208 days ago
208 days ago
This will be the first of two essay-cum-dispatches talking about the good and the bad side of a year in Kenya in which I made every effort to stray from the atypical ex-pat route and get as authentic an outlook as possible. For my first piece, I’ll be talking about why I left Kenya, which simply put, directly came from being kidnapped in May 2010. My reasons for choosing the negative part first is quite deliberate; life in Kenya is too good to blight with the 'bad part' being the concluding piece of my discourse so I want to finish with the positive, amazing side to a truly wonderful country that will live in my heart till my dying day. In the meantime, I'm hopeful that I can talk about this most negative of experiences in a way that is reflective not only of my own feelings but also gives an honest, measured desciption of a criminal gang like the ones who abjucted me; that they are not simply violent carictatures but actual people trapped by a desperate choice made to escape the poverty they were born into.
Anyway, enough of the preamble; I've kept you long enough.
On the night everything happened, I’d been in the school bar (having somewhere onsite to get beer was standard practice in schools in Kenya, largely out of convenience for the teachers) for some collogues’ engagement party. I’d stayed for an hour, drank a soda and had just walked the fifty-yards from the entrance to the school to my compound. I knew I would be waiting; Tobias, the evening askari (security guard) had a track record for falling asleep in his lodge rather than stand by the gate and tonight was no different. I knocked on the window of his lodge that looked onto the entrance and waited for him to appear when a sharp breaking noise brought my attention back to the road I’d just walked down.
As I turned around, a large, white Toyota had swerved to a halt narrowly in front of the gate and a tall, shaven headed man hastily got out of the passenger seat as the engine continued to run although there was no interior lighting inside the veichle so I couldn't see who else was there. At first I didn’t know what was going on until he drew out a small silver object from his pocket. It looked like a toy in his hand but the metallic gleam glinted in the light streaming out of the compound and I quickly realised it was a gun. He held his stance to show enough of it to convince me it was real, only to then raise it higher still as I lingered momentarily. A further instant of hoping for something miraculous came to nothing. The gun was still pointing at me; there was nowhere to go. I can remember those seven, maybe eight, long footsteps to the car as the man with the gun beckoned me towards him. I could feel myself walking towards my own death and yet what choice did I have?
It would only be after I had made my penultimate step towards the car that I heard movement behind me. Tobias had finally woken up and made his way from the lodge to the iron gate. I was still close enough to notice the sudden alarm on his face when he realised what was going on. Time moved very slowly as I watched him assess the situation, realize that there was nothing he could do to rescue me and began to turn back to his lodge to alert his superiors. I watched him vanish back into the hut as a hand reached from behind and pulled me face first into the darkness.
The following twenty minutes were a blur. I had been thrown into the back of the car and landed on the laps of two guys who had been hidden by the lack of light coming from the car‘s interior. They quickly folded me between them and I sat rigid and upright in the middle seat as the car accerlated away from my compound. The guy with the gun, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, shouted at me for my wallet in English, which I duly gave him. ‘What currency?’ he asked. I told him and he nodded; ‘No Euros or Dollars?’. I shook my head, struggling to find my voice whilst I tried to make sense of the situation. His friends in the back then riffled through my pockets and found my phone. The guy on the right held it up to the light streaming in from the streetlights so he could he could see the brand. Unimpressed, he tossed it to the floor and then snatched my glasses from my face. I felt his fat, sweaty fingers slide across my nose and I briefly entertained the thought of biting down on his hand as hard as I could, only to remember that the gun was still barely a foot from me. ‘What kind of sunglasses are these?’ he asked. I told him they were reading glasses. He didn’t believe me and tried them on before removing them off just as quickly. The glasses landed on my lap and I put them back on, which was met with little objection.
With all my valuable assets now secure, everyone sat in silence whilst the local radio played quietly from the car’s speakers. We weaved through Kawangare, the neighbouring slum to where I lived and down Ngong Road, one of the main roads that linked my district, Lavington, to the city centre. By this time, I had entered a period of absolute calm, as if my powerlessness freed me from being frightened and left me with little choice but to accept my situation and try to make it as normal as possible. Everyone got names so that in my head, I could recall who did what. The driver was Pamela, the guy with the gun was Katie, the two thugs sandwiching me into the middle seat were Emily and Rosie. Gradually, my curiosity got the better of me and I started talking to Emily as Rosie continued to shake his head and complain about the strength of my lenses in Swahili.
‘What’s going on?’, I asked, staring right into his eyes as my new found tranquillity became increasing foolhardy.
‘We’re going to take to take you to a cashpoint. You’re going to give us the pincode and we’re going to make some withdrawals. Do as we say and we won’t kill you’. I nodded solemnly, as if I had a choice in the matter.
‘I have a wife and daughter’, I added, hoping that some sort of compelling lie would give me further insurance against the worst possible scenario.
‘I have a daughter too’, he muttered, after dwelling on the comment about my ‘family’ for quite sometime; ‘she is three years old’. Another long pause followed, before he stared right back at me, meeting my gaze fully for the first time. ‘We’re hustlers not killers, you understand’, he stated firmly, as if to justify what he was doing, ‘do as you’re told and nothing will happen to you’. I nodded again and we once more returned to silence.
