It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

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СКАЧАТЬ most part he ignored his collection of mobile phones as they constantly vibrated and shrilled. Occasionally he'd pick one up, disappearing into his room to hold a quiet, intense conversation in Gikuyu or Kiswahili. But usually he would just look at the display, check who was trying to make contact, then put the handset down. The one that rang with most persistence was his line to State House.

      ‘It's very interesting,’ he mused. ‘They haven't cut off my State House mobile phone. My safe in the office hasn't even been opened. And my secretary is still at her post.’

      ‘It's their way of telling you that you can still go back,’ I suggested. ‘They're saying,“It's not too late, the lines are still open.”’

      Yet even by that stage, I had begun to recognise what constituted signs of stress in the Big Man. His booming, seemingly carefree laugh was the equivalent of most people's titter – a sign of tension, not relaxation. The more nervous he became, the more heartily he laughed. He wasn't sleeping well either – I gave him some of my sleeping pills when he mentioned the problem – and his mental fatigue was evident in his tendency to tell me the same things over and over again. His sentences were like ripples on the surface of a pool – they gave a hint of the thoughts churning obsessively in the depths below. I could guess what those might be: How on earth had it ever come to this? Was this the right path? Where did he go from here?

      The best way of relieving the stress was exercise. John was the kind of dedicated workout enthusiast who knew which machine targeted exactly which muscle group. One of the first sorties we made from my flat was to tour the local area scouting out which gym had the best weight-training facilities. Working out – a three-hour process – was not just a hobby, he needed it, needed to feel the adrenalin coursing round his body if he was to stay focused and sane. Other men might have started working their way through my drinks cabinet, but my fridge filled up with cartons of fruit juice. John, iron-disciplined in this as in so many things, had turned teetotal during his time in State House, when he had noticed that winding down from a stressful week with a bottle of whisky had become a habit, and that the habit was becoming increasingly hard to break. It was typical of him that he wouldn't let himself slip back, not even now, when he had the best of excuses for needing the odd stiff drink.

      His other recourse was religion. Having spent so much time in Britain, John had registered the scepticism, if not downright antagonism, of his European acquaintances when it came to matters religious. His Catholic faith was something he never talked about with his mzungu friends, I noticed, turning instead that side of himself with which they felt most at ease. Only the Virgin Mary medallion around his neck and the rosary ring on his finger – one metal bobble for each Hail Mary to be recited, removed only during weightlifting – gave the game away. But one of his last visits before leaving Nairobi had been to call in on the Consolata Shrine, where troubled minds went in search of solace. And in those fraught early weeks in London he did a lot of praying.

      As he quietly came and went, reuniting with girlfriend Mary Muthumbi – an advertising executive who flew to London to see him – officially registering his presence with a Foreign Office that expressed only polite interest, a silent question mark was forming. Fleeing the country, in a way, had been the easy part. What, precisely, was he going to do next?

      As far as I could see, there were only two options. Option One: Leave government employment and keep quiet. Give the tapes and computer material – your insurance policy against assassination – to a British lawyer, along with firm instructions that should anything happen to you, they will be released to the press. Make these arrangements clear to those in power, and assure them you will never give another media interview in your life and will never go into politics. Work abroad, go into academia, get married to your long-suffering girlfriend and wait for the affair to die down. Eventually, maybe five years down the line, you will be able to return to Kenya, and while ordinary folk will look at you with a certain cynicism and think, ‘I wonder what he knew?’, most will respect your discretion and commonsense. No man can single-handedly transform a system, and you will be joining the ranks of former civil servants with clanking skeletons in their cupboards. Your conscience may occasionally trouble you, and you will have to acknowledge that you tried and failed. But you will have got your life back.

      Option Two was bleaker, more dramatic, and fitted straight into that Hollywood thriller genre. Lance the boil, go public. Blow the government you once passionately believed in out of the water and say what you know. People who matter may hate you for all eternity. You may never be able to go home again, your family and friends may suffer by association, your colleagues may regard you as a traitor, but you will have done the right, the upstanding thing, and lived up to the principles that have governed your life. You will have shown the world that others may do as they please, but as far as you are concerned, ‘Africa’ and ‘corruption’ are not synonymous.

      Most journalists, I suspected, would urge John to choose Option Two – it made for a fantastic story. I urged him to choose Option One. Those journalists would not have to live with the consequences. My old friend, it seemed to me, had already done his share, and his country's fate was not his burden to shoulder alone.

      Initially, he'd planned a press conference. The speculation and allegations being published in the Kenyan press irked him, he said, and he felt he owed the Kenyan public an explanation. I quailed at the thought of the bun-fight that would follow.

      ‘If you're going to hold a press conference, you have to be absolutely clear in your mind what you're prepared to say. Are you going to spill the beans now? Are you ready to explain what actually happened?’

      ‘No, not yet.’

      ‘Then don't do it. The most infuriating thing you can do to journalists is to hold a press conference and say nothing. It'll drive them crazy. They'll either force you into making admissions you don't intend or rip you to shreds for wasting their time.’

      Another idea he considered, urged on him by the few friends in London who were gradually discovering his whereabouts, was to record an ‘in the event of my death’ videotape in which he named names and explained his departure. If he were killed, it would remain as devastating testimony. He toyed with the idea, but held off once again. Perhaps he was wary of creating such an incendiary tape – who could be trusted to keep such red-hot footage under wraps? But it was also a question of strategy. John's modus operandi, perfected over the years, was to painstakingly think through every eventuality, harvesting the insights of well connected insiders, visualising every possible scenario before moving to action. ‘I try and dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s. I do this excessively, it's been my style throughout. And then, when I move – BOOM!’ The approach slowed him down, but he needed to feel he had set his intellectual house in order. If he taped an interview so early on, he'd be skipping the methodical preparation of the ground that felt like a necessity.

      A fortnight later, with the key questions unanswered, John moved out. He headed first to the home of Michael Holman, another British journalist whose friendship with him was as little known as my own, and then to a scruffy flat next to a north London fish-and-chip shop.

      I didn't like to admit it, but his departure came as both anticlimax and relief. There was no denying that my brush with a man at the vortex of a major political crisis had provided me with a vicarious thrill. But there had been a few close shaves, close enough to make me uncomfortable. My parents' flat happened to be situated around the corner from the Kenyan High Commission. Once I'd caught a bus that stopped just outside the building and two Kenyan women employees, leaving for the day, had boarded after me. To my alarm, they had ridden all the way to my bus stop. These women, who would certainly know John in his official capacity and recognise him if they bumped into him on the street, lived in my local area. Another time, John had been using a local cyber café and a Kenyan customer had suddenly started chatting to him in Kiswahili. It was not clear whether he'd been recognised, or this was just a case of one East African being friendly СКАЧАТЬ