twelve

       jessica and kennedy

        jessica

It’s the end of December, and Kennedy’s cell-phone number flashes on my caller ID. I’d saved his contact as “Kennedy Kenya” and that last word makes me, here at home in Denver, feel infinite worlds away from him.

I answer with giddy joy—it’s been impossible to get through the phone lines since the elections and the ensuing chaos. There is a terrible buzz, and all I can hear is shouting and chaos in the background. I can make out only a few words: Guns. Violence. Escape. Then he is gone, and I am helpless with dread, frantic with worry.

I stayed up all night during the elections. A government website monitored vote progress. I continuously pressed refresh on my Internet browser. Information was added at unpredictable intervals: sometimes every hour, sometimes more often, sometimes nothing for three or four hours. Updated news was hard to get: the international coverage is a summary, delayed by hours, devoid of the detail I craved. The Kenyan news websites felt thin. I searched the web for a few hours and figured out how to stream KTN, the local channel.

Then suddenly everything changed: Raila Odinga, the opposition leader, went from leading significantly, to being only marginally ahead, to then trailing far behind. A hasty announcement declared victory for the incumbent President Kibaki, and he was sworn in at night in a rushed, closed ceremony. The EU doesn’t accept the results, but the U.S. government, just as Kennedy said it would, congratulates President Kibaki. As soon as the announcement is made, mayhem erupts in Kenya: looting and burning, brutal killing targeted at ethnic groups. The entire country is consumed by chaos, and nowhere is more affected than Kibera. KTN blacked out as the government cut off all news service. Days later, when the news finally came back, I saw streaming footage of Kibera: roads barricaded, young men carrying machetes, cars burning, police shooting everywhere.

I feel as though I am losing my mind, stuck here in Denver, sitting with my family at a table at a Brazilian Steak House. I am trying to join in celebrating New Year’s Eve, but watching the waiters slice steak and lamb onto our plates, my only thoughts concern whether Kennedy will even make it out of this turmoil alive. I keep looking at my cell phone, my wished-for magic thread connecting me to him, a world away.

        kennedy

I hope she heard me say it: I love you, Jessica.

My phone is almost dead, showing just one last bar. I turn it off. I have to try to reach the SHOFCO office at night. It isn’t safe to return to Kibera, not yet. I have to keep going, holding it together. Throughout the slum I see signs of death and destruction. Smoke curls up into the sky from the fires, which burn across the city.

All over Nairobi’s streets, and throughout the country, violence has erupted over the disputed presidential election. Divisions are taking place along ethnic lines. What appears to be tribal warfare is not only about tribes, but also about anger over inequality and better access to resources and opportunities. Since Kenya declared independence from the British in 1963, only a few ethnic groups have dominated politics, and they have had access to better resources as a result. This election has brought to the surface all the anger about injustice and inequality that has been quietly building for forty-four years. The pandemonium in Kibera seems worse than anywhere. As news of the election results spread, people went out to the streets and began burning, looting, and killing neighbors they’d lived next to for years. As if a monster has been unleashed in Kibera’s streets, angry mobs of young people ran around burning tires, their machetes already drawn.

I feel deeply sad, not only for the victims but also for these young men who have been so badly oppressed that now they have turned wild. Many residents of Kibera simply cannot imagine they have anything more to lose. I always heard about terrible things like this happening in other countries nearby—Rwanda, Congo—and I thought it would take so much to get to that point. Now I see that it doesn’t take much at all, simply a spark; if there is enough poverty and hopelessness to serve as kindling, the flame burns and burns.

It’s dead silent in Olympic Estate. Some houses are empty. I wake up my friend Antony, who lives in Olympic.

I knock on his door. “Antony . . . Antony . . . it’s me, Kennedy . . . please open the door.”

“Are you alone?”

Thugs frequently kidnap people and then force the kidnapped person to lead them to the house of a friend. The friend then opens the door, believing it is a friend who is knocking. I suspect Antony thinks I’m one of these things.

“Antony, I swear I am alone.”

After watching me from the window, he opens up.

“Antony, man, so happy to see you!” I shout.

“Shhh . . . shhh . . . shhh. Don’t be loud speaking in Luo!”

I know Antony to be a brave man. To see him afraid intensifies my fear.

He walks me to the SHOFCO office, giving me an update.

