6 Chilling Survival Stories in Kenyan Aircraft Crashes

Aircraft accidents are the Grim Reaper’s buffet. But sometimes some people just refuse to die, some of them don’t just stare down death in the face and wag a finger at it, they also swim for miles or feed their infants whisky. Wait, what? Sorry Reaper, not today (hiccup).

—-#7  Mr. Bean Saves the Day

(Added 8 September 2013: Thanks to MMK’s comment down there for adding this entry to the list)

http://www.travelindustrytoday.com

Rowan Atkinson, the ‘hilarious’ ageless Mr. Bean once saved himself and his entire family after the pilot blacked out. At 4, 877 meters on a flight from Mombasa to Nairobi, Mr. Bean flew a plane despite having zero experience flying the twin-propeller engine. 

The Cessna 202 chartered plane had four passengers: Atkinson, his wife Sunetra, and their children Ben and Lilly. The pilot fell unconscious about 45 minutes into the flight, forcing the comedian to take the controls as his wife tried the good old method of slapping the KO’d guy into consciousness. It worked.

Where some of us would just soil out pants and pray someone deletes our internet history while telling the wife that we never liked her morning breath anyway, Atkinson took the damn controls. Like a typical man, yanked that think up and down until the plane balanced from its murderous nosedive.

The pilot is thought to have been suffering from dehydration. Once he revived, Atkinson moved from the controls and let the pilot do the professional piloting.

It is unclear whether he immediately went into character at the time and grinned as he saved the day.

#6 “Let it Burn”

Over to you, Usher.

Image from http://www.mcgrow.org.uk

 

Ever hated a plane so much that you begged the fire crew to let it burn immediately after you saved yourself from its murderous cabin? Of course you haven’t, but someone has.

On 11 April 1962, an EAA operated Canadair C-4 Argonaut plane struck the Embakasi Airport (Now JKIA) runway and almost immediately caught fire. The plane was carrying out stimulated three-engine approaches when the training captain attempted to unfeather the feathered engine and feathered one of the others. The plane stayed airborne for 1.5 miles before hitting the runway and beginning a fire bonanza!

The Canadair Argonauts had been forced on the EAAC by the BOAC, British Airways predecessor, despite the fact that they were ill-suited for East African routes. So the pilots hated them. So much that after saving his own skin and that of his two crew members, he simply asked the fire crew to…Let it Burn!

Now we know where Usher got his inspiration.

#5 Richard Leakey 

Setting standards for badass poses.
http://www.sierraclub.com

But whenever he is not out looking for poachers or cavemen treasures, Richard Leakey was out there surviving plane crashes.  He survived a small propeller-driven plane accident in 1993 that crushed his lower legs, which had to be amputated. Three months later, the man was again walking on prosthetics.

It is well-known (but hush-hush, don’t-tell-anyone-I-said-it kind of news) that the crash was most likely an assassination attempt. Given that no attempts seems to have been after that, it seems the Reaper and the assassins simply recognized his invincibility and left it to good ol’ time to do the work.

 When he was 11, he fell of his horse and fractured his skull.He also survived Moi and Kenyan politics.

Oh, and when the aircrafts weren’t trying to kill him, his kidneys were. He was diagnosed with terminal kidney disease and given a prognosis of less than 10 years. He got a kidney transplant in 1979 from his brother Philip but it was rejected only a month later…he survived the pneumonia and pleurisy from a weakened immune system

Whenever death sees this guy, it just offers him a cigar and kisses his ring.

#3 ‘The Drunk Infant’

http://www.wikipedia.com

On 28^th June 1946, a Rapide VP-KCU plane enroute from Nairobi to Mombasa made a crash landing in Garsen near Lamu.

The pilot had been flying on the wrong bearing and went off course, eventually running out of fuel and being forced to crash. The eight passengers promptly abandoned the wreckage and begun a three day survival series that would be so awesome that it would almost be forgotten in Kenyan History.

The passenger manifest shows that the passengers included a pilot, five adults and a baby girl.

The plan was spotted by RAF Baltimore on the 30^th but the party was only rescued the following day. In total, the six adults and an infant survived three days in the wilderness with nothing to eat but biscuits, marmalade, chocolate, and whisky. 

Whisky, saving babies since 1946.
http://www.rsc.org

…and dew water of course. There is no mention of whether the eight month infant was fed on whisky. But aren’t babies always high on something?

#4 Flight KQ 430

http://www.1001crash.com

When a Kenya Airways Airbus A310-300 crashed into the cold Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the Ivory Coast on 30^th January 2000, there was little hope of finding any survivors. There was no distress call from the pilot before the crash, and it took at least two hours for rescue operations to reach the wreckage. But one man didn’t wait to be found, he swam his way to life.

The bird crashed less than two minutes after taking off from the seaside runway. 168 people died in that horrific accident; which was also Kenya Airways first fatal accident since its formation in 1977. Rescue operations involving powerboats and local fishermen saved seven survivors from the water.

The still unnamed Frenchman’s survival instincts kicked in, and his good swimming skills also helped, and he swarm 1.6 kilometers (1 mile), with cuts and bruises, to the shore. How did he find the beach? Simple, he followed arc lamps set up by the rescue operators. 

“He was a good swimmer. That’s how he managed to survive.” Also, he flipped the Grim Reaper-this part is not mentioned in the story. 

#2 A Propeller Walks into the Cockpit

Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Just me, Propeller, Prepare to die!
http://www.mcgrow.org.uk

On 27^th April 1964, an EAAC plane landing at Kilwa in modern-day Tanzania left the runway. The soft ground brought the plane to a sudden halt, causing the port propeller to contact the ground. Given the design of the plane, the propeller flew off, hitting the cockpit and killing the pilot.

The man who survived the horrendous accident was First Office Tommy Turk. Turk survived because the pilot did not follow DC 3 flight manual procedure on a planned forced landing at the time. As he notes in his report, the manual stated that the captain should land the aircraft from the right hand seat, the FOs side, with the FO moving to the passenger compartment.

Cases of the propeller ‘walking’ into the cockpit after a crash were not uncommon. And that’s exactly what happened, a propeller strolled into the cockpit and sliced the good Captain in half. Tommy Turk later described the scene : “The Captain. was in a huddle on the floor, at an odd angle, holding his elbow, saying ‘my arm, my arm’. The arm had almost been totally severed, just above the elbow… I leaned over to pull the Captain up towards him so he could better apply pressure to the artery.  Only then did I notice that the Captain’s  body had been sliced in half by the propeller. Within seconds the Captain lost consciousness and died from the massive blood loss.”

Tommy Turk was a Hungarian pilot who lived in Kenya for most of his life. He retrained and retired as a Captain in 1973.  

#1 Captain Solomon Nyanjui

Death 0 Cpt Nyanjui 4
http://www.africanews.com

Captain Nyanjui is a man who has come to a consensus with death. You stop messing up my flights and I’ll stop making you look so incompetent. And given that he is still flying choppers today, it seems the deal is working.

Captain Nyanjui has crashed four times, each seemingly crazier than the last. While flying a chopper from Isiolo on November 15, 2007, Nyanjui crashed into the dense forest underneath. Thus begun one of the greatest survival stories that would last eight days.

The crash broke the man’s ribs but not his spirit. He had no food so he survived by eating leaves. To further compound the situation, and to make Lost even look more realistic, he had crashed in a region with torrential rainfall and teeming with wildlife. Wildlife is too general a reference, according to the man, a herd of elephants rocked the aircraft at night. Now, your nightmares of accidentally being rejected by your crash look like child’s play don’t they?

He then found the dislodged battery for his phone and sent an SMS to a friend. A whole new level of wingmanning was thus born, and can only be surpassed if someone in space needs to be rescued from a nagging date. He was, however, found by a group of farmers out digging a water trench.

He is a man who the gods of the air have tried to kill incessantly, and to no avail. Two years before the crash, he had crash landed an aircraft in the Aberdares while carrying the then Nation and Safaricom CEOs-Wilfred Kiboro and Michael Joseph. The crash was caught on camera.

…and of course he went back to flying again a few months later (he said he would)because fuck you, death.

You would think the Grim Ripper would just quit, right? Well, in 2008, Nyanjui had to make yet another crash landing while carrying a dignitary. 

 

Owaahh © 2013

 

The Perfect Crime: Not a ‘How To’ Manual

The man laughs maniacally as he hits the keyboard and stares at the screen. He is killing them and he loves it, or rather, he can’t control himself. The urges. They will never catch him, he kills as he wills, and they can do nothing about it. They are born when he says they are born, and they die when his whims desire. Except for that wretched editor. He tricks them into situations where they are sure to die, dangling on a cliff begging for dear life. They are his small ant farm.

He makes the hooded thug stab the blonde woman, and then rape her dead body. He makes three serial killers hunt each other, and makes his hero have sex with a prison warden. His villains are his toys, social wrecks with too much money and in desperate need of a thrill. He has killed his own mother thrice and slaughtered an entire family in a single paragraph. He had a woman once throw her infant son against the wall in five words.

The other day at a party a child hang on the balcony railing and everyone panicked. He removed his notebook and his pen, and he pushed her right over. He even added the thud as her head hit the pedestrian holding his girlfriend’s hand below. Not only did he kill the child’s mother after he slept with her, but he gave both the child and the pedestrian a concussion. He can do this, and although they all know who did it, they can do nothing about it.

See that man who just parked in his driveway and got mobbed by his loving wife and their two lovely young daughters? Can you see him kissing all three of them and smiling as the joy of family overcomes the fatigue that almost made him run over an old woman? Well, I’ll tell you a secret…tomorrow this home will be a crime scene, and our man up there will be alone in the world except for the framed photos of his now murdered family. Too soon? Did I rush you? Well, we needed to give the man a purpose.

Or the wedding you have been waiting for through so many pages of text and hours of screen time? How about we make it into an orgy, only a murderous orgy where we kill everyone you love? We can do that mate, the law doesn’t apply to those who sit on the throne.

Every night he labors to find a new way to kill the very people he has kept happy all along. He makes them, and he takes them away when he is done with them. He gives birth to them in the beginning, but he does not think himself a god, at least not just yet. Wait, maybe he is one. Hhhmmm… or he can be one next time.

The only true perfect crime, they know he did it, but they cannot do anything about it. The only crime in the universe is the unfinished story. It is what is wrong with the world. Even an incomplete dream must be finished, even if by force.

 

Who decides when a Society Should Evolve? A Case of Kenya in the 1800s…

Three intriguing cases made it before the lethargic Kenyan judiciary this week, all three representative of the hypocrisy of our moral (or immoral, if you will) culture, and our pathological tendency to yell generic arguments whenever we are faced with issues that are ‘new’. We are always ready to tell off such things as ‘foreign’ despite the fact that they have been in our society all along. What we do, as a 21^st century country stuck in a 19^th century mindset, is mistake lack of information for absence of such phenomena. We think that despite Africa being the cradle of man, that that man left and floated on dug-out trees to other continents and got sick before coming back with that sickness which we, as those left behind, now have to grapple with. Are we evolving?

No, that is not how ancestors did it, we know how those symbols of morality and sacred barbarism lived. Trust us, we know.

Case #1 was filed by a transgender, Audrey, who is seeking to compel the educational system to recognize transgenders. This debate has gained significance over the last few decades, as feminism and liberal ideas on sexuality have spread to the edges of our tiny, polluted planet. If you decide to change your gender today, surgically or just decide to, say, change your name from John to Joyce, the legal process, though lengthy, is permissive.

