John Keen, politician who enjoyed cordial relations with Kenya presidents

Mid 2015, a huge delegation from the Maasai community paid a courtesy call at Nairobi State House to thank President Uhuru Kenyatta for appointing Major-General (rtd) Joseph Nkaissery the CS for the Interior.

At the function, the President noted the presence of John Keen, then 89, and instructed that he be moved to sit next to him.

Mzee Keen, a natural story-teller with the memory of an elephant, did not disappoint. Immediately, he got into regaling the President with stories from the past, keeping the latter spellbound and in stitches of laughter.

Then he delved into his best self – belting out Kikuyu traditional songs, some of which the President had never heard before, and others he had heard as a youth when troupes of dancers entertained his father, President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, at the family’s Gatundu home.

As they parted on that day in 2015, the President vigorously shook the old man’s hand and said: “I must make a point of visiting you at your home and sit the entire evening to hear more of those songs!”

The date never came as the veteran politician made his final bow not long after. But he had got the President to laugh in public in the aftermath of the terrorist attack at Garissa University a few weeks earlier.

KIBAKI SECRETS
Tradition tunes, especially protest songs composed at the height of agitation for Kenya’s independence from the British, were Mzee Keen’s favourite pastime.

In the last few years of his life, I would accompany him on trips to his ranch near the Namanga border town. One would expect a 90-year old to take a nap during the 200 mile journey but Mzee Keen would stay awake the entire journey singing traditional songs.

Protest songs composed by the Kikuyu people when they bitterly disagreed with the white missionaries and broke off to form their own independent churches and schools were among his favourite tunes.

“I’ve never liked the white missionaries ever since my days in elementary school in 1930 when we were shown pictures of Jesus Christ as a white man and the devil as a black man,” Mzee Keen would tell me. “It was racism at its worst which made me keep a distance from Christianity for the rest of my life”.

FEMALE CIRCUMCISION

But much as he believed in the traditional, the old man had no track with the offensive parts of it like female circumcision. Once I asked him about it and he replied in typical John Keen style: “Why take away that part of a female which makes her enjoy sex nearly as a man does? I am for alternative rites of passage, not mutilation of our girls.”

But he fully believed in – and practised – polygamy.

“Which true African man has only one wife?” he often would ask.

Once, when I reminded him that his old friend, retired President Kibaki, once announced on national television that he had only one wife, Mzee Keen uproariously laughed and quipped: “Did he (Mr Kibaki), let alone anybody else, believe what he said?”

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What is certain, however, is that the retired President and Mzee Keen had a long history – and shared secrets – unknown to many.

They first met at the formation of the independence party, Kanu, in early 1960s. Kibaki was the party’s first Executive Officer and Keen the first organising secretary.

The latter was the elder of the two at 35 years, and Kibaki, 30. The two and the party secretary-general, Tom Mboya, were the young men about town. Their favourite joint was the Princess Hotel on Tom Mboya Street. At the time, the now run-down hotel in the seedy side of the capital was about the most prestigious night address for the upcoming African elite.

LONG NIGHTS

Mzee Keen recalled the long nights spent with Kibaki at the Princess Hotel. “Kibaki was then a bachelor and ate in hotels,” Mzee Keen remembered. “His diet was more liquids than solids. Being a Maasai, I liked it because I could eat almost all the meat, and him drown almost all the liquids on the table! Amazingly, he remained in full control of his faculties no matter how much he gulped. He was also disciplined and went home when he felt he’d had enough for the day”, Mzee Keen told me.

It was during one of the evenings when young Kibaki mentioned to his friend about a charming maiden from his home in Nyeri who was attending college in Kiambu.

Mzee Keen told me that knowing his friend to be a bit shy on women – until after he was on to his fourth bottle – he insisted they visit the maiden the following day, which they did, driving in Kibaki’s car, a VW Beetle.

While there, the straight-shooting young Keen told the girl that Kibaki was deeply in love with her and wanted her as his future wife. Lucy wasn’t amused and replied: “If that’s true, he has never told it to me and I am not aware”.

“Now I have just said it for him,” replied the young Keen. However, this only got the maiden madder.

“Yes you have said it. But it’s him, not you, who wants to marry me. Now, you two have to go back to Nairobi. If he wants me, he will have to come back here and say it for himself!”
It was vintage Lucy; ever my way or the highway!

Back in Nairobi, the experienced John Keen – already married to two wives – gave his buddy a few tips on how to charm the college girl and “box” her in. It worked.

