Monday, March 15, 2010

WHO MURDERED KENYAN CONSERVATIONIST ROOT?

INTRIGUES SURROUNDING MURDER OF KENYAN CONSERVATIONIST JOAN ROOT CAPTURED IN NEW FILM
By Nyambega Gisesa
On the night of 12 January 2006, intruders broke into the house of a shy Joan Root,69, in Naivasha’s “Happy valley.” One of the intruders brandishing an AK 47 shot several times at her bedroom. Lying peaceful on her white bed sheets, two bullets hit her on her leg and another on her hip.
Without taking anything from the house, the angels of death left as they came.
Minutes later the world acclaimed film-maker-turned-conservationist bled to death taking to her grave a web of complex theories and intrigues on who killed her.
Up to today, no evidence substantive enough to point fingers at her killers has been unearthed. Her romantic-turned sour story of her love for her divorced husband and her love for Lake Naivasha is captured in a new documentary film that premiered on February 1st on BBC 4, Murder on the Lake.BBC 4 screened the documentary on Monday.
In a special forward on the same day to Sunday Nation, award-winning movie producer Henry Singer, sent a cover copy of the 90 minutes documentary film that explores the murder of a fearless Kenyan conservationist.
Henry singer is one of the most respected documentary filmmakers in Britain having made several successful films.
Murder on the lake is the same story for Henry Singer’s 2009 Sheffield International Documentary Film Green Awards winner Blood on the Rose. The movie Blood on the Rose is set to be launched in Britain and then released for public viewing in the next few weeks.
Without revealing who killed Joan Root, the film documentary seeks to give the audience the chance to finally answer that question.
Was it a cold-blooded murder by members of a private army she had financed to keep fishers away from Lake Naivasha? Was it a revenge attack by illegal poachers that she had fiercely campaigned against? Was it an attack by some of her neighbors or was it something more bizarre?
In 1981, Root left her other home in Britain to settle in Kenya permanently having divorced with her husband Allan Root.
After her divorce settlement she remained with a single engine Cessna plane that she and her former husband had used on their numerous romantic and adventurous trips around Africa and a document giving her rights to the documentaries they had shot together. By all means, the divorce settlement was enough for her to live a rich life.

Living with wild animals
She settled on an 88-acre lakefront property along Lake Naivasha that gave her an apt view of the beautiful lake.
Drawn away from people as a result of her divorce, she lived quietly dedicating almost her time to wildlife and Lake Naivasha.
She only lived with her house help and tens of wild animals including waterbucks, dik diks, a hippo, a porcupine and two cranes that she tamed to behave like dogs named Adams and Regina.
The elderly woman who loved safaris used to wake up and walk around Naivasha animal conservation centers notably El samea looking for injured wild animals that she picked, nursed at her home and then released them to the wild. At times she visited her few friends. Nothing is known about her going to church.
Her relatively shy private life spent mostly with wild animals was suddenly disturbed by Naivasha’s dwindling fortunes.
Root would no longer painfully watch her once beautiful lake destroyed by harmful chemicals draining into the lake from the flower farms in the area.
As she loved to refer to the situation as an “ecological apocalypse”, she watched Naivasha’s population increase tremendously from a mere 30,000 people to over 350,000 mostly impoverished migrant workers seeking employment in the flower farms.
This gave rise to squalor, environmental pollution and run- away crime. By this time, she had become a recognized defender for the poor and an acclaimed conservationist.

Forms private army
When the police seemed no longer in control over fish poachers and those dumping harmful waste in “her” once beautiful lake, Root ready to defend the lake by all means recruited an army of young men.
Formed in early 2005, her private army was codenamed Task Force and was led by the husband of her housewife known as David Chege. Chege became the General and Root the Commander-in-Chief.
The private army of about 17 young men was trained basic fighting skills and supplied with crude weapons. It is has not been established whether they were also supplied with rifle arms. Joan and other whites in the area contributed funds for the private army. The recruits were paid between Sh 2,000 to Sh 4,000 per week. They were also supplied with jungle jackets and boots.
“The initial idea of the army was to arrest fish poachers fishing with size 2-3 fishing nets that were not allowed by the fisheries department and then take them to the local police station. She feared that with time the lake would not remain with fish,” the movie’s researcher Joe Kahu told Sunday Nation in an interview.
But soon things started going haywire. Her private army violently engaged with the poachers. Violent confrontations resulted in severe injuries and at times death.
Her noble idea now- turned- into a violent war claimed its first victim in September 2005, a young man only identified to Sunday Nation as Ojorwa.

