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Fifty years ago this April, Dr Johnstone Muthiora, who, barely six months earlier, had taken on one of the most powerful men in Kenya at the ballot box and won, died mysteriously. His death, coming as it did just over a month after the killing of popular Nyandarua North MP JM Kariuki, triggered rumours of another political assassination. This was despite the official evidence pointing to an unfortunate medical misfortune that could have happened to anyone.
Elected MP for Dagoretti barely six months earlier, Muthiora had received an unexpected and somewhat unusual diplomatic invitation for a parliamentary newbie. The invitation came from the Indian government. The fact that he returned to Kenya halfway through his visit, sick and in pain, only to die a week later, made people suspicious.
In a statement issued after Muthiora’s death, the Indian High Commissioner to Kenya, Air Chief Marshal Arjun Singh, said, “The government of India invited Dr Muthiora for a 17-day tour of India, during which he was invited to acquaint himself with India’s progress in many aspects of the country’s development: Agricultural, industrial, educational, cultural and social.”
The envoy said that Muthiora’s visit had been organised with the full knowledge of the Kenyan government. He also said that all the particulars of Muthiora’s illness and treatment in India had been given to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and his widow, Mrs Bonnie Muthiora.
Muthiora had never been to India before, and while possibly unusual, it must have been somewhat flattering that he, a mere backbencher in the Kenyan parliament, had been invited by the Indian government for an official visit.
According to a report in the Weekly Review, which interviewed family and friends close to Muthiora, he had agreed to go on the visit as a break of sorts.
“He had been working tirelessly since the October election of 1974, when he unseated Dr Mungai from the constituency. He had been all over the constituency, organising and initiating Harambee projects.
“Besides, he was rather depressed by the recent assassination of JM Kariuki, who had been a long-time friend from the days of detention during the emergency. He needed a rest, and the visit to India would provide the relaxation he required.”
It was reported that a few days into his trip, Muthiora hurt his shoulder in a fall while descending some steep stairs during a tour of the Taj Mahal. However, he experienced intense pain only a few days later, and it was while in his hotel room in Madras, Southern India, that Muthiora called for a doctor. The hotel’s resident doctor happened to be out, but the receptionist managed to contact another doctor who could attend to his pain.
The Weekly Review wrote: “India, like most developing countries, is short of doctors and those that practise are not always as presentable as one might wish them to be, but the doctor who came to Muthiora in his Madras hotel room left much to be desired.
“Even to unprofessional eyes such as Muthiora’s, it was odd that the instruments the doctor had brought were wrapped in what looked like dirty old newspapers.”
“After mixing the contents of various containers, the doctor gave him an injection repeatedly telling him it was for pain.
“This is only for pain. This is only for pain. The doctor had kept saying. At one point, Muthiora, who was indeed in great pain, had annoyingly shouted back at the doctor, ‘Okay, don’t keep on telling me, just give it to me.’”
It was the report of this jab by the doctor that raised suspicions among Kenyans, who believed that it was whatever concoction was in the syringe that led to Muthiora’s death soon afterwards. They suspected he had been poisoned.
According to the High Commissioner, however, the doctor injected Muthiora with a sedative and gave him some painkillers, after which he slept for about three hours. When Muthiora awoke, he was shivering and had a very high temperature. As a result, he was taken to see a specialist who carried out an ECG and a chest X-ray, among other medical tests.
The doctor’s diagnosis found that Muthiora’s heart and lungs were normal, but the liver was enlarged, even though it was not tender to the touch. He prescribed some medication to help Muthiora sleep. The doctor also prescribed that Muthiora rest.
Accordingly, the rest of the trip was cancelled, and within two days he was back in Nairobi, surprising his family, who had not expected him back so soon. A couple of days afterwards, he was admitted to the Nairobi Hospital. A week later, he was dead.
While I could find no evidence of the family having raised concerns over the death over the last 50 years, there has been plenty of speculation published in the media over the decades.
Those who looked at the death through a political lens believed Muthiora must have been killed. Some speculated, without any proof, that Dr Njoroge Mungai, the man Muthiora had politically humiliated at the 1974 contest for the Dagoretti constituency, was somehow responsible.
Until his defeat at the polls, the powerful and influential Dr Mungai had been viewed in some quarters as a possible successor to an ageing President Jomo Kenyatta. From 1964, Mungai had been a senior cabinet minister, moving from the Health portfolio after independence to the Defence Ministry during the Shifta crisis. He later moved to Foreign Affairs in time to persuade the UN to let Nairobi host the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1972.
