Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  "You are a young man. Listen to an older man. Do not waken those who are sleeping because when they wake you may be the one to sleep." Then he opened three suitcases lined up in the hall and they were full of money. And I realized I was being tempted by the devil...’

  Sixty undulating miles west in the tea-station of Kericho, the view from the Kalenjin side of the fence was of course very different. If anyone was qualified to put Moi's defence it was Mark Too, the head of Lonrho East Africa, widely believed to be Moi's illegitimate son. He was a Kenyan multi-millionaire wide-boy who refreshingly had no time for the stuffy protocol favoured by many of Africa's new elites. He was also, like Moi, a Kalenjin, with more than a passing resemblance to the president, but he deftly denied the story they are related. They met, he says, when he was a young boy in the mid Seventies. He was herding cattle by the side of the road when Moi's Land Rover got stuck in a mudslide as the then vice president made his way to open a cattle dip.

  'He said, "Who are you?" And I said: ''I'm Mark Too." And he said: ''I'm Moi." So I said: "Hello, Mr Moi." And he lightened and we were soon chatting away.' The story has a strong whiff of mythology, but the idea of Moi bonding with a bouncy young Kalenjin is plausible. The aspirant politician would have been on the hunt for men he could trust, and who better than a fellow tribesman who needed a leg-up in the world?

  Too liked to think he has maintained his credibility by his forthright ways. He claimed he infuriated Moi when he called for action against officials accused of swindling the Central Bank of more than £300 million for non-existent mineral exports in what became known as the Goldenberg scandal. He also insisted he was an outspoken supporter of multi-party democracy in the late Eighties when Moi was dragging his feet. But it is hard to imagine there has ever been a serious rift. Too was Moi's special envoy on secret missions all over the continent, as, with obvious pride, he kept reminding me.

  Too argued long and hard that Moi was misunderstood. He started in the late morning when the sun was high in the sky, continued over lunch in his old white-washed colonial tea planter's house, and was still going strong as a late-afternoon thunderstorm forced us to abandon our coffee on the lawn and run inside, pursued by a butler carrying our chairs, as must have happened in the old days. Too's main thesis was that Moi was happier tending his cattle than running the affairs of state.

  When you are president a lot of things happen in your name. Maybe his one fault is he has been too tolerant. People say 'I don't know how he will react' and so they say what they think he wants to hear. They give answers before they have heard his question. They should treat him like a human, like everyone else . . .

  Only last Saturday he was out early in his farm checking the seeds had been planted in the right way. He knows every corner of his farm. I promise you he is a different man when he gets behind his gates. He doesn't have a special table setting for himself. Whatever there is to eat, he will share. He is determined to set an example to Kenyans.

  Moi was in many ways a very British Big Man. He went to church every Sunday where he delivered impromptu homilies. He wore sombre suits; rose at dawn and neither drank or smoked. Bar the odd indulgence such as a private jet with white leather seats he eschewed flamboyance. He more than compensated for his lack of charisma by his prodigious energy touring the country and meeting Kenyans. He was estimated most years to have spent more than 200 days on the road.

  The picture of a benevolent pastoralist is no doubt how Moi liked to see himself. He maintained he ran Kenya as his household, like a philanthropic seigneur - an argument familiar to defenders of Banda and Mobutu, or even Romania's late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who liked to play up his peasant background and his love of rural life. Too was still doggedly defending his man at midnight over a late supper in his house in Nakuru when the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver, stiffened and mouthed to me, 'It is the chief.'

  Moi's gravelly voice came down the line. He had been going to see me the next morning following Too's intervention on my behalf. But he had changed his plans. He was flying to the coast to visit a village badly hit by floods. 'Tell him to see me in Nairobi.' The line went dead.

  I flew home for a week imagining I had seen from the inside the workings of a Big Man, and concluding from the telephone call that Moi made every decision himself and did not trust anyone to do the right thing in his place. Such was certainly the way of Mobutu and Banda. But, as I later learned, Moi was not as decisive as he made out - all too often he listened to the twisted information of bad advisors and let them act on it.

