Kenya: A Kikuyu Suspect

The slight, light-skinned young Kenyan was hustled into the magistrate’s courtroom by a squad of Nairobi cops.

The proceedings against him lasted barely ten minutes, and within the hour the prisoner was locked inside a heavily guarded cell in prison. Only then did police announce last week that they had placed charges against the suspected killer of Tom Mboya, the pro-Western Minister for Economic Planning and Development who was gunned down outside a Nairobi pharmacy last month.

In accordance with Kenyan law, authorities, pending the trial, would give no information about their suspect beyond his name: Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge. That was plenty. Two of his names identified him as a member of the dominant Kikuyu tribe. Mboya’s Luo tribal brothers suspected from the first that his killer belonged to the Kikuyu, traditional foes of the less powerful Luo. Thus new tribal disturbances are likely to erupt when Njoroge goes on trial this week. The plot is complicated by the fact that Mboya, though a Luo, was also a national leader of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the Kikuyu-controlled ruling party. Hence it was startling that Njoroge turned out to have been an active, though minor figure in KANU. It seemed probable that Mboya’s assassination was a political act motivated by a power struggle inside his party.

KANU had recently been dealt a reeling blow in a parliamentary by-election for a vacant seat in the Luo constituency of Gem. Though Gem had been carried handsomely by KANU in the previous election, the district in May gave a lopsided victory to the candidate of the Kenya People’s Union, the opposition party headed by an emotional Luo leftist, Oginga Odinga. Realizing that many Luo tribesmen had come under Odinga’s sway, President Jomo Kenyatta asked Mboya to undertake an emergency reorganization of KANU before national elections, which must be held before next June. Mboya, a member of Kenyatta’s Cabinet and a possible, if not likely successor, was hard at work when he was shot.

Njoroge, a onetime waiter and watch repairman, is a delegate from KANU’s Nairobi branch and an errand boy for some Nairobi politicians. Mboya’s task in the final months of his life was to find new candidates for the party and unseat its more corrupt elements; his mandate and his actions threatened some of KANU’s old hands. Whether one of them asked Njoroge to pull the trigger or whether the assassin acted alone may well prove to be the crucial question of the trial.