But more than this, he had been Kenyatta’s physician and was the president’s first cousin. He was alleged by some to feel a sense of entitlement because of this personal connection. As far as Dr Mungai was concerned, and a sense of this would emerge later during the Change the Constitution campaign in 1976, his most prominent rivals for the Kenyatta succession were no longer in the picture.
Former Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga had been sent to political Siberia; Tom Mboya, Mungai’s political frenemy in the early years of independence, had been sent to meet his maker, and the sitting VP, Daniel arap Moi, would surely only be “a passing cloud”.
However, the October 14, 1974, general election in Kenya proved to be Mungai’s electoral Waterloo. There have been plausible suggestions that Mungai’s fall had the tacit support of President Jomo Kenyatta, as the Old Man was said to have wanted his “arrogant” cousin taken down a notch or two.
Writing about Muthiora’s mysterious death, veteran journalist Kamau Ngotho implied that Mungai’s constant humiliation of Vice President Moi, and persistent disrespect of Finance Minister Mwai Kibaki, were among the issues that had displeased Kenyatta enough to quietly allow the political takedown.
Members of what Ngotho refers to as “the Njonjo-Moi axis”, who had their plans for the Kenyatta succession, supported Muthiora in his bid against Mungai.
Another doyen of journalism, Salim Lone, lent credence to the coalition of political forces against Mungai in a piece he wrote for The Star newspaper in 2019 on the passing of former Minister Charles Rubia.
Lone wrote: “It was April 20, 1975, and we were talking at the home of Dagoretti MP Dr Johnstone Muthiora, the day after he had succumbed to a suspicious illness.
“I was the editor of the Sunday Post then, and we had supported Dr Muthiora’s challenge to sitting MP Dr Njoroge Mungai in the election a few months earlier (at subsequent great cost, of course)…
“In our small condoling group with Mrs Bonnie Muthiora were also Kenneth Matiba, Dr JG Kiano and Maina Wanjigi, all of whom spoke equally damningly about the regime which had a few weeks earlier organized the brutal killing of J.M. Kariuki.”
Kiano was Minister for Commerce and Industry, Wanjigi was an assistant minister for Water Development, Matiba was head of the Kenya Football Association, and Rubia was an MP. Wanjigi and Rubia represented Kamkunji and Starehe constituencies, respectively, both in Nairobi, as was Dagoretti.
All of them had supported Muthiora at the 1974 election, even though Kiano and Mungai were close family friends and had been classmates at Alliance High School. Six months later, they were mourning the man they had supported against Mungai.
***
While the story of Dr Muthiora’s suspicious death has been rehashed on other platforms, one aspect of the story that appears to have often been overlooked is that of his formative years as a teenage hero of the Mau Mau struggle.
Scrolling through published news reports of Muthiora’s death, I found one of the best reports featured in the Weekly Review edition of April 28, 1975. At a time when once again, young Kenyans are struggling against what they see as an oppressive and unjust system, some may find inspiration in the tales of young people from our past.
This is the story of how a 16-year-old Muthiora was arrested, managed to escape from the notorious Manyani Detention camp, and lived to tell the tale.
The story of Muthiora’s escape from Manyani, the only escape from that maximum security colonial detention camp, is told in greater detail in Joram Wamweya’s book Freedom Fighter.
Of the dozen or so detainees that managed to make the escape, Muthiora and Wamweya were the only survivors. The rest died in the great arid plains of Tsavo, either from thirst or starvation, or from wounds inflicted by wild animals.
Muthiora was not the classic political upstart, appearing from nowhere to take on and defeat a giant. Aged 39 at the time of his death, his political résumé included struggle credentials that made him well known in Dagoretti, even though he was not a national figure.
From what I could glean from a news feature published in the April 28, 1975, edition of the Weekly Review, the week of his death, Muthiora was born in Waithaka in 1936. He grew up in a family that was actively involved in the struggle for Kenya’s independence. His father, who was fairly wealthy by the standards for African Kenyans at the time, sent his firstborn of 10 children to Waithaka Primary School, where Eliud Mathu was the principal. Mathu would go on to become the first African member of the Legislative Council of Kenya (LegCo), serving from 1944 to 1957. He would later become the first State House comptroller after independence.
According to the report, Mathu recognised that the young Muthiora possessed “exceptional ability” and did everything he could to encourage him in his education. Meanwhile, clouds were gathering on the political horizon in Kenya. There was frustration over the ruthlessness and injustice of colonial rule in Kenya.
As the Weekly Review put it, “This spawned an underground political movement in Central Province with branches virtually everywhere in Kikuyu country.
“In Dagoretti, Muthiora’s father was a treasurer of this movement, later to be known by the British authorities and throughout the world as the Mau Mau.”
