Somewhere in Geneva, at the capital of one of the most peaceful countries in the world, Kenyan lawyer Chris Mburu spends most of his waking hours worrying about human rights.
As a Senior Human Rights Advisor at the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, he is always scanning for conflicts across the globe. At his fingertips is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document laid down in 1948, but which lies effete under the boots of high-handed actors.
Before he got himself into the space where he defends others, Chris was a hapless village boy mostly concerned about his next meal.
Deep in Mitahato Village in Githunguri constituency of Kiambu County, he was always exposed: a house with gaping walls where passers-by could peep through the cracks, torn clothes that his mother could stitch as he waited in his birthday suit, insults about his family’s want that came even from his teacher, to name but a few.
His education was assured by Hilde Back, a teacher in faraway Sweden who used to send money every month to keep him in school. Before fate connected him with Hilde, the lastborn in a family of seven children, he had lost count of the number of times he was ejected from school for lack of fees.
Through a scheme where like-minded individuals picked African children to sponsor, Hilde ensured that Chris completed his studies at Mitahato Primary School. He then got to join the Queen of Apostles Seminary for his O-levels, then to Nairobi School for his A-levels, before he joined the University of Nairobi (UoN), and later the Harvard University.
His UoN class that graduated in 1990 produced numerous giants in Kenya’s legal space, among them Attorney-General Dorcas Oduor, Cabinet Secretary Rebecca Miano, Supreme Court judge Isaac Lenaola, and MPs Millie Odhiambo and Caroli Omondi.
In 2010, a film about Chris premiered at the Sundance Festival in the US. Titled A Small Act and made by Hollywood director Jennifer Arnold, the Emmy-nominated film was themed around Chris’s initiative to look for Hilde, years after she had lost contact with his family, to thank her.
Chris has worked with the UN since 1996. Thanks to his UN job, he has worked in countries like the US, Haiti, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, the Congo, Ethiopia, and Sierra Leone, Cameroon, among others.
You came from a pretty humble background, so how did you find yourself in Harvard for your Master’s degree?
While studying at the UoN, I was passionate about law and human rights. It was during the period of political repression, and worked very hard while I was still at the university to expose injustices.
I cut my teeth in journalism and activism by working with the Nairobi Law Monthly, which was founded by lawyer Gitobu Imanyara. Association with Mr Imanyara and other anti-government activists put me on the radar of government spies.
All these contributed to me getting a scholarship to study at Harvard. But it wasn’t that easy. This was during Moi’s time, and my enrolment at Harvard was delayed by a year because the government confiscated my passport.
Why?
Mr Imanyara was being sought by the Moi government because he was quite a thorn in the flesh of the administration. When he won an award called the Golden Pen of Freedom that was being given out in Greece, he could not go because he was in custody. He was sick and being treated, in chains, at the Nairobi Hospital.
I remember sitting at the hospital ward with Mr Imanyara, Paul Muite, and the late Pheroze Nowrojee. A plan was hatched that I should travel the following day to Greece to accept the trophy on Mr Imanyara’s behalf.
When I came back, carrying the trophy, my passport was confiscated. Actually, the government was considering arresting me at the airport, but Mr Muite and the others mobilised a lot of pressmen, and I think the Special Branch people were a bit intimidated.
However, the government took away my passport, and I didn’t see it for a year.
And how did you get to join the UN?
It happened because of Haiti. After studies at Harvard, I was interning with Amnesty International while living in the US. One night, a call came from Geneva. Unknown to me, the UN had contacted Harvard to identify people who fit a certain profile.
At that time, there was a crisis in Haiti and the US was involved. Their president had been overthrown and was exiling in the US.
Meanwhile, back in Haiti, gangs were causing pandemonium, forcing people to move out.
There was a need to screen the people moving out to weed out the good from the ones who had been causing mayhem, and so human rights lawyers were needed.
However, the UN said lawyers who were US citizens couldn’t be accepted for the job.
The tricky bit is that the ideal lawyer for the job needed to have knowledge of the US legal system. As such, it created a need for lawyers who are attuned to US law but were not American. Harvard was asked if it had people who met that criteria, and my name and contact were shared.
I fell into a very small pool of lawyers who were in demand.
This job couldn’t have come at a more opportune time, as I was supposed to leave the US and return to Kenya at the end of that month.
Tell us about your 1990 law class that also produced senior counsel like Ahmednasir Abdullahi and Paul Mwangi.
We have a grouping called MV90, a name inspired by the format for naming water vessels. The MV90 group has many facets. We have an investment group, a golfing group, and a health group. It has really brought us together as a unit.
We even received accolades from Kenya’s fourth president, Uhuru Kenyatta, during the burial of one of our friends, called Njiru. Mr Kenyatta said MV90 is one of the best things he’s ever heard about, because it comprises friends who come together for each other.
MV90 consists of people who are very successful, but when we’re in our [virtual] network, we are just ourselves. We say silly things, insult each other, and remind each other of past events, good or bad.
What handicap are you?
I have an 11-handicap index in golf. I got this handicap when I was based in Rwanda.
I picked up an interest in golf in the late 1990s when I was based in Sierra Leone as the civil war raged on. The game was all I could ask for. Being the social person that I am, and golf being a social game, it gave me a chance to be me.
My favourite golf course is in Yaoundé in Cameroon. It is a very challenging course. Sometimes you think you’re winning and then you lose, sometimes you think you won’t make it, and then you hit a good shot, and you make it.
