Judiciary museum to keep rich tradition of the courts alive

Carvings of the eight previous Chief Justices who have served in Kenya, on display at the Judiciary Museum of Kenya. PHOTO | JEPTUM CHESIYNA

What you need to know:

  • The museum is divided into four sections representing four themes: pre-colonial, colonial, independence and new Constitution.
  • The basement that houses the museum originally had 26 holding cells. Twenty cells were demolished to make space for the museum but six were left intact.
  • The corridors contain documents from famous cases. The Kapenguria six trial is documented. The entire case involving Mau Mau fighter Dedan Kimathi is chronicled — his charge sheet, his order of execution and finally his report of execution.
  • The last room of the exhibition contains pedestals bearing busts of previous chief justices. There is a photo of every chief justice from Robert Hamilton in 1904 to Dr Mutunga. All judges’ busts except Dr Mutunga’s have wigs. The busts are made from carbon fibre.

Justice is a Turkana woman. The first display you see in the recently opened Judiciary Museum at the Supreme Court building is a fibreglass statue of a blind woman in Turkana traditional attire carrying a scale and a long sword.

She is modelled after the Roman goddess Justitia, a warrior princess who metes out justice without favour. The visual vocabulary of justice is now universal, it seems, and whether outside an English court or The Hague, it is usually a woman with scales and probably a blindfold.

But why is justice personified as a woman in many cultures?

“Maybe it is because women are more oppressed in society and are more likely to spot unfairness,” says Mr James Nyaga, the stand-in curator on loan from the National Museums of Kenya.

As part of the Judiciary’s programme to bring justice closer to the people, the institution has over the years built more courts across the country and held open days. The building of this museum in Nairobi to better explain judicial history and processes is part of the plan. 

“My challenge is to other public-facing institutions, be they government or private sector, to consider emulating the Judiciary’s example of recovering and preserving the rich history and heritage that defines the present,” Dr Willy Mutunga, who retired as chief Justice on Thursday, said during the launch.

The museum is divided into four sections representing four themes: pre-colonial, colonial, independence and new Constitution.

The pre-colonial period, is appropriately non-judgmental. The whole exhibition emphasises the consensual nature of justice in African society. This is because consensus was a much valued attribute before the British colonialists came. While he was Chief Justice, Dr Mutunga encouraged alternative dispute resolution, including relying on the wisdom of elders. 

Colonial photos on display at the Judiciary Museum. PHOTO | JEPTUM CHESIYNA

PRE-COLONIAL JUSTICE

Back to the exhibition, it is clear the version of pre-colonial justice was sometimes bloody. For example, in the museum, there is a photo of the cliff in Taita Taveta where capital punishment was administered. If you were found guilty you went skydiving without a parachute. The locals believed that if an accused person survived the high fall, then they were truly innocent and the judgment was in error. 

The colonial period is dominated by photos of the legal pioneers. There are photos of the first court in Kenya in the coast. It was turned into a museum but was reverted into a court.

The red-and-black robes used by the pioneers are exhibited with a sign encouraging visitors to touch them. Each judicial wig had their own special metallic urns with the name of the shop in London they came from. This period is filled with photographs of confident looking white men in official gowns.

Even in the blistering coastal heat they insisted on putting on the complete attire.

They have the heat-trapping robes and their festering wigs on. In first photographs in the period, the first law professionals were all white. It is only in later images that one notices some Indians on the Bench. There are no blacks in the photos save for a picture of African court clerks, like the one taken in Maseno.

The law books are getting thick by now, the statutes are coming together and the ordinances are becoming too many to memorise. The legal profession is also growing rapidly.

The documents from the time ought to be better protected. It is clear some documents that are more than 80 years old, are not sandwiched in manila or pressed against glass but are left under the harsh glare of a fluorescent bulb.

The basement that houses the museum originally had 26 holding cells. Twenty cells were demolished to make space for the museum but six were left intact.

The six cells fall into two categories. Some are remand cells and the rest are for convicted prisoners. Their walls are a metre thick according to the architect Mr Samson Malaki. Indeed, the walls of the cells were so thick that they delayed the launch of the museum by one-and-a-half years as the contractors went about demolishing them.

Justice in Kenya had a solid foundation, it seems.

The cells themselves are grim and were in use until 2010. There is no light inside except through a solitary window at the back. In the basement, one can barely see outside. In the cell you are blind. There is no comfort except a solitary hard bench at the end. The cells themselves are flanked by two narrow corridors and even thicker outside walls.

There is no way prisoners could dig themselves out because the walls outside were even more imposing.

There is a drain outside running the entire length of the basement.

“The prisoners relieved themselves in the gutter and this place stank to high heavens,” Mr Nyaga says.

The walls of the remaining cells are in their original state. They bear the names of previous occupants with scribbling such as “Andrew was here,”. 

Some left longer messages.

One of the cells maintained for display purposes at the Judiciary Museum. PHOTO | JEPTUM CHESIYNA

FAMOUS CASES

“Get rich or die poor,” a prisoner called “Anto” advises.

