Verdict: stick
Remember Cincinnatus in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading? He was imprisoned for “gnostical turpitude”. Love that word, turpitude. Maureen Isaacson deploys it with a different descriptive in her review of Michela Wrong’s true story of corruption in Kenya, It’s Our Turn to Eat. As Wrong’s book demonstrates, “moral turpitude” may prevail in high places in east Africa, Isaacson observes; but she calls out the author for opportunistically seizing on an “African Watergate” to score, with off-putting smugness, cheap points against the continent. It’s turpitude all round, then:
‘Eating” is the Kenyan term denoting the gorging on state resources and Michela Wrong’s new book is about gorging, about ethnic entitlement, about corruption and the man who blew the whistle on the sleaze in the Kenyan government.
John Githongo, a journalist turned anti-corruption czar, uncovered the scam about the Anglo Leasing and Finance Company, which had 18 contracts with the Kenyan government and turned out to be no more than a facade for a company which was no more than an address in London Like Kibaki, Githongo belonged to the same ethnic group as Kenya’s first post-independence Kenyan president, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu man.
When Daniel Arap Moi, a Kalenjin, came to power in 1978 things changed, but with Mwai Kibaki at the helm from 2002 Kikuyu snouts were back in the trough. They no doubt expected loyalty from one of their own, says Wrong. They felt betrayed by Githongo. She had known him since the 1990s when she was reporting on Kenya, and thought him “a highly moral, ethnically denatured young man. He would probably have thought of himself as a spiritual being first, a Kenyan second, a Kikuyu third.”
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