WANJIRU WAS SPOT-ON WITH HAVOC OF CHOICE

 BOOK REVIEW: THE HAVOC OF CHOICE

Reviewed by Margaretta wa Gacheru (wrote it February 14, 2022)

With the General Election coming around in just a few months, this could be a good time for Kenyans to pick up Wanjiru Koinange’s 2021 book, ‘The Havoc of Choice’.

Koinange’s book is a novel, and thus, it can pass for fiction. But there is so much that feels accurate about the eye-witness accounts of her characters who actually live through the 2007 election and its aftermath that it seems particularly timely for us to remember how we never want to repeat the havoc and horrors of 2007-2008’s post-election violence.

Koinange’s book is centered around two families, the Mwangi’s and the Muli’s. Kavata Muli is married to Ngugi Mwangi, and they have two kids, Wanja a university student and Amani, a charming eight-year-old who is the apple of everybody’s eye.

The crisis in the Mwangi household has to do with politics and the corruption associated with it. Both Ngugi and Kavata are well-educated, but out of his joblessness and consequent frustration, he decides to team up with Kavata’s father who is the outgoing Member of Parliament for Machakos. Kavata is appalled since she despises corruption and her father’s flagrant brand of political corruption. She warns Ngugi she will leave him if he agrees to run for her father’s seat since she knows he will become just as corrupt as her dad. He doesn’t listen, and so, she takes off for the US without giving notice, not even to her precious son.

The Mwangi household falls apart without Kavata. Their driver, Thuo, gets jailed since he is the last one to have seen Kavata before she ‘disappeared’. Meanwhile, the election takes place and MP Muli’s Fixer Jane fails to buy off enough voters to give Ngugi the win Muli expected. But Ngugi’s loss is not the biggest issue of the hour.

We witness the country explode as news of the incumbent’s win is emotionally received by the Opposition voters. All manner of gruesome and grizzly violence is witnessed first-hand by Thuo’s wife, a Kalenjin mama, Cheptoo, who is advised to get back to Eldoret before something dire happens to her as she awaits the return of her husband.  The Mwangi’s cook Schola also experiences the violence, first when witnessing the church, packed with parishioners, being burnt to the ground, and then when she gets raped by a Kenyan policeman.

Kavata doesn’t experience the volatile situation first hand, but once she sees it in the media and hears Ngugi lost, she’s determined to get back home. So while most people are trying to flee from the violence which erupts all over the land, Kavata is intent on getting home by any means necessary. By the time she finally arrives, she experiences a different level of personal pain that I won’t disclose because I don’t want to spoil this page-turner of a novel for readers.

The Havoc of Choice may seem to start slowly and focus on family affairs. But it quickly opens out into a global story that even features the Kenya Diaspora. Koinange explores issues of class and culture, including ethnicity, as well as corruption and the crisis of post-election violence. What’s stunning is how much more violent the immediate aftermath of the election was than we might have wanted to believe. Koinange does not shy away from explaining how the burning of houses, businesses, and even churches wasn’t hyperbolic. One feels she has carefully done her homework and depicts actual events, events that nobody wants to see repeated. Yet this is the beauty of fiction. One might even believe the story is a dark fantasy that Koinange made up. But we know that she did not.

“Kenya burning’ was a headline that got repeated for many days in the international and national media. There was even a book of gruesome photographs under that title, taken mainly by Boniface Mwangi and funded by Ford Foundation. But reading The Havoc of Choice will give you a more intimate feeling of what that period was like. Koinange does an excellent job creating characters who are credible and complex. It is their witnessing the PEV in very personal terms that will make you recall why you truly do not want that kind of uncontrollable flare-up of emotions. And if it is true that some or much of the violence has been paid for by greedy politicians, let us pray that those who take the cash don’t follow through. We want the elections to be free and fair, and Kenyans accepting election results peacefully.