John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the USA, was killed in November 1963. A Commission of Inquiry found that he was the victim of a single shooter who fired his rifle at the presidential motorcade in Dallas. The shooter was himself shot dead two days after the assassination while in police custody without ever answering any questions.

This unsatisfying conclusion—that a frustrated “loser” was able to strike down the world’s most powerful man—spawned hundreds of books and dozens of theories that differed from the official findings. US legislation committees held hearings and one outcome was the John F Kennedy Assassination Records Act of 1992 which required that all government records about the assassination be sent to the National Archives and released to the public in 25 years.

This has been happening at intervals and in December 2022, another batch was released, this time of 13,000 documents from the archived 5 million-page collection. There is little new documentation about the actual assassination as most of those have already been released.

Dating between October and December 1963, most of the new documents are mundane human resources memos, reports, newspaper scans and other records, some of which have faded over time making the typed text illegible. There is a 1964 memo about the IBM company starting to use a computer system they are developing to “machine process” records at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), some of which relate to the assassination.

Still, there are some revealing documents about events around the time of the assassination. Did a wealthy drunk man in Sweden predict the assassination two weeks before it happened? Did a female agent drive with a team of assassins to Dallas? Did Cuban leader Fidel Castro order the assassination of Kennedy in retaliation after discovering that there was a similar plot against him? Did a Chinese diplomat write a confession that his country had orchestrated the assassination? These are all investigated through embassies and bureaus around the world and debunked in different intelligence memos.

Many of the pages are now available because people mentioned in the CIA documents are now deceased. There are secret reports from the desks of intelligence officers, some with names obscured, about events in the region that had a functional desk called the “Near East and Africa”.

They show increasing concern about developments in the Congo whose economic wealth was seen to be important to the USA. The CIA did not believe Africans could handle the situation in Congo, a country that could fall under the control of communists. US policy was seen as indistinguishable from that of the United Nations (UN), so the USA would support the build-up of UN troops, as a failure of the UN would reflect badly on the peacekeeping role of the United States.

Did Cuban leader Fidel Castro order the assassination of Kennedy in retaliation after discovering that there was a similar plot against him?

The Kennedy administration planned for a centralized government comprising all political factions as the only hope of averting a civil war. To enforce this policy, they were willing to withdraw their support to the military, a threat that so distressed army chief Joseph Mobutu that he drew his gun on the CIA officer who brought him the news.

At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, Mobutu had become critical of the lacklustre leadership and indecisiveness of the country’s Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. The CIA would deny any role or support for Mobutu when he seized power in a bloodless coup two years later.

Another October 1963 memo notes increased tension in Kenya amid the constitutional talks taking place in London. The Kenyan opposition suspected that Britain would accede to Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta’s demand for easier procedures to amend the constitution and grant more authority to the central government which would weaken their minority tribes’ position. To force concessions, opposition leaders in Nairobi had threatened to secede before they were calmed by their leaders in London. In the meantime, British authorities took precautionary measures and deployed a special police force to the Rift Valley region with African troops also on alert.

Other memos note that, in November 1963, armed groups from the Somali Republic conducted well-planned raids from across the border into Kenya’s northeast and speculate it could be the start of a guerrilla campaign to show that the region’s Somali inhabitants are determined to secede. British police suspected that the rifles and grenades used in the attacks came from Somali police stocks. While the Somali government denied instigating the attacks, British officers predicted they would support more raids ahead of the Somali election in March 1964.

There are follow-up memos about how Somali attacks did increase after Kenya’s independence from Britain on December 12 and the Kenyan government soon declared a state of emergency in the region. Kenyatta vowed to deal decisively with the raids but said Kenyan forces would not undertake “hot pursuit” across the border since this would permit Somalia to internationalize the situation. Observers were sceptical that Kenya could control the situation by patrolling a dead zone along the 450-mile border. However, Kenya and Ethiopia worked out a defence pact to stop Somali insurgent activities in both countries.

Another memo notes a protest by 500 Ghanaians at their embassy in Moscow in December 1963 following the killing of a student named Edmund Assare-Addo. Soviet police claim he died of exposure while intoxicated but the protesters believe he had been killed because he wanted to marry a Russian girl. It ends with a suggestion to use wire services to show the protests in Moscow as evidence of racist attitudes towards Africans despite Soviet propaganda and tie them to other events like the expulsion of Soviet diplomats from the Congo.

Observers were sceptical that Kenya could control the situation by patrolling a dead zone along the 450-mile border.

