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

Cornels Akello Onyango was dazed when a beautiful young brown woman menacingly approached him brandishing a razor blade. “Get ready to be circumcised,” she barked as she walked towards him.

For him, the fact that the threat was coming from a woman was a shock in itself. The look on her face left no doubt that she was capable of carrying out the threat.

Onyango, stark naked, frightened and his mind in a turmoil, was in front of a group of about 10 stone-faced men.

The looks on their faces left no doubt in his mind that at some stage the encounter would develop into a violent and vicious confrontation.

Onyango’s experience illustrates a fraction of the suffering, denigration, humiliation, physical and mental abuse of the victims and survivors of the Nyayo House torture chambers and other places of detention during the Moi regime.

Author and historian Maina wa Kinyatti describes the scenario thus: “I was ordered to strip naked and sit down on a chair. My hands were chained to the chair and I could not move at all. From the moment the brutal interrogation started, everything in the room changed and the language of coercion and violence was introduced.”

(Nairobi lawyer) Ng’ang’a Thiong’o’s incarceration at Nyayo House has yet to be erased from his mind.

“The hood was removed and there I was in a dark cell. The next morning I was put in a lift while blind folded and upon landing several floors above I was taken into a room, put on a seat and there I found myself in front of nine mean-looking guys.

‘Tell us about yourself, your friends and your involvement in the struggle,’ the interrogation began. Questions and more questions for hours without end were followed by beatings with slaps, kicks, whips, wooden pieces of wood and burning with cigarette ends.

“My screams did not help and as they continued brutalising me, they were insisting that I confess all that I knew or they would kill me. After collapsing due to exhaustion, I was returned to the basement cells. The guards were instructed to continue with the beatings.

The beatings continued relentlessly and only the methods varied. One day, they would remove pistols and threaten to shoot me. There were screams from the neighbouring rooms with men screaming at the tops of their voices. I lost count of the days and time, whether it was day or night. It was a total nightmare.

“I ended up being taken before Chief Magistrate H.H. Buch who declined to take my plea as I was his student at the School of Law. A court was hurriedly convened under Mr Joseph Mango and it was packed with the very people who had been torturing me.

“I was charged with neglecting to prevent the commission of a felony contrary to Section 392 of the penal code. I told the magistrate that I had undergone a harrowing experience in police custody where upon he said he would first enter a plea of guilty and then hear the details.

The then deputy public prosecutor Bernard Chunga rose and read a six-page statement on my alleged activities to overthrow the government. Without asking any question, the magistrate wrote that the facts were true and correct. He then wrote mitigation on my behalf and sentenced me to fifteen months imprisonment.”

Former Runyenjes Member of Parliament Njeru Kathangu was arrested on July 11, 1990 at Mutugi’s Bar and Restaurant in Dagoretti Corner, Nairobi.