Another Sweep for Jomo

Africans have a superstitious horror of the chameleon, which in Kikuyu is pronounced kipu. It so happens that the initials of Leftist Oginga Odinga's nascent opposition party, the Kenya People's Union, have the same phonetic pronunciation--a fact that President Jomo Kenyatta's political songwriters did not overlook during the nation's three-week special election campaign. All through Kikuyuland last month, Jomo's ardent KANU party youth-wingers chanted a 20-verse warning against the abhorrent turncoats of the "chameleon party," punctuating each stanza with guttural cries of "moto, moto, moto!"--meaning "Burn, burn, burn!"

By the time the returns were counted last week, Odinga was scorched. At issue were the 29 seats vacated by his adherents when they quit KANU last March. Jomo's KANU candidates, whose party symbol is a cockerel, captured twelve seats in the National Assembly and eight in the Senate. Odinga's KPU, represented on ballot sheets as a bull, won seven and two respectively. That left KANU with a plurality of 121 to 7 in the House and 39 to 2 in the Senate.

Matter of Money? It was a dismal showing for the first opposition party in Kenya's three-year post-Uhuru history, but Odinga had covered himself in advance. During the campaign, "Double-O" claimed that if KPU failed to win all available seats it would be proof that the elections were rigged. "You can be a friend of Kenyatta's only if you crawl and cringe like a hyena," he cried. "He is a frightened man with a little heart." Jomo proved to be equally adept at badinage. At a rally in Nairobi, he warned that the dissidents were prepared to buy votes. "If these people offer money," he said, "you must know it is foreign money meant to undermine the sovereignty of our country. Beware of this political prostitution. Take the money--but vote for KANU."

Main target of Jomo's wrath was not Odinga but rather Bildad Kaggia, the lone Kikuyu in the KPU's Luo-dominated upper ranks. Kaggia, roared Kenyatta, was a captive of the Communists, a liar, a cheat and a lover of "black necks"--a derogatory Kikuyu reference to the darker-skinned Luo. Moreover, suggested Jomo in the ultimate Kikuyu insult, he suspected that Kaggia was not even circumcised. Kaggia was crushed by an 18,000-vote KANU plurality.

Gourdfuls of Beer. Odinga, touring the countryside in his black Mercedes, tried to win the voters with promises of free land, free education and jobs for everybody. He also worked the stale vein of antiwhite chauvinism. "The country is under the thumb of the Europeans," he charged. "Kenyatta is told what to do by the Americans. The whites should all be kicked out. You see them walking along, smoking their cigarettes and not looking anyone in the face. Why should we have to come along behind them and pick up their butt ends?" The antiwhite line worked well in Luo country, but in the cities it fell as fiat as the African beer doled out by the gourdful at the polling places. Victory was just what Jomo had predicted. When the results were in, his triumphant KANU candidates feasted on roast oxen--a symbolic meal commemorating the KPU's decisive defeat.

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