7 Ballsiest Hoaxes Ever Pulled by Kenyans

 I’ve only been conned once. By an old man. An old senile man. Not 60s old, older, that guy was really really old. By the time I realized I was the sucker in the transaction, he was probably on his deathbed, dying of natural causes. I was KES 2500 poorer, carrying a shredded ego and for some odd reason, finding it funny and embarrassing at the same time. Although the relic didn’t get a lot of money, the pang of my gullibility lasted for months, probably longer than him.

But when that old man was younger (or still old, but not as old), Kenyans fell for many hoaxes. To their defense, it was the Age BG-Before Google. Still, even in the Google Age, we are still made of suckers and gullibility. Suspect Everyone.

This is a sequel to this previous list.

#7 The Facebook Phishing/MPESA hoax

One of the most ingenious hoaxes/financial cons in recent years, this one takes the cake for how fool proof it can be if you are not skeptical.
It works rather simply; a Facebook friend starts a random conversation, he or she then asks you to send money to someone for them-always KES 5, 000, repayable the next day as KES 8, 000/7, 000-because they are in a fix. The appeal for first, friendship, and second, greed, is the very ingenuity of this hoax. You have friends and you are greedy because you are a human being like the rest of us. 

The phishing component is often the first phase. You receive a random link to vote for someone or something of the sought that takes you to a dummy Facebook page where you need to enter your email address and password again to access. A day or so later, you can’t access your profile, and suddenly your Facebook friends are calling you asking you whether your friend got the money. You try to change your password, but nein! The fraudsters add an extra password recovery email address to your profile and it’s a game of cat-and-mouse between the two of you, battling for control.

The name of the MPESA is always something common, like Tracy Kamau, Stacy Kamau, Janet Kamau. You will never get your money back.

#6 The Medical Adverts

There was always a sense in the Kenyan ‘spirit’ of Harambee that skirted the thin line between altruism and survivor guilt. Pure concern for others, it would emerge in later years when the ‘spirit’ was banned, is easy to exploit especially in a country used to throwing money at problems. Every disaster or accident is immediately followed by a call to fundraise, and no questions are ever asked about why the system doesn’t work. News reports on almost anything sad, even the death of a cat (hasn’t happened yet but who knows) are followed by  a Pay Bill number for the sad reader to restore some hope to humanity (or its endless greed).

 The medical adverts con is easy, and the epitome happened only two months ago. Two men walked into local dailies and paid for a medical appeal advertisement for a Master Cavlin Wanzila.

It later turned out that Wanzila is not really Wanzila, but Laren Galloway. Galloway has creepy but intriguing blue eyes, most likely caused by a genetic disorder called Waardenburg Syndrome.

Does this picture look familiar? You’ve been duped.

Now you know that, but when the photo was published in local dailies in August, not many did and the hoax worked. With a small investment of about KES 50, 000 and remarkable ingenuity, our confidence team of two men and a woman just sat back and watched the monies roll in from gullible well-wishers who seriously wanted to help.

Ruth, the woman in the story, had received at least Shs. 1.7 million by the time the trio was made.

#5 Fred Achieng’, or was he?

By the time the British justice system sentenced this guy to four years imprisonment for fraud and theft, he had left a trail of bruised egos and bad debts. His greatest ruse was that he was the playboy son of Saudi arms dealer Adan Khashoggi, Mohammed Khashoggi.

He used his ‘father’s’ name to win over favors which mostly included free nights in presidential suites at five –star hotels, all over. His ruse even managed to make suckers out of successful businessmen like Allen Sheppard, the proprietor of the Grand Metropolitan Hotel Group in London.

He was a big spender and an astonishingly talented pianist. That latter attribute worked well for him, winning him many nights in five-star hotels. At some point, he was a cabaret artist in a prestigious hotel. At another, he was swindling everyone who had money at the coast. Using his best ruse and at other times claiming he was the son of a Permanent Secretary, Fred (or whatever his real name was) really had a blast in Nairobi, Mombasa and London. The lowly porter with a knack for the keyboard pushed it too far by targeting five-star hotels, but since there was no Google then, it took sometime before his huge bills got him made.

#4 The Miracle Babies

There has only been one true miracle baby and he was crucified on a cross. Or so the story goes. Unless you believe your pregnant daughter too when she swears she was fertilized by nature, and not by a young man you can blast with the shot gun you will buy for just that purpose. But Deya and his wife Eddah Odera had 12 of those, the miracle babies, not the shot guns, between 1999 and 2004.

The man with magic bullets.

At 56, Eddah was post-menopausal and her body should have shut down that business of churning out babies like a Coca Cola bottling factory sometime in the decade before. But she claimed it hadn’t. The entire system was simply machine-gunning out babies like it was being paid to do so. The Lord, through her husband and prophet, Gilbert Deya, had seen it fit to bring forth a new football team in five years (there are some teams in the EPL that can attest to this never working).

The ministry’s advert openly solicits “God has blessed us with miracle babies that the world has never seen anything like before. Your donation is very useful to your miracle.”

It was total BS.  DNA tests showed no genetic link between the dozen children and their bewildered post-menopausal mother. No one seems to have thought of claiming that the foreign DNA was God’s. Wait, if we are theists, all DNA should be His, right? Logistics, logistics, you would think Nature or someone would make it easier. No one used the defense that maybe because a deity was simply making sperm out of thin air, maybe the DNA couldn’t match in the first place.

One of the women who was jailed with Deya’s wife, Rose Kiserem, later confessed to the whole thing being a ruse to hide a child-trafficking ring. It was a face-saving confession, and it only came after Deya refused to ‘apologize to her.’ Wait, shouldn’t he be apologizing to all those women who lost their kids?

#3 Kamlesh Pattni

Of course the Brother Paul had to be here. The story of Goldenberg is old, and tired, and Pattni is still rich, but it still needs to be told.

In the early 1990s, the not-so-bright Kenyan government sought to mitigate the economic crisis it had created the decade before by encouraging exports. Local businesses were given an incentive that  included a payback of every $20 for every $100 of products exported. Simple, yes, but there was no system of verifying volume, the entire process relied on the paper trail.

Pattni, young and ambitious, quickly opened a company and started exporting nonexistent gold to get the bonus. There was only one tiny gold mine in Kenya at the time, in Kakamega. The actual gold that was ever exported was first smuggled in Kenya from Congo and then forwarded to get the government bonus. He roped in the suckers and collaborators throughout the system; more later when he was almost caught and instead conviniently started his own bank, Exchange Bank Limited which made his system foolproof. Instead of the usual 20%, Pattni earned 35 percent for his gold and diamonds exports.

Never has this picture been more relevant.
Source: LA Times…

By the end of the mess, Kenya’s public coffers were $600 million short, and through a commission of inquiry and some lethargic prosecutions, Goldenberg would become a tattered rag of a story, and Pattni would become Paul, Brother Paul. Rich and blessed by God, a greedy system, an obnoxious judiciary, and apathetic at-least-he-did-not-steal-from-my-house taxpayers.

#2 The Man who milked an Elephant

Unlike Brother Paul who seems to have emerged from his elephant-milking unscathed save for a bad reputation, Peter Baraza had the injuries but no milk. In a story headlined ‘Meet the man who milked an elephant‘ that appeared in a local daily in 1998, the 21-year old Kenyan farmer claimed that he had milked an elephant as she grazed with her calf. The irate mother, after letting him milk her a bit, then turned on him and gave him a proper ass-whoopin’! But it didn’t smash him or cause very extensive injuries-he had a dislocated shoulder, ‘other internal injuries’ and the shock of surviving with such an awesome story.

Dramatization

So, why didn’t he, like Nyaumbe (the man who bit and beat a python) make it to Badass of the Week. Because it was a hoax. One that everyone, including papers such as LA Times, went ahead and re-published. That article raises a poignant question about the original report that appeared in the Daily Nation, why Baraza, other than the reason that he just felt like doing it, had tried to milk the elephant.

