History - E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and David William Cohen. The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. xv + 344. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.95. Cloth. $26.95. Paper
| Autor: | Kennell A. Jackson |
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| Rok vydání: | 2006 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | African Studies Review. 49:165-166 |
| ISSN: | 1555-2462 0002-0206 |
| DOI: | 10.1353/arw.2006.0073 |
| Popis: | E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and David William Cohen. The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. xv + 344. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.95. Cloth. $26.95. Paper. On a February night in 1990, Robert Ouko, the foreign minister of Kenya and, in the West, the man increasingly considered a possible uncorrupted successor to Daniel arap Moi, was assassinated. Taken from his farm home at Koru in western Kenya by a still-unidentified gang, he was shot in the bush and his body set ablaze. Ouko's murder was yet another grisly landmark in Kenya's postindependence history of political assassinations. E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and David Cohen have written an ingenious account recapturing the crime and mapping its reverberations. Theirs is not a linear story, nor a whodunit, but a deep exploration of the murder as event and of its resonance across many levels of Kenyan society. First and foremost, it is the story of Robert Ouko with its multiple subnarratives: family man and local Luo squire; highly educated citizen of the world; entrepreneur and development advocate; patriot who might have diought his dossier on corruption would alert Moi and help his country. He was, in sum, a man near the apex of the Kenya state but endangered by the vicious politics at those lofty heights, ascendant in the world outside but beleaguered in his own land. Atieno Odhiambo and Cohen show how these subnarratives converged in his murder and helped disperse its impact so widely. One of their many priceless episodes comes from the subnarrative of Ouko as endangered civil servant. When he traveled to Washington with Moi in late January 1990 as part of a huge Kenyan unofficial delegation, he was warmly welcomed by Bush administration heavyweights, while Moi was ignored. (Bush was piqued by cash-strapped Kenya's having leased an expensive Concorde jet from London.) This was the episode that finally undid him. At a press conference, the minister so outshone the president that he was perceived to be superseding Moi; less than two weeks later, he was dead. The narrative of this episode and of other key moments in Ouko's life are riveting. Atieno Odhiambo and Cohen also present an elaborate account of the surrounding institutions and various inquiries or commissions. Most important, they examine what might be called the atmospherics generated by the murder. They aim to do more than just reconstruct a context for what happened. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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