  For the home of a Big Man, State House, Nairobi, was remarkably low key. In contrast to Mobutu's palaces, where goons with sunglasses manhandled you if you so much as looked at them, sentries in pressed khaki drill with crisp blue berets jumped to attention and guided me to the waiting room where attendants were waiting with pots of milky tea. It was more county squire than Third World autocrat. There were even prints of stag hunts and partridge shooting in the entrance hall and a set of ever so slightly dilapidated comfy chairs.

  But to sit in Moi's waiting room, as I did in October 1997 a week after his late-night phone call, was to take on the role of sycophant at the court of Louis XVI. Perched on the chaise longue opposite me was a senior executive from Kenya's Tour ism Board splendidly attired in a bright blue suit with gold buttons. Beside him sat an archbishop, a mayor and - I assumed from his chatter about constituencies - a would-be MP, a popinjay of a man in shiny designer clothes. Our elaborate courtesies had the thinnest veneer for we were bitter rivals for the ear of the chief.

  Halfway through the first afternoon, out of boredom I rose from my chair, wandered over to a set of shelves and leafed through the leather-bound family photo albums with their blur red and amateurish pictures of Moi's foreign tours. Behind me I sensed a prickle of unease. My neighbours clearly feared that my insouciance indicated I was at the head of the queue. Their concern, however, was unfounded; the following morning found me once more in their midst. Nine o'clock, ten o'clock, eleven o'clock passed. Then a thick-set official in a dark suit .poked his head around the door. 'The reporter?' he barked. Pathetically grateful, I jumped to my feet, and followed him out.

  Moi was in cracking form: his arms swung at his side as if he was half his seventy-four years; he was whistling a jolly tune; he was clearly still revelling in the events of the night before when parliament had passed a package of political reforms, out manoeuvring his critics for the umpteenth time in his career. But quite what he had to be so jaunty about was hard to imagine.

  Moi was a second-generation 'Big Man' but he was in politics since before independence and he learned all too well from Kenyatta's heavy-handed and venal ways. Dissent has been ruthlessly crushed for most of his rule. Persistent opponents have been assassinated. By the late Eighties Kenya had scores of political prisoners, many of whom were held and tortured in the Central Police Station, just 200 yards away from the verandah of the Norfolk, Nairobi's premier hotel, favoured by the wealthier tourists in search of the Out of Africa dream.

  The repression eased a little in the early Nineties when Moi succumbed to international pressure and allowed multi-party elections in 1992. But when pressed he instinctively resorted to force. Dozens died in the countdown to Kenya's second election in 1997 in fighting between opposition demonstrators and the police and in so-called tribal clashes, which looked suspiciously like the work of government agent’s provocateurs. The worst violence occurred near Kenya's Indian Ocean beach resorts. Tour operators bemoaned the damage to tourism, but Moi's opponents pointed out that at least tourists might start to appreciate the discrepancy between the pictures in Western holiday brochures of gambolling giraffes and smiling black game guards in trim khaki shorts and the truth, namely that Kenya is spiralling relentlessly downhill.

  As the millennium approached, Kenya's image as an island of prosperity in a sea of chaos was seeping away in a flood of corruption scandals. Even as most Kenyans struggled to feed let alone edu
cate their families, grasping officials creamed off state resources. Month by month the roads became more potholed and the hospitals and schools more down-at-heel. An opposition leader claimed in parliament that nearly $2.5 billion had been stolen from the state since 1990. Moi's sons were frequently linked to financial scandals. Even Britain, traditionally Moi's most loyal Western ally, was starting to reassess its position amid fears that Kenya was going the way of Nigeria and becoming another conduit of fraud and drugs. All the while, whether attending a church service or a cattle market, Moi was, of course, the lead item on the nightly television news, dispensing largesse as if it was his own.

  'I am very busy,' Moi growled as I sat down. 'You have two minutes.' But he was under pressure from a British public relations team to launch a charm offensive and belatedly he remembered the script. He was also mortified by claims he is no better than Mobutu, and determined to change his image. One government insider later told me that when in 1982 Moi heard that air force officers had launched a coup he burst into tears - not out of fear but at the thought that there were Kenyans who did not like him. Our conversation lasted half an hour, but it was more of a lecture than an interview. He returned time and again to the 'treachery' of the West, in particular Britain. He had backed them in the Cold War and yet all he got was abuse.