The story was also insensitive to the elephant- it implied that she had only knocked him out when she realized that he was milking her, which was like a minute later (like her boobs are that numb, but who knows).

This is an aside, but does anyone know whether elephants have nipples? If they do, they must be big. Baraza-crushing big. They are probably the ones that knocked him out. What search terms do I even enter into Google for this without looking like am researching for a fete of wildlife intercourse, pun intended?

I am not very sure what is happening here.

But there was a major problem. The real Peter Baraza from Nyahururu had no injuries and had made no such claim. He, like the rest of us mere mortals, feared elephants for their sheer size and their ability to make a smudge out of our entire lives. Someone had made up the story, and when Baraza was done with Nation Media Group in a defamation case, he was KES 2 million richer. This time, he had milked an elephant for real, just not in the forest.

#1 Eric Awori

This is one of the least known, yet the ballsiest hoax ever pulled off by a Kenyan on Kenyans. Yes, it beats Brother Paul’s daylight robbery. Even Deya’s how-about-we-sign-up-a-whole-team-from-this-uterus ruse.

 In the pre-automatic cars age, and when cars were still the reserve of the government and her owners, Awori decided to play what would turn out to be the most embarrassing con someone, make that entire newsrooms and thus, millions of readers, would ever fall for. Forget the old senile man who made a sucker out of me, forget him and his shaking hands and dying wishes, Awori made a fool out of an entire nation.

Step 1:
Sourced from http://www.blog.espow.com

Awori’s con was simple. Sometime n 1985, he made the ballsy claim that he had driven a car in reverse from Mombasa, through Nairobi, to Rongai (the Nakuru one, it’s further than the landlocked country past Lang’ata. You need a Christopher Columbus for this one) and then back to the capital city. Simple, right? Until you re-read the first sentence in this paragraph and notice the words ‘in reverse’!

Parallel parking an automatic car is hard enough as it is (someone said it would can be used to sort out who to sacrifice to the zombies first, I think that can work) but we have a guy here who swore by the gods of Motor oil that he had put his manual shift in reverse and driven about 650km (on bad roads, by the way) without his head getting permanently sore from looking at his driver’s mirror and without a single accident.

There was no mention of a navigator, although that would have been confusing. It’s like when you are trying to direct your wife out the parking lot, and you tell her to turn the wheels to her left, and then she asks whether it is your left or hers, and then you sit and cry? Or one of those times when you have to do the writing motion to remind yourself which one is your right upper limb?

Awori claimed the world record was then held by Gerald Hoagland, and in the celebrity shenanigans that followed the king of reverse in Kenya, he even got a new Toyota Corolla from Westlands Motors. True, a Gerald Hoagland had driven 102 km in reverse “Fortunately for Hoagland and motorists in general, the event took place on a special track.” Because driving in reverse is disorienting and bound to get messy. The girls might cheer you on and cream their pants for you, until you drive right into the bevy of cheerleaders. Men will put pinups of your car’s booty on their walls, and worship you. Awori knew that, he banked on it. 

But he wasn’t done. He announced he was going from the city to Mombasa driving a 7-tonne lorry. In reverse! Clearly, all these reversing was growing the ballsiness of our antagonist here. The even crazier part? Car companies fell for it! The very people who sold such machines fell smack into the con! DT Dobie (you would think, you would think.) donated fuel, and a Mercedes-Benz lorry for Awori to guide with his back-of the head eyes all the way to the Kenyan coast. Car companies, mainstream newspapers (I see you, Daily Nation), and just about everyone else.

They say you should never marry someone until you’ve watched them drive in reverse.
Image from http://www.getahead.rediff.com

They say you shouldn’t marry someone until you’ve watched them drive in reverse.

Of course he won! …and a ‘John Miller’, a supposed Guinness Book of World Records adjudicator, sent a telegram confirming that Awori had smashed a record. In reverse. He was putting Kenya on the reverse map and local dailies were buying the story like sponges.

Once you win over everyone at home, the next step is New Zealand, right? Awori new that, and according to his telexes, that was his next step, Auckland, for the “620-km Kiwi Auto Reverse Rally. ”He took the hoax too far by ‘winning’ that world championship too far, and before long, his Kenyan assembled bubble burst. When the cops caught up with him after the New Zealand High Commission called BS on the win, all the reversing that Awori had been doing was his swivel chair in an office in Mama Ngina Street as he shuttled between the telex machine and the coffee pot, periodically breaking into maniacal laughs while patting himself on the back. 

People are still setting records for reverse driving, but Awori is not among them

 No mention on whether he was jailed but if he was, you can be sure someone in prison made him drive. In Reverse. If you catch my drift…

Owaahh^©, 2013

 

7 Most Eccentric Kenyan Politicians

The thin line between eccentricity and insanity is riddled with money, and power, and political office, and balls.  In fact, if you the common Wanjiku were to try some of the eccentricities here, there would be a ‘Get Wanjiku to Mathari Hospital Campaign.’

#7 Kamwithi Munyi

In an age that was characterized by sychophancy and national asskissing to win favor with the big man it is hard for anyone to stand out, but this man did. Everyone was ‘toeing the line’ which is just euphemism for kissing the man who lived in the house on the hill’s ass.

Kamwithi Munyi would wear “… two wristwatches lest he missed a presidential function, nodded at every word the president uttered as he judiciously took notes”

Kamwithi, seen here after reincarnation…

That’s it, Munyi wore two watches because he didn’t trust either to be correct. He believed in ‘The Synergy of Many Watches and the ancient art of asskissing’ [citation needed] Or perhaps no one told him about Segal’s Law “A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.”

People wear two watches for different reasons, the more apparent of which is stupidity.

#6 Dixon Kihika Kimani

Where Peter Oloo Aringo was the court poet, Dixon Kihika Kimani was the court jester and he owned that with unmatched awesomeness.

Kihika Kimani Live? Anyone? NTV?

Most of his quips were in vernacular but the meaning cannot be lost to anyone.
He holds the record for being the only man to ever represent three different constituencies. You would think disappointing three different electorates would qualify one for the list but this man did more, or rather sad more.

When a Nakuru trader, Mbugua, expressed interest in a car he was selling, he laughed off the whole idea and told him in Kikuyu: “Ukwenda gakari gaka nduire thuragiria? (You want this car, in which I have been farting?)” Well, that is not exactly a sales pitch, sir.
Interviewer (when he saw the 70-year old Kihika with a 6-month old boy): “Ona gaka no gaku mutongoria? (You have fathered this one, too, mheshimiwa?)

…and he might have succeded, meet his gorgeous daughter, now the Nakuru County Assembly Speaker…your argument is invalid.

Kihika: “Tondu niwe undeithitie gugaciara?” (Have I asked forhelp from you on that matter?).
“Hata sasa nikitaka naweza kuchukua wanawake tatu, nne, niende nao kwangu kwa sababu nina mali (Even now, I can take away three or four womenand marry them off because I have wealth),” he would say.

He was elected in three different constituencies, a fete no one has achieved before or after him. He is also famous for having his six wives run in different constituencies, giving new meaning to the art of spreading your luck.