We drove around Nairobi for a while, maybe an hour, as the crew made maximum withdrawals twenty minutes before and after midnight. As Emily was evidently the more coked-up, he was generally anxious that I was looking around and continually told me to close my eyes. As Rosie was more interested arguing the driver, I kept my right eye open and managed to work out that we’d roughly driven through the city centre and had headed out towards the airport by West Nairobi before we went down some odd back alleys and into a part of the city I’d never been too. After another twenty minutes of winding streets, we followed another car into a gated compound that was full of cramped, crumbling flats. Thinking I was about to be switched cars, I braced myself for some more manhandling but nothing came. We had simply followed another veichle into a compound and the security guard at the gate must have thought we were in convoy. We followed the road around the compound and stopped under a house with an over-arching balcony. After at least a minute of complete silence, Pamela said something and the car suddenly burst into loud discussion. My hosts were obviously agitated and there was a prolonged shouting match before Katie, Rosie and Emily all got out of the car at once, leaving Pamela, who seemed the most anxious of them all, taking care of me. He turned around and I met his stare with my own but I could still notice his whole body trembling from the corner of my eye. Pamela was scared and if only for a fleeting second, the power dynamic had switched. The glare continued but at no point did my expression change. I could feel it painted across my face as I let my head tilt to the side to study the beads of sweat beginning to drip down the side of his head. He continued to tremble but his gaze never left mine. It couldn't have been more than a handful of seconds but after what felt like hours, Pamela sat forward in his chair; ‘Stay here’, he barked suddenly, and in firm English as he too bolted out the door. I sat in silence, furiously computing my options and waiting for someone to get back into the car. No one did.
All I could think about was why they all left. Had they gone to get more manpower? What if they were going to get spades and polish me off in the Mau Forest nearby? My mind whirred through the possibilities before I was disturbed by sudden coughing from the boot. At first I thought someone was standing outside of the car; maybe Katie was still keeping watch over me, only for the coughing noise to come again. Someone else was here, presumably the owner of the car, which was far too eye-catching and expensive for my hosts to use for grabbing people. Realising that the only two current occupants of the car were the two abductees, I instantly convinced myself that the car was going to be sprayed with bullets. Instinct took over and without a second thought, I threw open the nearest door and took my chances.
Guessing that everyone had gone to my left, I went the opposite way and frantically started to run away from the Toyota. I didn’t think to turn back for the man in the boot. Every second was priceless and my survival instinct took over as I rushed towards a large wall at the far end of the road to my right. I tore through the first fifty meters before I felt the ground disappear beneath me as I tumbled into an unseen pothole in the grass that had filled with water from the recent rains. Splashing furiously, I pulled myself out and effectively made up the next ten metres on all fours, whilst I scrambled to regain my balance. Using my momentum, I then took a running jump and tried to vault the wall that closed off the compound. Despite it being a good seven-foot and tipped with spiked points at its tip (mercifully it wasn’t simply broken glass that had been stuck onto walls as per most gated enclosures in Nairobi estates), adrenaline took over and I got most of the way up the fence and managed to hurl myself over albeit cutting open my hands and arms in the process.
As I lifted my body over the fence, I braced myself for landing on the stony tarmac on the other side only for the impact to never arrive. The leg of my jeans had got stuck on one of the spikes and I was hanging upside-down, swinging like a pendulum on the side of the fence facing the road we’d come down to get into the compound. I anticipated gunshots at any second but after a couple of seconds, the denim finally tore itself away from the fence spike and I dropped to the ground, landing heavily as I fell into the cul-de-sac track. Picking myself up, the next hundred meters also went by in gold medal time whilst I hobbled down the road, looking to get off the street and hide somewhere. Spotting the gate of another compound, I was half way up it when a surprised askari burst out of the shadows and confronted me, only to notice my badly cut arm and torn clothes. Realising what was going on, I was frantically ushered into this new compound and hidden in a lodge as the askari concealed himself in dark scrub. I heard him wolf whistle twice and someone whistled back from across the darkened road. I hoped it was another askari but I couldn't be sure so I stood at the entrance to the lodge, ready to run again if the gang had just been tipped off to where I was now hiding.
After a few minutes, the crew drove by the compound I was now stashed in. I watched them from the window of the lodge drive alongside the gate as they peered out of the car, looking for me. The askari who'd hidden me never moved from where he was lurking, and no-one said a word or twitched a muscle. Perhaps the gang saw me peeking out of the hut of my new compound as I watched them go but they weren’t stupid enough to wake the neighbourhood trying to get me. They drove on and away, presumably with the man in the boot still there.
Two long hours duly followed as the police and the security firm from my compound failed to respond the alert calls from the askari. Eventually, after much begging and pleading, I persuaded him to call me a taxi driven by someone he trusted. As word spread around the neighbourhood about a sodden white man covered in blood, sitting in an askari’s hut, a few people came to check if I was okay and three of them sat in the back of the taxi to reassure me that nothing was going to happen to me as we made the long drive back to Lavington. The sheer length of the drive (some forty-minutes) and the landmarks we passed on the way home like the Nyayo stadium told me that I’d been driven to somewhere around West Nairobi before I made my escape but this is a guess at best. To this day, I’m not sure where I was taken.
