“Tawala maisha yangu eh, tawala, tawala”

“Tawala maisha yangu eh, tawala ewe Bwana”

Breathing is vital to your survival. Take four seconds to breathe in, hold it in for three, then release it through your mouth. The objective is to relax and be focused. Whisper a prayer to your gods, thanking them for the sanctity of life. Pray just like your mother taught you. Hum this worship song, it will calm you. Hum it in Swahili, using the melody you heard in the white master’s church...

“Oh, Tawala maisha yangu eh, tawala, tawala”

“Tawala maisha yangu eh, tawala ewe Bwana”

Place your right eye gingerly behind the scope. Observe the movements, block the noise, feel the wind blowing across your clean-shaven scalp and adjust accordingly. The world at this point should go into harrowing silence. Background screams of agony should not concern you. Blood-infused dirt in your mouth should not distract you. The sharp pain in your leg should not alarm you. Sink slowly and steadily into the endless realms of death. Then pull the damn trigger.

That’s how I killed.

****

I wasn’t born a killer. I wasn’t ‘grown’ into one either. In fact, you would argue, I was born to be killed. The worst time to be Kenyan; the 1920s.

The “white highlands’ were the expansively fertile farms that grabbed onto the curves of our beautiful motherland, dressed by the sweat of her children, but defiled by her visitors. I didn’t know of the concept of freedom; of a time when life was worth living. All I knew was the endlessness of suffering. I was born into the belly of the devil; the hellish coffee farms of Mr. Arnold Archibald Smith, also known as the “hangman”.

The hangman was a short man styling a thick handlebar mustache with chubby cheeks and yellowed teeth. He walked with a limp; his left leg harnessed by a brace. The only one time he ever spoke of why he limped was when he hosted the Grieves. A neighboring plantation family that specialized in tea.

He told his guests - in animated fashion - of how he faced off the Ghost of Tsavo. He stood up and grabbed the rifle that hang above the fireplace. He then, to convincing effect, mimicked a hunter, crouching in the long grasses of the Kenyan savannah, following the trail of his prey.

“I then cocked this rifle you see here and boom! That big bully of a beast was lying there, dead as they come, on my feet.” He claimed as he motioned with his rifle, spilling his guest’s tea.

“Kamau! Bring me a towel, I have spilled some tea. You smelly son of a whore.” He shouted but chuckled a little. His voice boomed through the hallways into the servant’s quarters where my father worked.

“Yes, sa. Sorry sa” my father said as he rushed into the room, bowed, and proceeded to clean. He wiped the spilled tea from the floor, picked up the broken pieces of ceramic, and mumbled incoherently.

“Once you are done here, go and polish our guests’ car, you stupid monkey!” Mr. Smith was laughing at the scene and darted his eyes across the living room to see if the Grieves were as amused as him.

They weren’t.

“Yes sa. Sorry sa” my gangly father would say, in between mumbles, as he rushed to get a bucket.

That evening we had a special dinner in the quarters. I sat across my mother and to the right of my father but struggled to swallow the sweet potato and maize stew. I looked at him. Straight at the face whose wrinkles were starting to betray what used to be a youthful man. The man of the house. I watched him eat. He smiled and told his wife about his day. My mother was seemingly enamored by her husband’s tales of duty as she peeled her sweet potatoes. Listening to stories about “master did this” and “the master said that”. My father, whose front teeth had once ached him when young and now had a gap where they stood, spoke loudly with food still being chewed, spitting all over the place.

How could this man not hate himself?

“Do you know that he is always finishing his sentences with abuse?” I blurted out loud, cutting the conversation into a sharp and rude turn.

Silence.

“Mr. Smith hates you; he thinks you are too close to Lady Smith.” I continued. I didn’t know where I was headed with this.

He chewed slowly with his mouth now closed. His tired eyes, reddened by life, squarely fixed onto me.

“Who taught you to speak to your elder like that boy?” he spoke calmly. Each word was well enunciated and given time to breathe as he ensured the message had sunk.

I should have kept quiet.

“Yes, I will speak up! I don’t want to continue being mocked by the other boys when they see us working in the house. And seeing you and ma being abused every day. Why can’t we work the coffee berries like Kinuthia?” I spoke with a singing-like voice, struggling to keep a hold of my emotions.

“You sit there and go to their schools, learn their language, and read their books. Nobody else around here gets that. Nobody! Be grateful that all I get is abuse. Words don’t kill me!” He said, speaking slowly, and assertively. He mumbled the rest of his sentence and continued to eat.