# 5 C M Njonjo and his pinstripe

Meet Sir Charles M. Njonjo, the Duke of Kabeteshire. Njonjo is almost always seen ‘…Clad in his trademark three-piece custom-made pinstripe (with his initials “CN”) suits with a watch on a golden chain dangling down his neck.”He is a man who is known for his British mannerisms, although we cannot confirm whether this is as cool as having a British accent (which has been scientifically proven to increase one’s chances of getting laid exponentially). Njonjo is credited with giving us Kenya’s Machiavellian prince, also known as the giraffe of Kenyan politics, and hence triggering events whose effects we are still seeing now. If kids do not get their free laptops.in the next six months, you know who to blame now.
Everyone knew Sir Charles was stylish and more obsessed over his pinstripes than the government he was supposed to be advising on legal matters. The truth about the pinstripes, was captured in the Miller Inquiry when so many snitching on the man that it held the record until Michael Vick was tried for holding dog fights [citation needed].
The Miller Inquiry ended up being more about the man’s vanity and narcissism than the accusation of treason. THis was the same man who had accused people of ‘imagining the death of the president’ so…karma.

The age before zoom?

“In January 1981 he (senior superintendent of police Essau Kihumba Kioni) discussed with a Mr Todd, an accountant in the revenue section, the issue of excess baggage weighing 270kg that had been flown in by Njonjo from London. When it was confirmed with the London authorities that Njonjo had not paid for the excess baggage, the chief accountant discussed the matter with the airline’s Managing Director, Lord Cole and Njonjo was invoiced Sh36,272.50 on January 21, 1981. On January 29 the same year Kioni was summoned to Njonjo’s office, where in front of Lord Cole and Simon Mbugua the then permanent secretary in the Ministry of Transport, the former AG expressed his disgust at the police officer.”

270kg of what most certainly were a bunch of suits and for which a lowly officer got to see the AG’s office.

You raise us tyranny and a suit, Hosni? We raise you consistency!

Now, even common folk like you and I get clothes that are tailored somewhere-the difference is whether they are tailored in a sweatshop in China where one of the company policy rules is to not get frustrated and jump out of the window, or in London where the cost of thread can feed a family for a few weeks.

Njonjo wins this for consistency, having worn the suits for almost as long as he has been posing for photos.

#4 Martin Shikuku and the early grave

In an age where sycophancy was real, there were those few blessed with tonnes of bollocks the size of Saturn complete with rings of badassery and nongiveanyfuckatall-erely (citation needed). One of those few was Martin Shikuku.

KANU might be dead, Shikuku, but it had already sired enough….

Shikuku dug his own grave actually he had two of them dug and labeled clearly so no one would bury him in his wife’s grave. Then he bought them coffins and placed them in the house. You can relax now, married guy, suddenly your oily spanner on the kitchen table sounds like child’s play. If she ever brings up that or the dirty socks on the coffee table, point her to what Shikuku’s wife had to go through with two coffins in the house, maybe even using them as a book case.
Shikuku made his funeral arrangements in 2004 (Including no religious rites and political speeches), which is pretty weird because his chances of being assassinated had gone down exponentially with the fall of the ‘official’ KANU in 2002. He is most famous for saying that KANU, the mother and father of the republic, the cockerel of the land was dead.

“Yes, I need two levels in the grave too, in case I decide to resurrect”

Everyone knew it, but you couldn’t just tell the king he was naked. Simply calling the cock (ignore, for the next few minutes, that the last two syllables of his surname alluded to poultry) dead does not count as a qualification to be on this list-there are enough men having to tell their girlfriends that everyday-but the cock in question here was the only cock in the whole nation (I don’t know why you are thinking of the cock that is not the cockerel that is only male poultry. You might need therapy), But my guess is that there are two places you couldn’t say ‘the cock is dead’ and expect to be treated the same way after between 1965 and 1991 and that’s Kenya and the Playboy mansions.

For eight years he walked past his own grave most likely even jumped in a few times to get a feel of his body’s eternal home. You figure he most likely covered it or something, more to prevent the occassional four-legged domesticated animal from falling in and forcing everyone to throw ropes at an ass.

#3 Mutula Kilonzo, the Lion herder

So you own a pet, or pets,yes? You do, of course you do, you are most likely reading this with your feline lord straddled across your lap, and you are stroking her with one hand as you scroll down with the other…any lubricant and I would ask you to first finish off the creepy business before reading on! Or you own lolCats, the internet equivalent of these living deities. Still, you own a pet, even if its just the cockroaches now walking across your carpet simply because someone whose pants you are trying to decode is seated across….whichever the case, your relevant lane on the road of pet-keeping is a damp weather road with potholes compared to this man’s.

No, not this one of his hobbies…

Meet the other Mutula who lives in his Sh2 million cage called “The Hague”. The other Mutula is not a learned friend, he is a friend with a mane, a lion (Dear dyslexic, we all have loins, if we had wanted a list about loins we would have written one. So, lions it is, unless your lions are roaring in which case, stop reading this and go get checked by someone, preferably a witchdoctor with proven experience and no front teeth….trust me, you do not want to know why). 2 million bob, you that read right (but you that read wrong, this too…again, twice, too easy?).

That’s the price of a decent family home in most parts of KE, or a campaign if you want to win a parliamentary seat in Meru.

The politician is rearing three lions and has named the dominant one after himself (ofcourse). The lions and the cheetahs (one named Mutula and the other Ocampo because …well,because subliminal) are fed on beef and goat meat from his livestock, but only five days in a week so they don’t become obese-no one wants momo-lions.

Two Mutulas, one owned by KWS, the other by KRA.

One lionness is named Sis and the other, Nduku, after his wife. Now, given that this are the only three lions on the ranch, and that they most likely mate (although they are orphans), this could actually be a representation of a man’s threesome fantasy cum incest cum adultery with le sister and le wife cum everyone at once. [citation needed]
Now you have to clarify which Mutula you are talking about, is it Mutula the Simba, Mutula the Wild Pig, Mutula the Cheetah or Mutula the  former Mbooni MP (you would think representing a constituency with such a name would be enough).

Naming a wild pig after yourself is not exactly subtle is it sir?

#2 D. T Arap Moi and his baton
Its the way he shamelessly fondles it in public (for over three decades, the horror!) that should tell you who we are as a country. We are queer, we like to watch…

See how he holds it?

It looks somewhat like a dildo, something you would see in a grotesque porn movie with a lass on heels on one end and a jerk on the other. In this scenario, only the lass is missing.No one knows whether he sleeps with it.
Moi is an obsessive man, as this profile on his sense style suggests . He is well-dressed for a man his age, and looks quite healthy but it is impossible to find a profile of the man that does not mention the “elegant gold- or silver-tipped ivory rungu.”

He referred to it as his fimbo ya nyayo- making you dear male reader, not the first one to name something you own and fondle ‘fimbo’, in fact, take a number, this one might have copyright issues.

We know he used it whenever he was angry; sometimes shattering it in which case another rhino or elephant would have to die for a replacement baton- unless all the rungus were made when the first one was killed, poachers, are two tusks enough for…say, 30 presidential phallic symbols? This is a safe environment, you can answer at the comment section…(the worst that can happen is a 30k fine if they catch you).

Is it just me or is the head on this one bigger?

During a visit to Australia in 1981, Moi accidentally dropped and broke it.   He was so distressed that aides had to arrange for a replacement to Down Under (See what I did there?)

Eddie Murphy once described Moi as a bone carrying head of state . If Eddie Murphy had been Kenyan, Eddie Murphy would have had Eddie Murphy’s balls between a pair of rusty pliers in the basement of Nyayo House for sedition and making fun of the father of the nation. The man was Machiavellian to the core, a giraffe and a tyrant now celebrated for being old and clairvoyant.

Seen here definitely not describing the size of the real one

Should it worry you when everyone talks about the pointy thing you carry around everywhere? Especially if you don’t work in the porn industry?

Yes, the taxpayer paid for an eccentricity because you don’t want your president to be distressed that the thing he holds on to is now broken. Because we never heard it after, in the next 20 odd years of leadership, we can assume he improved his grip, learnt how to….hold it better with dropping it…if you catch my drift.
It seems to escape our national conscience that we have phallic symbols in the capital city and a major town and we are not worried about its impact on morals (come on clergy, when do you start hating on this one too?).

