Njonjo’s legacy a clash between victims’ anguish and desperate, revisionist lies

In death, as in life, Charles Njonjo’s peculiar effect on the national psyche has been consistent. Outright lies and desperate rationalisations contended with recollections of raw anguish and several hues of unresolved grievance as national discourse trained its transient focus on the fallen man’s legacy. This is how Njonjo lived: colossal, rampant and unbridled in the vast field of state power, and a tragic yet breathtaking spectacle in his downfall.

Many tributes were so utterly lacking in credibility that they only served to underscore the asperity of the public judgment of Njonjo’s legacy. In this view, Njonjo was a conceited bigot, incorrigible coup-plotter, contemptuous peacock and implacable bully addled with proclivities which distorted and perverted governance and public policy, inflicting incurable distress and injury to countless Kenyans.

Neocolonial malaise must be understood to be a matter of elite policy. A sovereign state cannot be induced to a course of action without the complicity of its most consequential leaders. 

Arguably, we continue to proceed precipitately along a calamitous trajectory, impelled by internalised colonial effects that remain intact six decades after uhuru.

Sessional Paper Number 10 of 1965, which proposed the continuation of extractive colonial economic policies, typifies this sleight of hand. It demonstrated how colonial institutions can be perpetuated within African self-government. 

Using the vocabulary of high and low-potential areas, it promulgated hierarchical classes of citizenship as state policy. Sabotaged and perverted, Africanisation merely designated the emerging African elite as first-class citizens, who magically ascended into ownership of vast tracts of land, plum state appointments, mind-boggling commercial opportunities and tremendous political power. 

Disenfranchised citizens, legitimately aggrieved by intolerable injustices meted through the colonial tendencies of their rapacious compatriots, were viciously suppressed. As poverty and suffering ravaged the marginalised majority, the obscenely endowed elite tightened their ties with colonial systems.

Inveterate Machiavellian 

This is the rhizome from which our historical injustices sprouted. Postcolonial struggles for justice are often suppressed as treason and subversion. Kenya’s administrative Leviathan, essentially colonial from its first day, has been adept at this.

The role of people like Njonjo was straightforward: to enlist the agencies of a sovereign state in perpetuating colonial structures whereby a privileged minority subjugate a majority doomed to be chronically mired in existential precarity.

Njonjo vehemently opposed Africanisation, categorically ruling professions like medicine, engineering and law out of bounds for Africans. Throughout his tenure as Attorney-General, Kenya imported mainly English judges. Kitili Mwendwa, who punctuated this expatriate monotony, served for only three years as the first Kenyan African Chief Justice and was hounded out of office in a manner consistent with Njonjo’s modus operandi. 

He was followed nearly three decades later by Zaccheus Chesoni.

By collating accounts dispersed amongst various memoirs, it is possible to generate a portrait of Charles Njonjo. 

An inveterate Machiavellian, he staged spectacles of ruthlessness to send a message among the elite and consolidate his power. 

When Pio Gama Pinto, a radical nationalist, refused to endorse Njonjo’s power plan, he was hounded relentlessly. 

Pinto’s friend, vice-president Joseph Murumbi, became inconvenient to Njonjo’s vision, so Njonjo stalked him with menaces until the poor gentle soul lost his nerve. 

Njonjo’s admirable side

The trail of broken men languishing in the wake of Njonjo’s rampaging quest for power suffices to enable us to reach a fair assessment of the man and his legacy.

To be told that Njonjo was too complex for our native comprehension is outrageously condescending. Alluding that Njonjo’s unheralded admirably humane side somehow counteracts his vileness is simply irrational. 

We evaluate Njonjo’s legacy precisely because it represents a failure of humanity. Obviously, Njonjo was neither a bantam nor a shark; he was a human being. But his ‘human side’ was truncated to an exceedingly short radius. 

In other words, Njonjo’s circle of moral consideration was remarkably diminutive, and its beneficiaries accordingly few. 

Those who fell outside this circle found their very humanity contested, arguably justifying to their brutalisation.

By holding up Njonjo’s human(e) side, therefore, his partisans imply his critics were ineligible for the privilege of experiencing it, and possibly deserved the man’s cruelty. 

Thus, discourse about Njonjo’s legacy has become, thanks to this otherwise redundant intervention, a vigorous litigation of our humanity. The question of who qualified for Njonjo’s consideration, and who did not, revolves about the larger question of who was, and who wasn’t, human enough.

High public office takes it for granted that a public officer’s circle of moral regard is vast, tending to infinity. 

They are bound by oath to “…do justice to all, without fear, favour, malice or ill-will”.

Njonjo’s admirable side was restricted to a narrow circle of intimates. This fact alone should suffice to underscore the magnitude of his failures; as a human and as a state officer.

The writer is an advocate of the High Court and a former State House speech writer. @EricNgeno