“Would you rather burn your skin under the hot sun, plucking the coffee berries? Like the children of Kinuthia? Eh?” he continued, now speaking much louder than before. He pushed his plate away from him and told my mother to leave the room. She hurriedly took the plates from the table and stood up to leave.

“Leave the knife.” My father said. He then started drawing on the table with it, looking down, and proceeded to speak,

“Have you seen him of late? He doesn’t have his hands anymore. Chopped off! That man is a thief, caught stealing Master Smith’s food. Ungrateful, like everyone else in those fields!” He was now all out shouting, his hand hanging in the air with the rusted knife pointing to the fields.

I felt the tears swelling up in my eyes, fueled by shame. I didn’t hate my father; I hated the defeat in his voice. I hated his consignment to this life of nothingness. 

“Kinuthia may have lost his hand, but he still has his soul, his pride, his manhood!” I shouted while standing up with my hands having banged the table and tears flowing.

That night I slept a little bit later than usual. Swollen on my eye, deeply cut on my thigh, and slashed across my face. I was breathing through my mouth as my nose was broken. My lips were swollen and the taste of blood stuck on my tongue. The cocktail of pain, fatigue, and extreme emotions wore me out. I started to fade away to sleep. I smiled a little, the stretch of my face cheeks pained my swollen eyes.

I knew that my father still had some pride in him.

I was woken up by the sharp sobering shrills of a woman’s scream.

“That sounds like ma!”

I rushed out of the quarters, we shared one room and the door was straight ahead. My body was still very sore. Gathered around the Mugumo tree that commanded the center of Master Smith’s compound, was an angry mob. Kinuthia saw me approaching the crowd and tried to hold me back with his stump of a hand but was unsurprisingly unable to. I pushed through and stopped to see what was the bother.

It was my father causing all this ruckus. He was swinging on the tree, side to side, his face wore a smile but his neck wore a rope. There beneath his swinging feet, stood Mr. Smith fumbling around with the rope. He was mumbling, as my father would, untying the knot from the branches. He was trying to bring down his victim. Like the hunter, he claimed to be, after entrapping prey. Beside him, stiff and traumatized, was his boy, Archibald Jr.

I would, later on, learn that the boy had argued with his own father, begging the hangman to spare my father’s life. I respected Archibald Jr. for that, it is never easy fighting against a system. That requires bravery. The women gossiped that my father’s crime was laying with the master’s wife. I was young and impressionable. I listened. The rumors rang true for me, and I was disgusted by him. Absolutely sickened!

You have to understand that we are the sort of men that saw things you will never have the displeasure of witnessing. We saw the Second World War between the white men. When Archibald Jr. joined Her Majesty’s army, I was recruited to carry his weapons on the North African Frontier. I read your textbooks, the shiny covered new syllabus, they don’t mention us, do they? We were bloodied in the brutal trenches, fighting for people who hated us, against the enemy that also hated us. It is there, that I learned to kill, and to do it quickly. They would have done the same without remorse. It was all fair.

I came back to this beautiful land a different man. All of us did. Everyone died in that war, only some of us are yet to be buried. My master, Archibald Jr., who later on freed me of the duties of being his servant would pay for me to study in England. I became a lawyer in a country where laws didn’t even exist. It would mark the dawn of a new life and of the fifties.

I loved the books. I understood their language well. I was born in their house you know. I spoke their tongue much better than my own! I found myself speaking on behalf of my skin-folk in London, urging their politicians to free my men. I stood shoulder to shoulder with the Pan-Africanists, as we evangelized across the black continent on the beauty of independent rule.

I was a man other men came to consult. This is how I met Mr. Kenyatta who was leading the independence fight. He urged me to join his team but I wasn’t too keen about it. He was trouble. And trouble he became since we were arrested and sent to Kapenguria, together with four of our comrades.

The six of us would speak deep into the nights of the dream we wanted for this country. We wanted to liberate, to establish a new world for the forgotten and the persecuted. We wanted to deliver freedom, and honor the ones that were senselessly butchered. To raise the sons of those men that swung side to side on Mugumo trees across the highlands. When Sir Evelyn Baring freed us, the winds of change breezed across the nation. Freedom was near. Time was sweeping into the sixties.

I was the youngest of the six and had just married before my exiling. A marriage not founded on love really. It was a companionship that blossomed into lifelong tolerance - a somber view of the beautiful institution. We battled the verbal onslaughts and judgmental on-stares as we tied our knots to a sensational twist; my bride was a white man’s daughter.

“…it then comes to no shock that these young British women are all desperate for exploring the black man, and his beastly ways. Is it surely even love? Nobody believes it.” closed off an article on the Daily Standard.

