Argwings Kodhek Road stretches through the Hurlingham and Kilimani neighbourhoods of Nairobi, a leafy residential corridor that gives little indication of the violent history behind its name. The road is named after Clement Michael George Argwings Kodhek, Kenya's first African advocate, a Luo politician and diplomat who died in a car crash on this road on January 29, 1969 — five months before Tom Mboya was shot dead on what is now Tom Mboya Street.
Argwings Kodhek's career was remarkable by any measure. Born in 1923 in South Nyanza, he pursued higher education with a determination that took him across three continents. He studied at Fort Hare University in South Africa — the same institution that educated Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe — before moving to the University of Wales and then Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he earned his law degree. He was called to the bar in 1951, becoming the first African from Kenya to qualify as an advocate. Returning home, he established a legal practice in Nairobi and quickly became involved in the anti-colonial movement, using the courtroom as a venue for challenging the racial restrictions of the settler state.
After independence in 1963, Argwings Kodhek served as Member of Parliament for Gem-Rangwe and held several government positions, including assistant minister in Jomo Kenyatta's cabinet. He was known as an outspoken figure who did not always align himself with the dominant faction within the ruling party. By the late 1960s, tensions between Kikuyu and Luo politicians were intensifying, and Argwings Kodhek found himself in an increasingly dangerous political environment.
On the night of January 29, 1969, Argwings Kodhek's car crashed on the road that now bears his name. The official finding was that it was a traffic accident — his vehicle hit a tree, and he died at the scene. But the circumstances raised immediate suspicion. The crash occurred at night under conditions that were never fully investigated. There were no independent witnesses whose testimony was made public. The post-mortem findings were not widely disclosed. And the timing was extraordinary: within six months, Tom Mboya, the most prominent Luo politician in Kenya, would be assassinated in broad daylight on a Nairobi street.
The coincidence of two Luo political figures dying violently in the same city within the same calendar year was not lost on observers. Some political analysts and journalists have suggested that Argwings Kodhek's death was a prelude to Mboya's assassination — that he "had to be taken out first before the prime quarry," as one commentator put it. Whether this theory is accurate or not, it reflects a deep and persistent scepticism about the official account. No inquiry was ever conducted into whether the crash was engineered, and the case has never been formally reopened.
Argwings Kodhek Road today is one of the more affluent streets in Nairobi, lined with apartment complexes, restaurants, and embassies. Few of the residents who use it daily are aware that it memorialises a man whose death remains unexplained. Together with Tom Mboya Street and Pio Gama Pinto Road, it forms part of a pattern that Assassination Roads Nairobi examines: Nairobi names its streets after politicians who died under suspicious or violent circumstances, while never conclusively establishing who was responsible.
See Also
Sources
- E.S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale, eds., Mau Mau and Nationhood (James Currey, 2003), pp. 227-231.
- Bethwell A. Ogot, "The Decisive Years: 1956-1963," in Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940-93, ed. B.A. Ogot and W.R. Ochieng' (James Currey, 1995), pp. 48-79.
- David Goldsworthy, Tom Mboya: The Man Kenya Wanted to Forget (Heinemann, 1982), pp. 258-260.
- "The Strange Deaths of Luo Politicians in 1969," The East African Standard, July 12, 1969.