“Philosophers have interpreted the world, in many ways the point is to change it,” one prisoner who had been locked up in the capital offences cell wrote.

One remand cell wall has an ominous and potentially incriminating scribble “35mm” perhaps in reference to the size of cartridge for a popular American gun.

The corridors contain documents from famous cases. The Kapenguria six trial is documented. The entire case involving Mau Mau fighter Dedan Kimathi is chronicled — his charge sheet, his order of execution and finally his report of execution.

There are stories of English soldiers massacring Kalenjin herdsmen in the Rift and getting fined one pound for each body. Next to it is an order to kill a herdsman who killed a white man.

The colonialists did some horrible things, and unashamedly catalogued their acts in granular detail.

A Union Jack remains stuck behind glass and a bright light. There is a tunnel; a no-man’s-land that used to separate the suspects in remand from the criminals in prison. Now the tunnel marks the crossing between colonial period and independence. A Kenyan flag lies at the opposite end.  

New age

The tunnel sides have illuminated Kenyan flags, and photos at Independence. Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and the flywhisk, Kisoi Munyao hoisting the flag at Mount Kenya, Tom Mboya and the trade union procession, the last governor Evelyn Baring boarding a plane. The transition from being dependents to being independents is presented very well.

The court exhibits section of the museum  houses some interesting pieces.

There is a stuffed chicken that was an exhibit. A collection of knives, clubs, swords and other weapons.  

There is also a briefcase full of cash. I ask whether the defendant in that particular case involving the briefcase was a Supreme Court judge. My question is laughed off.

The cash looks real. Lifestyle counts 14,000 worth of notes with different serials on each note.

“It isn’t real,” the curator’s assistant says. They went to the trouble of printing fake currency with different serial numbers? Why go into that level of detail?

“They aren’t real,” he repeats. It seems the curators built a section for actual exhibits used in court cases but decided to use fake currency notes.

There are bolt cutters that are big enough to cut through a metal grill. There are mangled padlocks that were probably cut using the cutters. 

“Merely possessing such a tool, should be grounds for arrest,” Mr Malachi offers.

There are guns and homemade guns. There is a soda crate with beer bottles. The problem with this section is that no explanation is offered as to what you are looking at.

The imposing judges’ chairs are spread out through the exhibition and look like thrones. They are made of thick hardwood, more leather than a small herd of cattle and with backs so high you would think their Lordships were a race of giants.

And there are plenty of chairs. There are seven exhibited in the museum. They are all on wheels as they are too big to carry without conscripting a whole village of locals.  

The exhibition on use of forensics in the Judiciary is empty. It only has one grey microscope in an otherwise empty glass case.

I ask my guide whether this empty case symbolises just how casually the Judiciary embraces science in resolving court cases.

“We haven’t completed this part of the exhibition,” Mr Nyaga says.

The last room of the exhibition contains pedestals bearing busts of previous chief justices. There is a photo of every chief justice from Robert Hamilton in 1904 to Dr Mutunga. All judges’ busts except Dr Mutunga’s have wigs. The busts are made from carbon fibre.

FREE ENTRY

We could not establish how much the project cost, but we learnt that construction began in 2012. At the entrance, there is a window marked as a ticketing booth, but it is not yet functional because we did not pay anything. 

Dr Mutunga features prominently in the exhibition. His main contribution to the Judiciary has been to lift a veil on the mystery, show the innards and allow the sunlight of public scrutiny into the third arm of government.

His quote welcomes you into the museum and covers a whole wall. He has photos of himself as both dissident and chief justice. He is also on several videos playing on a loop. The actual cell he stayed in was among the six preserved from demolition. 

One of Dr Mutunga’s quotes is right next to citations from esteemed company like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Thomas Jefferson.

So we ask, is the museum an attempt by Dr Mutunga to burnish his legacy?

“It was conceived in 2012 and has nothing to do with his retirement,” Mr Malaki the architect who designed the museum says. “This was a way to demystify the institution of the Judiciary and it isn’t based on an individual”.

In the photographs, the chief justice is wearing different versions of his official dress. One dress has gold buttons and each button has three crowns, another has gold buttons with the obverse side hollowed out and the third has no buttons.

The Judiciary is replete with meaning, the processes, dresses and pageantry. There  is not explanation about what the three robes symbolise or when it was required for the CJ to wear either of the gown.

Missing also is the 2013 presidential petition. It gets half a chart of pictures with no explanations although it was arguably one of  the most momentous case after the 2010 Constitution. 

There is no talk of backlog, digitisation of records or information of the contemporary state of the Judiciary. We don’t see how many courts, and judges there are.

Moreover, none of the implements of torture used by previous governments are included. Detention orders of opponents of President Daniel Moi’s rule in the 1980s, including Dr Mutunga, are also missing.

We see names of judges and officials involved in the Dedan Kimathi case, but names of Kenyan judges behind questionable detain orders are not given. The sins of the “white devils” in wigs are catalogued very well, but not those of their post-independence successors.

Perhaps those should be the subject of another exhibition.