The process itself is unnecessarily lengthy, perhaps to convince you to quit midway as the wheels of government turn as they did in 2^nd century China. The simple switch of the (M/F) is, however,  impossible by current laws. The reasons for this are broad, but the primary one is that the framers of the constitution ‘did not envisage a scenario’ where one could simply switch from being a man to a woman. Never mind that this constitution was drafted at the same time the LGBTI movement was gaining traction and recognition. Kenya, are these your sons and daughters too? The ‘cultural’ background excuse makes for a compelling case.

One is either born a man or a woman, with respective genitalia, as evolution and/or creation has seen fit to divide us as a species. Only, that definition is very limited, it assumes that having certain genitalia automatically assigns you a gender, and ignores the fact that gender is as much a cognitive development process as it is a biological one. It also explains why those born with ‘undefined’ genitalia were either killed or ostracized by our morally upright but seemingly barbaric ancestors.

Case #2 is seeking to have the government decriminalize homosexuality [If you open this link, do not even read the article, jump to the comment section]. This one is not new, it is just that with a judiciary that has had to reel under accusations of being lethargic in its jurisprudence, it should make for an interesting case. The common defence we have is that ‘homosexuality is unnatural, it was brought to Africa by the colonialist, it is a western decadence.’ WRONG! Homosexuality has been rampant in all human society since time immemorial, it is not even limited to human beings, it is present in animals and most probably, extra terrestrials.

This misconception is based on two things. One, that we know all about our ancestors despite the fact that we have made no significant effort to know how our ancestors lived before 1890, and two, that homosexuality and sexual ambiguity can be ‘shipped.’ Are we mistaking the lack of information (about sexuality circa 1800) with the absence of a phenomenon in our culture? In case #3, eleven women were arrested and charged with ‘engaging in unnatural acts.’ Their crime? They had engaged in bestiality with a dog, probably a pimp among equals now, while acting in a porn movie proving once again that Pwani si Kenya. Ignoring the fact that the law on which the charge itself is based is archaic and subjective as to what cultural benchmark we are using, as one man’s best friend is another’s love [sic!], the outrage about the case has been indicative of our collective hypocrisy.

Since January 2013, there have been at least three cases of bestiality but none of them has received as much attention as that of ’11 Women 1 Dog.’ Perhaps the number of participants in this cross-species orgy is the reason why we have made memes and exalted a dog that now has to be an unwilling prosecution witness. In the context of this discourse, I offer that it must be something deeper. In each of the aforementioned cases, the human beings were male, and the animals were either goats or some other domesticated animal. (In Sudan, you are caught loving a goat, you marry it, even pay dowry).

The cases are so common that all you have to do is Google search ‘Bestiality in Kenya‘ and then you can pray to whichever deity you give money about how an imperfect society he created. All these cases are where the person is caught, whether it is with sheep, a cow, a donkey, or (another) goat in April 2013, how many do you think go unreported, or undetected?  In our patriarchal society, the act of a man having sex with an animal is seen as moral depravity, but surprisingly, not at the same level as that of a woman engaging in bestiality. Read this ‘dossier’ on female sex workers being paid a handsome figure for engaging in bestiality. Yes, dear reader, that blog post is about bestiality in porn movies, in Kenya, in 2008!

Again, because the only male in this ’11 Girls 1 Pup’ case is ‘foreign’, we heaped all the blame on the ‘mzungus who bring us such moral decadence’. We transfer our locus of responsibility to other people, as we do in politics and civil society despite the fact that as slaves of Breton Woods Institutions and now China, we are all as foreign-funded as can be…Another likely reason is that the females now considered the junk of our upright and moral society are young curious college girls who were using their bodies, which by right belong to our upright and moral socially acceptable institutions of marriage, whether as a rightful partner or a third party, for money/employment.

Our common ‘Kenyan’ perspectives on prostitution are interestingly stupid, please, do indulge (and perservere the bad grammar) in this Wikipedia entry on the topic. Prostitution is the oldest lasting profession, given that everything else has evolved into something else, such as thieves to politicians, and priests to sodomites (on the one hand, on the other anti-contraceptive, anti-condom messengers). If you think about it, all ofhuman employ is a form of prostitution, you use something you have to provide someone, or society, with something he/she/it needs or wants. It is the same for the blacksmith who uses both his skill and experience as it is for the woman or man who uses her/his genitalia to do the same.

We validate more the person who meets another in a social gathering or on social mediaand they do as they will only if neither gets paid out rightly. If anyone pays you, you are a prostitute….if you listen to the myopic arguments against prostitution, such as those that contributed to the crucifixion the former Nairobi mayor after he suggested legalizing and taxing prostitution and ‘sex work’ in the city, you will constantly hear the argument that it is ‘un-African.’ Prostitution has been present in all of human society since people learnt that these genitalia fit into those ones, and that sex is a human need and want, perhaps the only one that truly matters. It was in African culture before the ‘mzungu’ , perhaps not at the same level of limelight, and certainly not paid incurrency, handbags, or rent as it is now, but certainly in some way… (We sold Mt. Kenya to John Boyes for four goats, go figure the math).

Me, right now, evolving this article.

Did bestiality exist in Kenyan societies? Of course it did! Was it rampant? We don’t know. How can we know if we do not investigate? ‘Other people’ seem to be doing a better job at analyzing our sexuality history than we are. It is much easier for us to blame ‘the West’ for the breaks in our moral façade because it makes us feel less responsible for ourselves. It also helps deify our ancestors as the symbols of ‘morality and good manners. Generations of individuals who had defined sexuality and gender roles and who would never, ever, look at an animal in an amorous way’ TOTAL BS! Human beings are human beings, whichever planet we came from, and whichever theory of man you believe in, our homogeneity as a species is significant.

We are animals at a basic level, with our own thoughts on our ‘heightened cognitive senses’ which makes every subsequent generation feel superior to the last, and hence, more foolish….and, it is Christianity and other ‘new’ religions that are ‘UnAfrican.’ If we were being purist Africans, we would still be swearing oaths and consulting with seers instead of burning them (Yes, 21^st century symbol of progress, we torch to protect society, hhhhmmmm, burning human flesh, the smell of singeing immorality).

So what is the façade? That we have accepted all this ‘Western cultural values’, including religion, fashion, food, and greed (another human instinct, but indulge me for a minute) while hoping that the ‘liberal thinking and moral decadence do not have transferability.’

We want to atone for our blindness by saying that homosexuality, undefined sexuality (cognitive and biological), and such things as bestiality did not exist before the white man explored Africa and brought guns, cocaine, HIV/AIDS, and capitalism.

On the one hand we are willing to do anything for money, including stepping over each other in the process despite the fact that our real African culture was communal. It explains why there was no outrage amongst court poets when the feudal prince went to the Queen’s land where the Prime Minister made all effort to hide him from the media and seemingly, being seen with him.

In our African culture, the true one, not this hybrid one in which we purport to have found an equilibrium between the past and the future, such a slight would not be taken lightly. If your host does not want to show you off, then you are the sidekick hidden in the closet when the wife comes home unexpectedly. As a communal people, a guest got first class experience. In fact, whenever a prominent guest visited your home, you let him sleep with your wife! Okay, just one of your wives…It is how we got Wangu wa Matheri the misogynist from just another wife of a local chief…it is also why your mother will show you off to her chama and slaughter her healthiest chicken when you go to visit.

It is why you had sets of china and cutlery designated for guests only…but thousands of Kenyans bombarded the articles with half-witted, incoherent, fallacious, regurgitated comments and expressed their ‘moral outrage’ at the fact that some media had seen the slight and reported it. In the article about the comments, you can see more comments because, well, we are a vigilante nation.

Che ‘The Ape’ Guevara…

So, who determines that it is time for a culture to evolve? If a 21^st century country validates stupidity by referring to their version of a 19^th century mindset, is it evolving or static? How long does it take for a hybrid culture to become mainstream? Is the same culture that considers itself progressive, but laughs when men strip down a woman for wearing as she wills, and is her right to, evolving?

The validation is often that it goes against our African ideals yet our ancestors were by and large comfortable while naked. If you watch that video in the last link, you will hear a woman saying ‘usichukue hiyo kitu‘ [do not record this] and you can tell its more of ‘do not show the rest of the world how evolved we are‘ than ‘save this woman from the animal instincts of a mob.‘ A people so evolved that we have to train people ‘not to strip women.’ Clothes, and this extreme sense of having to be dressed all the time, are the western cultural elements, not the wearing of ‘skimpy clothes.’

The mentality itself is rooted deeply in religion, especially in rural areas where this seeming hybrid culture is still foreign. It validates our common misogyny, unless there has been a case of a man in short shorts’ having to lose them for being irresistible to women, and other men. The act of stripping someone is the height of this misogyny where the validation is that ‘we are teaching her a lesson.’ Such stupidity, in this 21^st century Kenya, is the reason why the three cases above will be determined on a non-existent ‘cultural benchmark.’

The same ‘Africanness’ to which we owe clitoridectomy, or as we like to call it, Female Genital Mutilation, to which we quickly revert when we need to pull down ads that are ‘too revealing to children.’ To that culture, the same one where boys pleasuring, nay, masturbating each other was a ‘normal cultural thing’, but was given up at initiation (yes, Kenya, these are your ancestors, the real African ones, not you hybrids). You can read more about just how ‘sexually liberated’ they were here.

These same issues we are facing now are still troubling the Western states we love to hate. Truly evolving societies are breaking down these issues and critically assessing them by first making them mainstream issues and not hiding behind  a façade of moral uprightness. They are first agreeing that for any meaningful debate to take place, all human beings who successfully navigate the arduous journey of a sperm towards the ova, and subsequent imprisonment, have certain inalienable rights and responsibilities.

You can yell that such individuals should be burned at the stake, or burned like this ‘purported witches’ in Kisii (I would request that you watch that video in its  5-minute entirety, it is brutal, but that is Kenya in 2013 where three people are being burned as hundreds watch and cheer). The ‘witch-burning is also so common in modern-day Kenya that you only need google it too.

We can yell all we want, but homogeneity in the human species, or this moral cocoon we think we live in, will never be…

When we decide to first agree that all human beings have free will, and that what one man or woman does in the comfort of their own homes should be between him and his deity, if he is stupid enough to believe in judgement beyond that of his fellow men and women, we might then begin the real, painful, tideous, ‘unnecessary’ process of evolving from 1800 to at least 1903.

We are not evolving; we are merely acquiring technology and more information, and actively making all effort to live in a past that never was, or never existed as we think it did. If anything, we are just robots of consumption, actively swallowing propaganda and advertisements, as we have sermons and religion, without thinking for ourselves.

It is the 21^st century since Christ alright, but we are living in our romantic version of Africa in 1850, but we are ‘moving on’ [sic!].  Kenya, are these not your sons and daughters? Who said that nature is one thing, or has one single outcome, preferably the one that the mob agrees with so it can sleep better at night? Isn’t nature the same source to which we owe all that is wrong in our ‘perfect, often-forward-moving society?’ A society that does not evolve, my beloved Kenya, dies.

Owaahh, 2013.

 

No White Light?