Young Muthiora was drawn to the movement but was considered too young to be entrusted with anything serious during those difficult days of resistance to British colonial rule. By 1950, however, when he was only 14, Muthiora was running Mau Mau-related errands for Kenya African Union (KAU) members Paul Ngei and Isaac Gathanju.
Ngei would be jailed as one of the Kapenguria Six alongside Bildad Kaggia, Kung’u Karumba, Jomo Kenyatta, Fred Kubai, and Achieng’ Oneko. After independence, Gathanju became Deputy Mayor of Nairobi.
The errands involved young Muthiora distributing leaflets, which the colonial authorities called “subversive literature and propaganda”. Finding this work to be more urgent than school, Muthiora abandoned his studies to devote his energies fully to the cause.
In 1952, the year when a state of emergency was declared in Kenya following the arrest and detention of Kenyatta and other leaders of KAU, Muthiora, then 16, was arrested and charged with being a member of the Mau Mau. Found guilty, he was sentenced to death and detained at Kodiaga Prison in Kisumu.
Enter, stage right, Fitz de Souza, then a young lawyer who would after independence serve as an elected MP and Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly until 1969.
De Souza had thrown his lot in with the national nationalist movement in the 1950s and he took up the boy’s case, getting Muthiora acquitted on appeal.
Years later, De Souza would say of Muthiora, “I had an impression then of a boy who was thoroughly dedicated to the cause. Even though he was only 16, there was a very fiery expression in his eyes, which impressed me a great deal.”
However, the appeal win would be a Pyrrhic victory, as Muthiora was immediately rearrested as he left the court and held under a different charge. Unfortunately for him, De Souza was now fully engrossed in the Kapenguria trial. The two lost touch and did not meet again until seven years later.
Muthiora was taken to what is now the Central Police Station, then known as Kingsway Police Station. The cells were full at the time, and he had to be transferred to the CID headquarters, which were based where the Nairobi Serena Hotel now stands. He was to be brought up for trial and sentencing the following day, a process which, in those days, took a few hours, and the sentence was predictable.
Muthiora later recounted that the European police officer escorting him to CID HQ said: “You know you’re going to hang this time? Doesn’t it bother you?” Refusing to betray any sense of fear, Muthiora responded, “I don’t think I’m going to hang.”
There would be no trial for Muthiora the following day, as that same night, the 16-year-old boy escaped from the CID headquarters compound and made his way back to Dagoretti.
To the Dagoretti leaders of the nationalist movement, the boy had proved himself in his escape, and young as he was, Muthiora was given several assignments which would normally have been reserved for older, more experienced people.
The Weekly Review wrote, “He became a gun runner for the movement. He was given money and told to secure guns in whatever manner he could. His means of securing arms were varied according to the circumstances in which he had to operate.
“He paid prostitutes to steal guns from the British soldiers or buy them from money-hungry African policemen. He paid taxi drivers to do the same, and on one occasion, he and a group of daring young men got into Langata barracks and came away with a quantity of arms.
“Once secured, these arms had to be delivered to Mau Mau freedom fighters in the Aberdare Forest area. On several occasions, Muthiora worked on the highly dangerous mission of escorting couriers, up to deliver arms and provisions to the Mau Mau leader Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi.”
It was a difficult life for a young boy. It called for numerous disguises and frequent brushes with death; after the Lari Massacre on March 24, 1953, in which nearly 100 loyalists were killed by Mau Mau forces, the British government drastically tightened security within Kenya.
A new commander-in-chief of British forces in East Africa, General Sir George Erskine, was sent out to Kenya in June. That same year, an overall plan to restore law and order in Kenya was put into effect. The plan involved setting up several concentration camps in various places in the colony to which would be sent thousands of suspected members of the Mau Mau movement.
One of the undertakings under this plan was the infamous Operation Anvil of 1954, which rounded up thousands in the Nairobi area. Muthiora was among those who were rounded up.
They were first taken to Langata camp, which was then in what is now Nairobi West. Then, together with thousands of others, transported in trains whose windows were blackened so that detainees would not know where they were being taken.
As it turned out, their destination was Manyani Detention Camp, a camp reserved for hardcore Mau Mau.
Telling his story to a journalist years later, Muthiora said: “As soon as I got to Manyani, my one thought was to escape.”
It was an impossible dream. No one had ever escaped from Manyani. The camp was in the middle of nowhere and was surrounded by barbed wire, electric wire, and a huge trench. There were armed sentries on guard, day and night. Even if by some miracle a detainee managed to escape, they would not know what direction to go in, as none of them knew where Manyani was. They couldn’t be sure whether it was in Kenya or outside the country.
Nevertheless, Muthiora was determined to escape, and he spent all his days in the camp trying to figure out the weak link in the security arrangements.