  The Western world has in recent years applied double standards. I have known British leaders from Churchill onwards, the whole lot, Callaghan, Wilson, Heath. I knew their colonial secretaries and their attitudes. Here in Africa Kenya has always been called a stooge, an American stooge, Big Men, Little People a British stooge. And all of a sudden they abandon Kenya with all this talk of democracy and human rights . . . All around us we have military regimes and yet no one seems to protest about them...

  I recognized the injured tones from government offices all over the continent. The collapse of the Soviet Union trans formed Africa almost as much as Europe. Overnight the rules changed. The West no longer needed to turn a blind eye to the excesses of its ideological soul mates. A victim of the changing times, Moi was bewildered and annoyed by his rejection. For years for the West he was the Slobodan Milosevic of east Africa. Just as the Serbian leader was seen as indispensable to security in the Balkans in the mid-Nineties before the conflict in Kosovo led to the vilification that he deserved, so Britain identified Moi as a regional bulwark, discreetly overlooking his excesses, in return for his support. He was the first African leader to volunteer troops for the Commonwealth monitoring mission for Rhodesia's transition to Zimbabwe. He boycotted the 1980

  Moscow Olympics, and yet the West had abandoned him. Trying to sound a note of self-pity, Moi closed by pleading he had also kept Kenya intact while most of the region had fallen apart. With tribalism so deep-rooted, what could he do? How could he be expected to crack the whip?

  'At independence our forty-two tribes all became united under one flag. I am accused of not acting against corrupt civil servants. We'll do the best we can, but it takes time...'

  Ever since taking office Moi had preyed on the West's fear of tribal bloodshed -something of an irony, given that the British colonialists refined the concept of 'divide and rule'. The assassination of Tom Mboya in 1969, a Luo tipped as Kenyatta's successor, had shown how deep-rooted tribal antipathy was. When a Kikuyu was convicted of the killing, there were ugly clashes between the police and Luo mourners who were convinced there had been a plot to deny Luos power.

  By the time of my interview Moi's argument was looking increasingly weak. He himself had frequently exploited tribal rifts to bolster his position. The bloody aftermath of elections in 2007 when rival parties split down tribal lines and more than 1,000 people died in clashes underlined once and for all the perils Kenya faced.

  Africa is a continent of degrees. Kenya is ringed by some of the most bloodstained states of the late twentieth century. A foray across the frontier in any direction leaves you acutely aware of the hideous shadow that tribalism, or rather the manipulation of tribalism, has cast over Africa.

  *

  The skeletons lay where they had fallen between the pews.

  Heaps of bloodied clothing filled the aisle. Jagged holes in the walls showed where the killers threw in grenades. Splintered skulls testified to the machetes used for the coups de grace. Several thousand people were slaughtered in the simple red brick Catholic church at Ntarama, a village twenty miles from the Rwandan capital Kigali, on 15 April 1994, in just one of the massacres of the genocide. The killers were from the majority Hutu tribe fired up with bloodlust by extremists in the Hutu ruling party to eliminate the minority Tutsis. When I visited the scene two years later the flesh had long since rotted away but the ghosts were everywhere. You could sense them behind the sweet-smelling tropical bushes. They hung over the church like the damp equatorial heat.

  After overthrowing the Hutu extremists the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front had left the church untouched as a memorial. There was something distasteful about the caretaker as he rummaged through the debris to illustrate the horrors of that awful day. I almost remonstrated when he asked for a tip. But as I sat on the track leading away from the church listening to a survivor describe how his family were butchered, I appreciated the caretaker's woeful task, and understood the outburst of anger that had followed my suggestion that maybe the time had come to bury the dead. Without such grisly monuments revisionism could set in and allow the world to sit by and watch again.

