The Dark Legacy

• They were brutalised or killed by Moi’s agents and yet Wako has refused to pay compensation awarded by courts.
• The victims of Kenya’s darkest chapter won’t wait for the Truth and Reconciliation for a hearing
• How a small band of Moi agents wrote Kenya’s darkest chapter in a basement

“One of the officers was appearing in the cell every morning and telling me that I had little option but certain death if I did not cooperate by accepting that I was a member of Mwakenya. I survived on bread and tea for six days when I broke down and accepted that I had taken an oath.”

Waheire was taken to court at 5.30 pm and convicted on his own plea of guilty. He was jailed for four years on December 17, 1986. His plea of guilt obviously meant that Mghanga, Mutonya, Mutahi and Murathe recruited him.

For Maurice Adongo Ogony, then a lecturer at the Mombasa Polytechnic, Nyayo House was a place of discoveries.

“I made a few interesting and sometimes painful discoveries in that joint,” Adongo who was arrested in April 1986 narrates.

“The one thing that frightened me the most when I first got the blindfolds removed from my face and got to see outside my cell were the bundles of clothes in front of the opposite doors. I kept asking myself and imagining endlessly where the heck the folks who once put on those clothes could be.

“It didn’t take long for me to find that out – thanks to one James Opiyo – who on my third day of interrogation ordered that I be taken to the swimming pool.

When I arrived at the door, I was told to remove all my clothes including the underwear and enter. I could feel a smile creeping into my face when I realised that the once proud wearers of those now miserable looking pieces of clothes must have been in the pool all this time I had been worrying about them.

That smile was abruptly wiped off my face when I stepped into the pool. The water was chilly and there were some creepy stuff floating there.

“I quickly turned back to Opiyo who was standing beside me. You can’t put people in here, I said half begging half angry. He slammed the door in my face as if to announce. ‘Yes I can.’

Adongo was yet to make another discovery not any bit more pleasant than the first one. “My second discovery happened on my third day at the pool.

I was exhausted, restless and feeling terribly sick. I couldn’t sit, couldn’t stand and my head was heavy like lead.

Somewhere in the middle of all these I fell asleep while standing and fell down on the concrete floor with a thunderous splash. In my dazed state again there was that mischievous smile creeping on my face.

I said to myself, ‘So that explains the terrible landing noises I had been hearing from neighbouring cells?’ Folks were falling down like leafs from exhaustion. That is what I know about Nyayo House. It was a place of discoveries”

Spouses of Mwakenya suspects were also not spared by the torturers. Emma Ainea Weyula, a copy typist in the ministry of Education, was arrested together with her husband on November 29, 1990 in Milimani Estate, Bungoma Township.

She was recovering from a caesarean operation that she had undergone only two months earlier.