CRASH WITH A JUMBO

On another occasion, the two friends were assigned to do some job for Kanu down at the Coast. In the adventurism of youth, they opted to travel to Mombasa by road in Kibaki’s VW Beetle.

Halfway at Mtito-Andei the pair had lunch with Kibaki as usual going more on liquids. By the time they got to Voi, Kibaki was off on two winks forgetting he was supposed to be Keen’s co-driver.

Years later, Mzee Keen said of that day: “Fatigued and with darkness falling, I nearly crashed into a herd of elephants crossing the road. I hurriedly woke up my sleeping “co-driver” and we resolved to spend the night in Voi. Next day we found a place to leave the Beetle and proceeded to Mombasa by train, which is what we should have done in the first place but for youthful (mis)adventure.”

Kibaki and Keen would again closely work together when they formed the opposition Democratic Party (DP) in 1992 after the return of the multi-party system in the country. Then, as now, the biggest headache for opposition parties was getting funds to counter the well-oiled campaign of the ruling party, thanks to the incumbent’s easy, and often illegal, access to State resources.

Mzee Keen recalled a secret DP top executive committee meeting called to decide whether the opposition party should accept cash donations from individuals adversely mention in connection with the loss of public resources. In mind was the Asian wheeler-dealer, Ketan Somaia, who would send emissaries to the effect that he could “donate” Sh20 million to DP.

DEVIL'S CASH
The key mastermind of the Goldenberg heist, Kamlesh Pattni, also had sent feelers he would give “something small” the opposition party.

While some in the secret meeting argued that the party should not touch any of the “dirty” money, Mzee Keen told me his argument was that “it is individuals who are dirty not the money. I saw no reason why we shouldn’t take the money which had anyway been stolen from the taxpayer.”

Eventually everybody saw “logic” in John Keen’s argument and the party accepted money from Somaia: “We felt morally justified to take money stolen from the public and use it to fight crooks if we came to power,” Mzee Keen told me once.

Mzee Keen first met now retired President Daniel arap Moi, who was two years older, in the 1950s. Keen, then a hot-blooded firebrand, was not impressed with Moi at first.

He recalled: “My first impression of Moi was that of an inarticulate, not so forceful and indecisive character. I had fire in the belly and didn’t think much of him as somebody to engage.”

In the fullness of time, Keen would discover that behind the soft veneer, Moi was a steely and calculating operator in his own right. Politically, they would be friends on and off.

Attending talks on Kenya’s independence in London in the early 1960s, the worldly Keen told me he pitied Moi, the non-smoking teetotaller who, as a “born-again” Christian, could not venture where Keen and other “sinners” flocked in the evenings, but would lock himself alone in his room during the London winter. One evening, Keen told me, he – most likely sent by the devil – stormed Moi’s room and told him: “My friend, the London cold will kill you sleeping alone here.”

LOVE FOR THE SOIL
As for Kenya’s founding President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, Keen first met him about the same time he met Kibaki shortly after the formation of Kanu, and Kenyatta’s release from prison a year later.

Keen’s most memorable early interaction with old Jomo was when they flew together to London for the Lancaster House talks on Kenyan independence.

He recalled sitting next to the old man who was shaking with much discomfort as the plane hit the turbulence over the Mediterranean.

“I could tell the old man was so uneasy, unlike the roaring lion of Kenya we came to know. To distract him from his discomfort, I had to tell him one story after the other until we reached London”, recalled Mzee Keen.

From the incident, apparently Mzee Kenyatta developed a soft spot in his heart for the young Keen. The latter told me of a day when he was completely broke those early years and gathered the courage to ask for some money from the old man. He told me Kenyatta was sympathetic. The President opened his drawer and wrote him a personal cheque for 1,000 pounds, quite a lot of money those days.

LAND IN PROBLEMS

At independence, Keen’s caustic tongue would land him in problems when, in 1966, he had an outburst in Parliament, when he said that the three East African heads of State “should be overthrown since they were an obstacle to integration of the region into one federative State.”

Two days later, Keen was picked up by police from Parliament grounds and put in detention without trial.

Six months into prison, he wrote a personal letter to President Kenyatta to apologise and ask for pardon. In the letter, he recalled the stories he had told the old man one day on their flight to London.

But knowing the old man’s love for the soil, John Keen promised that if set free, he would quit politics and abide by Mzee Kenyatta’s popular call for Kenyans “to go back to the land”.

The President got touched by the letter and young John Keen was immediately set free.

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