[UAH] The man with whom President Jomo Kenyatta shared secrets that he could not tell even Mama Ngina

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Mbiyu Koinange once confided to a friend the reason he never spent the night with any of his four wives.

"What would happen if I dreamt in my sleep and started divulging Jomo's secrets? I certainly cannot live with such an eventuality, so I decided never to share a bedroom with anyone, my wives included."

Koinange was on his own a man of considerable accomplishments. He was one of the early nationalists, working with Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah to organise resistance to colonialism in the first half of the last century.

He was also one of the first Africans to get advanced degrees from Western institutions, attending a string of prestigious colleges including Columbia University in the United States and Britain's University of Cambridge.

Koinange served as a Cabinet minister for the best part of two decades since Independence.

Yet the son of senior chief Koinange wa Mbiyu is ultimately known to history for his association with President Kenyatta, a man with whom he shared a friendship spanning nearly 40 years and in whose company he spent most of his adult life.

During the Moi presidency, Nicholas Biwott was seen as the most powerful of Mr Moi's inner circle of advisers. The difference is that Mr Biwott was not constantly seen around Mr Moi in the same way that Koinange was a constant shadow at Kenyatta's tail.

Koinange accompanied the president everywhere and in the evening – and on frequent holidays in Mombasa – they would be seen enjoying soup and mutura (goat offal sausage) while cracking jokes that nobody else could understand.

In a profile of the man for the Sunday Nation, former Butere MP Martin Shikuku, a leading critic of the Kenyatta administration, said he had once complained that MPs could barely access Mzee Kenyatta because Koinange was always hanging around him.

"I was told to mind my business because there were things Kenyatta talked about with Koinange that he couldn't share even with (First Lady) Mama Ngina," Shikuku, now deceased, had said.

Kenyatta and Koinange were not natural allies. Before he left Kenya to study in the US on a Rhodes scholarship organised by anthropologist Louis Leakey, Mr Koinange was very suspicious of the future president.

Kenyatta had been a critic of senior chief Koinange's alliance with British administrators before he left the country to highlight the nationalist cause in the UK in the early 1930s.

But with time, senior chief Koinange joined those agitating for Independence. A meeting between the younger Koinange and Kenyatta in London also served to convince him that he had misunderstood Kenyatta.

The late president's biographer Jeremy Murray-Brown records that the pair quickly established a rapport.

"With his intelligence and American experience, Koinange was stimulating company for Kenyatta."

The meeting was fateful not least because it was Koinange who worked with Kenyatta to find a new name. They sat together and went through the dictionary and settled on the name Jomo to replace his baptismal name "Johnstone".

Koinange eventually returned to the country and contested the Kiambaa parliamentary seat on a Kanu ticket in 1963. He won and held that position until 1979.

Koinange was born in 1907 and obtained his early education at the Church Missionary Schools in Kiambaa before proceeding to the Alliance High School.
His time abroad was marked not just by his early exposure to Western education but by his efforts in the nationalist movement.

Between 1951 and 1959 he was the roving representative of the Kenya African Union in Europe, and in 1959 he took up the post of director of the Bureau of African Affairs in Accra, Ghana.

While he played a sterling role in the search for Independence (the Daily Nation in its story reporting his death in the edition of September 3, 1981, referred to him as "one of the nation's founding fathers"), his post-Independence chapter is not regarded with fondness.

He was seen as one of the hawks around Kenyatta who came to be known as the "Kiambu Mafia" and was linked to some of the worst excesses of the first two decades of Independence, including the assassination of JM Kariuki in 1975 and the campaign of intimidation aimed at blocking Daniel Moi from the presidency.

Like a twin that struggles to survive after the death of its sibling, Mbiyu went into a spiral of depression and illness following Mzee Kenyatta's death in August 1978. He died in his sleep four years later and was survived by four widows and 18 children.