Pheroze Nowrojee is described by the ICJ Kenya as a legal titan, human rights defender and voices of conscience.
“Pheroze Nowrojee gave me the courage to go to Eldoret to face KMA ” disciplinary hearings” that led to KMA standing committee on human rights” – Dr Ling Kituyi
Part 1
INDIRECT INFLUENCE OF PHEROZE NOWROJEE TO DR SIMON KIGONDU AND KMA HUMAN RIGHTS COMMITTTEE
Simon Kigondu the Human Rights Defender (HRD)
I often describe myself as a human rights defender. This has come from my parents who over the years I have observed them attempt to speak out against injustices, some of them bigger than their position in life. But my dad was occasionally bullied and even kicked out of meetings when he called out corruption.
The power of KMA NGC & AGM meetings – mentorship through stories
KMA NGCs and AGMs
When I was elected chairman of KMA Machakos Division in 2001 I began to attend KMA National Governing Council (NGC) meetings, traditionally held in the 3rd weeks of August, January and in April, and the KMA Annual Scientific Conferences. NGC reports are then presented to the KMA AGMs every year in the 3rd week of April.
Dr James Nyikal, Dr Mohamud Said, Dr Ling Kituyi
In my formative years at KMA I met many people who have influenced my trajectory in KMA, in the human rights space and in life in general. Dr James Nyikal was the national chairman of KMA when I was in the chair Machakos, 2001 – 2003. At that time Dr Mohamoud Said was the convenor of the KMA Human Rights Committee and Dr Ling Kituyi was the immediate past Assistant National Secretary of KMA and a very active member of the KMA Human Rights Committee. During NGCs we spent many hours listening to them at and after NGC meetings. Dr Mohamud introduced me to the Kenya Red Cross where I became a life member.
Dr Ling Kituyi at KMA ASC Kisumu, April 2024
I met Ling again in April 2024 at the 51st KMA Annual Scientific Conference in Kisumu where Dr James Nyikal was a keynote speaker. She had a nice reunion with the old folk the likes of Dr J Aluoch and Nyikal. She told me she was now retired from Geneva and had some time. I quickly put her back to the KMA Human Rights Committee to mentor the young ones. The beauty of KMA is that those who have been there before mentor the younger ones directly.
KMA report to the UN Rapporteur of Human Rights
As the youngest KMA National Governing Council Governor in the year 2001 – 2003, I spent many hours in awe listening to Dr Mohamud Said, on the sidelines of KMA NGC meetings listening to stories about human rights abuses in the Moi era. Dr Mohamud reported that one of the successes of the KMA Human Rights Committee that is etched in the history of Kenya was the report KMA gave to the UN Rapporteur on Human Rights in 1998. Doctors affiliated to KMA, had collected and documented the horrible political tortures that the Moi Regime had exerted on people and communities that were considered to be against the regime. KMA helped form and worked closely withthe Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU), to document human rights abuses. Abductions and torture did not start with the current regime.
2024 Demonstrations and Police Shootings and documentation
During the protests, KMA had noted the difficulty in documentation of injuries at the make-shift health facilities that health teams had set up to treat people injured during the demonstrations. Many gunshot victims came through the city centre makeshift health facilities for first aid. In one of our medical briefings of first responders we noted that on the first day of ‘maandamano’, the medical notes for all the victims treated at the makeshift health centres in the city centre had mysteriously disappeared. We suspected a hand of the state.
2024 KMA-IMLU Forensic Documentation trainings
It was no wonder than when in 2024 there were reports of police brutality, abductions and shootings I remembered the stories that Dr Mohamud and Dr Ling Kituyi used to narrate, and they sounded so eerily like what was happening in June 2024. I and asked Dr Ling to do a series of lectures on forensic medical documentation. KMA working with IMLU organized this series and Ling was one of the trainers. Regimes get away with human rights abuses when they are not documented correctly. Doctors are an important component in the prevention of human rights abuses through accurate documentation of histories and injuries of victims of these abuses.
View KMA – IMLU Forensic Medical Documentation on KMA YouTube page:
https://youtu.be/5g7x3kI1Cx4?si=VsqjgEEut1CnBwLw
Amnesty International Kenya
In recognition of my stand on human rights, I was asked to serve as a board member of Amnesty International Kenya (AIK). AIK has contributed immensely in defending human rights and speaking out against human rights violations. Ironically the chair of the AIK board is Dr Stella Wairimu Bosire. Stella was my medical intern in Murang’a. She is a past CEO of KMA. She is a member of the KMA Human Rights Committee and a Co-convenor of the KMA Reproductive Health Committee.
Why do I give this background?
Pheroze Nowrojee has passed on.
I have cried upon reading the testimony of Dr Ling Kituyi in our Human Rights Committee WhatsApp Group on what impact Pheroze Nowrojee had on her fight for human rights.