Your Excellency, if you would please toss your rungu in there too, and maybe stand closer to the fire?

The irony did not seem to dawn on anyone that the guy burning 60 tonnes of ivory  to discourage poaching was holding a baton was made of ivory.

Closer…

..but when you are the president you can even add the phallic symbol to the currency….

When yours truly tried it, carrying around a stick as a boy, there was a fully-fledged, state-sanctioned, family intervention because everyone thought he was exhibiting masturbatory behaviour (holding the/a stick all the time is not exactly subliminal is it?)

No one said it out loud but he knew, or rather he knows now why it was thrown into the latrine.

I dare to start hitting on women in the club while holding a baton suggestively. Well, Moi can get away with that but you my friend can’t… This can only work if you own stuff and you make shit happen.Some life advice? Whatever your eccentricity is, don’t carry a baton unless you are high in the police hierachy, unless it can get you laid then always carry a baton, in fact, carry a pair of balls too!

When you are president you can even immortalize the phallic symbol, and add a mountain just for kicks…

#1 Dr. Taita Towett and a host of eccentricities
Any list here at Too Late for Worms that Dr. Towett appears in is bound to have him as the most of anything… because  was weird and he owned it….like a bawse, before it was even cool to be short and not give the tiniest of F-words for what anyone else thought. Taita Towett is here because if he wasn’t rich or powerful, he would have simply been a madman.

So you think you are awesome? Tell me more…(see the specs?)

Now, one understands why a man with 26 children, five marriages and two divorces would make everyone keep time. You don’t want a whole polling station yelling ‘give us money, give us money’ at the same time. As a Kenyan politician, Towett knew the ancient art of keeping your constituents waiting, ensuring you could break their will one by one.
When everyone was clamoring for multipartyism from 1988? Towettwas advocating for a party-less state-which would have saved us from our legendary political prostitution. We also know that he was a linguist, and a tribalist, by today’s standards for having not pretended he wanted ‘other tribes’ in the Rift Valley in the 1960.

Research Endeavors
Long before Robinson Githae told us we were dying of hunger because we are stupid (not exactly in thos words), Towett had already tried to figure out how eating moles (which he paid catchers KShs. 15 for) affects the eater’s sleeping habits.His hypothesis? That rodent’s have heavy sleeping habits and most likely affect how the eater sleep? This would have been important research and might have, to some extent,, provided Githae with the scientific evidence he needed to validate telling such a proud goat-and-donkey eating nation to eat rats.

Plus there would have been a clash of egos, cats do whatever they want too…Feline Towetts

He had first wanted to use cats for the study but abandoned the feline animals because he discovered their ineptness. The cats were naturally heavy sleepers and he settled on the moles.

That’s right, this guy stayed up watching rodents sleep. Which makes sense, to some level, because you want to wake your cat up when the mice are asleep, or to take shifts waiting outside the mice-condo in your wall (we have watched too much Tom and Jerry, clearly).
Why we don’t have the journal article? Well, he’s research couldn’t really have passed the scientific tests of validity because of several reasons. One, he was his own sample population, okay, he and the moles he caught and booked one of his wives to cook for him were the sample population. Being the guinea pig is not exactly sharp is it?

(Singing) SOMEBADY SAAAAAAAAAAVVEEEE ME!

Two, even if we were to accept his self-experiement, there is also the other matter of his WhiteCap. Anyone who knows Queen’s O’Clock knows that it is the ancient cure for insomnia and is so effective that it most likely made the moles look bad.
Another one of his many research endeavors was the effect of alcohol on sexual performance in men. It just sounds like a ruse to get an orgy from your five wives doesn’t it? You would think owning a harem would increase your chances of getting laid…

Mashimoni
It is said that his Ngata house farm was invisible until one got really close to it, and no, I am not making phallic allusions as I was doing in one of the previous entries. The house, known as ‘Mashimoni’, first made it to the national news plate when the Standard carried an article in 1987 of how weird Towett was.
When the journalist asked him why he dug out so much soil and built a bunker excuse for a house, his response was:

I can even wash my hands in the sufuria and set the style standards for Mike Ross. (and how to not forget where you placed your glasses for everyone else)

“There is no such thing in the world as ‘below ground’ because even if you dig a hundred kilometres into the ground, you will still be stepping on ground. I have built my house below grass. You will appreciate that grass only grows at the surface of the earth. My house is, therefore, ‘below grass residence’.”

Plus below grass sounds like euphemism for being baked.
If you think you are eccentric, dig a house below ground level and call it Mashimoni (the name is so graphic, but I figure he had a crisis because he wanted to call it Shimoni but couldn’t because it would have alluded to something completely different) and spend a few months watching moles sleep, or socialites, whichever tickles you.
The Passenger Seat
Towett’s greatest eccentricity was not even watching moles knock it off or even making barbeque sticks out of their tiny internal organs. His greatest eccentricity was that he thought the inner design of the car was stupid, and he set out to offset the imbalance. How? First, he took out all the back seats and placed a bag of sand in the back (Of all his cars). Then he removed the passenger seat and reversed it to face the back so the passenger could face the driver in transit.

His justification for removing the back seats? “I am not running a taxi service. One seat is enough for me”
For turning the passenger seat? “I like to see who I am talking to, as we travel… most people are so linear in their thinking you waste time looking at them directly in the eye”

Dramatization

But sir, you had a family of 26 children, what you needed was as many seats as those in a Nyayo bus, not less. The rationale here was probably not ‘putting all your eggs in one basket.’
Coould it have all been a ruse to get head-it must be easier? Or to be straddled when driving without the whole, shift-gears-first-so-I-can-move-thing. It makes sense, especially in a car-chase, plus also gives new meaning to head on collision.

Which means that at some point in NRB’s notorius jam, a bored driver would look at the next car and see a man seated on the passenger seat, facing behind, not giving a fuck about anything, and just being awesome and weird. That man, giving a whole new definition to riding shotgun, and perching his spectacles on his head because why not? It also means that guy who drives a ‘pimped out’ Vitz with Christmas lights on the outside and a spade on the excuse of a boot suddenly looks sane.

Owaahh, 2013.

 

7 Most Elaborate Cons ever pulled off in Kenya by Foreigners

Hunter Thompson quipped “In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”

The Original Con.

Wanjiku, the taxpayer who watches soap operas every evening and takes the 9 O’clock news for truth, expects elected leaders and the media to do due diligence and not be stupid and gullible.

History shows that more often than not, they do exactly the opposite. Many of the cons were successful because we have a tendency to believe foreigners, and often approach interactions with them with ‘half-closed eyes).

#7 Lamine Diack’s ‘Son’

The (almost) Sucker: Maina Kamanda, then Minister for Sports
You are also forgiven for not knowing Lamine Diack, or why someone would masquerade as his son to swindle a cabinet minister. The would be sucker, then Sports Minister Maina Kamanda had a stroke of luck, and figured it out before he lost his money.

Do something, like call a Minister and say you are the Second Coming.

The Ruse
Imagine you are a cabinet minister and you receive a call from the head of an international sports organization claiming his son, Mohamed was carjacked and is now stranded Kenya. He needs more than Shs. 300k to find become ‘un-carjacked.’

Chances to have the head of IAAF owe you one? Those do not come easily, do they? You can already sense the excitement as you call your bank to see whether they can loan you the money (you are a cabinet minister, of course you are broke, your over 900k salary a month notwithstanding). Kamanda later said “I…alerted my bank to see if they can lend me the 4,000 Euros.”

The taxpayer should be taxed for this scenarios, right? As an allowance for ‘international assistance, networking and asskissing.’ To make sure that whenever a political leader needs to do a favor, he has the necessary funds to handle the bills and buy a favor.

Sir, did you get a reimbursement for the Liddos part?

