NKOSI SIKELEL’ iAFRICA: FROM A CHILD OF KENYA TO A SON OF AFRICA

By Njonjo Mue

Worth Noting:

• Our movement comprising grassroots activists, civil society organisations, progressive academics and opposition politicians held march after march in the city under the slogan “No Reforms, No Elections!!”
• We intended to make it clear to the Moi regime that without comprehensive constitutional reforms, we would not allow the country to hold the general election scheduled for December 1997 because that would mean going into an election with a playing field that was so tilted in his favour that only President Moi could win.
• The government banned all our demonstrations. No sooner would we announce a planned demo than the police would declare it illegal and warn of dire consequences for anyone who dared to defy their ban. But that would not stop us from marching.

For six months after I returned from taking my exams in Oxford and re-joining the ICJ – Kenya team as a volunteer with no salary, our hard work was finally rewarded when a couple of donor grants were approved and the organisation reinstated me on the payroll. This was in February 1997.

A month later, I applied for a job with the London-based NGO ARTICLE 19. It had recently opened its first ever regional office for Africa based in Johannesburg and was seeking to recruit an international lawyer as head of office and legal advisor to its Africa Programme.

I was invited to travel to Jo’burg for interview in mid-April.

The South African Airways flight that took me from Nairobi to Johannesburg landed at Jan Smuts International Airport late one Sunday afternoon. The airport was easily three times the size of our Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and resembled many of the airports I had travelled through in Europe.

I took a cab to The Devonshire Hotel in the Braamfontein neighbourhood of Johannesburg.

The following morning after breakfast, I took a taxi to the ARTICLE 19 office on 87 Juta Street, only to realise that it was just a couple of blocks away from the hotel and I could have easily walked the distance in less than ten minutes. In my experience traveling around the world, it seemed to be standard practice that taxi drivers never volunteered to their client information that would deny them business.

I took the elevator to the fifth floor where the ARTICLE 19 office was located. When I knocked on the door, a well-built African woman with short hair and a big smile answered promptly as if she had been expecting me and was just waiting on the other side of the door to let me in.

“Good morning, my name is Njonjo Mue” I introduced myself. “I am here for a 9.00 a.m. job interview,”

“Welcome to ARTICLE 19,” she said inviting me in to the warm tastily furnished office. “I am Claudia Motswane. I am the office manager.”

Claudia and I hit it off almost from the first moment that we met. I learned later that she had been employed a few weeks before to manage the new regional office. She offered me a cup of rooibos tea and we made small talk as we waited for the two members of the interview panel to arrive.

Shortly thereafter, we were joined by Richard Carver, the head of the Africa programme who had travelled from London for the interview, and Jody Kollapen, a commissioner with the South African Human Rights Commission, who was also a board member of the newly registered ARTICLE 19 Africa office.

The interview went smoothly and I spent one more day sightseeing and shopping in Johannesburg before returning to Nairobi.

A few days later, I was offered the job with a start date of 1st August 1997. I was to spend the month of August undergoing orientation at the head office in London before relocating to Johannesburg in September.

Getting the news that ARTICLE 19 was offering me the job as its head of regional office based in Johannesburg was a bittersweet experience for me. In the months leading up to the interview and the subsequent job offer, I had been at the frontline of demonstrations in Nairobi as we pushed for a new constitution.

Our movement comprising grassroots activists, civil society organisations, progressive academics and opposition politicians held march after march in the city under the slogan “No Reforms, No Elections!!”

We intended to make it clear to the Moi regime that without comprehensive constitutional reforms, we would not allow the country to hold the general election scheduled for December 1997 because that would mean going into an election with a playing field that was so tilted in his favour that only President Moi could win.

The government banned all our demonstrations. No sooner would we announce a planned demo than the police would declare it illegal and warn of dire consequences for anyone who dared to defy their ban. But that would not stop us from marching.

This resulted in an inevitable clash as the police violently dispersed our demonstrations with rubber bullets, batons and teargas. I had gotten so used to the adrenalin rush that I knew I would miss it terribly when I relocated to Johannesburg.