I lay with her in the frivolity of a night out in London as we wrote the final pages of our impending independence. I had fallen for the enemy. What would my father say, if he saw me? Maybe he would have loved it. Laughed at the irony of his son being even more submissive to the master than he ever was. That his own seed had grown to be choked by the weeds of colonialism. That he now, would be the master. That he would share a meal with his killer. He would have spat on my face and cursed my name.

We hoped inwardly that we were to become a sign of the future times. We understood what the world was; scared people driven by fear of what they knew nothing of. A symbol of the unification of the existing differences.

“Tujivunie Kenya, hii nchi yetu tukufu.

Kenya tunayoipenda,

Daima.

Kenya nchi tunaiyoipenda,

Daima.”

June 1st, 1963, the day of Madaraka was momentous. That morning, we sat in the throne room of Kenya. The heart of the state house, signing papers and toasting to freedom. We discussed the terms; the slices of the country we were to share. And in the aftermath of the storm, as the ink was drying on the papers and we, the liberators, were handing over into independence, I was awarded a large estate in the capital and became the first principal of Nairobi.

I recall being driven in a Mark II Continental along the city streets flanked by a jubilant throng. They had traveled by buses, others on the rails their fathers built, and some on foot. They came with their children and their grandchildren. I had never seen so many people out in the open. They sang. They danced. They cried. They were free. We were free.

They waved at our cars as we went to Central Park to lower the Union Jack. I was unable to hold back my tears. I was overwhelmed by the ceremony, as we saw the traditional dancers shake their waists and shoulders. They were proud of being Kenyan. That was what we fought for. I swear, the sky was a little bit bluer and the sun a little bit warmer. Later on, that evening, in a perfectly fitting fashion, I held onto a blue blanket that wrapped my newly-born son. I named him Madaraka.

I was a good father, I believe. To both the city and the boy I was to raise. I am sure if you had the chance to ask them, they would have agreed. I spent days with my son; playing and bonding with him. Whenever he would get scared, he used to run to hide behind his mother. I pushed him on. Assured him. The world would punish weakness. I sat him in libraries and we would read for I wanted him cultured.

He was a different boy. His skin was already a glaring marker of the differences that existed. He reminded the oppressors of their contempt for the darkness blotting our skins. He reminded the oppressed of the brutality of the mzungu that were prophesied as butterflies on a snake. He was a symbol of the class difference in government, economy, and social structure; all in one. A Kenyan but with a white blemish. What a tragedy to introduce him to this unforgiving world.

I wanted a tough boy, and earlier on, I could tell he had my little devilish spirit. A fighter who would never back down from any bully. He was an orator that would sway people with his words, weaving them through audiences, as he performed his plays. The fact that he had to be strong didn’t break him. And that is all I had ever really prayed for.  

So, when I picked up my son from his final year in high school, I saw a man. Beards sprouting on his pimpled face. He had the mother’s dashingly handsome smile. His brown eyes danced around with unique optimism. Eyes bright and full of hope. Eyes that saw the good in life. We cruised through the countryside that day, therapeutically passing the highlands now owned by my fellow countrymen. Seeing the beautiful land that nourished the mouths of her true children. The sun was setting behind those hills, and also on the seventies.

He set off to university and I made sure he did that here in Kenya first. I didn’t want him in Europe. He would be torn by the vultures there. He hadn’t seen a war; he wasn’t tough enough for that kind of hostility. And secretly, I didn’t want to be the last black man in my family.

“No, sa”.

While on campus, he formed a party, the Uzalendos. A group of ambitious post-colonialist youths who wished to usurp our single-party system. They were resilient in delivering the message of dissent across university campuses. He campaigned and rallied heavily against the sitting government. My government. Was he trying to get to me with this? Was he reaching out? He published journals claiming how the youth were bitter about the old guard. They called us despots, detached from reality, who’d milked the country dry.

They protested the development of urban shopping centers, saying it would kill off the traditional African market...

“…these men want to find new ways of making more money off the backs of their citizens. We are their donkeys. Little do they know; we are now mules. Stubborn and defiant. We will resist...” This was an excerpt from one of their articles.

We went to cabinet meetings to discuss how to curtail this ragtag of idealists. I wondered if he was trying to fit into a world that had rejected him. I would sink slowly into contempt. We were the ones who knew better, these kids had no clue. We were the ones who saw the gory scenes of dead brothers in the fight, their brains splattered on the mud. How would he understand struggle? He was considered a prince in most corners of the city! He had nothing to fight for! We were building a nation as one, one party, one symbol, one people! What was so wrong with that?