As she straddled across the room,
feet dragging a trail of blood
The music stopped
The birds died
She held the wound upon her head,
walked as the life escaped from her
The blood zigzagging behind,
Death following with a wicked grin
The man started humming a dirge
The woman laughed
Something must have changed the game
Everything was fear
The mice lurking behind the wall
The eerie silence in the room
The dead cat
death was on a rampage today
He had brought the plague,
Upon the mind of the pair
A plague and a desire to kill
So here she was,
dragging, dropping, drooping, but never begging for mercy
They just sat there, two maniacal creatures of predation
As their last victim fell, knelt first

Felt her side

Felt the knife handle
Fell, died. Death wins.

Owaahh

 

A Society that Eats its Own: Tracing Cannibalism in Kenya’s History

Strait Times, October 10th, 1924

On 10th October, 1924, the Straits Times of Singapore reported that an elderly Taita man had killed and eaten one of his two sons. The two boys, as the accompanying screen grab reads, had ‘allowed the cattle to stray….the father decapitated the other, stripped the flesh from the bones and hung it inside his hut to make biltong. After eating some portion, he intended devouring the remainder.

Fast-forward to 2008 and Enter Godfrey Matheri, your every day lower class worker who lives in a mud hut and does his best to get by, like everyone else. Only Godfrey Matheri has a dark secret, at night he turns into the stuff of legend, akin to dark stories that should only exist in the mind of a deranged crime and horror writer. The Naivasha Vampire brought to light a previously unknown phenomenon in Kenya, that of cannibalism. His was not exactly cannibalism, hence the Vampire tag, because he used to cut open his victims’ veins and drink their blood (shove over, Dracula). He had buried one of his victim’s beneath his bed, both a symbolic and a deranged act.
It is likely Matheri had shown a streak of such vile crimes earlier in his life but in our society that tends to stigmatize everything, went seemingly unnoticed until he became Kenya’s first known serial killer and vampire.

Will the world be overrun by Kenyan Zombies? Are we evolving?

The ‘Mteita native’ in 1924 and the most recent cases of cannibalism have similarities that include some kind of spontaneity that makes one wonder whether the signs were there all along. What is the difference between the Kenyan government, 50 years after independence and 89 years since the Taita Case, that is any different? Any man found to have eaten another would be sentenced to ‘…imprisonment for life because his mental condition was abnormal’ (The Strait Times, 1924) which is exactly what would happen now in 2013. Although a psychiatric examination would be mandatory, there is virtually no information, no statistics, no psychological studies into why there seems to be a sudden hunger for human flesh, with some even taking the time to cook and roast organs and body parts.
Matheri was known as Foko, or Khalif if you were his accomplice. He removed his victims organs after butchering them and then buried their bodies in shallow graves.

Matheri, seen here totally not gurgling a virgin’s blood.

• He drinks it. He taps it into a cup, then transfers it into a flask and sips it in intervals. He kept his victim’s underpants, and the organs as trophies. Like the young victim who says he drew blood and when it was not enough he cut her up in some other place and drew more until he filled a cup. The he proceeded to drink it.
• On June 2nd 2012, Alex Kinyua, a naturalized US citizen born in Kenya, admitted to eating Kujoe Agyei-Kodie, 37. 
• On November 29th, 2012, Caroline Gatwiri was killed and eaten by her 23-year old husband, Morris Gituma Mutegi. He “…was said to have also forced his two-and-a-half- year-old son to drink his mother’s blood…In the morning, the couples child still had his mother’s blood smeared all over his face, oblivious of the shocking incident that took place hours earlier.

Does this sound eerily familiar? If it does then you might remember it as the plot in Dexter, the series about a psycho/vigilante/serial killer who is covered in his mum’s blood when she is murdered by a local gang.

The making of a Kenyan Dexter?

• The trail led to Kemeria’s house, where blood stains were on the ground and door. The smell of freshly cooked meat come from the house. The search team broke into the house and found a sufuria full of meat. Another group broke into the poultry house where they saw two polythene bags containing flesh and wondered why the herdsman was hiding the raw meat. “In the house, we saw clothes belonging to Mr Lodoket, so we hastily formed teams in search of the herdsman,” said Mr Tarkus. At last one search party arrived with the bad news — Mr Lodoket had been killed, his body sliced open and various parts cut out to provide boneless flesh. It was covered with a light blue bed cover after it had been cut open in the middle starting at the neck, down the chest to the abdomen. The left leg had the upper leg had flesh cut out, apparently to provide Thursday evening’s roast meat.
  

  Dramatisation

• On January 2nd, 2013, an unnamed man in Malindi killed and ate some parts of his five-year-old son. After committing the act, the man removed his son’s heart, liver and private parts, which he wrapped in a polythene paper bag and stored inside his house.
  The man later drunk his blood before wrapping his body in a white cloth and dumped it in a shallow pit about 400 meters from his house.

To the utterly stupid…

The stupidly funny…

All the people who eventually ate someone or sucked another’s blood had displayed some related characteristic prior to committing the crime. Kimeria, for example, “He warned us about it. At one time he nearly sliced open a 10-year-old’s belly when he tried to use the path at around 6.30pm,” says a neighbor, Mr Francis Tarkus Loket, of the man villagers claim is a cannibal. On Alex Kinyua, The previous month, Kinyua had attacked and fractured the skull of another man within the university campus. In February, Kinyua had posted on Facebook asking other students whether they were “”strong enough to endure ritual HBCU mass human sacrifices around the country and still be able to function
as human beings?”
His behavior had been noted much earlier, in December 2011, when an instructor told the police that Kinyua was ‘Virginia Tech waiting to happen.’
Although not always, Morris Gituma was said to have “… never raised his voice, not even at a child…”

Alex Kinyua’s crimes are relevant to this discourse partly because his Kikuyu name ‘Kinyua’ means ‘drinker.’ Some actually tried to link it to some genetic effect carried down from the Mau Mau who were often portrayed as being “wild, bloodthirsty and cannibal black terrorists.” This version of the story did not take into account the hunger and the misery that had driven the Mau Mau to the bush. Rather, it focused on providing a simplistic description of cannibalism for the barbarism it represents. And some historians claim that Kenya’s Mau Mau  fighters  engaged in strange ceremonies that involved eating of human flesh and drinking their blood.

Imperialism in KE Maoriland Worker, Volume 13, Issue 29, 18 July 1923, Page 5

The Mau Mau cannibalism angle has been explored extensively, even as recently as 2003 by non-Kenyan media. In this article, Adrian Blomfield claims :
The young son of a chief who refused to join was cut in two by Kimathi’s men, who drank his blood before flinging the two halves of the body at the boy’s mother who was then killed
After being forced to drink human blood, semen and urine, recruits would in some cases be ordered to eat human brains, sometimes of their relatives, as well as the flesh of recently exhumed or murdered babies.
While the words carry the old-colonialist perspective that focuses on the suffering and deaths of white Europeans and makes little mention of events such as the Lari Massacre of 1954, the elaborate description of ritualistic cannibalism is interesting. It came up again after the Kinyua case, as the outside world tried to find a genetic link about why one African would eat another in a ‘civilized society.’

Could it be, also that in the concentration camps where millions of Kenyans were herded to prevent them from supporting the Mau Mau, had undocumented cases of cannibalism? There is a high likelihood, especially because we know the detainees were grossly underfed, overworked and psychologically tortured.There have been several documented cases of people being forced to eat the dead to survive. The most famous, the Survivors of Flight 571 in 1972, ate the dead before they were rescued a month and a half later.
In truth, cannibalism, like the Murder of the Innocents, is not a new phenomenon in Kenya. It is just that with digital media and a more news-hungry middle class, such stories now make it to the limelight. Ritualistic cannibalism existed even before the 21st century, with rumors of ‘devil worshippers’ killing and eating various body parts for ritual purposes. Most of the victims were children who were kidnapped and killed, their bodies discovered later missing certain organs such as the genitalia, the heart and the tongue.

A pattern in most of the recent cases of domestic violence, including other cases such as Samuel Wanjiru’s case has been that the spouses involved are both very young, often in their early 20s and 30s.

In the Murder of the Innocents, the pattern is further compounded by a low socioeconomic level and three or more children. Without comprehensive scientific research, it is likely this will not mean anything, but it indicates there might be some correlation between the age where people marry, their socioeconomic status and family planning (or lack of).

Peter Nguli posits: Therefore, the urgent issue is rather finding out the root cause of this disease called cannibalism. Is it an alien zombie from the cosmos that has invaded our countrymen to cause an apocalypse, as seen in Hollywood science-fiction horror movies? Is it a contagious zombie virus, psychological problem or a drug-related apocalypse?

While we focus on votes and politics, a man with at least one confirmed kill and one very gory witness account of vampire tendencies was convicted of wrongful confinement due to failure by the prosecution to avail key witnesses and documents”. Did I mention that instead of searching for evidence that would have been crucial to proving the Naivasha Vampire murder case, and would have provided scholars with vital clues about the man himself, the police demolished it?

Such news has become ‘old’, in a Kenyan sense, and no longer shocks the middle class in their suburban houses and apartments. It is quickly written off as an act of barbarism and a deranged mind, and when the victim is dragged to the police cell, society is deemed clean of such people…until someone else decides to eat his spouse. Look at Morris’ act, it seems spontaneous although by the description of those who knew him, he was probably the kind to keep to himself. Why, one might ask, did he feed his two-year-old son his wife’s blood? Why did he feel the need to make the child part of his heinous act?

There is no simple answer, because he died a few hours later but let’s hazard a guess…could it be lack of food? Did he, like the fathers in Slaughter of the Innocents who have killed their children, feel inadequate because he could not feed his child? We might never know but since all the reported cases seem to be in the majority lower socio-economic class, something is definitely brewing.

Should we just accept cannibalism as part of society?

What would drive a man, save for a deranged mind, to eat another man? Hunger is the most obvious answer because food is the most basic of needs. It is also likely because the lower class is grossly underfed, with millions lacking food everyday while we turn arable agricultural land into gated communities. Will the lower classes rise up and eat the upper, more healthy looking upper classes? From the look of things, it is just a matter of time…or wait, am I the only one who has just discovered that we have been eating each other all along? Have you ever eaten someone (non-sexually of course, in context)? I hear the ‘small of the back’ is where the flesh is sweetest…

Owaahh

 

Murder of the Innocents: A Society that Kills its Young

A man walks into his home at the end of another long hard day at work.. He doesn’t know why he feels so on edge, or whether there is anything good left in his world. His five boys back at home, waiting to be fed. Their mother, an enigmatic character when she was a raw cherry, unhurt by the pains of life, now a mess of nerves and the backbreaking work of holding a family together. She nags, once in a while, like all women should, but tonight she pushes too much. Something is wrong, he knows, and the pounding in his head as she yells something about flour and cabbages as he walks into the house. Tonight he feels overly on the edge, the sound of her voice, all he hears is her condescending voice telling him he is not man enough, that he cannot provide for his family, like an African man should. It is not what she is saying, but it is what he hears…

A scream cuts through the otherwise serene air, the neighbors ignore the ‘woooii! Wuuuuwi! Usiniue baba Peter! Usiue watoto wangu’ –[screams] Please don’t kill me Peter’s father. Please don’t kill my children. They ignore it because the two are always fighting, there’s always a fight, every night, and she always screams the same things. Since the children walk out of the house, they figure it is just the usual spousal ups and downs. Who doesn’t go through them, really? Tethered by marriage, customs, a government that does not give a fuck, religions that only seek alms and tithes and a system that is rotten. The man in between with a wife he cannot allow to work because they have had so many children, and what can she do really, with no proper education in a world where one is judged by what they have read not what they know.
The next day, television viewers in middle class homes shake their heads at the gruesome and unnecessary deaths of five children and quickly switch to other channels they can watch without disgust. The crime scenes are gruesome, as one would expect from a bloodbath. “The lower class is eating itself,” the middle class tells his wife as they get ready to touch in for the night, “why can’t one just give up his children for adoption if he cannot take care of them.” Quickly, the discourse turns to politics and the plight of five is quickly forgotten.