As your bank sorts out the money issue, you ask your secretary to call back Lamine so you can see ‘what more you can do for him.’ Get the son into Liddos, perhaps, because he might need striptease therapy after the carjacking? Only that this time, you are talking to real Lamine Diack and he swears he knows nothing a son in Mombasa or Kenya, and probably calls your mother names and tells you to quit weed before hanging up on you.

You call the police, trick the guy and arrest him. Then you hold a press conference to express your dismay; underneath it all we know you are cursing the lost chance to be a sucker.
The confidence man who wanted the $5, 100? Nelson Banda, a Zambian national (and no, he is not, to the best of my knowledge, related to the former president).

#6 The Artur Brothers

The Sucker (s): The Kenyan media and public, and almost everyone in between
You have probably heard of this saga so much in the last nine years that you can recite it better than you can the second stanza of the national anthem. The two brothers with similar first names and weird last names, one with a full-time smug on his face that tells you he knows things you don’t.

This is a case of what Johnny Depp’s character in Dark Shadows describes as being ‘so overt it’s covert.’ It is the art of hiding by not hiding, being so much who everyone thinks you are that it can only be a lie. Its what Mike Sonko does by displaying such stupidity that we are just glad he wears clothes.
The Ruse?
It all started with the seizure of a 1.1 metric tonnes of cocaine haul in 2004 at the port of Mombasa that upset the drug business and triggered background power fights, and put the corruption machine into full gear.The Artur brothers were brought in as ‘investors’ and in private circles ‘security consultants (in a way, this is true, just not precise).

The smug look on their faces! Who shaves them anyway? Is there like a mercenary barber?

In 2005, Raila Odinga claimed that they were assassins brought in to kill him.
….before the Arturs said that they had been hired by Raila and ODM to bankroll a regime change (wait, paid to pay for something? Okay…).

Actually, for the lazy reader who hates clicking on links, the main point there is that they ‘…met with Kalonzo and Raila who wanted US$41 million to support the ‘No’ referendum campaign in November 2005 to bring down the Kibaki government. They claimed they had loaned Raila $1.5 million in cash.”

In 2010 they claimed that Kibaki knew about the Standard raid. Didn’t anyone give this people a job description? An entire bureaucracy and no one thought to at least think up a JD?
Like a good number of the entries on this list, they were accommodated at a five-star hotel in Nairobi (Which the taxpayer almost obviously paid for) before moving to ‘their’ Runda home (where they invited the same media they later raided-well, supposedly). Maybe they were the fangs of the rattle snake to which Michuki later alluded.
They were ‘assistant commissioners of police’ with state ‘protection’ (that we still paid for…happily… and just to show them, well, that we can afford mercenaries).

Again, the smug look…what’s with these guys?

On the mercenary issue one of Arturs (I was too lazy to check which one) said: “if we were mercenaries, Kenya could not afford us.” I don’t get these people, insulting our ‘national pride’ by claiming we do not have enough taxpayers and lenders to pay two mercenaries, we pay over 1, 900 of those already-we brand them ‘politicians’ though, it’s easier to spell. (I am tempted to switch to full vernacular mode, what Sunny Bindra calls peculiar lingo and ask ‘ii nikii we!?’)
In the end, no one even knew whether they were Armenian as claimed or Czech as claimed by the immigration ministry. For such an incompetent government, at least they got the Eastern Europe part right.

…Or even why we deported them to Dubai and not Armenia where they claimed to have hailed from.
That claim of an assassination threat? A claim that matches their recent appearance in Maldives just a few days after Mohammed Nasheed, the ousted leader, expressed similar fears.
Now Maldives is scared of falling for the same con job with the president even saying he doesn’t know how to pronounce the first name (Neither do we sir, we just think of how some people would read ‘A tool’ and take it from there. Catch up, ignorance is no excuse). Then this press statement.

#5 Grace Aluma Ondonga, The Woman who ‘sold’ International Life House

The Sucker (s): An MP, diplomats, top companies
The Ruse

Grace Aluma offered to sell International Life House and all of its 15 floors to a group of rich and powerful dudes who drive around Nairobi looking for buildings to buy. Her first pitch was that she was a uranium dealer with the American government, and that she had over $100 million to invest in Kenya.

Sold, to the stupidest bidder!
Source http://www.netagecars.com

Granted, this was the age before the internet so it’s not like you could just Google-search a person and go through their Wikipedia page (stop opening a new tab, she doesn’t have one).
Grace, illiterate as she was, was most likely inspired by this guy, the con artist extraordinare (if they write books about your crimes, that’s a good thing, right?) Lustig is known as the Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower in 1925 (date is key; we don’t know how many other times it’s been sold, France loses many wars).

He became famous for this one act because of the sheer balls it took to ‘sell’ such an iconic piece of architecture and never be prosecuted it for it because the scrap metal dealers he swindled were too powerful to be embarrassed but not bright enough to not see the con. Granted, they were French so, doesn’t really count as a great con Lustig, resurrect, and try again!

Cool move Ondonga, now try sell the most notable piece of architecture in a country and you qualify as a pro…

Her most prominent suckers? Then Bahati MP Fred Omido, Dr. Victor Johnson (UN Consultant from Sierra Leone). She also collected money from Westland Motors (now Toyota Kenya), Swissair (defunct) and Kenya Commercial Bank. Of course, it makes sense for big companies to want to own buildings, the fact that the seller is illiterate being less important than the fact that its such a fair deal.

Omido was later accused by Charles Njonjo of helping Aluma escape.
Like Count Lustig’s ruse, the exact suckers are not named in the media reports, perhaps to save them from the embarrassment. For the simple fact that they are not French, this ruse took balls!
She and her accomplice, Dr Simon Ngoye Mulopwe were arrested in 1984.

#4  Debra Amelia Kasambura nee George, The Queen of Sheba of the Nubian Empire

The Suckers: Government officials (of course), businessmen, Kamlesh Pattni (Someone got even for us? Have we feted them yet?)

If you Google the Queen of Sheba, you are more likely to land on pages about the Queen of Sheba of the Nubian Empire, alias Debra Amelia Kasambura Nee George than the real saphosexual who travelled to get some from King Solomon.

First, just because someone has a pompous title doesn’t mean she’s legit, okay rich and powerful guys? Especially if the title of her Kingdom ‘Ra Nubia-Sheba Imperial Queendom of Sheba Throne’ sounds like someone was trying too hard and couldn’t find time to edit out some kingdoms.

Royalty? Where is the purple?

She claims to have
“… studied law [sic!], psychology [of course] and international marketing [explains everything]… practiced law while running a clothing and design business and also ran a consultancy firm.” (Because….superhuman!)…to have married Adam Sheikh Thabit Kasambura, the self-declared King of the Nubian Dynasty which, according to her, stretched to Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Egypt in 2001.’

How lucky were we, that one year later she decided to grace our capital city with her royal presence?

The Ruse
In March 2002 (everyone was confused between 2000 and 2003, it seems), she arrived in KE and commandeered the Presidential Suite at the Grand Regency Hotel (owned at the time by the one man who deserves a list of cons all to himself) all to herself for what she termed as a ‘working holiday’. Like good lapdogs, many senior government officials and businessmen advanced her goods and services … because, well, because royalty!

She demanded special treatment and made government officials run at her beck and call organizing a meeting with President Moi and doing all things pertaining to ass-kissing. She raked up a Shs. 3.4 million bill at the five-star hotel that included medical bills the hotel had paid for her when she fell ill.

This is not her?.