“We come from far and Pheroze was a mentor. Rest in peace” – Ling Kituyi
I cried when Dr Ling Kituyi referenced Amnesty International and SAMA in her story that will follow, and I quote:
“After Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, I asked Amnesty International to help us get resource people from South Africa who understood how hard it is to work under oppression. Amnesty funded two speakers from the alternative black South African Medical Association, formed after the official South African Medical Council refused to sanction the doctors ( white ) who had colluded with the apartheid government in Steve Bikos death. We held nine CME around Kenya and local LSK chapters begged to join in” – Dr Ling
Today I’m prouder of AIK than I have before. During the demonstrations of 2024 AIK, KMA and LSK visited Kisumu to document the injuries that had been sustained by police violence and produced a report on the same. You can pull Dr Serena on the side and ask her what she witnessed. This was reported to the KMA NGC.
KMA also works closely with South African Medical Association (SAMA). The SAMA vote was one of the one hundred votes that helped KMA’s Dr Jacqueline Kitulu secure the Presidency of the World Medical Association (WMA) in Helsinki in Finland in October 2024 at the WMA General Assembly. I’m elated to hear of their contribution to the KMA Human Rights Committee. What goes around comes around.
Listening to Dr Ling Kituyi’s testimony, and given my love for stories, I could not help but ensure that I let the whole world know how Pheroze Nowrojee has influenced me indirectly through my mentors. Ling’s story has also validated my belief that doctors and professional associations play a very important role in protecting mwanachi from state excesses by documenting human rights abuses. The beauty with documenting these experiences is that future generations learn what to do or what not to do without necessarily being the victims firsthand.
As Pheroze Nowrojee completes his tenure on earth, on behalf of Kenya Medical Association Human Rights Committee I thank you. Your impact lives on.
I put the story of Dr Ling Kituyi here verbatim because it cannot be paraphrased. We thank her for all the work she has done to ensure that Kenya remain a place where human rights are upheld and when they are not, KMA calls them out. I’m sure this will be in her memoirs
Part 2
THE STORY OF DR LING KITUYI TO THE KMA HUMAN RIGHTS COMMMITTEE WHATSAPP GROUP UPON THE DEATH OF PHEROZE
Some of you may not know how Pheroze relates to KMA Human rights committee. One advantage of age is to be a storyteller.
State oppression and abductions is not new. My own baptism of fire was Easter 1991. I was on “nights off”, a week of rest and recuperation after working nine weeks nonstop as a Casualty officer in Nairobi. The RNR was taken in Bungoma at the foothills of MT Elgon. Because I had small children, I was awake at dawn with the milkman, and I noticed as the morning fog lifted that the mountain was on fire. More than a dozen places at once not like a forest fire. Recall there were no phones, even landline. Internet had not yet begun. What was going on?
I woke my husband, and we wondered what might be happening to his grandfather Petero Makari Kituyi, the last hereditary chief of the Bukusso, deposed in the 1930s for defying the British. In our naivety we packed the kids in the car with picnic lunch and drive towards the Mountain that towers flat-topped like Cape Town’s Table Mountain.
We found thousands of people sheltering in churches and schools at Siresisia Market, arrows poking out of chest, panga cuts all over their bodies. Some had not eaten for days, and I helplessly gave them my children’s picnic lunch. We returned to Nairobi to raise the alarm. Recall there was one radio and TV station and no You Tube or Twitter. The famoushaematologist to late Professor Kasili organised professionals to give humanitarian aid like food and blankets as even UNDP Kenya declared they do not interfere in a country’s internal affairs. The subsequent National Council of Churches report “The Burning Spear” documented 600,000 displaced and 1,200 dead as part of so called ” ethnic clashes” As if the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are spontaneous ethnic combustion.
Those that protested losing their lands began to disappear. Professor Kasili organised us to document this with other doctors like Professor Samson Wanjala, Dr Richard Baraza and the late psychiatrist Major Kokonya. None of the newspapers would cover this. We paid for full page adverts in The Nation and The Standard, but they returned our cheques.
Eventually the then DPP Bernard Chunga brought a few to court at midnight, charging them with belonging to February 18 Revolutionary Army and they confessed within ten minutes and were sentenced to death without any legal representation. This leaked out through the cleaners.
The then young Nancy Baraza and her junior associate Eugene Wamalwa organised vigil at the high court to offer free services to anyone brought to midnight trial. This emboldened the detained to refuse the charges.
As I was a young doctor just starting my practice in Hurlingham, sharing offices with Professor Charles Change, I was asked to go to Kamiti Maximum Security prison to examine the detainees. How to go to prison was not on the syllabus at Medical School in Norway. So, I asked Pheroze Nowrojee – how do I get into a maximum security prison. He got me a court order.
