‘Heartbeat: An American Cardiologist in Kenya’ Details Life With President Daniel arap Moi
David Silverstein
(REVIEW) When David Silverstein’s cardiology fellowship in Seattle ended in June 1974, he was faced with the choice of three destinations to start the new chapter of his life: the South Pacific, Israel and Kenya.
Top on his list was that the destination had to include a cardiac catheterization laboratory.
The University of South Pacific was hiring, and to the young cardiologist this sounded like a ticket to paradise. However, the university did not have such a lab and wasn’t intending to build one.
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Israel was his second choice given its cultural pull and because Silverstein spoke Hebrew. As a result, he was invited to Ben Gurion University. The university did not have the lab Silverstein so yearned for, but there had been a plan to construct one in the future. In the end, the heat did it for him since Be’er Sheva, in the south Negev Desert, was burning when he visited in August.
That left Kenya. The following year, Silverstein settled on his new choice and embarked on a career at the University of Nairobi. There, too, was the promise that a new cath lab would be installed at Kenyatta National Hospital, the teaching facility affiliated with the university.
This marked the beginning of an adventure that saw the doctor rise to prominence as a cardiologist to then-Vice President Daniel arap Moi, who later rose to be president and who made Silverstein his personal physician. From this vantage point, Silverstein witnessed history — both in Kenya and around the world — as the president’s personal doctor. In his new book, “Heartbeat: An American Cardiologist in Kenya,” Silverstein recounts the highs and lows of being Moi’s personal physician. It meant that he was privy to some of the biggest secrets and decisions ever made in the history of the East African nation.
The relationship started in an odd fashion. Moi had visited the hospital for a checkup. Silverstein was seeing him out when they ran into his supervisor, professor Hilary Ojiambo. The Kenyan medic and the vice president greeted one another — but he never even uttered a word to the young American doctor.
Silverstein would later receive a phone call from Jeremiah Kiereini, the powerful permanent secretary in the Ministry of Defense, telling him that Ojiambo had called “to alert him that an agent for the Mossad and CIA was treating the vice president.” Kiereini told Ojiambo: “You know, the CIA and Mossad are our friends. And David is a good doctor. He saved my son’s life!”
In 1978, Kenya’s founding president Jono Kenyatta died and Moi succeeded him — overcoming many obstacles placed in his path by some powerful forces that never wanted the vice president to come to power. This group consisted mainly of wealthy politicians and businessmen from Kenyatta’s Kikuyu ethnic community. Moi was a Kalenjin. In African politics, one’s ethnic background is a serious matter.
Playing a big role in Silverstein’s book is Charles Njonjo, a lawyer who served both as minister for constitutional affairs and attorney general at different times. To his detractors, Njonjo was a British wannabe who loved to be addressed as “sir” — although he was never officially knighted by the British monarchy.
In the book, Silverstein gives Njongjo a major role in what was known as “Operation Thunderbolt,” the rescue mission carried out by an elite Israeli Defence Forces team to free hostages aboard an Air France plane that had been hijacked by Palestinians and commandeered to Uganda, Kenya’s neighbor, where the dictator Idi Amin ruled.
The rescue planes flew from Israel to Uganda but would need refueling on their way back to Tel Aviv. This is when a Mossad agent visited Njonjo and requested that Kenya look the other way during the operation and allow refuelling to take place in Nairobi. Njonjo took up the matter with Kenyatta, and the mission was successful.
There are other anecdotes. There was the time Silverstein had to stage a major fight to clear his name and save his medical career after the death of his patient, Chief Justice Zaccheus Chesoni. Some members of Chesoni’s family claimed he had died due to negligence, laying blame at Silverstein. The doctor went through a tribunal and was later acquitted by a court of peers.
The allegations that Silverstein was a spy would surface years later, this time when he worked as the president’s doctor and had accompanied Moi to visit to Iran. At one of the meetings, the Iranian ambassador to Kenya claimed Silverstein was a Mossad agent. This caused some discomfort during the visit.
But the incident would have a happy, even comical, ending when on the day the presidential delegation arrived back in Nairobi, Silverstein was awakened by an emergency call to attend to a patient at the Nairobi Hospital. The patient turned out to be the same ambassador who had told everyone present that the only doctor he could trust to give him optimum care was Silverstein.
Moi’s deep Christian faith is seen throughout the book. At one time, when he appeared to be working too hard, Silverstein, quoting from the Old Testament which Moi loved to read, retold the story of Moses and his father-in-law, Jethro, who advised the Israelite leader to delegate authority.
It was therefore befitting that when Moi died, his family invited Silverstein, who is Jewish, to give a eulogy.
“I ended the eulogy by putting on my prayer cap and reciting the Jewish memorial prayer for the departed, El Maleh Rachamin, in Hebrew and in English,” Silverstein recalls. “I miss him still.”
Tom Osanjo is a Nairobi-based correspondent for ReligionUnplugged.com. He is a former parliamentary reporter and has covered sports, politics and more for Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper.