Kenya On The Edge

Flashback to Sunday, August 1, 1982. I’m 13 years old and waking up to the sound of the phone ringing. The call was from a cousin that lives next to State House - the presidential home in the capital city, Nairobi.

My father tells me through my closed bedroom door saying that there had been a coup. I had no idea what that meant at the time. I could tell from the tone of his voice that something was drastically wrong. We were supposed to go and play golf that morning, but my cousin said that he’d heard shooting all night advising us to stay in no matter what.

I vividly recall spending most of the day looking out the living room window into the garden at the Jacaranda tree, standing tall and proud under the glare of the Kenyan sun, surrounded by a carpet of purple-blue bell flowers recently fallen from its branches. A look over at my dad and the barely perceptible look of worry on his face was unnerving. He never showed worry - ever. We could hear sporadic shots fired somewhere in the distance.

The phone rang often, friends and family having learned of the coup exhaustively speculating, the rumor-mongers among them spinning their tales and spreading their own brand of fear. We had little concrete information at all other than an announcement over the radio that the government had been overthrown.

By afternoon, we actually heard gunshots over the radio - there was a struggle going on for control of the VOK (Voice Of Kenya), the state radio station now called KBC (Kenya Broadcasting Corparation) followed by shouts, more shots, silence and later... music.

If the coup was successful in overthrowing Moi, what would happen to us?