My father on the other hand, was horrified by my participation at what he considered to be dangerous misadventures.

“You have a special gift, Njonjo” he would tell me. “You write so well that your articles are regularly carried in the press. Why don’t you offer those skills to the struggle and let others go to the streets?”

Hi angst was understandable for no parent would approve of his child getting shot or their skull cracked by our trigger-happy riot police.

However, in the end, he and I never got to agree on his proposed division of labour. I decided that I would continue to write and offer intellectual support to the struggle as well as march as a foot soldier with Wanjiku.

Despite my reluctance to leave all the action behind in Nairobi, eventually the time for me to relocate to South Africa came.

After a month of orientation at the London head office of ARTICLE 19, I arrived in Johannesburg on a rainy Friday evening.

I checked into the Devonshire Hotel in Braamfontein where I had stayed during my earlier visit for the interview.

It was the day before Princess Diana’s funeral was held in London on 6th September 1997. Although I did not have a particular interest in her funeral ceremony, I followed the proceedings on television because it rained heavily in Johannesburg and I was stuck in my hotel room all day.

The cold, rainy weather in those early days of my stay in South Africa would not dampen the sheer excitement I felt to call this country my new home.

During this first weekend in Johannesburg, my mind frequently went back to the 1970s and 80s. During those years of growing up in Kenya, we had only one radio station, the Voice of Kenya (VoK), which would frequently report on the brutal and racist apartheid rule in which a small minority of white people ruled and suppressed the majority black Africans of South Africa who were denied their most basic rights.

VoK news reports from South Africa, as well as Rhodesia and South West Africa, which also were ruled by minority white racist regimes, made it very clear on whose side we were. The white rulers were referred to as Kaburu so an so e.g. Kaburu Botha, Kaburu Vorster, and so on.

While Kaburu simply means a white settler of Dutch origin (Boer), in those days at the height of apartheid, it came to denote a derogatory term that meant not only a white person, but a colonialist, an imperialist, even a barbarian.

Ian Smith, who had unilaterally declared independence under white settler minority rule in neigbouring Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) was given the pre-name Mhaini , meaning traitor.

Conversely, the leaders of the freedom struggle were referred to in glowing heroic terms: Mzalendo Oliver Tambo, Mzalendo Steve Biko, Mzalendo Sam Nujoma, Mzalendo Robert Mugabe.

Mzalendo is the Kiswahili term for Patriot. There were many Wazalendo in the struggle, but there was only one Shujaa : Nelson Mandela.

The Kiswahili dictionary states that the term Shujaa means hero, but in our young minds, hero did not even begin to describe the larger than life mythical figure of the man who had spent all our lifetime in prison on Robben Island for his courageous stand against apartheid.

As we were growing up, Shujaa Nelson Mandela and his co-convicts from the Rivonia Trial were serving a life sentence on the island. No photos of them were permitted and none had ever been published, which made Mandela even more god-like in our young minds.

Listening to these news reports by the Voice of Kenya on the struggle for freedom from Southern Africa made me think that my country, Kenya, was wholly committed to the emancipation of all African peoples. But that was before I grew up and lost my innocence.

“When I was a child, I thought like a child.” But when I grew up and “put childish ways behind me,” I discovered that while such African countries as Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia, and other frontline states sacrificially supported the struggle against apartheid to the hilt, providing safe havens to South African exiles and training bases for uMKhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the Africa National Congress, some elements of the Kenyan government, notably the then powerful attorney general, Charles Njonjo, maintained secret ties with the apartheid regime.

Still, I never thought I would live to see Mandela alive, or for that matter, that apartheid would come to an end in my lifetime and South Africa would become a free and democratic country.

Yet here I was at the beginning of my exciting tour of duty as a resident of the new South Africa, the Rainbow Nation, to use a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in celebration of the diversity of the peoples of the land now led by none other than Nelson Mandela himself.

I did not let my being marooned at the Devonshire Hotel by the rain that first weekend dampen my spirits.