  Georges Ngalinde remembered the night of 6 April 1994 with nightmarish clarity. He was tilling his plot when a neighbour rushed over with a crackly radio to announce that their president, Juvenal Habyarimana, and the president of neighbouring Burundi had been killed when their plane was shot down over the capital, Kigali. Ngalinde hurried home to discuss the implications with his family and they sat up all night fearing trouble. But not even Rwanda's bloody independence history of pogroms could prepare them for what was to come.

  Habyarimana was a Hutu who had reluctantly signed a ceasefire and power-sharing settlement the previous year with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, then a rebel movement controlling a third of the country. It is widely assumed that his plane was shot down by extremist Hutus opposed to the deal. It later emerged that local authorities had been drawing up lists detailing the ethnic breakdown of each community to facilitate the slaughter. In a well-planned operation, on the night of the plane crash mobs set up roadblocks and started to butcher Tutsis and moderate Hutu politicians.

  On the advice of the local Hutu authorities Ngalinde and other Tutsis from his commune took refuge in their church. For all but a handful it was to be their tomb. Ngalinde was scouting for food outside when trucks of militia drew up alongside the church accompanied by a crowd of local Hutu peasants, including many of his neighbours. First they fired through the holes in the walls, and then they finished off survivors with garden tools. His two children were among the victims. All the while Ngalinde was watching from a plantation on a nearby hill. He had been haunted by the screams ever since. He stared at the ground; his face was the proverbial African mask in the face of tragedy.

  Up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in the Rwandan genocide in about a hundred days, a rate which makes even Pol Pot's genocide of Cambodians seem slow. Manning checkpoints with bloodstained machetes, the killers boasted to foreign correspondents about what they were doing. Women and children gleefully took part. In village after village butchering Tutsis became part of the daily grind. There were even cases of death squads taking a breather from the slaughter and leaving potential victims overnight in mounds of bodies, before resuming their work the following day.

  Correspondents covering the genocide were appalled by the sluggish reaction in the West. For weeks Rwanda barely made newspaper front pages and elicited the most grudging responses from governments. Rwanda was the stereotypical faraway place about which people knew nothing. Editors were fixated by the dramatic events in South Africa where apartheid was finally laid to rest. As for the
Western powers, unless pressed they were never going to put Rwanda on their agenda. It had no strategic nor economic interest, the factors that have encouraged intervention elsewhere. Moreover, Bosnia was causing enough heartache and the botched American operation in Somalia the previous year had inspired a terror in Washington about involvement in Africa. Before the genocide started, a UN force that had been despatched to monitor the peace settlement had warned its headquarters that extremists were stockpiling weapons. Major-General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the force, sent a memo to New York detailing plans for genocide and seeking permission to raid a suspected weapons cache, but officials feared too aggressive a response could lead to the collapse of the mission and urged inaction. In Washington in mid-May the State Department indulged in linguistic contortions to avoid using the word 'genocide', favouring instead the 'breakdown of a ceasefire', in a bid to play down pressure to intervene. Years later I asked the then head of UN peacekeeping Kofi Annan about this period and he expressed deep regret at not shouting from the rooftops.

  One significant factor of course was the ennui that African carnage inspires in the outside world. Since the Sixties when up to a million people were killed in Nigeria in the Biafran war, the continent has often given the impression of being convulsed by tribal conflict. Biafra was merely the beginning.

  Nowhere in Africa has tribal identity had such a disastrous legacy as Rwanda and Burundi in the last forty years. Both have - or in the case of Rwanda had a 15 percent minority of Tutsis, a Nilotic race who moved into central Africa and lived alongside the resident Bantu tribesmen several centuries ago. Contrary to received wisdom they were not always at each other's throats. Many intermarried. While there is some truth to the legend that in the pre-colonial era Tutsis were cattle-herding aristocrats and the Hutus were serfs, the division was entrenched only in the 1930s when Belgian colonists issued tribal identity cards and set up an apartheid system. Ever since the Belgians bequeathed power to the Hutus in Rwanda, the tiny state has been beset by anti-Tutsi pogroms. Across the border in Burundi the boot was on the other foot. There the Tutsis had kept power and they did all they could to avoid sharing it. When about 100,000 people were killed in Burundi in late 1993 the news was judged in most Western newspapers to merit only an occasional mention.