Why Nyayo torture chambers should be open to public

By TEE NGUGI

Friday, February 18, marked the 19th anniversary of the opening to the public of the Nyayo House torture chambers in Nairobi. The public first got to view the torture headquarters on the February 18, 2003, after the Kanu regime, first under Jomo Kenyatta and then Daniel arap Moi, was ousted in the 2002 elections.

That Friday, I joined former political prisoners, their families, and human rights activists at the site to remember the depravity to which a regime could descend in order to perpetuate itself in power.

The Kanu regime operated several other sites of torture around the country, mostly in various police headquarters.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel, The Gulag Archipelago, relates the story of Stalin’s torture sites dotted around the Soviet Union. So the Kanu government, just like Stalin, had torture sites dotting the country, the way groups of islands dot the sea to form an archipelago.

But what distinguished Nyayo House torture chambers from other sites in Kenya was that they were purposefully designed as a place of torture, complete with a dedicated team of torturers.

The chambers consisted of several cells in the basement of Nyayo House and interrogation rooms on the top floor. Prisoners, blindfolded, stripped naked and handcuffed, would be taken for interrogation via a lift that only stopped at the cells and the interrogation rooms. The rooms were sound-proofed to prevent members of the public visiting government offices in the building, from hearing prisoners screaming in agony.

In his memoir, Two weeks in Hell, Ngotho Kariuki recalls the various torture methods used to extract confessions from prisoners. These included beatings and genitals being burnt with cigarettes or squeezed by pliers. Cases of castration were not uncommon.

The walls would be stained with blood from prisoners who had been beaten to death or near death. And just like at the notorious John Vorster Square in Johannesburg during Apartheid, prisoners would be thrown from the interrogation rooms to their deaths, which would later be branded suicide.

Next to the basement cells was a control room from which torturers could flood the cells with water or blow gusts of cold or hot air. Prisoners would be locked in the dark cells for up to three days without food or water. To survive, they drank the water flooding the cell, into which they urinated and defecated.

At the gathering that day, the ex-prisoners called on the government to repeal Legal Notice No. 11 of 1991, which had declared Nyayo House torture chambers a prohibited zone in order to allow the public access to the site.

While commending President Uhuru Kenyatta for acknowledging gross human rights violations by the Kanu regime, they called on him to effect the recommendations of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission. They further called on him to operationalise the Ksh10 billion reparative fund he once announced.

Additionally, the ex-prisoners called for the torture chambers to be preserved as a national site of memory.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator