It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong Read Free Book Online Page B

every possible scenario before moving to action. ‘I try and dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s. I do this excessively, it’s been my style throughout. And then, when I move–BOOM!’ The approach slowed him down, but he needed to feel he had set his intellectual house in order. If he taped an interview so early on, he’d be skipping the methodical preparation of the ground that felt like a necessity.
    A fortnight later, with the key questions unanswered, John moved out. He headed first to the home of Michael Holman, another British journalist whose friendship with him was as little known as my own, and then to a scruffy flat next to a north London fish-and-chip shop.
    I didn’t like to admit it, but his departure came as both anticlimax and relief. There was no denying that my brush with a man at the vortex of a major political crisis had provided me with a vicarious thrill. But there had been a few close shaves, close enough to make me uncomfortable. My parents’ flat happened to be situated around the corner from the Kenyan High Commission. Once I’d caught a bus that stopped just outside the building and two Kenyan women employees, leaving for the day, had boarded after me. To my alarm, they had ridden all the way to my bus stop. These women, who would certainly know John in his official capacity and recognise him if they bumped into him on the street, lived in my local area. Another time, John had been using a local cyber café and a Kenyan customer had suddenly started chatting to him in Kiswahili. It was not clear whether he’d been recognised, or this was just a case of one East African being friendly to a fellow abroad. Had I been working for Kenyan intelligence, I would have simply toured all the London gyms with good weightlifting facilities, asking if a large black Kenyan had recently signed up. But John warned me that his emailing would be the activity that would eventually lead his pursuers to him. By analysing the emails he sent back to Nairobi, he said, it would be possible to eventually work out the geographical location of the terminals he’d used. Sure enough, a Kenyan newspaper editor who liked to show off the extent of his intelligence links would later drawlwhen I walked into his Nairobi office, ‘So I hear John Githongo has been holed up with Michela Wrong and Michael Holman in London.’
    A few weeks after finding his own place, waiting on a London Underground platform, John realised he was being followed by two middle-aged Kenyan men who looked exactly what they almost certainly were: undercover agents. He sprinted down a passageway and hopped onto a train to lose them. Then one day, emerging at his local tube station, he was confronted by a Kenyan man, standing coolly watching him, making sure John registered his presence. They had tracked their prey down to his lair, and were showing off the fact that they knew where to find him.
    Yet they did nothing. There was no attempted break-in to verify what, if any, material he held in his new lodgings, no raid to confiscate the incriminating laptop–still in his possession and containing plenty of unbacked-up material–no overture, no whispered threat, no attempt to lure him back to Kenya. They were hanging back, waiting. Waiting for what, exactly? Presumably for the same thing as the rest of us: waiting for the Big Man to make up his mind.
    He moved yet again, this time to Oxford’s St Antony’s, a college with a history of offering sanctuary to those in political hot water. Professor Paul Collier, an expert on African economies, had come to the rescue with a not particularly demanding senior associate’s post on its East African Studies programme. It was exactly the kind of academic berth John needed at this juncture, offering him accommodation, a work space and–crucially–the time in which to gather his thoughts.
    One of his first acts there was highly