Her life in danger
Her home was not spared from the bruises of the violence. Her private army moved to provide security at her home. Still violence in the lake area never stopped and caught between a rock and a hard place she decided to stop funding the army.
Root was now the subject of harassment and threats. Her fortified residence was attacked at one time when she escaped through her backdoor after a brick was thrown to her living room, at another time she was carjacked and in September 25 she became a burglary victim.
She still refused to leave her home even after an informant told her that a gang was going to "do" her soon. Instead, she became an exile in her own homestead straying no more past her fence.
“The woman we loved to call mama was no longer easily seen outside her home,” a young man who was a member of the Task Force told Sunday Nation. He refused to reveal his identity stating that anything said about Joan root was a threat to his life.
Almost four or five months later, Root lay dead having bled profusely from an attack that locals claim Root's private army brought the three killers with an AK-47 assault weapon to her bedroom.
Did Task Force kill her?
Her death shocked Kenya’s “Happy Valley” and the international conservation world. Investigators and journalists within and from abroad streamed in to unmask the man or men behind the death of the one-time Oscar Awards nominee.
For the Kenyan police known for sluggishness in conducting investigations, the Joan root case was different. As early as 2nd February 2006 four men were charged with violence in connection to her murder but were later acquitted after Kenyan police said that there was not enough evidence to charge them with her murder.
Among the men charged by the police was Root’s Task Force General David Chege. Chege was from Karagita, the largest of the slums around Lake Naivasha and in her she had entrusted all her secrets. After differing with her trusted loyal lieutenant, she stuck him off her payroll. Did this motivate Chege to kill her?
The lead researcher for the movie, a Kenyan based in Naivasha told Sunday Nation that it was still hard to establish who killed her or what motivated the killings that turned the conservation world into a morning mood upon her death in 2006.
“She had grown very popular among the locals and with her success her enemies increased. At times she differed with the young men she financed to guard Lake Naivasha, during other times she differed with poachers, flower firms that spoiled the ecological system and her rich neighbors and the flower firms who underpaid the locals,” Joe Kahu told Sunday Nation, “it’s not easy to know who killed her. Everything to mask her death brings out theories, theories and theories.”
Those named in these theories as her possible killers include disgruntled former employees, organized crime rackets, poachers and those whose economic interests were threatened by her activism.
Root was born in Kenya to Edmund Thorpe, a British coffee farmer and safari guide. She grew up to be an influential fearless wildlife photographer and filmmaker.
Her stint as a photographer and filmmaker involved a venomous spat from a cobra that almost blinded her save for her sunglasses, a bitten face mask when filming a hippopotamus underwater and the rear nerves of sleeping with a caracal so as to film it.
With her film-maker husband Alan Root who she divorced in 1981, the two pioneered filming animal migrations in Africa.
The two traversed Kenya and Africa capturing natural beauty and wildlife using a singe engine Cessna and hot balloon.
Some of their works include the 1979 documentary Mysterious castles of Clay that was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, the epic 1975 documentary “Year of the Wildebeest” that recorded the migration of more than 1.5 million hoofed mammals from Tanzania and the 1976 film “Balloon Safari over Kilimanjaro” that captured the Maasai Mara game Reserve and the 19,340-foot peak of Mount Kilimanjaro.
On May 23, 2007 actress Julia Roberts agreed to play in a Joan Root biopic that was produced by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner of Working Title Films. Sunday Nation captured the news aptly, “Julia Roberts drawn to “murder” in Kenya.”
The latest movie about her life has already won positive reviews. Michela Wrong, author, ‘It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower’ said "Murder on the Lake' is far more than the story of one white woman's murder in a remote African location. This intriguing whodunnit, with its surprise denouement, paints the portrait of an impoverished, tense and unhappy modern African state, where the needs and demands of human beings and animals rarely coincide, and compassion is in short supply.’
On the road to winning the 2009 Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival Green Award,the movie was described as “... A beautifully crafted and heartfelt homage to a fearless campaigner which also provokes some unsettling questions about trying to stop ‘progress’ in the developing world. This is documentary directing at its very best.”
The UK paper Times review gave the movie a five-star saying “This beautifully shot film contained anything you could want from a narrative in fact or fiction: a heartbreaking tale of a romance that went wrong (between Root and her former husband Alan), an investigation of the environmental consequences of African industrialisation (the mass production of flowers by Lake Naivasha), a moral dilemma (was the flora and fauna of the lake more important that the livelihoods of the workers and the “poachers”, a term, it was pointed out, that made sense only in white man terms?), and a mystery.”

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