The wannabe mane hunter of Lang'ata

‘Every good story begins on a Friday,’ my father used to say.

This one begins on a Saturday evening as I sat in my mansion in Karen, mulling about how everything had gone to the dogs. The dogs called contractors! Trees were being felled, and funny buildings being put up for rent by the African arrivistes and wannabe noveau rich eating from the tenders and coffers of government largesse, aka taxpayer sweat! Other mzungus had long fled Karen for Nanyuki and Lake Naivasha with its dwindling flamingoes

Even the silly expatriates who knew elephant dung about anything were smart enough not to live in Karen. But my grandfather had arrived here in Kenya in 1916 to hunt big game and never left, claiming to have been the safari guide of the legendary American writer, Ernest Hemingway, on his game killing safaris; and my late father had been a game trophy fencer through the sixties, seventies and eighties, until President Moi went ape on ivory and burnt it in the 1990s.

Dead and mounted glassy-eyed buffalo and rhino and dik-dik heads lined the walls of my mansion, following visitors everywhere they went with sad eyes. ‘Six lions have escaped from the Nairobi National Park,’ Feisal told me in a hoarse voice over the phone – and I put the long tube muffler over the barrel of my telescopic rifle, got into my old Land Rover which had just gone obsolete, and went on the hunt in Lang’ata.

On the dusky drive between Karen and Lang’ata, I imagined myself getting lionised. I would not stay in Lang’ata, I would go to the filthy CBD with its uncollected garbage and eat a street kid or two, then go snooze on the stairs of the MacMillan Library, in between my stone brothers there. Even in my fantasies, I was an evil lion.

On the radio in the Land Rover, I listened to the wannabe jokers who rule radio crack jokes and read #KOT tweets from twits – ‘I simba-thise with the lions;’ ‘since you don’t want to come visit us, we are visiting you,’ et cetera. Yet if you have ever strayed near a lion, you will know it is nothing to joke about.

A big lion can outrun any horse on the Ngong Racecourse any given Sunday, hump 80 times a day, tear down a Central Bank safe with its claws, and as Jeff Koinange may say, ‘my, oh my, what a roar!’ In the end, KWS only managed to re-capture five of the beautiful beasts.

I have a dark genius for tracking down the big cats, it runs in my blood, and I have never missed an open shot. Sometime on Sunday, I managed to find the sixth MIA lion, trying to get back to its home in the Nairobi National Park, and took it out with a single bullet right between its noble and large liquid eyes.

After I loaded its body onto the back of the Land Rover, I stayed as the sun rose, gazing into the park, and The Simba Hotel and the large line of apartment complexes encroaching the dead lion’s home. In this way, Judah (as I had decided to baptise my kill) and I were both victims of the land grabbers. I sold dead Judah to Feisal to sell to the Chinese to make lion teeth necklaces and lion Viagra from paws.

I kept the mane and gifted it to a powerful politician living within the vicinity of my home in Karen. Later on, I watched him on television as I sipped on Red Label whisky, neat, campaigning somewhere in Kerio, and insulting his opponent as a ‘lesser man.’ Then the tribal elders took a lion mane head gear that I recognised, and made him ‘The King Maker of Kerio.’

A sudden flood of shame filled me. Feeling sick to the stomach, my eyes burning, I leaned forward, took the remote, and changed the channel.

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