Like all other entries on this list, this one thrived on the pathological greed of the Kenyan politician, civil servant, businessman, hotelier (I am resisting the urge to say society in general). Her carrot was a purported Shs. 15 billion she wanted to invest, and she was open to ideas because who wouldn’t believe a pitch for so much money with no ideas? For someone with so money, it would make sense that she hadn’t paid a coin, and never did, for the suite or the medical bills, wouldn’t it?
Why they should have seen it from the start?
First, as a country with a sizeable albeit marginalized Nubian community.  (she wasn’t lying on that part at least, they are the guys that ‘own’ Kibera), Kenyans should have known, or at least even asked around, about the ‘Nubian Kingdom.’ Or even simply ask the Kenyan Nubian Council of Elders (it exists). Why, someone would a marginalized people have a queen with so much money?

This is the King of the Jungle of Sheba and Lubia, Mufasa.

Her ruse is now widely known, at least in crime-watch circles. Here the author says ‘She’s as much the Queen of Africa as I am the Prince of Wales‘ which points to her symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Like most of the individuals here, she was never charged although she was ‘arrested’. The authorities were, as this article puts it  “Mortified at the ease with which she had pulled her con” because you shouldn’t make a con look so easy that it would look silly on the charge sheet.

Plus you conned Pattni, Kenya’s own Lustig, that should get you a Head of State Commendation or a spear of some sort, at least.

#3 Michael Otieno, the Diamond Dealer

The Sucker (s): William Daniel Marrow, James Edward Harreland Jurgen Robert Ahlmann.
During a recent ‘Twitter war’ between Nigeria and Kenya, Team KE kept bringing up the issue of Scam 419, a legendary and infamous ‘internet scam’ where you get an email from a ‘distressed Nigerian prince or princess’ and it activates your Prince/Prince Charming buttons to rescue her by sending her your bank account details. It turns out we might have some shared history…

Disclaimer: This is only a hypothesis, the would-be sample population is not exactly forthcoming with data…

The Ruse
First, Michael Otieno was not really ‘Michael Otieno’, he was Augustine Azubuike Nwanga  alias Ahmed Suleiman. He and accomplices Johnson Chukweuemeka Obasi (stop! Don’t be lazy, read that middle name before we can continue),

….alias Suleiman Ahmed, and Felix Ibioma Anosike, alias Prince Felix (could this be him, the infamous one) carried out one of the most elaborate and detailed Scam 419s ever, right here in Kenya.
It all started when Nwanga contacted Marrow in September and told him of about a $9.5 million diamond investment in Kenya. One can see why that would be funny right now but these were different times, people thought Africa was full of diamonds.

After corresponding with Nwanga by e-mail (of course), Marrow decided to visit Kenya. He arrived Jan. 27 and was met at the airport by Nwanga and a woman- who is thought to have been his wife. The others arrived in Kenya on April 14 and were held for 10 days for a ransom of $200 000.
Ahlmann and Harrel said they came to Kenya to meet Nwanga and discuss shipping fish (of course, ‘fish’, is that what they call precious gems now?) to Europe. He sent them plane tickets (always invest in a con, lesson number one in con school), and when they arrived April 14 they were taken to the house  in Golden Gate (how apt) estate  where Marrow was still being held. Marrow had been held for four months at the time, which leads one to suspect his family and friends didn’t like him much and might have already rented out his room.
The victims were chained hand and foot (Marrow claimed his private parts and legs were burned with cigarettes and candles) and fed bread, rice and tea, and sometimes Coca-Cola.

Coca Cola, feeding kidnapped people since…let me get back to you on this

The men phoned their wives and requested the ransom payment (requested is the word used in that article, it sounds so pitiful, right?)

The Nigerian had lived in KE for 12 years at the time (Probably called Oti by his bar mates when he wasn’t busy burning someone’s balls with a candle), had a Kenyan family and worked in cosmetics.
Nwanga was lured to a Western Union office to pick up part of the money, but instead he was arrested  charged and convicted to a seven-year sentence. No mention of whether he was ever reimbursed for the plane tickets…
…and one of the victims, Harrel was later awarded for his stupidity- Okay, not really, he was given a letter of commendation ‘for surviving the ordeal.’
I don’t get why the ‘lawyer’ in this similar scam is writing in caps, does that make him look more legit? Someone should research on whether writing in caps makes you more believable. In that thread, when the swindler is ‘caught’ (the would be sucker’s financial advisor decided to Google, oh Google search, saving lives since 1996). The conman then goes like “You are just making false imagination against me” (How apt!)

#2 Dick Berg and the 4th All Africa Games

The Sucker (s): The Government, the media, and if you believe his side of the story, Henry Kosgey.
You are a third world country, you want funds for a continental tournament. You need money, hire first world consultants, right? Sounds logical, yes?

Okay, reverse back to 1987 and you are the Minister in charge of Culture and related shenanigans under President Moi, a scandal is in the offing, of course. The taxpayer doesn’t pay enough and as an elected leader, it is your duty to correct the situation you ensuring you oversee at least one scandal.
The Ruse
Dick Berg convinced the government that he could procure a Shs 10 billion loan yet there was no record of his work, nor did he own or run a financial company…

H. Kosgey, seen here not being duped by a foreigner.

Berg, claimed he had marketed World Cup tournaments in South America and Europe, and even the Olympics. Granted, this was more than a few years before the internet and before Google became everyone’s best friend, but still, someone should have done due diligence.

To look legit, Dick Berg ‘rented’ an entire floor at one of the five star hotels in the city-don’t be fooled, the taxpayer paid for that too. He promised to bring in top American artists at the time and, to show everyone he was legit (when someone tries too hard, something is brewing) he brought in Jermaine Jackson.

Jermaine, for the lethargic reader, is one of the less famous Jackson brothers, and given that this was at the height of the Jackson years, no one really knew any other Jackson other than the one with an undecided skin tone and the voice of a fetus. We must give him one for effort though, his hook was quite legitimate.

Because the GOK runs on a system of trust, goodwill, faith, gambling and other such systems of probability, it paid him Shs. 22 million as a commitment fee then after he disappeared claimed that there was no money to renew the maintenance service for the presidential jet.

They could have sold the staff instead…or the man holding it…

The man disappeared after placing only one advertisement in an international magazine (One, a single one? You were cruel sir, you could have at least placed three, just to give us back some of the money).

Henry Kosgey ‘launched a search for the man’. To date, nothing has been seen or heard of Berg, not that anyone ever expected him to be found. Which would not have been a problem if the entire floor mentioned earlier, and the Jermaine Jackson trip, were not all funded by the Kenyan taxpayer (US $2.6 million). On the bright side, at least they got a Jackson to visit, any Jackson was good enough, right? The bigger crime here is believing a man with a name that describes the entire male organ, okay, only one of the two ‘Bergs.’
The Dick Berg hoax was such a successful (although not new, Lustig had done it too before) con job, and elaborate that it has copycats in Uganda.

#1 Ato Lemma Ayanu Hiyeyi

The Sucker (s): Everyone.
In 2002, the new government felt the way people feel when they finally lose their virginity, as if they can take over the world one screw at a time (a 40-year old virgin? There was no way we could botch this…)

One of the first acts of government in 2002/3 was to decriminalize the Mau Mau, (Yes, for 40 years since independence the group had still been proscribed, Kenyatta the Elder had first ignored it, then everyone seemed to simply forget the same guys who had fought for their freedom…)

The Ruse

Like our virgin at the beginning of this analogy, the over-excited government sort to unscrew every screw of being largely unscrewed for four decades. Anyone who goes on such a rampage is bound to kiss a few frogs, right? The frog in this case was Lemma Ayanu, you everyday grandfather…or, if you were the suckers we call political and media bigwigs, General Mathenge.

Lemma, seen here not pretending to be General Mathenge.

It all started with Joseph Karimi, a journalist for the East African Standard in 2000 who wrote that Mathenge had been found in Ethiopia.

