Is August Kenya's black month?

By David Odongo

Kenyans can be forgiven for harboring thoughts that the eighth month of the year is indeed cursed.

Since the death of the Kenya’s founding president, Jomo Kenyatta, in 22 August 1978, the eighth month of the year, for Kenyans, is firmly embedded into our beliefs, that August is indeed, a cursed month.

Interestingly Martin Shikuku who was detained by Kenyatta died on the same day his jailer did. What a coincidence!

Four aircatfts have crashed on Kenyan soil this month, three Ugandan and one commercial airctaft in Mara with tourist aboard. The road carnagae is on upswing. The list of tragedies is just too much and unbearable.

An incident that shocked many was on Tuesday night, when 52 people, were hacked to death or burnt alive, among them 11 children and 31 women in Tana River and Mandera counties in a feud that is largely about pasture and water. Some 100 houses were reduced to ashes, 300 head of cattle killed, and 1,000 people displaced in the Pokomo retaliation attack on the Orma.

Reporters from The Standard  Media Group who visited the scene of Tana River killings described it as similar to mass murders of the Great Lakes region, with mutilated bodies of children and women, old and young, strewn across homesteads, their blood caked on the ground, and flies flying all over.

In Mandera County, six more people were killed on Tuesday night at Rhamu – a day after five others were slaughtered in Jaraqo, Banisa.

The two counties are 660km apart.

Still in the same black spirit that comes with august, on Wednesday night, eight pupils St Theresa’s Asumbi Girls Boarding Primary in Homabay County were burnt to death. The students, who were on holiday tuition couldn’t escape the menacing flames since the dormitory door was locked from outside and the windows were barred with metal grills.

The black month is still far from over as this week, news filtered out that long serving Butere Member of Parliament had succumbed to cancer. The prominent politician, who was popularly known during hey days as a peoples’ watchman, passed on Wednesday evening at Nairobi’s Texas Cancer hospital where he was undergoing treatment.

Ten years ago, on the 23rd day in the month of august, Kenya lost Michael Kijana Wamalwa.  In late 2002, Wamalwa, fell ill and had to be treated, supposedly for kidney problems in London. He was taken ill again in mid 2003 and was once again treated in London. He briefly recovered, and returned to Kenya to marry Yvonne Nambia, in a sumptuous ceremony.

Just two months after the wedding, Wamalwa returned to the Royal Free Hospital for another check-up - leading to widespread speculation that his health was worse than doctors had been letting on. He was never to recover. He died on the morning of 23 August 2003, and was later given a state burial at his farm in Kitale.

Fourteen years earlier, the curse of the black month seemed to stalk Kenyans as in August 7, 1998, hundreds of people were killed in truck bomb explosions at the United States embassies in the Nairobi.

The bombings are widely believed to have been revenge for American involvement in the extradition, and alleged torture, of four members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and was organized by Osama bin Laden.

On August 14, 1990, Bishop Alexander Muge set off on a journey from which he would never return. He had been warned by Minister for Labor Mr. Peter Habenga Okondo not to set foot in Busia. However, Muge defied the ban and traveled to Busia. On the way back, he lost his life in a road accident near Kipkaren, Uasin Gishu district. He was forty-four at the time of his death.

On 22 August 1978, President Kenyatta died in Mombasa of natural causes attributable to old age. He had suffered a first heart attack in 1966 and in the mid-seventies lapse into periodic comas lasting from a few hours to a few days from time to time. In April 1977, then well into his 80s, he suffered a massive heart attack. On 14 August 1978, he hosted his entire family, to a reunion in Mombasa and died eight days later.

On August 1, 1982, a group of soldiers tried changing Kenya’s history when they took over the radio station Voice of Kenya and announced that they had overthrown the government. The group tried to force a group of Air Force fighter pilots to bomb the State House at gunpoint. The pilots pretended to follow the orders on the ground but once airborne they ignored them and instead dropped the bombs over Mount Kenya's forests, unarmed. The 1982 Kenyan coup d'état attempt was a failed attempt to overthrow President Daniel arap Moi's government.

Hezekiah Ochuka, a Senior Private ruled Kenya for about six hours before escaping to Tanzania. After being extradited back to Kenya, he was tried and found guilty of leading the coup attempt and hanged in 1987.

The coup left more than 100 soldiers dead and more than 200 civilians who included two Germans, an English woman, and a Japanese male tourist and his child, and two Asian women took away their lives after being raped during the coup

Masinde Muliro, one of the central figures in the shaping of the political landscape in Kenya also died upon at the Nairobi airport on the morning of August 14, 1992.It was Shortly after this t Muliro returned from London for a fundraising mission for the newly formed Ford political party. The controversy of his death was heightened by the absence of an official post mortem. Muliro was buried on his farm in the Kitale area of Kenya.