So, when he graduated, and without the expulsion letters his other party members had faced before him, I was proud. He could become someone now. His own man, and shed off the boyish rebellious farce. He was big and could then face the world in its whole rotten beautiful mess. I threw him a big party and invited my friends in government. He had to see that what we did was good. That we were all cut from the same cloth; two sides of the same coin.

Like father, like son.

The party had many people there. We had his friends and mine. We were frying chicken in the pan, and roasting goat on the grill. It was August 1982. I was happy, dancing with my wife on the lawn. We swayed slowly to the music on the system. Not too hard to break any knees, but close enough to trigger memories of youth now well in the rearview.

We had perhaps too many negronis to drink. The young men had their new and stylish Tusker beers. Those ones were packed in those wooden crates with the elephant on the sides.

“The pride of Kenya.”

We bickered about the old days, loudly and proud of our times. We were old, but far more optimistic about the future than the young generation. We knew there was nothing worth going back to, that the future was the only direction we could drive towards.

I am sure my son looked at me that night like I looked at my father the night before he died. He must have seen me dancing and drinking, and wondered why I would be so happy despite the fact that the newspapers abused our government. Despite the people on the ground mocking us. I know he must have thought it because later on that evening, he approached me.

“Attend the march with me tomorrow.” He said, “it will be organized by my party, a peaceful protest through the city.” He was now able to look me in the eye and emphasized ‘peaceful’.

“You need to understand the realities on the ground. People are poor, and they are bitter. You all are sitting here, dancing in these suburbs. You fail to understand them!” He took a seat and stared into the starry night above. He was thinking through his words, trying not to offend me.

“You don’t have to run to the islands in the Pacific when you need a break. Or go to London for a check-up on your pressure. There is a beautiful coast here. And why don’t you bring that London medicine here?” he was starting to get too comfortable for me. But he had a point.

I don’t know if it was his boldness or the fact that this conversation reminded me of my last one with my father, or the fact that I was on my ninth glass but, I agreed.

On that Sunday, we were dropped off at the notorious bus station at the end of town. A place that buzzed in activity with hundreds of vehicles, ferrying people into the corners of rural Kenya. We walked up to the marketplace and passed cloth sellers and fruit vendors. Sundays were ideal for markets.

Since it was busy, and I was well, the principal of the city, there was a lot of attention. They would stop to ask me questions, grab my hands and beg me for money, for food, for a job in the council, or for me to speak to them. Arms stretched up to me in some sort of messianic complex. 

“We don’t have food to eat!” one shouted and the rest erupted in applause. I was squeezing through the crowds, struggling to keep my face straight through the stench.

“The fishmonger has just touched me and now my suit smells of Nile Perch,” I said, smelling the cuffs of my shirt. As I wondered if I would have to dry clean it or just throw it away.

There were men shouting loudly beckoning passengers onto the buses. There were women hawking their farm produce. There were car honks and metals clanging onto other metals. I had to speak above the chaos to be heard.

“I haven’t heard this much noise since the war days!” I said, now laughing a little bit at the craziness.

“I think we should leave to the quieter parts,” I said out loud, hoping my voice rises above the rest. I was using my hands as accompanying gestures. I pointed to the upper areas of town, where it would be much quieter. My son nodded and walked on.

“Yes, of course, my people are outside the Intercontinental Hotel anyway.” He answered as he glided through the people. He was the one with different skin, but I was the one that stood out.

As we were emptying into the quieter streets where more formal business thrived, I spotted countless military vehicles and men in air force clothing. All lined up next to the Inter-Continental.

“The air force in the middle of the city?” I thought it strange but paid no mind to it. “Where are your people?” I asked.

He too seemed confused.

“What do you mean?” He said, sheepishly smiling.

As I turned around, I saw a tall man with broad shoulders and especially buff. One of the army men. He was panning his eyes around the area. He lifted his hand, palms wide, turned it into a fist, swung his hand down, and shouted,

“Fire!”

The world went silent. A loud ring in my ear pierced deep into my skull and rendered me immobile. I couldn’t hear a thing; the world was spinning. It was an uncomfortably sharp sound that had forced me to hold onto my ears, cupping them. I was bent over staring at my feet. The dust from the explosion and the shrapnel scattered on the ground had converted the beautiful street into a scene plucked from a war film.

“I have to keep moving.”

The bullets were whizzing past me. They punctured holes into cars, buildings, and people. The screams and the buzz of the machine guns were fading in and out. I was losing my sight; my eyes stinging from the smoke. I felt a sharp pain tear through my leg. Still, the world spun, and now, the ground was getting closer and closer to my face.