• 11th April, 2009: Jane Wagaki (wife and pregnant), Scholastica Wairimu 15 Martin Muiruri 3 killed by Patrick Kanyi, stepfather.
• Early October, 2010 –  Bilah Omare (wife); 12-year-old son, Kinley Ogendi; and 9-year-old daughter, Ivyn Ogendi killed by Justus Ogendi Kababe in Vadnais Heights, Minnesota.
• 23rd March, 2012- Silas Kiprotich 10, Salome Chepkorir 7 , and Bethuel Kiplangat 5 and a three-year old  killed by John Tanui 37 in Rongena, Narok South.
• 25th September, 2012: Amos Kipkoech aged ten, twins Dominic Kiprop and Caleb Kipchirchir aged nine, Daniel Kiplagat aged five, and Gideon Kipng’eno aged two.
• 10th November, 2012:  Brian Misati 8, Robert Toto 6, Cythia Moraa and Mogutu Mun 3 are killed by their father, Misati Nyangwenchi in Egesa Village.
• 12th December, 2012- Elizabeth Ochieng, Wycliffe Odhiambo, Melvin Atieno, Walter Otieno and Moses Ochieng’  killed by Boniface Ouma Auka in Korogocho slums. He hanged himself on January 7th in a prison cell.
• December 28th, 2012: Unnamed two months baby girl is strangled by the father after her  teenage mother dumped her at the father’s house.
• 2nd January 2013- Kahindi Zero kills his four-year old son ‘to get healed.’

It does not make it to the front pages, there are more important things than the deaths of five children in a poor family. The normally overactive, adrenaline social media lynch mobs do not bay for anyone’s blood even after it happens again and again. It does not matter, it would seem, if it does not happen to you or anyone you know.
Stabbing is a very personal way to kill someone, or something, in this day and age. When you combine it with the fact that the murderer here is killing his or her own, the personal nature of this crime becomes even more evident. They might also choose stabbing because it is convenient; every household, the economic position notwithstanding, has ‘sharps’ such as knives and machetes. Unlike the US where gun control is thought to be the solution to the constant bloodbaths, one cannot ban the use of knives and other such tools and cutlery.

• The children aged between two to 10 years had deep stab wounds all over their bodies. (AfricaReview, 2012)
• The gushing blood and twitching bodies of his own children could not stop Kirui, who earns a living brewing busaa and distilling chang’aa in the village. “The tragedy happened at around 3am this morning (yesterday). The man used a panga and slit their necks, killing each one of them,” said Wambua. (All Africa.com, 2012)
• …Nyangwenchi who has since gone into hiding, killed the children by stabbing them in their necks.
• “The body of the eldest daughter was discovered on the door step, while the rest of the bodies were found in a plantation nearby,” Nyaboke said.

“After killing his children aged 10, seven, five and three, he went and hanged himself with a rope and died on the spot,” he said.
The gruesomeness of these crimes bespeaks of an underlying psychological and socio-economic problem; the occurrence indicates that something is rotting in this society of ours. What do the crime scenes tells us? First, these crimes happen in low-income households, or rather the ones that make it to the news. Most are perpetrated by the father/husband, and often after a fight with the wife or family. The perpetrator, in most cases, kills himself or herself by hanging or some other such method. Why does he not stab himself?
Stabbing, even while being both personal and convenient, and fast, is still not a consolation that the innocents do not suffer. Think of it like this, one man cannot kill five children at once, so he must kill them in some order. Does he start with the strongest? Or the Eldest? Or with the lastborn he so much loves? One murder might be an accident but most of these murders are well thought out acts of savagery.
What do these murders indicate? Are the social fractures now showing? The socio-economic pressure on the father who does not feel like he can sufficiently provide for his family? Or the mother who feels frustrated by the strain and burden?
“The man slit throats of his five sons aged between ages 10 and two with a kitchen knife and then hanged himself in the same room. (Capital FM, September 25th 2012).

Another common factor in these bloodbaths is that the victims are often three or more, and often of the same sex-male. Does the number matter? Combined with the other factors in the crimes, a pattern emerges. The families are typical low income households where family planning is unheard of, and myths subsequently made to justify this need. Such households, whether in rural areas or in urban slums, are feeling the brunt of the socio-economic strain that results from the growth of a capitalist and seemingly selfish- society. In the one case that was thought to involve the mother, the Korogocho Massacre (December 20th, 2012), she told the police that she had separated from her husband and left the children in his care.

Amos Kipkoech aged ten, twins Dominic Kiprop and Caleb Kipchirchir aged nine, Daniel Kiplagat aged five, and Gideon Kipng’eno aged two

The looming crisis will probably catch us all flatfooted, unjustifiably so. While we are a country desperately in need of a social revolution, as opposed to a political one which we think we deserve, the children of low income families continue to live in such acrimonious households where they have to fight for their own survival. We shake our heads when we hear the murders occur ‘…because of food…’ as if food does not matter. The most basic of needs, food is the universal representation of parental responsibility. It is why we say ‘put food on the table’ and not ‘ fuel the car’ or ‘pay rent.’

• Residents claimed that the man was bitter after his wife criticized him for failing to provide food for his family. (SomalilandInformer.com, 2012)
• The suspect quarreled with his wife over rent and killed the children after she stormed out.
• Yegon had an argument with his wife whom he  accused her of having an affair before committing the heinous crime.
•  Nyangwechi’s wife Hellen Kemunto said they have had quarrels in their 10-year marriage but never knew their arguments would up in tragedy. “I did not know that the quarrels will one day lead my husband to kill our two sons and daughters. I did not know his intention for chasing me away,” Kemunto said tears rolling down her cheeks.
  
• She returned to her matrimonial home on Sunday morning only to be welcomed by the body of her last born daughter the doorstep http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?articleID=2000070431
• Maelo said that at the time of the incident, Tanui’s wife was admitted at Tenwek Mission Hospital where she was expecting to deliver a fifth baby.
  

The likely cause is some social fracture, some element within the sanity that one would expect from the social institution of a family that is exhibiting itself as infanticide and other ‘household’ crimes. What is the risk then? One cannot remove knives and other sharps from the households, no can you stop all parents who can harm their children from doing so, so a compromise of sorts must be made. How is the rest of society to make sure that children are safe, even from their own parents?

Still, one must wonder what is missing from society to make the parent who cannot provide for his or her family seek to end the lives of his or her children. Is it economic? Is it social? Is it, by some far chance, political? I posit that our society is breaking from the base because we focus on things that should not be our ultimate priorities. Politics, our infatuation with political structures, has taken away any mention of social crisis. You have a low-class that has to wake up every morning, or every evening if you work night shift, to face a host of socio-economic issues.

The five children in the house need food, and education, and shelter, and the one man to supply all that is paid peanuts for back-breaking work. When they fall sick and he takes them to the public hospital, the nurses and doctors are on strike because the political class will not relent in its own selfish rape of the national coffers. Public schools are full, and understaffed, while we build big roads to nowhere. Food, the most basic of human needs, is prone to get even more scarce as we turn perfect agricultural land into gated communities for the middle class and the upper class. Then a slum will mushroom next to it to supply an army of workers to wipe our shoes, guard our gates, wash our clothes, provide cheap labor, watch our children and most of all, vote every five years.
It is only a savage society that will kill its own children, and that is what we are. The discourse revolves around political apathy, the notion that he who does not vote does not care. Consider social apathy, the amnesia you experience whenever you hear of a husband killing his entire family and then hanging himself, or waiting until he is incarcerated to commit suicide. No one wants to know why one would do such a thing, no one cares anyway. Each time it happens, it falls several columns into obscurity until the only mention of it is three lines in the Occurrence Book at the local police station listed as ‘Domestic Violence.’

The base of the pyramid is chipping, and when the cascade comes, for it will, it will take us all down with it. To think we are a civilized generation is to merely massage our own egos. We are still primal, instinctive, brutal animals. All that we have done, to rephrase Groucho, is to learn how to pretend we are civilized. Our only advantage over the cavemen is that this is our time, and unlike their lives which we can only hypothesize, we might actually have a chance to  make the ideal society.

Owaahh

 

4 Randomest things Ever Done by Settlers in Kenya

We all agree that the colonial times were dark days, we gained religion and cultural diversity, and lost everything else. History has a knack for leaving out randomness, frankly because it does not fit into the fabric of the sane society we purport ourselves to be…Have you ever wondered what the settlers did in their spare time, for fun, and for the random kick?

#4 Peter Harold Poole
Enter Peter Poole, born in 1932. His Wikipedia page indicates that he was an engineer from Essex who ran an electrical shop on what is now Moi Avenue.
“On October 12, 1959, he was charged for killing Kamawe Musunge in Gordon Road,Nairobi. Musunge had been riding a bicycle when Poole’s two dogs stopped him. Musunge threw stones at a dog, for which Poole shot Musunge dead with a Luger pistol [3]. Musunge was Poole’s houseboy [1]. Poole was executed on August 18, 1960. At the time Kenya was still under British rule, and the verdict was received dismally by white settlers in Kenya, who could not accept that a white man could be sentenced for killing an indigenous African”

The drama continued…

A man died for throwing stones at a dog, the story does not even say he hit the dog but one Peter Poole put one through him—-a bullet that is. The hanging was covered extensively in the US and the UK, including Time Magazine with the title ‘White Man Hangs’.
Poole was regarded as a matyr by the white European community, and his hanging got some coverage later when Tom Cholmodeley was convicted of manslaughter and jailed for 8 months. 4 years before the Poole case, Leo Hoyle had been sentenced to death “…for raping and killing an African woman to ostensibly “ end her agony” of being kicked out of her house.”  . Col Etwart Grogan killed two Africans infront of a magistrate but was only convicted of assault and sentenced to two months of hard labor.

#3  Lord Egerton
Every living Kenyan knows Lord Egerton, or at least the Egerton University that stands on land he donated to the institutiton. As such, most of the details of his private life are lost in his single act of generosity. Lord Maurice Egerton of Tatton, fourth Baron Egerton of Tatton in Cheshire (not to be confused with Galbraith Lowry Egerton Cole) died in 1958 childless and unmarried, but not by choice. It is said that he was spurned by an unnamed woman; the same woman for whom the Egerton Castle was erected at great cost (Turns out flowers and chivalry ran out of style a long time ago).

With a face like that, even a castle wouldn’t work…

As proof that testosterone has been the death of men since time immemorial, the Egerton Castle was built to impress this one woman, to make her change her mind.
“ He conceived of a castle that would have no comparison in England or any other country for that matter.
Dressed stones and zinc tiles for the roof were shipped from Europe, the builders from Europe and Asia. The result, in 1938, was a stupendous four-storey edifice fitted with some of the most up-to-date mechanical and electrical gadgets at the time, including an escalator.”
Upon completion, the peer threw what was billed as the biggest party ever seen in pre-colonial Kenya, with guests coming from as far as Northern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe and Nyasaland, now Malawi.
The cheers and congratulations, it was to turn out, had come too soon. When the woman for whom the castle had been built came back to Kenya and viewed it, she dismissed it as “a museum” and a monument to vanity.” (Benson Riungu, East African Standard, 2004).