The weak link, when he found it, was strangely simple. The electricity for the camp came not from the grid, but from generators that ran day and night. However, at certain intervals in the evening, the generators would be turned off – probably for maintenance – and then they’d be turned on again. There were only a few minutes during which an escape could be made; it had to be within the time when the electric fortifications were temporarily ineffective.
Had Muthiora lived to write his autobiography, there would have been much drama that he would have recorded in detail. Such as how he and his fellow escapees walked towards Mt Kilimanjaro and survived attacks from spotter planes sent out to search for them.
In the event, Muthiora eventually found his way back to Nairobi on foot, weighing a mere 36.2 kilos and looking like a skeletal ghost.
Returning to Nairobi did not mean the end of his ordeal. Muthiora was arrested at Athi River on the outskirts of the city. Unbeknownst to him, there had been a recent escape from the McKinnon road camp, and the colonial authorities, who were searching for the escapees, presumed that he was one of them.
On being arrested, Muthiora decided that the best strategy would be to say nothing and pretend he was deaf and mute. It was not until he was arraigned in court that he broke his silence to reveal that he had escaped not from McKinnon Road, but from Manyani.
According to the Weekly Review story: “There was consternation in the court for it was not possible to charge, to change the charge. So Muthiora was freed, but immediately rearrested on a different charge and sent back to Manyani, where he stayed until his release in 1959.”
For Muthiora, like for thousands of other detainees, freedom was not the joy it should have been. It was depressing, but then he remembered his interrupted education and started studying at a private correspondence school, gaining his school certificate that way.
In 1960, with the help of Dr Kiano and the financial contributions of many Dagoretti people, he got onto one of the famous Mboya-Kiano-Kennedy airlifts that sent more than 1,200 Kenyans to study in the US.
During his sojourn in the US, Muthiora met and married his wife Bonnie, a white American with whom he had three children. He also graduated with a PhD in international law from George Washington University.
On returning to Kenya in 1968, Muthiora worked in the construction industry until he landed a lecturer’s job at the University of Nairobi in 1971, where he taught in the Department of Government. In the interim, Muthiora had been urged to run in the 1969 general election by the people of Dagoretti who recalled his role in the struggle for independence. He declined, saying he had only just returned to the country.
However, when he was asked again ahead of the 1974 poll, Muthiora agreed. He made an effort to keep his campaign focus on issues rather than personalities. From the very beginning, Mungai, as the incumbent, was put on the defensive.
Mungai’s style of campaign was in direct contrast to Muthiora’s. While the challenger vigorously called for changes and action, in his speeches, Mungai outlined his past achievements as a minister in various portfolios. He talked of having helped maintain peace in Kenya and promoting the country’s name during the ten years he was in parliament, a reference to his Defence and Foreign Affairs portfolios.
In the end, these achievements did not impress his constituents. Dagoretti people felt they were part of the city of Nairobi but did not enjoy adequate social amenities such as water, roads, nursery schools, and houses. These were the issues that mattered to them.
In what might have been a fit of desperation or a moment of hubris, Mungai told constituents that he was the president’s physician and that, by implication, he should be returned to parliament. This left him open to all kinds of attacks, including one by George Githu, the then editor-in-chief of the Daily Nation, who ridiculed the claim in a commentary he wrote just before the election.
***
At Muthiora’s funeral, reportedly attended by over 20,000 people, a message was read on President Kenyatta’s behalf by the Nairobi Provincial Commissioner, Paul Boit.
Kenyatta mourned Muthiora’s sudden death as a great tragedy that had robbed the nation of a great leader. The president said that Muthiora’s dedication to the people of Kenya would always be remembered.
Another presidential message of condolence, also read by Boit, came from Uganda’s President Idi Amin, who described the late MP as a great freedom fighter and true nationalist.
Speaking on behalf of the Speaker of the National Assembly, Nakuru MP Mr Mark Mwithaga said Muthiora had been highly respected in the National Assembly. Kisumu Town MP Grace Onyango urged the people of Dagoretti to replace their fallen MP with someone of the same calibre.
The most moving eulogy came from Dr Kiano, who had been a close friend of Muthiora’s.
Kiano said that in Muthiora’s brief time as MP for Dagoretti, Muthiora’s concern for poor people, his concern for better social services, and his concern for the well-being of every man, woman, and child became more and more evident.
“What is more, Dr Muthiora became a national figure. His influence went beyond the confines of Dagoretti, for he spoke for all Kenyans when he fought for the betterment of the less fortunate citizens of this land. Today, he is no longer with us, but his short lifespan has left an indelible mark and an everlasting presence in national life.”
