back on strike. There was a dilemma: ‘Do we keep this man here or release him?’ I was released very early in the morning and told, ‘Go straight to your class.’ I went straight to the class, taught for an hour, and left for the office,” he said.
The mysterious death
He said after his lecture, on his way out, he found his sister Susan waiting for him outside the Gandhi Hall. She was crying and demanded they go home.
“When we reached home, she told me, ‘My brother Charles, who looked just like me, 10 years younger than me, had been killed in Mombasa.’ I asked, ‘How?’ But she responded saying he was on a ferry and jumped off the ferry, which was not true,” he said.
Nyong’o said he dropped all the politics and drove to Mombasa to look for his younger brother.
“For three good weeks, with the support of the Port Police, we looked for bodies around Mombasa. Whenever anybody surfaced, I would go and look, and it was not him,” he said.
Nyong’o said the family enlisted the services of the British Marine Corps to comb the place.
“They told us, according to the science of this place, ‘If your brother died on the said day, he should have reappeared by now. In this place there are no sharks, and there is no way he could have been eaten. The story doesn’t look true,'” he said.
The alcohol poisoning
Tired and stressed by the search, Nyong’o decided to pass by a nearby joint for a cold beer.
“One evening, I was sitting at one of the hotels in Mombasa, having my white cup beer over the counter. I was depressed. So I had a car of my host outside. So at one point, I decided to go to the loo. As you know when you are drinking beer, safari is part of the adventure,” he said.
But depressed, Nyong’o made one fatal mistake that nearly cost him his life and regrets it to date.
“But the mistake I had done: I left my mug of beer on the counter. When I returned, I took three sips and started vomiting. Which means it had been poisoned. I ran to the car, drove home, and I was in bad shape,” he said.
But the host, whose wife was a nurse, saw Nyong’o in a bad shape and administered first aid.
“They administered first aid, took me to the bed. I was sweating. She gave me drugs and called a doctor for me. By the time I woke up, it was past midnight. They told me what they had done,” he said.
Nyong’o said the following day, the host put him on the first flight to Nairobi, saying they did not want to lose him too.
The pregnancy
Nyong’o said in the month of July 1980, his wife Dorothy Nyong’o was pregnant with their first child and welcomed a bubbling baby girl.
“With the birth of our daughter, every night I would get prank calls. It was very unstable to have a young family with these kinds of problems,” he said.