There was a time when it would take an escalator to impress a woman?

Rejected by a woman? Sounds common, we have all been friendzoned at some point in our male lives, right? So, he did what we all do and went to a bar to brood over his troubles, right? Actually no…
“Being spurned appears to have changed Lord Egerton in a fundamental way. Thereafter he seemed to live in a fantasy world.
He furnished and ran the castle as if the family he had envisaged actually existed. Nobody but the house servants was ever allowed in.
But an even more far-reaching chance was in his attitude towards women. He developed such a passionate hatred for them that he banned them from his castle and put up notices warning female trespassers that they risked being shot on sight.
Visitors, including friends, were to leave their wives and daughters eight miles away from the castle. And when he planned to visit the quarters where his African staff lived, he would issue a two-week notice so that all women could be vacated.” (Riungu, East African Standard, 2004).
Wait! What? So being spurned made a man ruined pleasure for everyone else? …and he thought that donating his land to a university would somehow atone for such a sin?
Remember that house by the way, it will come in handy later…

# 5 The Ju Ja Incident
This is one of the least known signs that the settlers were mad. It is not included in any school curricula history books, nor will you find it in most stories about Teddy Roosevelt’s Africa expedition.

I don’t know about the outfit though…

To understand the gist of this story some background is necessary.
Enter Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States (1901-1909). Almost all historians of ‘badassery’ agree that Teddy is the most badass president to ever occupy the White House. Reading his acts makes James Bond look like the fake character that he actually is. First, Teddy had a moustache which was a NWC Police Commisioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Governor of NY and other things. He had a black belt in Jujitsu, was an accomplished championship boxer, expert marksman and, as if all that was not enough, he frequently skinny-dipped in the Potomac River (Yup! They all saw his balls). Did I mention that in 1912, while at a campaign rally, someone shot him as he was giving his speech. The logical thing would be to rush the president to the hospital, right? No,, not when you are Teddy; when you are this guy, he refused medical help and finished his 90 minute-speech, with an open wound on his chest.
So, why does this matter?
In Northrup-The Life of William Northrup McMillan, Judy Aldrick follows the story of McMillian and Teddy Roosevelt during the famous African safari in 1909.

We now know who invented the cool pose…

The seven-month visit included a long stopover in Donyo Sambuk, a village near Thika town.The ex-president had a big entourage, even by today’s standards, which is estimated to have had over 500 porters carrying all manner of items ‘…including collapsible baths and cases of champagne.’

A collapsible bath huh? Guess who is carrying it…

Among the dignitaries was Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s third and favorite son. McMillan, the host in Juja, accommodated the party at his 19, 000-acre estate. When the former president and his son Kermit were not hunting, they would drive to Nairobi, specifically to the Norfolk Hotel, to party. On their way back they would pass through Khoja, and often marvel at the newly constructed Ismailia Mosque. Now this is where it gets interesting

Aldrick includes a relatively unknown story; that they stole the stone lions that had been placed on either side of the Ismailia Mosque gate. They took them back to McMillan’s house where they remained unnoticed as a conflict was brewing in Nairobi over the theft. In what qualifies as a conspiracy, the government official who had first noticed them in the house organized to have them buried on the farm to avoid embarrassment.

Teddy and Kermit, pictured here not stealing two carvings of lions…and seemingly sober.

About 29 years later, in 1937, the farm was owned by the Nettlefold family. Their workers discovered the lions and assumed they were stone idols from West Africa (the gods Ju and Ja). The connection between the former president, his son, and the two idols was made many years later, by which time both of them were dead and history could not judge them harshly. The name of the –mistaken- gods, however, remains as the name of Juja town.

Oh, and where Egerton gave up after asking a girl out twice, TR asked Alice Hathaway Lee to marry him and she declined, he did more badass things, like getting his mother and sisters in on the proposal (not building a castle with an escalator in 1938, that’s for weak guys), and the second time, she said yes-because the badass guy always gets the girl. His exact words when she rejected his first proposal? “See that girl, I am going to marry her. She won’t have me, but I am going to have her.” That would count as a rape threat today, I’m guessing.
#2 Patrick David Shaw

A ‘ 300 pound school assistant administrator who freelances as a terrifying white cop in a black neighbourhood’ sounds like something in an action movie trailer, doesn’t it? Something featuring Bruce Willis and Denzel Washington to be precise?

Granted, Patrick David Shaw was more of an immigrant than most of the others in this list. His father was a prominent London doctor but the younger Shaw had moved to Kenya as an agricultural officer in 1955 and became a naturalized citizen in 1971. He was famous for his brutish policing ways and the fact that he was always first on the scene, driving his cream Mercedes, license plate KFH 845 and carrying a .38 pistol.

When he died in February 1988, his death was covered by international media and his funeral in March was attended by Pimps, thieves, prostitutes, top police brass and the Chief Justice (the list is a bit redundant though). His legacy is shootouts, car chases and a string of dead men. He rarely ever slept, according to some accounts, because of a glandular disorder that accounted for his chronic obesity. His Mercedes had a special seat that allowed him to sleep, which is said to have been no more than two hours. His only other known venture was running a boy’s orphanage, he never married, and he never took a vacation. His pastime activities were reading FBI manuals, ‘Wanted’ posters and the Kenya Penal Code.

Not Pictured: PD Shaw

It is said that his name replaced the ‘boogieman’ whenever mothers scolded their children. “Be good, or Pat Shaw’s gonna get you.”
Pat Shaw’s kill ratio was remarkably high, even in today’s trigger-happy police force. He is rumored to have been involved in the murder of J. M. Kariuki, a murder that has a much better plot and intrigue than most movies.
He joined the police in 1959 but gained national fame in 1977 when he shot and killed Duncan Gachui, one of Kenya’s premier bank robbers. The ensuing gun battle happened in South C and “The officer shot the gangster dead through the mouth.”
His next big kill was the infamous Wakinyonga ‘The Killer’ who was cornered in a bar in Kangemi where he was partying with his girlfriend.

Over to you Makmende, what have you done?

In 1979, a Ugandan outlaw named Walimba murdered a Nairobi family. Shaw was at the murder scene so quickly that Walimba was still there. He shot Shaw in the shoulder and fled. Shaw drove himself to the hospital, was treated, and then drove home.
From then on, Shaw was never without his .38 special. He switched last fall to a 9mm Beretta automatic, wanting a faster-firing weapon.

And did you know, one of Starehe Boy’s School’s boarding houses is called Shaw House? It was named after Pat Shaw because he was the assistant director in administration at the time of his demise.
By the comment thread here  it turns out some people think of him as the original Makmende.
He was always the first to arrive at a crime scene, often when the crime was happening, and would always shoot first.
Wait, did I mention P.D Shaw was actually never a police officer? He was merely a member of the Kenya Police Reserve. Did someone say Waiganjo?
#1. The Happy Valley Set Murder Mystery
You know how our parents never miss the chance to tell us how morally rotten our generation has become, given that we now have a style called ‘twerking’ and there is a search engine wholly dedicated to porn? Well, the Happy Valley Set will make all that look like child’s play…
The Happy Valley set is called that because they settled in the Happy Valley region of Wanjohi Valley.  The exploits of the group were covered extensively, and even immortalized in books and films such as The Happy Valley and the White Mischief. Among them was Hugh Cholmodeley, 3rd Baron Delamare, who is credited with being one of the original members of the Happy Valley Set and Lord Errol, the unofficial leader.

One against three, Alice could handle….

The group first came to international spotlight in 1941 when Lord Errol was killed in Karen. His purpoted murderer, Sir Jock Delves Broughton, had hunted him down to avenge the cuckold horns Errol had made him wear. The label of the Happy Valley set was ‘….louche parties, fuelled by alcohol, drugs, and sexual intrigue.
“These men and their wives were not uniformly champion adulterers, although Gwynned Gooch, née Brooke-Meares (1875–1964), and a neighbour were found naked in the back seat of a Buick during a party at the Errolls’ house, Oserian.”
“Beryl Markham was first married at sixteen to Alexander (Jock) Purves (d. 1945): each time she took a new lover, he hammered a six-inch nail into the wooden frame of their front door.”
Jack Soames was a voyeur who drilled holes in the ceilings of his bedrooms to watch his copulating guests.
At Clouds they played the ‘sheet game’: a sheet would be strung across the drawing-room, half a dozen men would poke their penises through strategically sited holes in the sheet, and the women on the other side would select their favourite appendage. A head start in the competition was enjoyed by Julien ‘Lizzie’ Lezard (1902–1958), a lover of both Idina Sackville and Alice de Janzé, who was so proud of his long member that he also liked to display it, along with his cards, when he got a full house at poker.

Pictured here totally not doing drugs and each other…and bed sheets.

When Evelyn Waugh stayed with that ‘fine desperado’ de Trafford at Njoro in 1931, the latter was trying to organize a scheme to capture gorillas, which he believed he could sell at £2000 a head to Berlin zoo: ‘he got very drunk and brought a sluttish girl back to the house’, then ‘rogered her and her mama too’. De Trafford, Waugh reported, in words applicable throughout Happy Valley, ‘fights & fucks and gambles and gets D.D. [disgustingly drunk] all the time’ (Waugh, Letters, 63–4; Diary, 347) .

Suddenly, that Truth and Dare you played at the random party does not look so daring does it?
The Muthaiga Club was their hang-out joint where they held the sane day time games such as polo matches and race week. The saying in England was ‘..are you married or do you live in Kenya…’, an obvious allusion to the spouse-swapping that took place during the racy parties.

The dealer was Francis Greswolde-Williams (1837-1931) who lived in the Kedong Valley. He fit into the role of the drug dealer because he was not as attractive, sexually at least as the other males in the Happy Valley set. Historians describe him as being “…too fat and drunken…notoriously coarse mannered and sporting a black eye-patch…”
One must take into account that all the members of the H.V set were damaged, at least emotionally or in Lord Delamare’s case, both emotionally and physically. One intriguing character is Alice de Janze who shot her lover and then married him (Because how else does one fall in love?) to Idina Gordon who ‘…funelled lovers to her younger husband to keep him amused.’ Alice de Janze was known as ‘the wicked Madonna’ and is thought to have killed Lord Errol in 1941.

Alice de Janze, the wicked Madonna, quite pretty when she was not shooting her lovers.

The protagonists here are real, with Lord Broughton being charged, and then acquitted, for the murder. He was one of the first suspects because Lord Errol was virile, which means he just plain screwed anything that wore a skirt and was still warm. He killed himself later, in 1942, at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. The other suspect,  Alice, shot and killed herself the same year after she had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. Recent investigations have uncovered seemingly convincing but largely circumstantial evidence that Anne killed Enroll. The most likely motive is as dark as was her life, that ‘they would be together…forever…’

“Alice appeared at the morgue where Lord Erroll’s body was resting. In front of witnesses, she lifted her dress, rubbed her hand between her legs, wiped her fingers on the corpse’s mouth, and said, “Now you are mine forever.”

Owaahh

 

7 Most Badass Kenyan Gangsters

Granted, this list is inconclusive and not entirely reliable because most data has been obtained from the police press releases which normally read like refined propaganda, and news pieces whose authenticity is not very clear. Then there is the conspicuous absence of any MP, current or former, yet they have the balls to steal from hapless and apathetic taxpayer every year and look at them straight in the eye when they say they are going to use their taxes to pay their taxes (it makes sense, that last part).