You know, golf has a lot of life lessons. Sometimes, if you try to hit the ball so hard, it doesn’t go anywhere. You have to hit it smoothly. And that’s what happens in life: if you want to kill it, it doesn’t go anywhere. But if you want to take it gently with joy and happiness and excitement, then the doors open. But if you try to look too rough and too uncompromising, doors close.
In golf, if you play a gentle game, you get good scores. If you play when you’re angry and you’re just yelling at the ball and trying to make everybody else a scapegoat for your misfortunes, you play badly. It’s about connecting with the ball and having a smooth swing.
What has the UN job taken from you?
It is the relationships with my friends. I’ve been one of the luckiest people in the UN to travel around with my family. Family has not been a pain point for me. Some people in the UN, due to the nature of their work, sometimes get separated from their children.
You may have children in Kenya, and then you keep travelling, only seeing them once in a while. That can be very brutal. I haven’t faced that because my wife has been very brave, travelling around with me and our three children [born in 2005, 2008 and 2010]. But I am now separated from my children as two of them have grown older and gone to learning institutions in different countries.
However, in terms of solid friendships, the Kenyan friends that I had have suffered a lot because of my absence. Whenever I return, I see that my best friends are busy doing different things. One has maybe become a judge, and so they have a community of judges. It doesn’t help that I come home and stay for about a week or a month at a time. That is not enough time to see everybody. When you have so many relatives and so many friends to see, it’s not as easy.
I didn’t attend many of my friends’ weddings because I left immediately after we graduated. I don’t attend their fathers’ funerals; I don’t attend weddings of their children or graduations. These are all the things that build the social fabric, but I haven’t been there for a lot of them. That has really hurt me, because friends gravitate around friends who stood with them during those moments. So, I find that I’ve lost that out. A lot.
However, I’ve worked for the UN for three decades, and it’s become my passion. It’s what I love. I love working to change the world, to help the world, to unite the world, to bring peace to the world, to have a world where human rights are respected, and I have worked with various human rights agencies over the decades.
What has the job added to you?
It has opened the world to me. I know the world, and I know a lot of the problems and the challenges in the world. I know opportunities that are brought about by being in different places, I know different cultures.
I’ll soon be conversant in seven languages. So, it’s enriched me tremendously and transformed me in some ways, like with French. It made me a leader in something that I would never have dreamt of when I was graduating in 1990. Now I speak French so well, and I’ve become a big leader in it that I was knighted by the president of France [as a chevalier in December 2023].
Retirement isn’t too far from you now. What are your plans?
My retirement plans are set. Taking up from the work that I have been doing on French, I really want to work on developing the Mitahato French Village. This is a project that started with a library that stocks books only written in French.
I learnt French as an adult. I was working in the US, and then they sent me to Congo. But they didn’t realise that I couldn’t function in Congo because I didn’t know French.
So, I started learning French very rapidly and took a sort of a crash course to catch up before I lost my job because of not speaking the local language. Then, French really helped me in my UN career. I was able to rise to the position of coordinator of a country. And then I started thinking, ‘You know, many Kenyans and many Anglophones are missing this opportunity of working in Francophone countries, yet there is a big demand for people who are bilingual.’
I kept thinking, ‘Every time we interviewed people from Kenya or from East Africa for jobs in Congo or in any other Francophone country, I felt bad when they missed out just because they couldn’t speak the language.’ I felt that if I can make some little contribution in Kenya, it would be to help some young people learn French, and then their lives would open up, career wise.
In retirement, I plan to start a university, and hopefully by the time I retire, I’ll be able to work on it and develop it. My plan is to be the chancellor of a university I have founded that teaches all the disciplines in French, which will be a first in Kenya. It would offer more opportunities for people to develop themselves.
There is also the Hilde Back Education Fund. I can take over its running. I started the Hilde Back Education Fund in her honour, before I even reunited with her. It has offices near Garden City on Thika Road and concentrates on helping needy children through secondary school. The fund gets donations from across the globe, and this has been more so since the film A Small Act came out. One British man gave us about $3 million.
Coordination of the donations has been ably handled by Kathy Eldon, a Briton based in the US. She is the mother of Dan Eldon, a young Reuters photojournalist killed in Somalia in 1993.
What lessons did you pick from Hilde about charity?
I was surprised when I visited Hilde in Sweden. When you’re being supported, you think somebody’s rich. You think that the person is trying to find ways of using their money. But I realised that in terms of Swedes, Hilde was actually poor. She lived in the same tiny apartment for 50 years. She didn’t buy a car, and she was not living a luxurious life.
In later calculations, she found out that she would spend about $15 (Sh1,947) a month to support my education. The deal was meant to cover only school fees, but Hilde started paying for other items like shoes. She would also send me toys.
My sister would write to Hilde and say, ‘Chris is doing very well.’ And Hilde liked the fact that my sister used to write to her. She would write back, and my sister would read the letters to me. And so, my relationship with Hilde outlasted the others that were supporting other children.
I am totally convinced that the more you help, the more you get. A lot of people are afraid that if you spread out a hand, what you have will fall out. But in fact, when you spread out a hand, more drops in than you had. So, I’m totally convinced because I’ve seen my life going from better to better. For the people who don’t give, I don’t see where the money they save goes. I’ve not seen anybody becoming rich because they don’t give. In fact, I’ve seen people becoming rich because of giving.
