“I took the oath, I can’t vote for a Luo. I remember having a heated argument with my uncle, just before the Auggeneral elections in which he said the Kikuyu people took the oath to never vote for a Luo. It is against this backdrop that the oaths were administered to the Kikuyu people, some of them forcefully.
After an exchange of words between Jaramogi and Jomo, a scuffle ensued and presidential security agents fired live bullets killing several people. Jaramogi the great nationalist had had a showdown with President Jomo, when he went to open the “Russia Hospital” at the lakeshore town of Kisumu, Jaramogi’s home town and bastion of his Luo support.
Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Jomo’s first Vice President who had quarrelled with Jomo in 1966, had been cast away and replaced with Joseph Murumbi, had been put under house arrest the same year.
Six months later, an even more illustrious politician, the cosmopolitan, mercurial and urbane, Thomas Joseph Mboya was gunned down by a Kikuyu assassin, as he stepped out of (Channi’s) pharmacy at 1pm on Government Road, today’s Moi Avenue. Secretary General of the Kenya Federation of Labor, Tom Mboya and his wife Pamela, during their honeymoon in Israel. Today that road that goes through Hurlingham is called Argwings Kodhek Road. In January 1969, he was involved in a freak fatal accident at the junction of Hurlingham roundabout and the slip road that leads to Department of Defence (DOD). Argwings Kodhek was an erudite, British trained barrister who served as Jomo Kenyatta’s foreign affairs minister. A third had been detained and then put under a house arrest. “People were asked to strip nude, drink a slaughtered lamb’s blood and made to swear that the they would always protect the leadership of the country from going to the Luo community.ġ969 had been a terribly bad year for the Luo people, which had lost two of its most illustrious sons to a spurious road accident and an assassination. “It was a murky, tribal, blood-filled affair conducted in the darkly night,” the mzee recently reminisced, when we meet after his rendezvous with the matriarch. In 1969, my mzee friend was an “A” level student when he was yanked from boarding school and taken to Ichaweri village, Gatundu location, Kiambu County, then known as Kiambu District, the ancestral home of Jomo Kenyatta to be oathed. The Kenyattas are struggling to understand how a people they have lorded over for half a century, have now turned against them, just when they need them most To cut to the chase, the Kenyattas are struggling to understand how a people they have lorded over for half a century, have now turned against them, just when they need them most. The deliberations of that sit-down shall remain undisclosed primarily because it was a private conversation and because the mzee, who also happens to be my friend for many years, shared the sit-down conversation with me in strict confidence. The matriarch wanted the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But after two successive by-elections in Kiambu County in 2021, it had now dawned on the Kenyattas that indeed the Kikuyu people weren’t bluffing.īut, I’m running ahead of myself. Until several months ago, the Kenyatta household did not believe that the Kikuyu nation had had enough of the ruling family’s stranglehold on a people who have been known to have erstwhile held the family in awe. The matriarch, Mama Ngina Kenyatta wanted to know just one thing from the 70-plus-year-old man: Why have the Kikuyu people turned against us? Us being the Kenyatta household, more specifically, against President Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta’s reign. In February 2022, the Kenyatta family matriarch summoned a mzee from Kiambu County, an old-time friend of the family for a sit-down.
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