Two weeks in hell: A retake of Nyayo torture chambers

It is about three decades from 1986 to today. It may have taken Ngotho wa Kariuki this long to publish his memories of a two-week stint at the Nyayo torture chambers, but his is a burning story. Ngotho’s book, Two Weeks in Hell Inside Nyayo Torture Chambers (Medi-Teki Publishers, 2015), is a story for those who treasure liberty, justice, rule of law, individual rights and equity.

It is a stark reminder of what can go horribly wrong when a society forgets its humanity and turns on itself.

Ngotho had served the country as a professor of accounting at the University of Nairobi and as Dean of the Faculty of Arts. In 1986, he was teaching at the Eastern and Southern Management Institute (Esami) in Arusha. He had just returned to Kenya when, on March 6, he was ‘visited’ by officers from then Special Branch of the police. This was the beginning of a harrowing two weeks in detention.

First, the “visiting officers” spent many hours in Ngotho’s house looking for “seditious” documents, books and publications. Seditious generally meant any material with words like Karl Marx, Marxism, Socialism, Libya, comrade and Cuba. These were subversive words — and they were known to be portent among university staff and students.

Indeed, some University of Nairobi staff and students were sympathetic to the 1982 coup attempt and had been were on the wrong side of government. Ngotho was charged with being funded by foreigners to destabilise the government, associating with other subversives like Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo, being involved in training guerillas and buying and stocking ammunition. The big problem, though, is that evidence didn’t exist.

The security agents relied on self-incrimination and false confessions wrought by torture.

WAS NOT PREPARED

Ngotho wasn’t prepared for the Nyayo torture chambers. No one ever can... for torturers are evil geniuses. He admits in the book that when training (intellectually) for the Revolution, they had known that the enemy was tough, so they needed to be strong. But how does one survive a waterlogged prison cell?

What nerves of steel does one muster to drink fetid water reeking of human waste? Which man is strong enough to endure hot pinpricks, burning cigarette butts, and steaming water sprayed on one’s private parts? What does it take to endure sudden gusts of hot and cold air, or flooding, freezing and steaming water in one’s cell?

How does one remain calm in a secluded room with safari ants or snakes for company? Ngotho says these were staple torture methods at Nyayo chambers. This barbarism is what the unfortunate guests of the infamous Mr Opiyo (Ngotho spells his name as Opio) suffered every day till release or death. However, Ngotho says the most vicious of all the torture tactics was the “game of waiting and wearing out”.

Endless interrogation was meant to tire the detainee, to make him long for freedom, to break him down mentally and to lead him to a “confession.” Records show that there are those who were broken and told their torturers what they wanted to hear. They were convicted on the basis of such sham evidence. Records also show, as Ngotho recalls, that the human spirit can endure the most creative of evil.

For Ngotho and many other detainees then, mere knowledge that the interrogators were fellow human beings against whom he could test his survival skills seemed to give him hope. He argued with his tormentors; fought back, threatened, stuck to his story, lived in the knowledge that his friends — such as Maina Kiongo — were in the same predicament, and remained committed to outlasting the police.

One of the detainees’ enduring tactics was to sing Mau Mau songs, vowing, “... never to say again what happened to us; nor to the others. Those who’ll survive to tell the story to their children will tell of the horror of Nyayo House, a den of terror. Then those generations will know that the second liberation of Kenya was won by blood and sweat, just like the first one.”

Indeed, Two Weeks in Hell recounts the horror that people will experience when fellow humans become obsessed with protecting personal interests.

But evil can beget good. It is the evil of the years that Ngotho talks about that planted the seeds of justice and freedom in the new Constitution. It would be remiss today for anyone to support any argument about the lessening of freedoms that the Constitution guarantees, considering the suffering that Ngotho writes about.

Unfortunately, though, Two Weeks in Hell is unedited — with absolutely unforgivable mistakes, including misspellings of the names of Ngotho’s close friends, incomplete sentences, poor grammar, and incoherence. It seems like the publishers simply printed a raw manuscript.

But maybe we need to read the text as it is — a tortuous remembering of a time of betrayal, inexplicable violence, shattered dreams, lost jobs, separation from family and friends, starvation, blood and death. Such stories of hell are difficult to tell coherently.

The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi.