By Anyang’ Nyong’o
This is a season for Kings and king makers. It is also a season for betrayal, some in the city and some in the village, notwithstanding the sentiments of the late Prof Imbuga, my schoolmate at Alliance High School many years ago along with the late musician, Arthur Kemoli.
God rest their souls in eternal peace, thou great artists who calmed the souls of men with drama and music.
Shakespeare remains the greatest artist in the study of the nature of men and women in politics. In his historical plays he exhibited an extremely sharp acumen on how power is acquired, wielded and disposed of, albeit in largely feudal societies of his time.
But not much has really changed within the courts, state houses and corridors where people jostle for positions, elbow each from the proximity of the seats of power and pretend wily nilly that they have influence when they are as bereft of it as weeds shaken by the winds.
When former Attorney General Charles Njonjo helped the then Vice- President Daniel Toroitich arap Moi succeed Jomo Kenyatta, Victoria Britain, then the Guardian correspondent in Nairobi, asked me to write an article for that British newspaper on that succession episode.
I remember warning Njonjo that he had to look out for his political future. Just as he had helped Moi ascend to the throne would Moi soon suspect him of harbouring ambitions to ascend to Moi’s seat.
For those of you who have read or still read William Shakespeare, you will recall the warning King Richard the Second gave to Northumberland regarding Henry Bolingbroke.
It is Northumberland who had connived with Henry to dethrone King Richard so that Henry could take the throne, sending both the King and his Queen into exile. The following warning, which I quoted extensively in my Guardian article in late 1978, should be read by many king makers today, especially those made through conspiracies and deal makings.
RICHARD: “ Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal
The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne,
The time shall not be many hours of age More than it is ere foul sin, gathering head,
Shall break into corruption. Thou shalt think
Though he divide the realm and give thee half, It is too little helping him to all.
He shall think that thou, which know’st the way
To plant unrightful Kings, wilt know again,
Being ne’er so little urged another way, To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne.
The love of wicked friends converts to fear, That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both
To worthy danger and deserved death.”
There, perhaps, is the recent scene in the Jubilee coalition reduced into Shakespearean poetry, which is both tragicomic and dramatised as history is made before our very eyes. Only that our Northumberland outwitted our Henry Bolingbroke well before the latter sat on the throne to turn tables on Northumberland the kingmaker. And so King Henry may still resume his throne, but how long Northumberland will withstand that only God knows. I hope you can solve the puzzle.
Both Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Tom Mboya should have read King Richard the Second carefully. The above quote applies to them with equal force. But that is history, and it is history, which gets repeated quite often.
One wonders whether we are all doomed, like the same Shakespeare said in Hamlet, “to walk the night for a certain period of time,” and then we shall eventually learn. The South African nationalist movements learnt it better than most of us, this political power/coalition making thing.
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