Never really thought much about Nakuru. It’s not a town, sorry, “city” that could harbour sweet bank robbers in the stead of John Kiriamiti, or hardened criminals like Edward Shimoli and his son Leon Shimoli, or even small-time vampires like Ruiru.
The only thing that sticks out about Nakuru is my late grandmother, kukhu Esther, the one who loved me like no other woman has, or can, coming down to Nakuru, to Afraha Stadium, for her revival and healing from Evangelist Reinhard Bonke.
Kukhu Esther never got her healing, the cancer having eaten most of her breast, the same cancer that would, 18 years later, show up at my mum’s door and tussle with her too.
Yet here we were in Nakuru, we being R— and I, and G—, her longtime DOP and cameraman, shooting a documentary on femicide. If this were a different type of story, I’d tell you all about it, but it isn’t, so I won’t. The judge was putting the law on the accused persons, taking his time with it, my buttocks firmly on the hard benches designed to remind you, despite all the times I have watched Shawshank Redemption and Prison Break, prison only looks good on TV.
Between waiting for the judge to finish his pleading, waiting for the askari outside to finish chewing his gomba so he can regale us with more prison escapades, and waiting for the day to end so we can get out of Nakuru, it hit me just how much of life involves waiting. Justice too, like prison, seems mostly to involve waiting.
I get bored easily, so I leave the courtroom; I do not bow, my first act of civil disobedience. I half-expect the judge to admonish me, or the court bailiff, who is nothing like the one in Vioja Mahakamani , to lose his temper, so he can find it in my jaws. Nothing. They barely look up, which would never have passed in Milimani Law Courts hapa Upper Hill. Those ones, look at them wrong and they’d throw you in Industrial Area Remand Prison. Kiongozi wa mashtaka continues with his drab monotone, like he never went to a Kenyan high school and participated in choral verses. Maybe that was one of the punishments of prison — an eternal flat-footed voice in your ear, “Mshatakiwa, koti hii imeonelea una kesi ya kujibu...”
The Nakuru Law Courts.
Photo credit: Joseph Openda | Nation Media Group
We make friends with one of the guards. Well, he wants to talk, and I am a willing listener. He does not have the verbal dexterity of Alphonse Makacha dot Makokha or the flair of Ondiek Nyuka Kwota, but he has some interesting stories of Edward Shimoli, whom he was personally guarding in court when the man escaped. He — the soldier, not Shimoli, or maybe even Shimoli — is the most exciting part of my day. He tells me how Shimoli asked to go to the toilet, found a gun his accomplices had left for him in the bathroom, shot the guards, and escaped. I am like, Wow! They called him the ‘Jackal’, and I imagined myself taking on that nickname, only I will be escaping baby mama traps laid out for me by Nairobi girls, all busy weaving sturdy nets to catch a big fish like me.
But Shimoli was also a scumbag, lived the life all those phony rap acts can only rhyme about: 14 murders, 88 rapes, and bank robberies so numerous he makes the government look like prudes. The soldier tells me that Shimoli was remorseless, a quality he passed on to his son, Leon Shimoli, a lesser gangster and man. Shimoli wasn’t a handsome man by any beauty standards you care to mention, yet even the soldier was in awe of him. One of those mysteries of the universe.
As these things go, he can’t help but moralise. He tells me how easy it is to end up in prison: mistaken identity, stolen identity, that stealing a sufuria and a knife is robbery, and stealing a sufuria with a knife is robbery with violence. The difference between the two is life imprisonment. “Rasta, kwanza lazima tukunyoe na chupa ukiingia jela! Alafu tukufinye,” he said, and I didn't want to know what that last part meant, but he seems proud of that statement, like this whole conversation was his way to use that line, to put me in my place, to remind me that I am not all that. But I'm a smart guy — above average, at least — and I know when someone is chewing away at my nerves like a hundred little sets of teeth. There are some people who feel insulted if you don’t react. And if you insult somebody in prison, or in my hood, then you might have to hit a guy in the face and get hit in the face in return. I wasn’t a natural fighter. I wasn’t born making fists. But in some places, you are forced to be a bare-knuckle pugilist. This is not one of those places.
He tells me that one of the guys in our case had been a fugitive for 12 years. Hiding here and there. But eventually, he says, your family gets tired. “Lazima utoke ujitaftie ,” which is how they caught him, this six-foot-something man, who looked like he could have just walked out from a budget meeting at a loss-making government parastatal, not the big four accounting firms, never those. I looked at the accused, half-expecting to see a smirk. Nothing. He was serene, cool as an actor. A cold-hearted thespian. Colder than half the guys in jail. I was impressed.
The judge inside is still drumming on, telling the accused what is what. In the newspaper, the parents of the accused said they still loved the children, but there was relief between the words. The soldier is nodding along; he, like I, bored out of our pants, waiting for whatever comes next; that my life was waiting for me on the other side. Waiting to leave.