After taking a few days off to make sense of things, I negotiated a release from my school contract. I stayed a further three months to complete the school year and remained living in the same compound until the day I flew out, partly out of defiance at what had happened, but in my heart, I knew my time was up. I had fallen in love with Kenya and I adored teaching the kids I had in my class but I knew that I had to go, mostly due to the reaction that I got from a variety of other expats and white Kenyans over what had happened. Indeed, the most awkward but clearest example of this came a week after the event, where having just returned to work, I got talking to a woman who lived in Karen, the wealthy suburb just outside of the city. We talked about what happened and then what I was going to do next and how did I feel about the people that grabbed me. When I told her that I knew had to forgive them so I could move on, she shook her head at my implied naivety. ‘You mustn’t forgive them. Not at all’. She told me about her neighbours’ experience with a gang like the ones that took me. In that instance, they overpowered the guard at the gate, stole everything and roughed up certain members of the family. The gist, according to her was how these gangs never stay quiet. They talk and brag about what they do. They’ll do what they do again and again. Referring to her neighbours, this woman explained, ‘the husband had all the right gun licenses and he wasn’t going to forget about what happened. It took him and his friends almost a year but they found them [the gang]’. What happened to them wasn’t stated but it was easily implied. The gang were all dead, probably buried in a shallow grave on a white famer's land in the middle of nowhere. All of this was explained in a weary, ‘you-know-how-it-is’ tone, as if discussing the recent poor weather. More pertinently, it felt like a way of saying that if I needed some help finding my kidnappers, I only had to ask. It was a horrible feeling, a silent nod of white ex-pat solidarity that underlined the ‘us and them’ mentality that a lot of folk from Karen seem to have. I slinked away shortly afterwards not knowing what to say and feeling confused by the casual attitude with which someone had suggested wiping four people from the Earth. For all the anger I had, this wouldn’t change anything and I realised that if I stayed, I would always be reminded of what happened, that the rage I had then would be stoked everytime my kidnapping was brought up and that ultimately I would never move on from what happened but rather remain be stranded in its emotional aftermath.
Obviously I still regularly think about what happened because of the absurdity of the whole situation. For one, there is the guy in the boot and simply put, I will never know what became of him. Chance are that the guys who took me would have been wise enough to let him go rather than compel an otherwise corrupt and laxidaxical police force to hunt them down due to the public outcry that would have followed had they killed him. Murder is very rare in these situations and I can only hope that at the worst, in the aftermath, he'll have got a couple of weeks off work and then used the insurance money to buy himself a new car.
As for the gang who took me, do I hate them? After much thought and time to think things through, the answer is not really. To me, they have girls’ names and squabbled like children, allowing me to escape. My initial anger towards them has faded as the reality of their lives gains a clearer context. Whilst I was stranded in Cairo airport, waiting for my connecting flight home to London in August, it occurred to me that maybe one day, I’ll have a real daughter rather than the fake one I thought would persuade my abductors to take it easy on me. In the time it might for take me to do this, its doubtful that Emily will be alive to see his own daughter because the violent life he found himself trapped in.
Make no mistake; these are men who chose a wicked, immoral path and their lives will probably be brief and ultimately pointless but I wonder if you could ever walk back up the path you first took as a kid looking to pull yourself out poverty, if a slum community, like the ones in Kenya that my kidnappers almost certainly came from, which routinely deals out extremely violent mob justice to petty thieves, could ever accept gangsters back into their community. I think back to the last time I was in the car, starring down at Pamela, before I made my escape. All I saw in his face was a frightened young man who desperately wanted to be anywhere but in a stolen car with two recently adducted men who had private security teams tearing down the city looking for them. When I arrived back at the compound, I walked into my apartment and instantly returned to my life of relative happiness, luxury and security. Pamela will never have that. For all the short term wealth he acquires, all it buys him is a life expectancy of thirty years at the very most.
More importantly for the sake of how I recall Kenya, when I think back to what happened after I escaped and found myself crouched in that wooden cabin which stunk of cheap cigarettes and Tusker larger, I realise that the security guard could have easily given me up to the gang for a cut of the money they’d already got from my account. Instead, he hid me and seemed quite prepared to fight off four armed men that were half his age with a bike chain, which whilst being ludicrously foolhardy, is also indicative of the typical African mentality of protecting people in need, whatever the cost. The taxi driver who took me home travelled specifically down the route I asked him to do; no short cuts, nothing to spook me. As my wallet had been nabbed, he refused to accept any money from those waiting for me when I returned from the compound, despite the fee being well over a day or three’s wages for him. Kenya, for all its problems with corrupt police and politicians, is a country that will one day in the near future, do incredible things and as time goes by, I’ll forget the ‘names’ and faces of the gang that took me but not Newton, the guard, or Charles the taxi-driver. To me, those are the key figures in all of this because they put themselves at risk to get me home during my hour of need. For that alone, I can’t help but love Kenya, which is why I’ll be back, and hopefully sooner than later.
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