8 February 1947 – 6 March 2008
Apollo Njonjo, a former contributor to ROAPE's issue, ‘Kenya: The Agrarian Question’ (No. 20, March 1981) died in Nairobi on 6 March 2008 after twenty five years of dealing with a heart condition complicated by diabetes. He was born in Limuru, attending distinguished local primary and secondary schools even during Mau Mau and the Emergency. He graduated with honors in history and government from the University of Nairobi in 1970. He then went to Princeton University, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, receiving his doctorate from the Department of Politics in 1977. His Ph.D. thesis on ‘The Africanization of the “White Highlands” and the Agrarian Class Struggle in Kenya’ remains a classic and still is widely cited.
Upon returning to Kenya, Apollo taught in the Department of Government at the University of Nairobi from 1977–79, then working for Technoserve, a US development organization. In 1981, he set up one of the first Kenyan owned and operated consulting firms, the Business and Economic Research (BER) Bureau. His main focus was on water development projects and his clients ranged from Kenyan ministries to a number of bilateral and multilateral organizations in Eastern and Central Africa. He also assisted students from his home area with grants and with advice and worked in other sectors as well as bringing a number of development projects to Limuru.
Apollo spent his life fighting against repression and for democracy in Kenya. He was a part of Kenya's ‘second liberation’ and the long and difficult struggle against the tyranny of former President Moi. He was Secretary General of the progressive Social Democratic Party (SDP) from 1991–2007 after which he headed The Center for Multi‐Party Democracy in Nairobi. He understood that Kenya's future depended on its ability to establish multi‐ethnic political parties and was disappointed when the SDP failed to live up to its initial promise. He ran for M.P. from his home district of Limuru three times, including in the last election.
Apollo is best remembered by his friends as someone with a good sense of humor, a keen intellect, an argumentative style, and an utter distain for tribal politics. He was intellectually honest and incisive and did not pander to popular views or to what others wanted to hear.
His own home and office were multiethnic and he was appalled by the violence which engulfed Kenya after the 2007 election. He also was singularly unimpressed by many of Kenya's new wave of politicians after 2002, viewing them as predictable primitive accumulators. He saw the devastating results of land grabbing and the building of vast shoddy complexes of flats in parts of Nairobi, where water and sewage resources were inadequate, something he knew from his own work.
The kinds of questions posed by Apollo and others in ROAPE's issue on the Agrarian Question in Kenya and in Apollo's article, ‘The Kenyan Peasantry: A Reassessment’ remain relevant today: what sort of differentiation is Kenya's rural population experiencing, with what consequences, how does it compare with previous types of capitalist development, and what does it tell us about Kenya's future? In his 1981 ROAPE article Apollo noted that Kenya's peasantry was increasingly being quasi‐proletarianized, and that its continued attachment to its small unviable bits of land made it prone to fascism, something disputed by other contributors to the volume. That said, Apollo felt Kenya's recent implosion into violence was not about land grievances, but ultimately about a political class which was prepared to do anything to obtain and retain political power, including perpetrating the worst sorts of violence along ethnic lines. He was shocked by what happened and feared for Kenya's future.
He leaves behind his family: his wife Irene Wanjiku, his daughter Waringa, his son Kimani and his wife Carol, and a grandson, Tyler Ngigi as well as friends and colleagues, all of whom miss him greatly.