The court order was not immediately respected at Kamiti, and I was made to wait under a big tree along with relatives bringing food. We got rained on. I was very pregnant. It became four o’clock and a junior warden came over to tell me to go home as I could only see prisoners in the company of the prison doctor who was now off duty. II protested as I had observed the prison doctor standing my his Mercedes, supervising a mechanic repairing it. Those days we were few doctors in Kenya and known by face to each other. Most had even gone to the one and only medical school.
I followed the prison doctor back to his office with an unhappy warden in tow. Once in the doctor’s office he ordered me to leave and I refused. He had wasted four hours of my time doing his own private business and now he could give me 30 minutes of his time to examine the patient. We were both very angry. So, he took his brief case and walked out of the room, locking the door behind him. I was locked in Kamiti prison. I sat on a high-backed school chair and wondered what I had got myself into. After half an hour the prison warden came back and unlocked the door and told me to go.
I went straight to Pheroze’s house opposite Nairobi hospital corner of Ralphe Bunche and Awings Kodek, to tell him what had happened. He told me to go back next day. The court order said I should see the patient between 12 noon and four pm in the presence of the prison doctor. I went back next day and was escorted to my battered patient. He had fresh wounds all over his body and I stated in my report that they were so new that they had to have happened during the three weeks in State custody and they were compatible with torture. I got front page headlines in Standard newspaper ” Norwegian doctor alleges torture”. Medical colleagues warned me I would lose my licence to practice, my work permit, I’d be deported etc. This had happened to Kenyan born doctors in the 1980s. Many cases followed and we opened a joint account called Kituyi and Nowrojee which was the precursor of what became the Independent Medico Legal Unit (IMLU).
I got a letter from Kenya Medical Association requesting I come to explain myself to a NEC meeting in Eldoret. I thought I was going to lose my licence to practice. I asked Pheroze for advice. He told me to go and see what happens. So, I went to Nyama Kima and took RVP to Eldoret, arriving late. I did not afford a car those days. MPS earned 5,000 shillings a month and school fees were a challenge. Trembling with a cracking voice I stood before a high table of KMA NEC members explaining I was documenting injuries for lawyers to use in court to prove torture. To my surprise the then KMA chair Professor Rogo asked: how can we support you? I had no answer as it was so unexpected. But my friend Dr Mahmud Said of Bungoma was a KMA NEC member, suggested we form a KMA standing committee for human rights and so it was done.
Together we ran series of CME in KMA chapters across Kenya. We called it “Documenting Special traumatology” as the colonial Chiefs Act was still in force, meaning one needed permission from the chief to gather more than 9 people. I had sent copies of all my reports to various embassies, Human rights Watch, Amnesty International and the UN high commissioner for Human rights. Many of these addresses I got from Pheroze and his daughter Binaifa.
After Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, I asked Amnesty International to help us get resource people from South Africa who understood how hard it is to work under oppression. Amnesty funded two speakers from the alternative black South African Medical Association, formed after the official South African Medical Council refused to sanction the doctors (white) who had colluded with the apartheid government in Steve Biko’s death. We held nine CME around Kenya and local LSK chapters begged to join in. The similarities in post-colonial Kenya and apartheid South Africa was both depressing and inspiring. If they could fight apartheid, so could we in Kenya continue to fight injustice. And KMA human rights committee became an important protective instrument.
One evening the all-powerful Minister for Internal Security Hon Shariff Nazir went on national television 7 pm news, accusing me of receiving money from abroad to overthrow the government of Kenya. I got a call from KMA human rights committee chair Dr Mahmoud Said, telling me to shut up and let KMA handle it. By nine pm news the whole NEC stood by Professor Rogo who stated that the human rights work I was doing is professional work, not political and that I was doing it on behalf of all doctors in Kenya.
Several years later when we were following up the King’ongo prison massacre I was called by the DMS to stop spreading lies and don’t I know he can unmake to me as a doctor in Kenya. The then Chair of KMA Dr James Nyikal told me to shut up. And by evening the full KMA NEC was on TV supporting our work as part of KMA human rights committee.
“Pheroze Nowrojee gave me the courage to go to Eldoret to face KMA ” disciplinary hearings” that led to KMA standing committee on human rights”
Many more stories on KMA human rights committee:
– Successfully pushing for changes in Police Act to outlaw torture
– To improve prison conditions
– To change the Sexual Offences Bill to recognise male rape (under colonial law only women could suffer sexual assaults)
– To set up gender desks in police stations and
– To develop the P3 form we want that adequately addresses documentation of GBV or torture.
We come from far and Pheroze was a mentor. Rest in peaceDr Ling Kituyi, is a past ASG KMA, a member of the KMA Human rights Committee
Dr Simon Kigondu is a gynaecologist, President of KMA, Board Member of Amnesty International Kenya.