"THAT ETHIOPIAN MAN WAS NOT MY FATHER," SAYS GEN. STANLEY MATHENGE'S SON

The son of Gen. Stanley Mathenge has been through hell. When his father went into the forest, his mother was immediately detained and the young man was put in an orphanage together with other children of Mau Mau fighters. Closely watched by white colonial officers, including John Nottingham, a young, kind-hearted District Officer, he moved from one bostal home to another, until his mother's release from detention. After independence, senior government officials brought him to Nairobi under the pretext that they would take him to Europe for studies but they abandoned him in the city where he turned to drugs. The late Bildad Kagia tried to rescue him, but took him into opposition politics, becoming the Secretary of KPU in Nyeri, and suffering political and economic dereliction as a result . He tells of his engagement by the late journalist Joseph Karimi and eventual travel to Ethiopia in search of his father, who had for a long time been rumoured to have been residing quietly in Ethiopia. However, he realised that it was a wild goose chase and that the old Ethiopian man at the centre of the drama was, in his opinion, fake.