The Kenyatta trials: Similarities between Jomo and President Uhuru’s days before courts

President Uhuru Kenyatta speaks to his lawyer at ICC courtroom in the Hague

When President Uhuru Kenyatta flew to The Hague recently for the status hearing of his case at the International Criminal Court (ICC) after ceding power for 48 hours, he might have missed his usual Presidential Lounge facility at JKIA.

But as the Kenya Airways aircraft (where he was flying First Class on a business flight) cut through the skies to Amsterdam, Uhuru might also have been grateful that it was not Lokitaung he was landing at – the way his father Jomo did on October 20, 1952, where he was held in custody until the decision to charge and try him was made by the British.

Ironically, whereas Kenya is a voluntary signatory to the Rome Statute that governs the ICC,  the perception in Kenya for a lot of folks is that it is like Jomo’s colonial court, “an instrument by Imperial powers to harass African leaders.”

The similarities between the trials of the two Kenyattas do not end there. Jomo was charged alongside five other Kenya African Union (KAU) officials – Fred Kubai, Paul Ngei, Achieng’ Oneko, Kungu Karumba and Bildad Kaggia.

Initially, Uhuru had been charged alongside five other fellows – Henry Kosgey, William Ruto, Francis Muthaura, Mohammhed Hussein Ali (and the oft-forgot man-in-the-middle of the ICC muddle), radio presenter Joshua arap Sang.

Terror militia

Collectively, they were known in street colloquial jocular as ‘The Ocampo Six,’ giving rise to matatu monikers as well as the popular song, Bahasha ya Ocampo (but, really, the infamous Judge Waki envelope).

Jomo was accused of managing a criminal Kikuyu terror militia called the Mau Mau. Uhuru has been accused of financing the less illustrious criminal gang called the Mungiki during the 2007-08 post-election violence.

Eventually, the trial of Jomo was held at Kapenguria, a small administrative post 500km north-west of Nairobi, grimly overlooking Mt Elgon near the Kenya-Uganda border.

An agricultural schoolroom was improvised as the courtroom, and the echo effect was such that a whisper by the defence was quite often as loud as an address, and therefore wrongly recorded as part of the verbatim proceedings.

A few Nairobi and foreign correspondents were allowed in, to humiliate Jomo in the eyes of the Kenyan public, and the world at large. Instead, Jomo came across as a martyr and hero, and thus increased the animosity of Kenyans, Africans and the progressive world at large against settler and colonial domination.

Contrast this setting with that of Uhuru in the modern ICC building at The Hague, with the latest telecommunications equipment of the digital age streaming the trial to the world, hundreds of journalists from all over the globe recording and transmitting it all.

Uhuru, of course, has also managed to play the martyr card to the rest of Africa, and going by the reception of rapture he got on his ‘home coming from the Hague,’ it is no longer vague that, to many Kenyans, the man is a hero.

It did not help the ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda that her witnesses have been dropping  from the case — retracting testimony and so on — like flies in recent times.In Jomo’s trial decades ago, the colonial prosecutor, DPP Somerhough, had no such problems as testimony from supposed “paid and coached” witnesses like one Rawson Macharia sailed through and cooked Jomo’s goose, raw though such testimony was. But it helped the prosecution then that the judge was RS Thacker, a retired Supreme Court of Kenya judge who, himself being a settler, was specially recalled and re-appointed to champion the cause of the settlers via the court of law. No chance of partiality with the ICC chief judge Kuniko Ozani, a professor of International Law who spent the other decade as the Director of Treaty Affairs in the UNO Drugs and Crime office.

Jomo had top legal representation from Kenyan Asians like AR Kapila, and the Briton D.N. Pritt (after whom the road is named), a most experienced lawyer in political trials.

Real killers

Uhuru has his ‘Pritt’ in the combative British Queen’s Counsel, Stephen Kay, who the other day said to the court that “we are now in the position that this (ICC) case has failed, and failed in so spectacular a fashion, it has no prospect of going forward in the future.”

Jomo got a seven-year sentence, but later made this comment: “This case has subsequently lingered – in any dispassionate assessment – as one of the most brilliantly calculated, fomented and perpetuated lies in the whole history of Imperial intrigue.”

This was in his book Suffering Without Bitterness. If his son Uhuru goes free from the Hague, as is looking increasingly likely, he will do well to remember that there are IDPs from the PEV still suffering – and bitterly so.

And like that famous OJ Simpson statement at the end of that infamous trial at the tail-end of the last century, he should issue a statement like: “I will spend the rest of my life ... looking for the real killers,” because we have 1,133 dead souls from that dark period of our history.

Somebody killed them... and history will still want to know who.