The records also capture an event that happened long after the Kennedy assassination. In July 1972, members of the Black Liberation Army hijacked a Delta Airlines flight from Detroit. They collected US$1 million in cash from the airline before releasing its passengers and flew on to Algeria, a country they knew little about. Even though Algeria had close revolutionary ties with Cuba, which was not friendly to the USA, its authorities seized and returned both the plane and the ransom. The hijackers—one of whom was a female with a young daughter named Kenya—were allowed to remain in the country.

American officials later tracked reports that the hijackers may have moved on to either Switzerland, France, or Sweden, or that they were back in the USA. In January 1973, the Tanzanian government seized three people who they thought may have been among the hijackers. While Tanzania normally offered refugee status to disaffected American blacks, they were willing to surrender the “undesirable aliens” if the US Embassy asked for their extradition. They were later released as a case of mistaken identity and the CIA wondered if it had been a staged effort to cause confusion in the search for the real hijackers.

The next document review will be in May 2023 when the remaining assassination records will be released. Unless, of course, their release is perceived to potentially cause harm to US intelligence, its military, or the country’s foreign relations.

Kenya is at a crossroads. The opposition has called for demonstrations across the country twice a week. They have accused President William Ruto of stealing last year’s election and of failing to control the surging cost of living. The violence accompanying the demonstrations continues to increase. Senior government officials have made belligerent statements about the opposition demands. For their part, the opposition sounds equally resolute.

Public uncertainty is deepening as the economic and social consequences of the resistance mount. Prospects for any kind of political settlement currently seem remote and it is not clear to Kenyans what success for the opposition looks like.

Kenya’s middle-class progressives — the numerically small but tenacious civil society sector in particular — seem dazed by the current state of affairs. The recent invasion of former president Uhuru Kenyatta’s family property by apparently organized intruders seems to have flipped the narrative. I would like to argue that the very idea of Kenya as we have known it is being challenged. This leaves many of us bewildered. For now, Kenyans have taken to social media to articulate their angst and try to make sense of the current situation. Opining in this regard, former Nation Media Group’s Editorial Director Mutuma Mathiu wrote on Twitter on 27 March 2023 that the invasion was “a key moment in Kenya’s political development. Something has changed, forever.”

Some historical context

The colonial project in countries like Kenya was no small thing. The sheer destruction it wrought on property and livelihoods, the killing and enslavement of entire populations, and the cultural and social re-engineering — all served to distort social harmony in African societies. The establishment of a colonising structure was the vehicle for the extension of British social structures in the colonies they conquered. The socio-political constructs that the British created in their empire were primarily reflections of their own traditional, individualistic, deeply unequal and class–based society that existed, and continues to exist, in England. Responding to what they didn’t know with what they understood, the architects of empire sought to recreate the rural arcadia of England, where since the sixteenth century local government had been controlled by an established self-defined ruling class.

The autonomous communities the British systematically dismantled in Kenya were replaced by an approximation of English villages in the hands of the traditional lords, a gentry as it were, comprised of a white ruling class and their African collaborators and enablers. Out of this was born the infamous “indirect rule” system of government, with power devolved to an entire hierarchy of greater and lesser imitation “gentlemen”. This was both less expensive for the British and, as with the English system at home, it was run by complicit amateurs, meaning that there was no need to create a professional class of Kenyans who would wield and then seek to exercise political authority.

Kenya’s middle-class progressives — the numerically small but tenacious civil society sector in particular – seem dazed by the current state of affairs.

This arrangement re-invented the collaborating class of Africans whose loyalty was to the newly established colonial government. The mission schools and colonial civil service produced and consolidated the domination of colonial society by this class. This group of actors rose to political dominance in post-independent Kenya.

For the past 60 years, this elite network has remained well resourced and networked and is as a result both resilient and stable. This in turn has contributed to the peace and stability Kenya has enjoyed. Even when this elite has had internal squabbles, which have regularly led to episodic violence in the country, they have been mediated through elite “handshakes” — essentially boardroom deals. Like the English aristocracy of old, unwritten rules of engagement govern their game of thrones.

The Great African Depression

The late, much celebrated African economist, thinker and analyst, Professor Thandika Mkandawire once described the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) imposed on Africa in the 1980s as the Great African Depression. The implementation of SAPs ravaged African economies, distorted social arrangements and restructured Africa’s public sphere in three fundamental ways.

