Название: It’s Our Turn to Eat
Автор: Michela Wrong
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007325115
isbn:
A few weeks after finding his own place, waiting on a London Underground platform, John realised he was being followed by two middle-aged Kenyan men who looked exactly what they almost certainly were: undercover agents. He sprinted down a passageway and hopped onto a train to lose them. Then one day, emerging at his local tube station, he was confronted by a Kenyan man, standing coolly watching him, making sure John registered his presence. They had tracked their prey down to his lair, and were showing off the fact that they knew where to find him.
Yet they did nothing. There was no attempted break-in to verify what, if any, material he held in his new lodgings, no raid to confiscate the incriminating laptop – still in his possession and containing plenty of unbacked-up material – no overture, no whispered threat, no attempt to lure him back to Kenya. They were hanging back, waiting. Waiting for what, exactly? Presumably for the same thing as the rest of us: waiting for the Big Man to make up his mind.
He moved yet again, this time to Oxford's St Antony's, a college with a history of offering sanctuary to those in political hot water. Professor Paul Collier, an expert on African economies, had come to the rescue with a not particularly demanding senior associate's post on its East African Studies programme. It was exactly the kind of academic berth John needed at this juncture, offering him accommodation, a work space and – crucially – the time in which to gather his thoughts.
One of his first acts there was highly symbolic. Just as his government experience had been at its sourest, he had been named Chief of the Burning Spear, Kenya's equivalent of the Order of the British Empire. Coming when it did, the award had felt part consolation prize, part bribe. Now he arranged for it to be sent to an old Kenyan friend, Harris Mule. Mule, a former permanent secretary at the finance ministry, had been a loyal civil servant who had refused to play the political game. When he had fallen into disfavour, he had quietly accepted his fate. John had consulted him when things got difficult, drinking in his wise advice. Now he sent Mule a medal he believed he himself did not deserve, and which Mule should have been awarded decades ago. If State House was ever made aware of that small gesture, it would have been well advised to take notice. There was a touch of the boat-burning about it.
Ensconced in his new lodgings, John was nothing if not methodical. Now that he had caught his breath, it was time to pull everything together: the contents of the diaries he had kept throughout two years in office – well-thumbed, numbered black notebooks transcribed in neat fountain pen, the sloping handwriting squeezed as close as possible to make maximum use of space – the documents he had copied and quietly sent abroad, the digitalised tape recordings downloaded onto his computer. If he was ever to make head or tail of it, all this information needed to be scanned, logged, written up and placed in some logical order. To date, he had turned down every interview request, made no statements, held no press conference. He had marked his fortieth birthday, that psychologically significant moment in a man's life, with the start of a new, uncertain existence in a foreign country. All paths still lay open to him. But he would only know what to do next once he had understood exactly what had happened to him. And to Kenya.
‘Youth gives all it can: it gives itself without reserve.’
JOSEMARÍA ESCRIVÁ, founder of Opus Dei
There's a certain sameness about presidential lodgings in Britain's former African colonies, and Nairobi's State House, the former colonial governor's residence, is no exception. Fall asleep in the waiting room and on waking you could, in that bleary moment of confusion, think yourself in State House, Zambia; State House, Tanzania; or State House, Uganda. Behind the white-pillared porticoes they present to the world, these buildings are resolutely dowdy, content to remain stubbornly out of touch with modern trends in interior design. No stark minimalism here, no streamlined vistas, no clever games with reflection and light. The décor is dark wood panelling, chintz sofas, red carpets and thick velvet drapes. The taste in pictures will usually be execrable: an anaemic watercolour of an English country scene, an uplifting motto urging the reader on to greater Christian efforts, an oil portrait of the incumbent so approximate it could have been sat for by someone else entirely. The carpet will be worn through in places, a clumsily carved piece of animal Africana will take up a great deal of space. The overall impression is of a dusty members' club crossed with a gloomy British country pub, and the effect is to make those indoors pine for the fresh green of the formal gardens outside, the only real area of beauty.
One of the peculiarities of Nairobi's State House is that it is invisible from the road, the only hint of its existence a formidable checkpoint and a challengingly high metal fence. Puzzlingly, this fence has repeatedly failed to do its job. In the wake of Moi's unceremonious exit, several solo intruders were discovered wandering the presidential grounds in the early hours. One was an Australian tourist, another a Ugandan. Arrested by the GSU, they could not satisfactorily explain what they were doing on the premises. After some initial headlines, they were never heard of again. Word spread amongst Nairobi's more superstitious residents. These mysterious visitors had been able to pass through State House's supposedly impregnable fence, then evaporated into thin air, because they were not men at all, but spirits. Jomo Kenyatta had refused to spend a single night in State House, convinced it was haunted by vindictive ghosts of the white administration. Moi, it was now said, had also left a malign parting gift behind, an evil genie, a curse which explained not only these night-time visitations but the variety of misfortunes – from Kibaki's near-fatal car crash to the death of his first vice president – that were to befall its new incumbents.
It was here, in an old bedroom converted into a study, that John set up base in early 2003. On his desk he placed a framed picture, a present from Bob Munro, a Canadian friend who ran a slum-based soccer-club scheme. It was a copy of a Charles Addams cartoon, showing a skier whose parallel tracks in the snow surreally divide and rejoin on either side of a pine tree. ‘That's going to be you,’ Munro joked, anticipating the impossible demands that would be made on the future civil servant. John had initially established an office outside the main building, within the State House compound. The president was having none of it. ‘No, no, no, I want you inside this building,’ Kibaki had said, insisting that the newly appointed anti-corruption czar should be virtually within shouting distance of his own office – just two doors and a foyer separated them. ‘Don't brief anyone but me, don't bother making appointments, just check that I'm free and come straight in.’ It seemed the president had taken John's message on board.
That physical proximity alone ensured John extraordinary influence. In a strong presidential system, being in a position to brush against the head of state in a corridor is worth a score of weighty-sounding titles. Whatever John's nominal grade, being granted free licence to update the president whenever he wished effectively placed him above many cabinet ministers in the pecking order. And Kibaki was true to his word. By the time he left, John calculated that he had given his boss sixty-six briefings, some of them stretching over two or three separate meetings. That walk-in access made him a player of huge interest to anyone wanting to cut through the layers of bureaucracy to reach the core of power. ‘People would give me information because they knew I could easily pass it on to the president.“You need to know this,” they would say.’
The first thing John did was to eliminate the traces of Kibaki's predecessor. Moi's official СКАЧАТЬ