Bam!

I was down on the ground. Face planted onto the road. I rolled around on the tarmac, facing the smoky sky. I could smell it, the stench of death hanging above me.

I groaned.

“Shit, my boy!” I tried to get up but the ache in my leg made me stumble and fall again face first.  

Zing! Another bullet narrowly missed me, as I staggered onto my feet. I could have sworn my eardrums were ruptured. I got up and limped around, shouting desperately for my son.

“Madaraka!”

A fool’s errand, nobody is louder than the tanks, the guns, and the wails of people clinging onto the fringes of death’s door. Human beings screaming for mercy, begging the gods for their lives, and falling to the ground, bullets polka-dotting their backs.

Luck and the mercies of the gods of war, are the things that allow you to survive an ambush. No amount of training saves you. A bullet kills as well a soldier as it would anybody else.

“God dammit boy! Where are you?” I shouted out, now my tongue tasting blood and smoke. I hoped it wasn’t my own.

I couldn’t move much more even if I wanted. I had lost a lot of blood. And then a sharp pain stung my lower abdomen. Another bullet for my worries. Ah the pain of a bullet, an old nemesis, it comes at you fast and in sharp relentless jolts.

“This is how I die, huh, on the streets of the city I built, butchered by the men I fed!” I whispered into the lifeless air.

I had made these buildings they perched themselves on and bought the steel for them. I am the one that distributed oil for the roads and shipped in iron for their industries.

And it is that same iron I tasted in my mouth. Thick, choking blood. The red slipped through the crevices of my teeth. I spat the bitter taste of my own mortality onto the tarmac. The grey was now covered in bodies whose mouths stayed open for their souls were departed.

“Boy?!” I desperately barked into the air, my voice raspy from the collapsing lungs, and an overworked throat.

The air was getting thinner. Time was surely up for me, I wheezed in and out loudly. Defiant against death’s merciless claws. I stood up and staggered across the streets, smearing blood on the sides of cars. Cars worse than I owned, now propped me.

I still felt entitled.

The smoke cleared for a moment and there I saw him. My son. My boy. Life was winding down to this. He lay flat on the road, face down, his back flooded in red. Motionless.

I gained courage and strength from the years I had lived. I was still a father. His father. That was my legacy and pride on the ground dying to the bullets of these bastards. I knew he must have been scared, waiting for me to save him.  

I ran towards him, more like aggressively limped towards him. He was close, I stretched out my hand to hold him one last time. But as I approached, a man experiencing his own final moments knocked me over and I fell in disgrace, rolling away from my son.

Defeat.

“I am the principal of this city!” I thought.

There is no dignity in death, we all humble ourselves and bow down to the spirit. We beg for comeuppance, for the sinful life we’ve lived. I begged not for my mercies but for my son’s. My boy was still there. He could have my life, oh Lord. He could have it all.

I dragged myself across the tarmac. I wasn’t even sure if I was actually heading toward him. I was hoping to feel his hand one last time. I was hoping to see him live. I wanted to tell him I love him. That I am proud he fought the system. Only brave men do that. I had seen and achieved everything. Etched in history, I could leave.

“God please!” I whispered through the tears. I still had the strength to cry. I was then too weak to even stretch out a hand.

“God please forgive me,” I said in defeat.  

What a selfish man I was. I should have prayed for him.

“God forgive…”

A siren blared across the town, creating sharp feedback from the speakers and interrupting my final prayer. A hoarse voice boomed through the megaphone.

“The government of Kenya as you know is no more. This is a hostile takeover.” He repeated over and over.

Of all the days I was to die, I picked the morning of the coup.

***

“Tawala maisha yangu eh, tawala, tawala”

“Tawala maisha yangu eh, tawala ewe Bwana”

Breathing is vital to your survival. Take four seconds to breathe in, hold it in for three, then release it through your mouth. The objective is to relax and not focus. Whisper a prayer to your gods, thanking them for the sanctity of life. Pray as your mother taught you. Hum this worship song, it will calm you. Hum it in Swahili, using the melody your lover uses in her local church...

“Oh, Tawala maisha yangu eh, tawala, tawala”

“Tawala maisha yangu eh, tawala ewe Bwana”

Shut your eyes. Ignore the movements, embrace the noise, feel the wind blowing across your afro and stay still. The world at this point should go into harrowing silence. Background screams of agony should not concern you. Blood-infused dirt in your mouth should not distract you. The sharp pain in your leg should not alarm you. Sink slowly and steadily into the endless realms of the abyss.

Then proceed to die.