Kennedy Nzuve: Honour and dignity is due

By Dann Mwangi 

One minute, you are being lifted in the air, in a heroic feat, full of life. Then, another minute, you are being airlifted, still heroic, but full of anything but life. 

So many paradoxes, ironies, mirror and metaphor moments as he arrives back home cargo-style… cold and in a box; a box partly draped in a flag, likely that of his unit in the Service. 

The mirror of a loss so huge that the flag, the identity of service, can only cover so much. 

The rawness of the morbid reality is tangible - he lays cold, in neither a coffin, nor a casket. It’s a brown box with strips of wooden reinforcements on the edges and sides. Cargo. It is labelled on its sides - not _Fragile_, _This Side Up_, or _Handle With Care,_ but with his name written-out with a marker, in a mix of capital and small letters - KeNNedy Nzuve. 

The capital Ns between the small Es echo the feelings. Mixed. Capital - the hero. Small - the fragility, fleetingness and frailty of life. The heroic identity sandwiched between the reality of life, and the now very present end of it. 

Count down… then, “Up!”. His colleagues lift him. “Walk!”, they begin to feel a fresh wave of reality - the weight of death. 

They struggle to march to the hearse in discipline-style steps. You can see the weight they are carrying transcends the physical. 

Getting the box into the hearse also seeming to be in sync, since the struggle to fit it in echoes the strain to box him into the space of the dead. 

His family is on the sidelines … feeling the airport night cold in a more chilling way than ever. 

They are seeing the box, their loved one—they believe, yet can’t believe—is in there. Death is dark. They are seeing darkness - it’s night, it’s _ũtukũ_ it’s Mũtukũ. 

His final official assignment was in Haiti, going after gangs whose words and actions dripped poison, like fangs. His heartbeat flatlined while in the line of duty. And now, he has six more days above the ground. 

May the relevant authorities desist from having their heads below the ground, ostrich-style; may they grant honour and dignity, to the man who honour and dignity is due.