The True Story of David Munyakei by Billy Kahora
Published by Kwani? Books

In 2004, David Sadera Munyakei, a former Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) employee who a decade before had leaked crucial documents related to the Goldenberg financial scandal, appeared before a public inquiry investigating the $1bn fraud. At that point, he was entering a second and, as it turned out, last phase of his life. Munyakei had been hired in 1992 by the CBK’s Banking Division, his first job. He soon began to notice irregularities in the processing of export compensation monies to a little-known company, Goldenberg International. And when, after he raised questions about this, he was advised to shut up and toe the line, he smuggled out the documents to opposition MPs.

The CBK dismissed him and set the police after him. His mother, traumatised at the news, collapsed and later died while Munyakei managed a shape-shifting escape into anonymity. Billy Kahora spent four months living with Munyakei and produces a story that reads like the best of the new Kenyan fiction. Observing Munyakei at such close quarters, Kahora does not portray him as a well-behaved hero but rather as a contradictory, often embittered man. However, Kahora’s main barbs, delivered with only the most sparing authorial intervention, are reserved for the grasping media industry and do-gooder liberal activists. The latter, publicly lionising Munyakei, are often too distant and naïve to really do him any justice. By the time of his death, in penury in mid-2006, his passing was barely noticed. It is, in short, a typical Kenyan story. l
 Parselelo Kantai