Very few autobiographies published in Kenya carry the institutional weight, historical depth, and authority of “From Jomo to Uhuru, Rao’s Nine Lives“, the latest by veteran jurist Sharad Rao, EBS.
Published in 2024 by Free Press Publishers, the 265-page autobiography is a meticulous walk-through of the Kenyan post-independence state machinery, narrated by a man who occupied some of the Republic’s most sensitive corridors of power—from the State Law Office to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and later as chairman of Kenya’s Judges and Magistrates Vetting Board.
A Barrister of Lincoln’s Inn in London, Advocate of the High Court of Kenya, and one-time Assistant AG under Kenya’s legendary Attorney General Charles Mugane Njonjo, Rao belongs to a shrinking generation of public servants whose careers flourished within the founding architecture of modern Kenya.
But beyond the prestige of its author, the autobiography offers a rare front-row seat in the events that shaped Kenya’s political and diplomatic coming of age.
What makes it particularly compelling is Rao’s weaving of personal recollections into some of the most consequential episodes in Kenya’s post-independence history. His narration is crisp, observant, and often remarkably candid.
Perhaps the most gripping chapters center on his time at the State Law Office in the 1970s, when Kenya, under the firm leadership of Jomo Kenyatta, was navigating the uncertainties of post-colonial statehood.
Inside the country, the young republic was battling poverty, disease, and illiteracy. On the international stage, Kenya was carefully balancing ideological tensions in a world increasingly divided by Cold War rivalries.
Officially, Nairobi positioned itself within the broader African doctrine of non-alignment. Unofficially, however, survival demanded strategic friendships and uncomfortable compromises.
It is in this geopolitical context that Rao opens what may be one of the book’s most explosive revelations: Kenya’s alleged behind-the-scenes involvement in the 1976 Israeli hostage rescue mission at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport.
Officially codenamed Operation Thunderbolt, the daring operation followed the hijacking of an Air France Airbus 300 carrying over 250 passengers and crew, most of them Israeli or Jewish.
The aircraft, after transiting through Athens and Libya, was eventually diverted to Entebbe under the control of militants linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and German radical operatives.
For decades, Kenya officially maintained strategic ambiguity over its role in the mission. Rao’s memoir appears to strip away much of that opaqueness.
According to his account, a clandestine meeting was convened at the residence of Attorney General Njonjo to determine whether Kenya would assist Israel’s military planners.
Rao says he was present as a note-taker and observer. Also reportedly present were senior Kenyan security figures, including then Commissioner of Police Bernard Hinga, GSU commander Ben Gethi, and influential Cabinet minister Bruce Mackenzie.
On the Israeli side, Rao writes, the delegation included decorated special forces officer Ehud Barak, who decades later would become Prime Minister of Israel, alongside intelligence officials.
The high-level meeting would produce one of the most sensitive strategic decisions in Kenya’s early diplomatic history.
Njonjo, acting as President Kenyatta’s principal legal advisor and political gatekeeper while the Head of State was reportedly recuperating from illness, is said to have laid down Kenya’s conditions for cooperation with Israel.
Chief among them was that any Israeli aircraft entering Kenyan airspace would need to appear as a civilian national carrier, and operational coordination at Nairobi airport would be tightly managed to preserve Kenya’s diplomatic deniability.
That was classic Njonjo: calculated, meticulous, and politically alert.
According to Rao, when Kenyatta was eventually briefed, the founding president issued a stern warning to his inner circle: if anything went wrong, they would carry the consequences themselves.
History shows that the operation succeeded militarily, though not without bloodshed.
While the operation’s commanding officer, Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu, was killed in action, all the 7 militant hijackers were killed, along with 20 Ugandan soldiers. 11 Russian-supplied MiG fighter aircraft belonging to the Uganda Military were destroyed during the intense fighting. The raid remains one of the most studied special operations in modern military history.
If Rao’s account is anything to go by, Kenya was not merely a bystander; it was a silent enabler.
Among the Kenyan officials present at the meeting, Bruce Mackenzie embodied the shadowy nexus of diplomacy, intelligence, and power.
Then a cabinet minister and trusted adviser within government, Mackenzie wielded influence far beyond his formal portfolio.
Born in South Africa and of British heritage, he had long been viewed with suspicion by sections of Kenya’s political establishment, with whispers that he served as an access agent for both British and Israeli intelligence interests.
His mysterious death in a plane explosion in 1978, while returning from an official visit to Uganda, only deepened speculation about the covert networks that may have surrounded Kenya’s involvement in the Entebbe operation.
Sharad Rao also devotes considerable attention to the experiences of Kenyans of Asian origin, documenting the community’s contribution to commerce, governance, law, and nation-building.
His autobiography also confronts the painful realities of post-independence economic Africanization that left many Kenyan-Asian families uncertain about their place in the country they had helped build.
Rao writes not merely as a lawyer or bureaucrat, but as a witness to belonging, exclusion, ambition, and resilience.
Sharad Rao’s gripping autobiography is now available at bookshops across Kenya, with online orders available through Free Press Publishers.
