Easiest place to get murdered is the village

By Ted Malanda

I spent a couple of days in the village recently, right at the time when thugs were holding villages hostage and slashing people in Bungoma and Busia, which are not too far from my home.

In between, I spent a number of evenings shooting the breeze over a beer with the local sheriff, a most amiable police corporal. The good man let on that a citizen of the village, my primary school classmate to boot, had been jailed, for life, for robbery with violence.

Another, he said, was on a most wanted list and that the last time he had bumped into police officers, he had escaped, presumably with gunshot wounds, to Uganda.

“There are illegal guns in this place,” he warned darkly.

Guns? In the sleepy village where I was born and raised? I had reason to believe him. Days earlier, two thugs had engaged police officers in a gun battle in Mumias, a place where we ordinarily only settle land disputes using fists and a few insults. Those guns, by the way, had been pinched during a night raid at a police post.

That night, as we had dinner in my father’s house, I looked at his ‘security’ with alarm. He owns a dog that he has to rescue when danger looms — by locking it indoors, if only to save himself the agony of listening to the mongrel’s helpless and cowardly yelps.

His doors are wooden and his windows are, in the style of the 1970s, reinforced with wire mesh only good for keeping out chicken.

I contrasted that with my own place, which at his insistence is heavily fortified like a prison. Not that it helped when some lout broke in the next day to steal my one and only blanket.

Look, 20 years ago, no one would have attacked my village because all the men — and Sophia, my nutty late auntie — would have come out to fight. Now they won’t — because the enemy has guns.

The corporal is a good chap, but by the time he cycles ten kilometres in the dark to the scene of an attack, you will be dead.

***

I was reunited with my high school classmate Charles Obulutsa, Milimani Commercial Court acting chief magistrate, via a newspaper story last week. Obulutsa, a skinny guy (then), was the school basketball forward and hockey fullback. He would charge into a tackle with a smile and when he jogged away, rough opponents would limp off, shaken.

As a magistrate in Kilifi, he was reported to have ordered the jailing and repatriation of a bellicose colonial-minded  mzungu who had taken to caning his Kenyan workers. 

-Vintage Obulutsa.

A jigger ate the post office, the bank is next

When I took my sons to a boarding school two years ago, the school director, a sentimental old geezer like myself, demanded that I buy the young men stamps worth Sh500, plus envelopes and writing pads.

I can confirm that my money was flashed down the drain. Those two clowns never sent me, their distinguished father, a single letter. A covert investigation also revealed they never sent any of their close relatives a letter, either. I’m also certain that none of the little girls who make my sons’ little hearts throb received love letters (although I suspect they received lots of ‘xoxos’ via mobile phone).

Tired

I was thinking about this as I walked to a post office in one of the affluent parts of Nairobi to collect a registered package.  What struck me the moment I walked in was this tired look around the premises. That, and the fact that there was no one else in the place apart from the postmaster and myself.

“Habari boss!” he greeted me with unbridled enthusiasm. 

Boss? Granted I had arrived in style, sitting back left in a humongous car with blue registration plates. But if the postmaster had been keen, my sitting back left had nothing to do with pomp and colour. The car was merely parked with loafers like myself who had begged the driver for a lift.

Besides, in my tired jeans, I looked anything but a boss. But his salutations became clear the moment I finished transacting my business. 

“Boss, I’m raising money for the church and was wondering if you could help me with something small…” he began. 

For the first time, I took a good look at him and realised his coat was as ‘tired’ as mine. His surroundings had the same worn, cobwebbed look and judging by the manner he was dying to engage me in conversation, I was probably the first customer he had served since morning.

How did it get to this? I remember queuing for eons to cash postal money orders when I was a college boy. In school, the only place we hanged out during ‘free walks’ was the post office because it was the swankiest building in town. In fact, my only claim to training as a writer are the hundreds of love letters I exchanged with young girls who are today no nonsense and selfish mothers, who don’t want my sons to tell their teenage daughters ‘xoxo’.

Back then, post office workers didn’t smile at you and say, “Habari boss.” They snarled in your face or ignored you altogether. And now the post is dead, eaten by two worms — the mobile phone and the Internet.

Sheepish

Those two worms are now wriggling into banks and in ten years, the lone customer at a bank might be met by a bored and sheepish managing director saying, “Habari boss. I’m raising money for the church and was wondering if…”

Big shame mobile phones and the Internet can’t be used to kill matatus, power blackouts and those  who spit in hotel sinks.