I also considered the fact that it is that time of the month again and we are all broke, there is a reward out on these purported criminals. Wait, is the only woman on that list wanted for ‘Illigal meeting, disobeying curfew order”? I think the bigger crime is the typographical error, and the cheeky look she has in that photo as if she was trying to get her good side…for a mug shot?

#7 The Embu GK Prison Escape Crew

In August 2005, a group of gangsters stormed the Embu GK prison and armed several inmates before shooting their way to freedom. By the end of the commotion, four people, a trader, one of the gangsters, a remand prisoner and a prison warder lay dead. This group of daring criminals was made up of, among others, Godfrey  Mulwa Kitheka (Ngilu), Simon Gitau Saitoti.

One of the images you get when you Google ‘Embu GK Prison.’ The pose….yo!

While this story is known among crime analysts, what did not make it to mainstream media was that the Embu GK escape was one of several prison escapes. Target practice for badassery had been Shimo la Tewa Prison and other smaller prisons from where capital offenders had broken out and gone on the run. This was before Michael Scofield became synonymous with (over)thinking prison breaks.

One of the prison break masterminds, Silas Mugendi Njeru, escaped from Shimo la Tewa prison on June 22, 2005. His accomplices were all capital offenders and he had been linked to the murders of at least five officers.Simon Gitau Saitoti was said to be a  “tall and light-complexioned gangster” which sounds like a movie villain. Like many entries on this list, Saitoti had been a matatu driver. When he was arrested, Tanzanian police officers found what sounds like a small arsenal for a drug war: seven guns, hand grenades, bullet-proof jackets and 85 rounds of ammunition. Ngilu was the opposite of Saitoti “ stout, dark-complexioned man”  said to have been a part of the prison escape.

Another prison break said to have contributed to the plain badassery displayed at Embu GK prison was the escape of 28 suspects from Naivasha Maximum Security Prison on April 21, 2004, followed swiftly by the escape of 29 remand prisoners from Meru courts.

What happened in 2005 reads like a movie plot. A group of gangsters drove into the prison compound and started shooting, they handed a group of prisoners guns and started shooting their way out of the prison. Forget what you have seen in movies though, Kenyan prisons do not arm all prison warders with guns because their role is not necessarily offense. This means that at any one time, most guns are in the armory and only the guards at the gates and the watchtowers are fully armed. You know this now, and a group of gangsters knew that in 2005 when they broke into the prison to break their friends out. So what happened to them? A common trend appears with all gangsters who display the characteristics of having titanium balls, such as shooting your way into and out of a prison, they die by the bullet of a police officer who most likely gets promoted.

 #6      Wanugu

Named Gerald Wambugu Munyeria by his parents, this criminal had a long history of criminal activities. He belonged to the same gang of four which terrorized Nairobi in the 1980s and the 1990s. The others include Anthony Ngugi Kanari (Wacucu), Bernard Matheri (Rasta), while the fourth position was occupied by different gangsters in the same period.

Going in the same trend as other thugs on this list, the gang of four went down ‘under a hail of bullets’ in Kajiado, Nyahururu and Nakuru at different times. Wanugu was most likely inspired by a criminal included in this list who died when he was eight years old. Before he started his illustrious career as a criminal, he was a mechanic and a tout.

How did he die?

“However, his hideaway was unmasked on June 27, 1996 as a team of flying squad on public tip-off tracked Wanugu to his rented abode at Kabati-ini, Nakuru. Armed Wanugu accompanied by his girlfriend on errands run into the elite squad.

Sensing danger he grabbed his fiancé as a human shield as he fired back at the police.  This did not deter the police from reciprocating and in a matter of minutes the two lay dead their bodies riddled with bullets.”

 Yup! Kenya police cannot be deterred by the possibility of an ‘innocent life’ dying in the process. And it’s clear that we have not started watching too many movies that depict police restraint now. Wanugu’s decision to use his own girlfriend as a human shield sounds eerily close to about 100 movie scripts. In the movie version, the police let the criminal go because they do not want to harm the innocent life. In the Kenyan version though, one standing behind the other makes it a more challenging target and saves bullets.

#5   Wacucu

Wacucu is thought to have been the leader of the gang. It is hard to find the court records detailing his rap sheet because well, the Kenyan court system decided future generations did not need to know. The criminal extraordinaire was alleged to have committed at least six murders within a span of two years, many violent robberies and bank heists.Gunned down on January 4^th 1996 in the far-off autonomous country of Rongai. He was the first of the gang to die and as he fell Wanugu stole a gun from him and bolted. So much for the brotherhood huh? All four had had a Kshs. 100, 000 reward tag as the most wanted gangsters in Kenya at a time when that kind of money could buy you a car or more than five acres of land.

Wacucu begun as a matatu driver, then became a mechanic and later a Karate tutor at the Kariokor Social Hall. You read that right, he had begun in much the same way as about half the entries on this list, driving people around in matatus. The trend indicates someone who can drive really fast, repair and still cars and kick ass!

The irony of it all? The story is told of a time when Wacucu was drinking in bar in Maragwa district when two police officer got drunk and begun to bully revelers? The leader instincts in Wacucu kicked in and “…he tactfully disarmed them, handcuffed them and took their gun to Kandara Police Station” Wait, WHAT? One of the three most wanted criminals in the country made a citizen arrest? Of the same guys who were supposed to have been looking for him?

Wacucu, pictured here totally burying the wrong person….maybe.

Wacucu’s controversies do not end there; the family thinks they buried the wrong man. First is the fact that his mother claims he was baptized ‘Malachi’ and not ‘Anthony’. The police spokesman at the time, Peter Kimanthi, claimed that he must have used aliases. The family also claims that they did not have enough time to identify the body, and had to do so in the presence of intimidating police officers.

His mother claimed that the body she buried was taller and darker than Wacucu had been and you cannot argue with a mother about the height of her son. She also noted that the criminal had had two warts on the two small fingers, both of which were missing from the body they identified. Do you think he might be an alive and well? And in Parliament?

 

 

 

#4   Wakinyonga-The Killer

Before the infamous gang of three there lived a man called Wakinyonga who terrorized Nairobi and its environs in the 1970s. Peter Mwea Wakinyonga is perhaps the first criminal for whom the surname was enough for a nickname and the first known all badass gangster. When the rest of the world was busy enjoying the bond films, and the film release of the Godfather, Wakinyonga was busy ‘bridging the gap between the rich and the poor.’ Forget economic policies, Wakinyonga used to rob the rich and give the money to the poor, because fuck capitalism and the laws of the land.

Wakinyonga is the grandfather of criminal gangs: He redefined how robbers viewed violence as a tool of coercion and sometimes, for mere adrenaline. Wanugu was killed on June 27^th, on the same day eighteen years after Wakinyonga The Killer.Why was he badass? He escaped from several police dragnets. The most notable escape was sometime in 1975 when he fled with a bullet wound in his right collarbone, and, of all other places one can be shot and still escape, his buttocks? Did you read that right? A man escaped with a bullet in his ass!

So what were his reported crimes? He was said to have robbed 330, 000 from a bank in Thika, 200, 000 from a bank in Nairobi along Wabera Street and over 80, 000 somewhere else. He was also said to have killed a Mr. Bloch as he attempted to steal his car. While I can see why someone who’s name sounds phonetically close to ‘botch’ would refuse to let his car go, Wakinyonga is perhaps the most badass criminal, our MPs aside, to walk on this Cradle of Man.

He went down in the only way a badass should, under a hail of bullets. Consider the following report:

“Police armed to the teeth and on a tip-off traced Wakinyonga to Nyakiambi Lodge and Nightclub in Kangemi, Nairobi on June 26, 1978 midnight, then surrounded it.

The pub was full to capacity with revelers enjoying his generosity. Interestingly, Wakinyonga had already dug his grave near his father’s and had sworn to kill a police officer before he died.

Coincidentally, at the pub he was boasting that he would shoot and kill the one famous officer, Patrick Shaw. While still binge-drinking, he noticed an officer, grabbed a machine gun from him but the officer pulled out a revolver, prompting an exchange of gunfire and confusion.

The dramatic firing lasted for a while before Wakinyonga was overpowered shortly after midnight on June 27 and the police recovered a revolver and several rounds of ammunition. Three bystanders, including a woman, suffered injuries. Drama would follow his burial as police made unanticipated swoop targeting young men and women.”

 Yes, that reads like a movie, and it happened, here, or as the police officers who were involved in the gunfight recorded their statements. There is a high likelihood one of the was a failed scriptwriter and he added a few lines to tune up the story but reading into Wakinyonga’s past, it’s likely most of the details are there. Further evidence is the shooting of bystanders, keeping with the Kenya police age-old fashion of stray bullets.

 Legend has it that the kill shot was taken by the one and only Patrick Shaw, Police Reservist extraordinare who instilled fear and respect due to his obsession with killing criminals. Nyakiambi Lodge and Night Club, where Wakinyonga the bank robber met his death, closed years later and the premises are now occupied by, of all mother of ironies, a bank.

#3 Rasta

On 3^rd October 1997, a newspaper called Maarifa carried the headline ‘Who betrayed ‘Rasta’ to the Police?”. The headline photo was one of Bernard Matheri’s bullet riddled body. The editor and journalist were later arrested, more so for the photo than the headline.To how just how badass one Bernard Matheri was, a worthy mention of his formidable sidekick, second wife and accomplice extraordinaire, one Mary Wanjiku Karirimbi (whose surname means a small fire). She started stealing as soon as she hit teenage, at an age where girls now scream Justin Beiber and write ‘gurlfriendz!’. She stole from her grandmother and before you let your moral outrage get the better of you, may I add that the Shs. 70, 000 she stole was Tithe money her mother kept in safety for her church?

This is not a mug shot, this is a badass pose.

When she gave 4, 000 bob to her mother, she told her she had found it on the road. But mothers know, mothers always know. So her mother did the silliest thing ever, she took the money to the police station (WTF!) and was rewarded….wait for it…..wait for it….Shs. 20 for reporting the crime?

She stole from customers who visited her boutique which had been financed by money she stole from a petrol station owner. And there she also met the Gang of Three and fell in love with Rasta who, since flowers and chocolate were too mainstream, gave his new fling an AK-47 as a gift to show his love (suddenly that clutch bag does not look so well-thought does it?). She was arrested in 1999 when she planned to steal Shs. 162 million (Yes, you read that right) cash in transit went haywire. Unlike the other criminals on this list, and which goes to show even badass women have a higher chance of survival, she was jailed for seven years during which time she ‘Found the Lord.’

Another member of the group, John Kibera, was the coffin-stealer of the group, because what is a criminal gang without a man who specializes in stealing coffins. Even more interesting is that this reverse undertaker is still alive and well because, like Rasta’s wife, he found the Lord. He was first a street boy, then a burglar, bank robber in the infamous Gang of Four and finally, the last step in the criminal world, a grave yard robber.

When he was caught, he did what anyone would in such a scenario, he hid in a coffin and then ran out, scaring and scaring all the onlookers who thought the dead had risen to begin the Zombie Apocalypse.

The last of the Gang of Four/Five, and perhaps the least known of them all was Timothy Irungu Ndegwa. Part of his lack of infamity is the fact that he did not die under a hail of bullets but was instead arrested and dragged through the Kenyan Court System, a worse punishment. He was sentenced to death in 2002 for the murder of an army officer and his punishment committed to a life sentence.