The man who found him, a George Milimo said he had met ‘an old man who had more than usual interest in Kenya and the goings-on there.’ The only qualifications needed to be a long-lost freedom fighter? Milimo said Lemma Ayanu answered in the affirmative when he (Milimo) inquired if he was the general in question. In court we call that a leading question, a question that has the expected answer in it…
Milimo claimed that Ayanu had regaled him with tales of his exploits in the liberation war and that he (Ayanu) was keen on visiting Kenya again, albeit briefly…it seems he had other things to do rather than tell us how he fought for our independence and disappeared before we could neglect him too.
The media fell for the story!

The Standard paid for Mathenge’s wife and son to go Ethiopia. Karimi reported that his wife had positively ID’d him saying ‘this is the man. The nose and set of teeth are his‘  (a wife would know her man’s teeth and nose at least, right? Even if she was senile and had not seen her husband for more than four decades). Even Mau Mau (spell check thinks the second Mau is unnecessary) war veterans who met him at the airport claimed he was the one, never mind that most of them were already in their 70s and 80s and senile.

So the NARC government did the only sensible thing and through ‘his MP, the President of Kenya’, sent him an invitation for the Madaraka day celebrations in 2003. Ayanu, who died in 2010, brought Kenya to a standstill, and was accorded state security, high-class accommodation and celebrity status. He had been found, he was old and he was frail, and he was good PR. There was no way this could have gone wrong, right?

Everyone believed the government had found, and returned, General Mathenge– a commander in the Mau Mau independence movement. He fled Kenya in 1956 after the nominal leader of the movement, Dedan Kimathi, who is thought to have usurped power from the uneducated but experienced Mathenge was captured and executed by the British colonial power. He had the rank of general bestowed on him after he returned from service in Burma in the Second World War. He and 28 other fighters fled to Ethiopia, with the hope of getting support there, but they never returned. “
They need not have waited four years for the DNA results to tell them Lemma was not Mathenge.

The man couldn’t speak any of the national languages, and even said he knew nothing of the Mau (he called it that, he probably thought we said the second ‘Mau’ because we were retarded, seems my spellcheck agrees).
.. Or the fact that the man who recruited Mathenge  into Mau Mau (Harkman Muiruri) cast doubt the moment he saw the man.

There was also the age issue, when Mathenge escaped in the 1950s, he was 37 and would therefore have been 84; Ayanu was 72 at the time.

Other issues included the fact that he didn’t know ‘his’ code (Mau Mau used codes in the forest) nor was he tall (he was shorter by at least a foot) and had a gap, or a scar on his nape.
.. Or the fact that he admitted he knew nothing of the Mau Mau [“I have no idea what Mau is as I was not involved in the liberation struggle] which raises doubt that some of these stories of his ‘excitement and anticipation’ were either lies on mistranslations. Well, most are misunderstood, some are mistranslated.
Ayanu owned huge chunks of land in Ethiopia. “…Sellassie offered Mathenge Ethiopian citizenship along with a 1000-acre farm, an offer the Kenyan accepted after marrying an Ethiopian woman. ” This just sounds like a weak redoing of the Shashamane story (Jamaicans, Rastafarians etc etc).

The dreadlocks are awesome sir, but what did you say you code during the struggle was?

Karimi was nominated for CNN’s African Journalist of the year Award in 2000 but later disqualified because of issues surrounding authenticity. He had shielded journalists from interviewing the man-argued that he wanted to hide his Ethiopian identity. Some claim he might have been too embedded in the narrative and “… became  a participant in the developing saga.”

. Once it was clear it was a hoax, and possibly a con, it made international headlines. Appearing in The Economist,  Newswire and the BBC. Some saw somewhat of a silver lining in it (optimists, such ready suckers!) and some saw lessons.
It was one of the few times that the government accepted it had been conned. A moment to be relished, although I suspect it’s because the taxpayer didn’t want to look bad for judging the government for paying bills for an old man anyway.
The trick, dear reader, is to never get caught, and if you must, make it so big that everyone will be embarrassed about it and they will just let you go, or elect you to Parliament.

Owaahh

 

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

 

5 Hilarious Security Lapses of the Kenyan Presidential Guard

Whenever we elect a man to the House on the Hill, we give him the right to avoid all human contact except that which has passed through three metal detectors and dressed appropriately. We give him the best of our security forces, trained by foreign legions to throw themselves between their master and the bullet at any time. We give him the best cars, the best house (arguable) and the best women (okay, this last one is unconfirmed).

Our Kenyan Presidential Escort is especially overzealous, jumping out of moving vehicles and refusing to smile despite being paid peanuts for such a dangerous occupation.

You get the picture….

See any teeth?

Once in a while, however, even they slack off, and its during such times that a small cadre of people, with the biggest balls we have seen this side of the Sahara (except for some mammals we cannot name), pull off stunts that put shame to the security system. This here is a list of such men and (spoiler alert!) a child…

#5 An Eight Year-old Sneaks up on the President

When Bethuel Mbugua was eight years old, he chose the easy mode and just walked right up to the president. Remember that this was Moi, the man who ‘appoints and disappoints’, father of the nation and leader of ‘Chama cha mama na baba.’ To fully understand why this is the most ingenious breach of presidential security ever, some background is necessary.

Bethuel Mbugua was an exceptionally gifted boy who was enrolled in secondary school when he was seven years old and lectured over 300 universities and high schools in EA by the age of 10. By the time he was in Standard Six in 1986, he was rated too bright for his class and taken to Form Four at Ol Kalou Secondary School. But he was kicked out after a month because other students and even local residents started disrupting classes asking him to lecture them.

Kenya’s brainy kid of the 80s and 90s

Suddenly all your accomplishments in life do not look like they are something huh?

With no money to move his child to a school for the gifted, Mbugua’s father plotted what still stands as most famous sneak-in on the president ever. The eight-year old boy, already blessed with more brains than he would ever need, walked right up to the president during a fundraising at Kijabe Hospital.

 “I had a ready speech and when nudged by my father I walked to the President,” he says.

By the time the security guard saw him he had already gotten the attention of the President and the then VP, now President Mwai Kibaki who said “Pengine ana mchango yake (Maybe he is bringing his contribution),” 

Is it just me or is he holding his staff in a suspicious way?

In case you are wondering, the plan did not work because Mbugua later failed an IQ test and became the ‘laughing stock of the country’. His father, ever the optimist, sneaked him to Tanzania where he made a mark lecturing universities. On October 20th 1991, as luck and opportunity would have it, the small boy who had walked right up to the president made his way to the USA to pursue the American Dream.

#4 Man who sneaked into State House -23^rd December, 2002

Mr. Onyango Mono holds the record as the man who sneaked into State House by bluffing his way through the front gates. He was carrying a cross and a sword and said in a later interview “I’m not mad as Kenyans thought. I was sent by God to President Moi to tell him to hand over power immediately.”

I will just snuggle and wait for the guy to hand over power huh?

Just sneaking in was half the job, Mono snuggled on a carpet near the president’s office and snored through the night…because bluffing your way to the most powerful office in the land is a very energy-draining process.

He was found the next morning, minutes before the President entered his office. This means the area was not covered by any CCTV cameras and even if it was, someone in the security office thought nothing strange of the man with a cloak curled up on the floor holding a cross and a sword.

 “When he was woken up, he said he was waiting to meet President Moi to hand over power to him. He looks like a religious fanatic.”…

The source said: “The man told us that nobody stopped him from the gate to State House. He tried to open several doors, but he found them locked.”

“He finally found one of the doors open and walked in. He used the door regularly used by the president,” he said.

In case you are wondering which State House…

There you have it, a man just walked right through the State House gate and even had the time to try a few doors before finding an unlocked on and deciding that it was a good time to take a nap as any.

 

An aerial view, I bet you have never seen this one before.

