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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Caroline Kimeu

Torture, starvation, rape: Moi’s Kenya and the dark legacy of Nyayo House

A windowless tiled room with a barred gate. The metal reinforcements for the derelict concrete walls can be seen
The Nyayo House torture chambers, where hundreds of opponents of Daniel arap Moi were taken. Survivors want the building to become a museum. Photograph: @thekhrc

The 56 days that Patrick Onyango spent in Kenya’s dark, damp Nyayo House torture chambers remain clear in his mind. It was three deacdes ago that Onyango, now 66, knew that his opposition to the autocratic rule of Kenya’s second president, Daniel arap Moi, was to be punished when uniformed policemen seized him in the middle of a class he was teaching in Kisumu, the port city in western Kenya, bundling him on to a helicopter and whisking him to the capital, Nairobi.

There he was shuttled from one prison cell to another for nearly a week, he says, before being blindfolded and taken through a narrow tunnel to the cells of the infamous Nyayo torture chambers.

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