Rather, I reminded myself that this was a great turning point on my journey as a social justice advocate. It was also a reminder that I was no longer only a child of Kenya, but I was truly on my way to becoming a son of Africa.

I was therefore delighted to be able to sing along with fellow Africans from the southern tip of the continent the words of Enoch Sontonga’s famous prayer:

Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika

Maluphakanyisw’ uphondo lwayo,

Yizwa imithandazo yethu,

Nkosi sikelela, thina lusapho lwayo

God Bless Africa

Raise high her glory

Hear our prayers

God bless us, we her children

The Monday following my arrival in Johannesburg I reported to my new office at ARTICLE 19. Claudia and I spent most of the day discussing administrative matters of the new regional office that we would be jointly responsible for running.

Over lunch time, Claudia told me that she had a budget for my accommodation at the hotel for one week, then I could move to a furnished apartment for three more weeks after which time I should have found my permanent accommodation.

“Have you decided which side of town you would like to settle in?” she asked me over lunch.

“Why, of course in Soweto like you,” I responded enthusiastically.

Soweto, the short form of the So uth We stern To wnships, had a rich history. It was where most of the black population of Johannesburg lived and had come to symbolize the struggle against apartheid.

It had also been home to many of the struggle icons including Nelson and Winnie Mandela and Desmond Tutu. In fact Mandela and Tutu also gave Soweto the distinction of having the only street in the world to produce two Nobel Peace Prize winners – Vilakazi Street where both of them had once lived.

Soweto had been the hotbed of struggle activities aimed at ending the brutal, racist apartheid rule and was infamous for the June 16 1976 massacre of school children by apartheid forces as the children demonstrated to protest having to be taught in the oppressor’s language, Afrikaans.

This history of South Africa was inseparable from the story of Soweto and I so cherished the idea of becoming enmeshed in this history by moving into the neighbourhood.

However, when I excitedly announced my preference for living in Soweto, Claudia gave me a pitiful look as if she needed to disabuse me of my obvious naiveté.

“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I don’t think Soweto will be the place for you,” she said.

Before I could protest, she explained that although Soweto would be a good place to live, some of its residents were not so welcoming to foreigners from other African countries whom they tended to blame for allegedly taking jobs that should have been theirs. They had a derogatory name for us, Amakwerekwere .

Alas xenophobia against Africans from elsewhere on the continent was already taking root in South Africa.

In the end, I had to reluctantly take Claudia’s advice and find a house in a gated compound of townhouses called Montgomery Park in Randburg, eight and a half kilometres from the office in Braamfontein, where most of my neigbours were white South Africans and a small number of the emerging black middle class.

Despite not being able to live in Soweto, I was nonetheless grateful and excited to move to South Africa during a time of great transition.

The country was still breathing the fresh air of the early days of freedom and had recently adopted its new democratic Constitution that had been approved by the Constitutional Court on 4th December 1996 and taken effect on 4th February 1997.

The humble yet iconic Nelson Mandela was at the helm of the government as President. He had already announced that he would serve for only a single term and was content to use it to focus on the task of reconciling the hitherto deeply divided country while leaving the day-to-day running of state affairs to his deputy, the cerebral and philosophical Thabo Mbeki.

My job as regional director of ARTICLE 19 opened a whole new world to me. I maintained a busy travel schedule that gave me the opportunity to visit many African countries and to appreciate the beauty of our rich continent and meet the diversity of its people.

I also visited other parts of the world particularly Europe and the Americas on fundraising missions and to attend various conferences.

While I was initially frustrated at no longer being able to participate in demonstrations back home pushing for a new constitution, I more than made up for it by taking on a leading role in organising Kenyans in the Diaspora to play their role in pressuring the Moi state to accede to a people-driven constitutional reform process.

Part of my job also entailed holding many meetings with senior government officials in the region including members of the South African government.

But important as they were, none of these meetings was as memorable as meeting President Nelson Mandela.

(To be continued…/)

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About the Author

Njonjo Mue

Political Activist Lawyer Njonjo Mue

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