#2    Simon Matheri Ikere- The Infamous son of Gachie

When the entry on the Most Wanted List is titled “Public Enemy No. 1” then you know the police have a funky content creator for their website or you are completely badass.

He was arrested and jailed for arson for five years at the one place where hardened criminals in KE are manufactured, Kamiti Prison. Like most other thugs on this list, he was a mechanic at some point in his life. He first trained as a jua kali welder, then as a blacksmith and finally as a mechanic. Interestingly, Matheri chose the birth district of his namesake, the infamous Bernard Matheri Thuo, alias Rasta.

“Matheri survived by swimming across a fast flowing river to evade a hail of bullets and police sniffer dogs. He came home for the first time and we realized he was now a hard-core criminal,” intimates a brother.

Then his mother adds: “Kori karega nyina no gukua gakuaaga. Ndimukanitie maita maingi no ndaiguaaga. Riu ni ndamuneana kuri thirikari” ( if a goat’s kid rejects its mother, it dies. I have warned him many times but he doesn’t listen. Now I have surrendered him to the Government).

Matheri lived a very simply but wild life. When he was killed, the only things found in the house were two mattresses, a coffee table, a sofa set, a DVD and a 14-inch TV.

The stories told on this list are captivating because they sound like movie scripts. In Matheri’s case, a curious angle appears after he was gunned down in Madaraka Estate. The police swoop was carried out by over 100 police officers who, after riddling his body with bullets the typical Kenya police way, then proceeded to soil the crime scene in ‘unrestrained joy.’ They sat on his seat and then, most interestingly, were captured by television cameras enjoying a hearty meal of chicken and chapatti. Considering the operation took place at 1 am when the gangster and his wife were most likely boning or asleep, one wonders where the meal came from. There are several theories: One, that the meal had been made before but not yet consumed and two that Mrs. Matheri was forced to cook for the men who had just made a hole into her husband’s head.

The action of the officers gets even more interesting when you consider that they were too excited to remember to remove the handcuffs from the man they had just killed. How hard can it be to stage a ‘he started shooting at my (m)boys and they returned fire’ scenario? So the body beamed to the world had the hands stuck curiously behind because the officers had slept through their pathology class and new zero about rigor mortis and why any staging should take place within the first hour or so before the body stiffens. The next day, an accomplice of his committed suicide. Unless there is an unspoken suicide pact between such criminals, the death itself was as interesting as the fact that the Gachie villagers burned his body.

Matheri begun his working life as a taxi driver in…you guessed right, Rongai.

Of all the criminals on this list, Matheri showed the most ingenuity for someone who had never attended a military school. He had never used the front door of the house in Kitengela, and his wife of two years knew him as ‘Matheru’ because there is nothing like hiding one’s identity by switching a vowel.

Matheri was said to have shot and killed or wounded:  prominent African AIDS researcher, Job Bwayo; Lois Anderson, a Presbyterian missionary, and her daughter Zelda White, the wife of a U.S. embassy employee, a Carol Briggs, a missionary volunteer.” He is probably the only violent robber in Kenya who once had a Wikipedia page (It has since been removed).

#1   Edward Maina Shimoli, The Jackal

Acording to the Urban Dictionary Shimoli means ‘a beautiful girl who many envy and love.’

This is Shimoli, she might inspire men to be badass, but she is not…

To anyone who met him or heard of his legacy, there was ever only one Shimoli, also known as The Jackal.We all know that you cannot be called ‘The Jackal’ for no apparent reason. You either have to be related to the jackal family or at least show some of the animals characteristics. Shimoli falls in the latter category of natural selection. Synopsis, he was jailed for ten years. Spoiler alert, he died like all the other criminals on this list.

The other Shimoli, The Jackal, pictured here going green after having declined the customary paper bag.

Shimoli was nicknamed the Jackal partly because he found a way to incorporate women into his gangs and plots. Shimoli was the first gangster to incorporate affirmative action into crime. His prison escapes involved bribing and tricking prison warders, once breaking the leg of a warden. During another escape, his comrades carried out an escape that is only second to the seventh entry on this list where they shot at police as they were spiriting him to safety.When Shimoli was released from Kamiti prison on March 15^th, 2007, he had a record of having escaped from prison three times. Shimoli got his nickname from the Venezuelan terrorist ‘Carlos the Jackal’ because they both eluded police dragnets for a long time. Like Carlos, there is no evidence that Shimoli ever called himself ‘the Jackal.’

One of his dramatic escapes from Kamiti prison was right before he was to be hanged. He had been sentenced to death in 1996. .His last escape was from a Nairobi courtroom. Granted, the plot reads of numerous twists and accomplices but for a man who escaped from several rings of prison and police staff, having a tankfull of balls is an understatement.

When he was arrested in 2002 in Kiambu, Kamiti prison officers visited the police station and identified him as the same man who had escaped death row in 1996.  He was reported to have, among other people, shot his own wife in the back and killed his brother-in-law after he suspected they had betrayed him.

His charge sheet read like a script for a thriller movie.?: 14 murders, 88 rapes, drug deals and numerous bank robberies. Any man who rapes and keeps a record is 100% psychopath. Where Carlos the Jackal evaded capture for 20 years, Shimoli was a mere ghost for ten years. He escaped after a gun battle at Uhuru Park, then shot two policemen who stopped him as he drove a stolen Mercedes.

As if his three pairs of titanium testicles was not enough, Shimoli was photographed raising his middle finger several times to the police and judicial officers and even lit a roll of bhang within the precincts of a courtroom: badassery which got him one more year in the slammer. He was only jailed for twelve years because the police did not have evidence of his other numerous crimes. During the interview outside Kamiti prison, he expressed his fear that he would be killed and he was right because two months later, his body was lying on the cold tables of City Mortuary with a single bullet wound to the head. Shimoli did not want to leave prison because he knew, and with good reason, that an extra judicial killing was in the offing.

One event that might water down his badassery is the fact that in 2007, he was part of a team of prisoners at Kamiti prison that formed Crime si Poa. His litany of crime reads like something Stephen King would write up, but with Shimoli most of it is likely to have been true.

Addition, 26th March 2013

A reader (Chris) pointed out that I had left out one man who should have been number 1. I agree…

Daniel Kiptum Cheruiyot alias ‘Frank’
No, this is not Frank Martin but I can see why you would make that error.
CID officer, as he made everyone believe. In reality, he had only once been a Police Reservist who lost his job for hiring his gun out to robbers. Cheruiyot was also soft-spoken, murderous, cunning, and most of all, meticulous.

Looks a bit fatherly, no?

Like Matheri and Wakinyonga, he sparingly furnished the houses he lived in. In his house in Zimmerman where he was killed in 2005, he only had a single bed, a five seater sofa set (because a gang of five is not going to sit on the floor is it now?) and a black coffee table (I am resisting referring to it as ‘a black loot-counting table’).

“Only a few metres from the Deliverance Church, and tucked away in a secluded part of the vast estate, the house has a high perimeter wall ringed with broken glass. It is less than 200 metres away from the busy Thika Highway, and boasts burglar proof doors and windows.

Sandwiched between two houses, a passer-by has no view of Cheruiyot’s den, let alone the activities of its residents. The house’s backyard is, however, not barricaded with a wall like the front, and offers a possible escape route to the highway. “

Ignore the jackets and the clear lack of equipment, why haven’t they made a movie out of this?

He killed the first officer who went to arrest him in Imara Daima, Charles Karue and later killed Maina Cheserem.

Oh, and did I mention that the police ambush and 5 hour drama was recorded on video?
You can watch it part of it here  (ignore the lack of equipment, even Cheruiyot had bullet proof vests) and here.
What more would a man who has already survived severall gunfights, become a gangster complete with several homes and police murders, already using multiple phones in 2005, and died holding an Uzi sub-machine gun, do to be even more badass?

“Cheruiyot recently telephoned the control room at police headquarters and warned that he would continue killing police officers because he knows clearly that they are looking for him.”

Because catch me if you can? The man who did was rewarded.

Owaahh

 

The Barmaid and the Boy who Kissed an Inexperienced Bed

To the creative writer, there is something morbidly inspiring about morgues and barstools. Morgues because dead men tell no tales, as the saying goes, and the man looking for inspiration wants to tell tales. Barstools because, well, just barstools.

I often wonder how all the people who work in morgues live without a daily dose of writing about their experiences, about the different people they meet every day. But barstools are the place to be, partly because you do not look like an insane person when you talk to the person on the other side and partly because imbibing has a way of opening up the creative juices. The bar is morbidly relaxing, if you enjoy the sound of your own thoughts or if you are lucky enough to have good, non-demanding company.

Its times like that that seemingly small things become writing ideas, and you sit at 5.30 AM in the morning, with pains in places that probably should not hurt, and pen a story about the struggles of writing and the barmaid who might not know she is a shrink of sorts.

Immortality would not be good for any species, especially our kind for whom sated primal needs such as food and sex are not enough to keep our non-existent sanity. In case you do not bother to be regaled with stories of a man looking for inspiration, here is a link to flexible women, everybody likes flexible women, I am not so sure about pregnant women doing the split though.
I am thinking about sitting at the bar because I met Joyce this past weekend, a barmaid with a keen eye and a soft motherly look. Actually, I called her ‘mami’ several times before she gave me the evil eye and said ‘Ninaitwa Joyce’ (my name is Joyce) and someone pointed out that she actually had a tattoo of her name on her left arm. I had already been imbibing before I sat at the bar so a little blindness was allowed.

I like to watch barmaids/men work, there is something about the woman or man behind the counter passing out poisons to men and women looking for escapism that is intriguing. The barmaid at my kalocal, a heavy woman called Mumbi, or something like that, was a scary woman I used to stare at through the grills and wonder whether she enjoyed her work. She had no life in her, no spirit to make conversation, except when talking to older men who looked to have a woman listen without necessarily having to listen to their bantering in return.

Mumbi, or whatever her name was, was replaced by a thin thing with absolutely no life at all, even when an smiling old man bought her shots of things strong and potent. I have not cared to know her name, partly because I ‘bonded’ with Njeri, a waitress who has a happy face. Okay, I think she has a permanent smile but in actual sense she has one of those teeth structures that make the teeth stick out of the mouth at all times. I am sure you know someone with teeth like that, an oddly smiley face. I always wonder how people who look like that kiss without harming the other party.
Talking about risky kissing, I recently recalled an old story from high school. A student sleeping on the lower bunk was woken up in the middle of the night by a sharp searing pain in his upper lip and an odd weight. The weight was the upper bunk, complete with its occupant, which had come off the hooks on the ‘head-side’ and fallen on our protagonist. Sharp pain, and the weight meant that he could not scream, or he could, but it would emerge as a muffled cry like that of screamer with a pillow on her mouth.

For the few seconds it took the occupant of the upper bunk to realize he was now sleeping on his bunk mate, and not in a good way, our protagonist had a wound that required about fourteen stitches on his upper lip. On the bright side, my high school is next to a world-class hospital with a lot of hot nurses and doctors-hoping a good friend of mine does not read this because his sister works there-and a higher than proportionate number of white staff.

On the dull side, however, he now had to spot a bandage for a few weeks as the wound healed. Anyone who went through high school knows that there is a special place in hell for the kind of sadists who walk around in high school uniforms or with chalk imprints on their jackets. One of those men was Mr. Kiroko, a burly man who could chew on a blade of grass like there was a gift somewhere in the middle, and ignore the dripping drops of saliva, and overly disgusted students, trying hard to ignore him.