First, the African Academy was impoverished as the continent’s universities were defunded and delegitimized as authoritative centres of knowledge production. Stripped of their epistemological raison d’être, a social and intellectual void was created that has been filled by, among others, a proliferating class of evangelical pastors across the continent who increasingly occupy what once was the academy’s central place in defining the narrative vis-à-vis economic, political, and cultural matters. Secondly, the “Structural Adjustment” of Kenya’s economy led to the disappearance of the old certainties of social mobility. To make ends meet, Kenyans were forced en masse into the informal or jua kali sector. All of a sudden, the primary indicator of an individual’s success moved from one’s skills, experience and personal virtues to the patronage networks one was able to exploit. Thirdly, the decoupling of politics from economics took power away from the politicians and into the financial institutions — global and local — creating a new kind of politics dictated by the logic of the market. Unable to change society though popular struggle and negotiation, the arena of politics transformed itself into theatre and spectacle, the most glaring indicator of this evolution in recent Kenyan politics being the Sonkonization of Kenya’s political culture — a reckless populism.

In this environment, a new moral political economy emerged whose ethos was undergirded by hyper-individualism, a protestant ethic and an evangelical socio-political religiosity. Here, hustling and deal-making is the name of the game and corruption is only considered a vice if inclusivity in the redistribution of the goodies by whatever means fails to conform to the dictates of patronage.

For the past 60 years, this elite network has remained well resourced and networked and is as a result both resilient and stable.

The actors within this fledgling moral political economy engage in activities of the intermediary type, scheming and hustling but firmly entrenched in the role of kazi ya mkono for the more powerful actors in the post-colonial order. Over time, combined with demographics, reforms in Kenya’s governance infrastructure and readily available global credit from China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Western monies that became available in the low-interest environment following the financial crisis in the West in 2008, the new moral political economy expanded by creating an aspirational consumerist class in Kenya’s urban areas — a prosperity-gospel-church-going, land-buying, highly articulate, well-educated class. The culmination of its success was presumably its political contestation against the old order in the August 2022 elections. This ended with the ascendancy of William Ruto and his hustler comrades to the presidency.

We are therefore encouraged to observe that the current political stalemate between the opposition and the government might not be the usual Kenyan intra-elite dispute but a more fundamental contest between two orders. The first, an order that over the life of the postcolonial state has entrenched itself and feels entitled to the spoils of the state. The second, a new order that feels that the old guard has had its time and should make way for it.

History is replete with instances of clashes over power. The Glorious Revolution, which took place in England from 1688 to 1689, changed how England was governed, giving parliament more power over the monarchy and planting the seeds for the beginning of a modern political democracy. In many ways, the moment we are living in has stark similarities with the British revolution. My angst at this stalemate, however, is that Kenya’s progressives seem to lack the intellectual and spiritual clarity to catalyse a progressive vision that inspires popular energy in order to restore the balance of power — social, economic and political — in society, especially for the marginalised, the alienated and the dispossessed. Will history absolve them?

We at The Elephant stand with our fellow journalists against the attacks meted out during coverage of the recent demonstrations. An independent, impartial, and objective media is a pillar of our democracy and crucial to the state, the opposition, and the wider public. Press freedom is non-negotiable.

Going by recent events, we are quickly sliding down a precarious path as regards freedom of the press. The spike in disinformation, influence peddling, hostility and attacks blurs the ability of the media to deliver timely, critical and credible information necessary to help the public make informed decisions and hold meaningful conversations.

We are also particularly concerned by the targeting of specific media persons, media institutions, international journalists, and media industry practitioners.

In March 2023 alone there have been least 45 reported cases of attacks, theft, harassment and arrests by both state and non-state actors, with some of the journalists affected suffering direct attacks and bodily harm.

The genesis of these attacks can be linked to the publication of photos and the issuance of summons by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) following the March 20th demonstrations. The information published by the state agencies on social media platforms included false, misleading and misconstrued claims against participants in the demonstration.

The unintended outcome has been the formulation, and instrumentalization of hostility and violence against members of the Fourth Estate. So far, we have witnessed the targeting of reporters, photographers, videographers, and freelance media practitioners by the police, hooligans, hired goons, and looters keen to cause mayhem.

As chroniclers of societal events, scribes of the evolution of political demands, and recorders of unwarranted, gross violations, journalists have a solemn duty to inform the public on matters of public interest. They therefore must be accorded respect, allowed space in the political contestations as neutral observers, and respected as repositories of current and historical memories.

We urge our colleagues to prioritize their safety while out in the field, assess the risk factors, and coordinate with their newsrooms and law enforcers, in the course of their work during demonstrations.

We urge freelance journalists to coordinate, liaise, and embed with their colleagues for their own safety. We also call for urgent investigations into the robbery and assault of journalists, and for the speedy prosecution of the perpetrators. We ask that public figures refrain from spotlighting specific media persons and media houses, and ask aggrieved parties to channel their complaints against media persons and institutions through the legal channels as provided by law.

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The Elephant Desk