The feat was replicated later by a tourist who ‘mistakenly strayed’ into State House grounds and had ventured some 100 metres in before anyone noticed him. He was in the neighbouring grounds, doing whatever it is a young tourist would be doing along in the jungle, and saw a big house and decided to walk towards it. It turned out to not be the best decision of his life because that big house was not just any house, it was the home of the president. I can bet someone was reprimanded for sleeping on the job, both literally and figuratively, while these two individuals made the security in State House look like child’s play.

Here is what you would need to visit State House, unless you are performing at the National Drama Festivals or you just won a marathon.

Man who sat between Moi and Kibaki- Karume’s wife’s funeral

At Maryanne Wariara Njenga’s funeral a man sat between two presidents. No one asks a question because both security teams think he is an aide to either of the presidents. In actual sense, this is just another Jones who saw an empty seat and simply sat down.

I think you left your sandals in the house, and the loo, kind sir, what were you eating?

In 2003, the security teams around the presidency were in obvious quagmire after having only guarded one man for 24 years and now having to cater for a current and a retired president both with their own security teams. So a ‘non-person’, your everyday Jones with his own unachieved political ambitions, with no fat bank account to boast of and with no ‘name’ whatsoever, decided to take advantage. He sat in the VIP tent, between Moi and Kibaki, for hours before anyone started asking questions. Now tell me that is not just looking at presidential protocol and pissing on it? Very little of the event was covered, as many of the stories here, most likely because the security teams did not want people to ‘get ideas.’

Frederick Odhiambo, The Man who Embarrassed the President, Jamhuri Day 2008

Every time we elect a politician, we know that there is a distance around him that is considered a ‘buffer zone’ that normal people like you and me are not allowed to breach. Apparently, one 28-year old Frederick Odhiambo never got that memo.

 Just how a man not familiar with presidential security protocol could walk up to two rows behind the president unnoticed and sit for two hours is a tale of intrigue and suspense.

Not even the hawk-eyed presidential guard, always in their hundreds during functions of such magnitude, spotted him as he walked past several sniffer dogs.

The security detail chose to give him a good beating (if there is ever) to teach him and anyone who might be thinking along the same lines from ever trying such a stunt.

This is not dramatisation, I repeat, this is not dramatisation

Odhiambo said in a later interview “For three days,  I planned my mission, and I swear I was all alone; not even my wife Sarah Nyokabi knew a thing about it,”

He also said that he woke up at 5 am and left for the city center, his chosen scene, on an empty stomach (Disclaimer: Attempting a security breach on an empty stomach is not a proven advantage)

 When Members of Parliament and ministers started arriving and taking their seats, he mingled with some of them and walked towards the main dais and sat on a minister’s chair, three rows from that of the President. He chatted jovially with some of the country’s high and mighty.

Different angle, the offending weapon is seen here being neutralised by a guard’s hand…

“Some of them told me that the seat I was on was that of a minister, but none of them asked me to leave,” added Mr. Odhiambo.

He was all the time unaware that a presidential guard was sitting only two chairs beside him, and even greeted him: “Hi!”

Did you read that last paragraph? He greeted a presidential guard, talk about having balls of steel! I must, however, ask you to hold on the accolades because Odhiambo was a ‘premature heckler’, he shouted too soon, and chose his moment wrongly (Nyambane was being manhandled at the same time below the dais). He lived to tell the story though, on a hospital bed after an encounter with the guards he had just embarrassed. His message all along? “I wanted to tell him to ask MPs to pay tax and that the freedom of the media is paramount.”

Hmmmmm

Did I mention that after the 30-minute torture, Odhiambo was taken to Nairobi Women’s Hospital with soft tissue injuries. Why? Someone seems to have a pretty convincing answer.

 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

 

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.

 

 

Hell’s Academy: A Review

A group of people find themselves in hell and they need to know why they got there. So the play is made as a series flashbacks for the main characters. For a play lasting about three hours and about 25 people in the cast, it was quite a show. The play is actually a musical of sorts. Yours truly generally avoids musicals because his simple mind cannot get why you should merge two art forms as primary elements. Hell’s Academy did not really change his mind but the music was good, and actually felt relevant. The music and vocal coordination were exemplary too, I think it would be safe to say I sat through a musical, of sorts. It, however, has very visible issues with continuity and some parts, the art appreciated, are illogical.

The plot connects a primary religious theme with numerous sub-themes including culture, politics, economy and complacency. The issues pointed out with continuity are easy to fix areas, the constraints of a live performance notwithstanding. The guy in front of me laughed exactly three times while another guy behind laughed so much at one point that he started screaming ‘aki wacheni!’ As someone who sheds tears when he laughs too hard, I totally understand him.

Hell’s Academy cast

Most of the issues with continuity are easily attributable to the fact that this was a large cast-25 people- and multiple storylines. For the keen eye though, continuity issues spoil what would be the most creatively hilarious scenes. For example, when one character is caught in a compromising situation with his student, a Deputy Principal, the villain of the play, uses his phone to capture the moment. When he wants to show them to the principal, the two ‘lovebirds run back to their previous position and freeze. Cheesy, right? Only till you notice that the Teacher was not wearing his coat when the picture was taken but in the ‘photo moment’, he has it on. Its flimsy I know but there is a reason why a set should have a continuity girl/boy on set whose work is to be flimsy.

Another point in continuity is where one character has to forgo a scholarship because Joseph, the Deputy, has impregnated her. The village agrees to send him instead so they do not have to condone him anymore. Later, he has become a doctor at a posh island hospital. The girl gives birth and the child has issues so the village decides to call on him. Simple logic tells you a timeframe is missing. Here, a medicine course would take six years by which time the child would be on his feet and in school.

The costume also had some issues including the fact that the backdrop had an image of a horned and winged devil but the character had none. In fact, he only had a hat, red garb and face painting to make him look scary. Anything else but that could have worked. I am tempted to think that he was selected because of his height but any good director can turn an actor into the character he desires. A set of horns, made from anything, including well cut carton or any other hard paper, could work just fine. Get the guy a pitchfork, make him look scary and intimidating. Include a voice over of a villains laugh, the whole ‘mwahahaha’ as now permitted by the Oxford Dictionary.

As a self-confessed ‘Grammar Nazi’, and sitting next to one, the issues with diction and voice with some characters was also prominent and at times, distracting. A director, I think, should create characters with specific actors in mind and then let them personalize the language so the vocals are natural and not Morgan Freeman-wannabe. Two characters stood out, the principal and the girl whose mum dies and she is caught in a compromising situation seemed to struggle with the wording. Compared, the attempts to get our cultural mess of language into a script always works well in any comedic plot.

My favorite scene? Two actually, and my opinion here might be biased. One is the scene. In the video play where Juma, a good friend of mine, plays Pastor Project Fame-a parody of Judge Ian Mbugua and Samuel Gitau married into one hilarious character- and then sings ‘Thriiiiira!’

There are many others, including why the very funny chaplain character is condemned for being the Ian Mbugua equivalent in a show which he wins. How does he become a chaplain? The scene is hilarious and satirical but the logic behind it is wanting. Two, the scene where the chaplain calls God using a landline and talks to him with a Luopean accent. The last scene is illogical too, a hanging in hell? How many times can a man die? Even the concept of a Judgment Day following the Rapture implies that only those who are pure at heart will be rapture/taken away. How then the characters are ‘raptured’ and end up in hell…and yes, I over think things.

The beauty of watching the everyone forget that the national anthem has three stanzas and not one as high school made us all think. It’s a predictable reaction, just wait until the first stanzas is done and then look around at all the people who rush to sit before the second stanza starts and they shoot up again. Patriotism and conditioned amnesia, it would seem, are not very good friends. It also makes everyone, including yours truly, sing the first stanza over and over again before quickly mouthing ‘natukae na shukrani.’

Owaahh ^©