Granted, he was a Physics and Metalwork lecturer, perhaps the worst combination of disciplines for anyone hoping to be sane. Mr. Kiroko walks to our bandaged friend and asks

“Joseph, nini lifanyika?” (Joseph, what happened to you?”
Since there is no way of answering the question without it coming out as plain weird…
Joseph: Niliangukiwa na kitanda (The bed fell on me)

Mr. Kiroko (laughing): Ooohhh, I thought you had been kissed by an inexperienced person.

Those are the kind of men who deserve to burn at the stake for making sick and injured people laugh their way back to the theatre.
Okay, yes, barmaids. Njeri is special, she reminds me of the barmaid at another kalocal in South C who does not mind placing a lid over my unfinished beer and keeping it until I go back, even when it is a few days later. I first met Njeri on my birthday, when three girls raided my house and dragged me to a bar to stop mulling over my first major event as a single guy. She could not get over the fact that I had three women in a bar on a Saturday when the bar lacks any despite being in the residential area next to a public university.

I think I made around ten friends that day, men giving me the evil look because I seemed to be hoarding a precious commodity. Old men, to be precise, with clear worry lines on their face that only come from having two children, mortgage, a nagging wife, a demanding concubine, an old car and loans from all banks. They are the kind of men with tired looks on their face like the weight of all the people in the world has been placed upon their shoulders. They love sweet young things who can marvel at their experiences, and who are impressed by their seemingly fat wallets despite the fact that half the weight is just business cards.
I saw the kind at a club some time when I misguidedly decided to see what goes on in the dark side of Corner House. On the table next to me was a young girl, probably what Waga Odongo call’s ‘girl’s born in the multiparty era’ with two old men who could only have been her dad and uncle, or vice versa. One was fat and stubby, wearing the kind of coat you are sure your dad either looted from a stall during the 1982 coup or has had since his university days when Sabina Joy was still cool.

The other guy was younger, probably in his forties but was not interested in the particular girl. It was weird because she was dancing along, and she had moves from an alien planet, the kind that make you wonder whether the dancer has any bone structure at all, especially a pelvis, how can someone survive without a pelvis? The guys, on the other hand, were doing moves akin to swallowing a Taser gun and a raccoon with untrimmed nails.

Njeri still marvels at that, and every time I am hit by my withdrawals and I need to sit among strangers and block out the world, she always asks me why ‘my women’ are not with me. I smile then, because I do not want to tell her I have noises in my head that need silence in the middle of all the noise, and a fixation like counting the drinks behind the counter. I know she means well, so I buy her a beer, a Guinness Kubwa at the lower limit of Mututho time and shake my head as she tries to make conversation. She is hard to read, partly because her teeth are distracting and partly because I do not care to do so. It would not help either of us, she believes I am a pimp and I am happy to let her think so.
I met Joyce on Saturday, the barmaid with a tattoo of her name on her hand. That’s either vanity, or there is some sort of kidnapping ring going around in Kenya where people are tattooed their own names for easier identification. Maybe the bar is her prison? Think about it, she does not move from the bar, so maybe her legs are chained to something underneath so she does not move outside. She has to say in her circle, figuratively, and semi-circle, literally. It could be a project by the evil overlord, he of the all-seeing eye in the form of a bouncer who stares at your date like you are a chicken sticking its neck out begging to be killed. The thought crossed my mind, but I could not save her even if she was. She is not exactly hot, and the good lord, or evolution, or wherever it is we wretched beings came from, saw it fit to give me an untamed mind in place of smashing princely look. I do not think her parents are royalty so ours would not be a Shrek-kind of a story, so I let her be, and followed her with my eyes as she did her job.
There is something intriguing about the barman/barmaid and the way they maintain sanity in the middle of madness. Joyce even has a system behind her, which I noticed when I tipped her and she took the note and placed it on a tumbler on one of the shelves. The tumbler had her name, and there were other tumblers, probably five or six, with names of people I guess are the waitresses. The system seems pretty simple, given the madness of a bar, so everytime anyone gets a tip they take the money to her and she, hopefully faithfully, places it in the respective tumbler. I sit there and try to guess what led her to this life that is still not fully appreciated as an art in our country.

Is she happy about what she does?

Does she have kids?

Do they know their mother is pharmacist with a limited inventory who cures the worries of men by feeding them on what they order?

If she is a slave, does she have any sexy stories about why she is now behind the bar?

Like she tried to run away and her captors chained her there, so her way of asking to be saved is to tell me her name so I can stop calling her ‘mami’?

I missed the cues then I guess, and she is destined to live in captivity behind a bar her entire working life.

Owaahh, 2012.

 

 

Discourse on Religion: Making a Case for Antitheism

Before I open this discourse, I will give anyone reading this fair warning that emotions and blatant myopia should be left at the door if they cannot be permanently discarded in any exploration about spiritual matters. This should be an opening statement of sorts for a discussion on whether religion is still positively significant in our lives and not just a boxing match between any religions. If you can’t keep intellectual objectivity, please close the tab and move on. It would also help if we all first understand the difference between theism, atheism and anti-theism.
The flare up in North Africa and the Middle East has reignited debate about the usefulness of the concept of religion in a modern world. So what has religion really done for the modern man? It has allowed for the construction of social structures and the spread of what we have christened ‘civilization.’ Our African realities are slightly different because we have adopted religions without giving them the same intellectual basis that it deserves. Our Kenyan ancestors for example, became sponges of Christianity and Islam without weighing their actual effect and necessity within their lives. The conservative forms of religion introduced at the onset of colonialist, the African Inland Church, the Anglican and Catholic churches and other mainstream religion simply based their importance on the idea that the African was a heathen. Were we? In religious discourse with the few believers I have found willing to engage in an intellectual examination of theism (they are few and far between), the most potent question has been whether our forefathers would be punished for ‘lack of knowledge.’ Would they burn in the eternal see of fire for not knowing that the peak of Mount Kenya has nothing but ice and clouds and no deity lives there? The answer is almost always hidden behind a façade of super nature.

Ancient peoples for whom religion represented a core basis of all social and political structures believed in a series of gods and focused on spreading their religion to conquered peoples. Hence the Latin saying ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ which simply means ‘whose realm, his religion.’ It allowed each conquering prince to establish his religion and impose it upon conquered peoples. It assumed they had no free thoughts and that the new religion was much better than anything they had in place. In essence, however, it was simply easier to govern them if they worshipped the same gods as their rulers. Kenyatta explored the same concept when he told of how our ancestors ‘exchanged’ their ancestral land for the Bible.  The premise here is that one religion is better and ‘more correct’ than the other. It is more common than you might want to believe, and if you are a member of any religion this is most likely the premise upon which you gauge it to others.
This is not a discourse about which religion is better than the other, if such a comparison ever was possible, but one that man would benefit greatly from a world void of all religions. In an increasingly globalized world, the cuius regio, eius religio no longer works. The Muslim in a Christian country thinks consumerism is the real deity and that the lack of social order based on religion is wrong; the Christian in a Muslim country is perturbed by the apparent lack of basic freedoms and the ‘intrusion’ of religious doctrine into social and political structures. The Hindus and Jews have traditionally been able to stay obscure outside their main focus centers but their influence is still significant.

Fast forward to modern day Kenya and the situation is ever grimmer. You have the modern pastor who is simply a self-help guru rolled over in a basic knowledge about the bible and human psychology, wearing an expensive and colorful suit and driving a sleek car. The modern day Imam only maintains his flock if he is anti-American in all aspects, including the opposition to consumerism and interest. Whether he wears a long-flowing cloak and carries a staff, or an expensive suit and drives a fuel guzzler, or a man in a cap and a flowing kanzu who supports murder of a fellow human being, the modern day preacher is an epitome of everything that is wrong with religion. We expect our leaders to be perfect, we force them towards it and fixate on what spews from their mouths without examining their actions. They become like the rich business guru who gains his wealth by teaching others how to build their companies but never actually building one themselves.
Even more worrying is the apathetic state that most believers live in. Consider the current protests in Libya, Yemen and Egypt. Are the murders of an ambassador and his staff, and the blatant destruction of property worth it as an indication that people will not condone any review of their religion that does not agree with them? The fatwa against Salman Rushdie is a reminder of what religion has done for us as a people, being dragged into protests for which we know little about. It affects all of us, the discourse on religion, because it is now integrated in much of society. Traditional religions would have reacted in the same way modern ones do, simply exploring the possible lack of existence of no god would have led to being ostracized and shunned by all and sundry, and in extreme cases, execution. Religion was everything, it was food, it was family and it was government.
Would we be a better people if we had no religion? Not entirely. Different studies have shown that there is a significant psychological benefit to believing in something, or someone, with greater power than ourselves. In these times of high inflation and bad governance, a man should indeed believe in something. Is religion the answer? I think it goes to the same premise upon which I oppose atheist groups, it beats the purpose. If a man shall be judged by his individual actions then congregating to commit atrocities is merely making the offences mainstream. Sitting through a sermon where you know the pastors misgivings should be a sin, and explains why many pastors’ children become rebels. Psychologists think it has something to do with teenage rebellion but it is more than that, the child sees the parent in both cloaks, the holier-than-thou one he or she exhibits on the pulpit, spewing advice and interpreting messages from a deity, and the one at home, with no inhibitions of the congregation or the pulpit.
Gloria Steinem equates religion to something even more effective than consumerism. “It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.” But is anyone really thinking about it? If you were in church today or in the mosque on Friday, or wherever it is that you worship the deity you believe in, did you stop to weigh the reasons why the you are there? The real ones, not the ones that were fed to you by your parents or the preacher or the media? Did it make sense to you? Is sex abhorred in your religion and procreation encouraged at the same time?
Those who claim that there is no logical explanation for the supernatural ignore the fact that Galilei was executed for claiming, rightly so, that the earth was round. Is your counter argument that those were medieval times and the Catholic Church was more than just a church? If yes, remember this are the same guys, give or take a few centuries, who were busy interpreting the Bible from its original languages. Galileo’s imprisonment and eventual demise is no different from the shooting and murder of the filmmaker Van Gogh a few years ago by Mohammed Bouyeri for his role in the production of the film Submission. Its very simple: Do you believe the ‘infidels’ should die or can never be forgiven by your deity? If yes, you are missing the whole point of religion.
Spirituality should be the journey of each man on his own because once huddled together in small or large groups where some exert influence over others, as will almost always happen, then it ceases to be a journey and becomes a mob. When we fight open discourse with the threat of death, excommunication and the condemnation of eternal fire, we fail as human beings and in our minds, sanitize our actions. When the Catholic Church excommunicates a nun for engaging in political activities, and yet makes political statements every other week, does it not raise concerns about other contradictions in its doctrinal basis?
The human moral compass is not based on any single deity, unlike what your religion would have you believe. Instead, a child is nurtured within society to know and respect rules. Our self-appointed role as the most intelligent species means that morality is, or should be, embedded within human nature itself. You learn, however, that it is not right to kill your fellow man in any case, unless he opposes your religion or ‘insults’ it. Religion drives a herd mentality that can turn into a ‘mob mentality’ in an instant. Respect for life is defined by whether the victim is a member of religion or not as opposed to the sad loss of life. “Might makes right”?
Let me open this discourse here by ending with the last words of Theo van Gogh to his attacker, Bouyeri, who shot him eight times and stabbed him with two knives, “Mercy! Mercy! Can’t we talk about this?”