“A lot of sad news and I don’t know where to start.” Antony clears his throat. “Ken, you have to be strong.”

“Antony, what will we do?” But I know I am not asking a question.

I can see the moonlight reflected in his eyes, but his face is dark.

“Angel is dead.”

Angel was just a baby, not yet six years old. Her mother, Helen, is part of the women’s empowerment project, SWEP. We had nicknamed Angel “the SHOFCO baby.” She was conceived out of wedlock with a drunkard in the community. Her mother, Helen, unsuccessfully tried to abort her. Then Angel was born so little the doctors said she would not live to see her first birthday. She was given the name Angel, an angel from God, because this baby had survived so much.

“How could someone kill a little innocent soul?”

“It was a stray bullet from the police,” Antony tells me.

Tears are now falling down my cheeks. I feel my stammer and cannot talk. Neither of us can speak for a long time.

We reach the SHOFCO office. Antony opens the gate and looks around to ensure that no one is hiding. It is late, and I’m dog-tired and haven’t eaten anything since the tiny sip of porridge my neighbor in Kibera gave me. We have mattresses in the SHOFCO office, where members who are working late can sleep. I say good night to Antony and we fall asleep fully clothed.

Thirty minutes later I wake to the sound of a lorry stopping just outside the wall that surrounds our office. My heart pounds as I hear the voices approaching closer and closer.

“Antony . . . Antony . . . Antony, do you hear that?” I whisper.

“Shhh. Don’t talk. I hear them too.”

“Oh my God . . . today we are dead.”

Antony and I squeeze together on our single mattress, waiting to die together as friends.

The people outside are speaking in Kikuyu, but their voices are muffled and I can hear only pieces of what they are saying.

“They want revenge for some Kikuyus who were killed in Laini Saba village. Mungiki promised to retaliate,” I translate. Mungiki is an infamous gang often associated with the Kikuyu tribe. As Luos, we are in grave danger. We would be considered worthy revenge killings.

Antony crawls toward the window. “Oh God, it’s a gang. I can see the flashlights.”

“Please, Antony, don’t do that . . . they might see.”

A light from a flashlight is directed at our window. Antony lies so flat and still next to me that I can’t feel his breath.

We are on the second floor. They have not yet entered the building.

I reach into my pocket for my phone. It’s almost dead, but not yet. I dial George’s number, lying on top of the phone and covering myself with the blanket to suppress the sounds.

“Government . . . Government . . . this is the Mayor. George, I’m in trouble and I don’t know what to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Antony and I are at the SHOFCO office. What looks like Mungiki just arrived in a lorry. We are in danger.”

Before I finish the sentence, my phone goes dead.

Antony is still as a corpse.

I hear the sounds of people moving. I know if they can’t break in, they might just torch the whole place—this has been happening all over.

“Hurry up, they are coming!” someone is yelling.

The lorry’s engine starts and we hear it speed away, tires squealing.

“Antony . . . Antony. They are gone.” I touch Antony.

“Are you sure?”

“Did you hear the lorry?”

“Yes, but . . .”

Antony moves toward the window to confirm. “Yes, they are gone.”

We breathe in relief.

There is another noise outside.

“Is someone opening the gate?” I ask.

It sounds as if people are jumping into our compound.

Antony flattens himself on the floor again.

Someone is knocking.

“We have been tricked—they pretended that they were gone and now they are in our compound,” I whisper to Antony.

“Mayor, open the door!” someone says from outside.

“These people might burn us alive if we don’t open the door.”

“I’m not opening the door. Still, we will die no matter what”

“Antony, do you think we should make noise, so that neighbors would come help?”

“No . . . No. No one is left.”

The voices outside get louder.

“Someone please help us!” I can’t help but shout in desperation, and Antony joins me.

“Stop making noise! This is George and his group,” someone shouts.

I run to open the door. George is there, waiting for me. He is with a group of more than fifteen people, and I am overwhelmed with joy and relief at the sight of them.

George and his men had divided themselves into three groups surrounding the gang and had planted flashlights in the ground on the other side to make it look like there were many more of them than in actuality. George is a brilliant strategist.

“Kennedy and Antony, you guys were dying today. They knew whoever was living in Olympic must be Luos, as Kikuyus have already left the area. Kennedy, remember, while I’m still alive, you never fear. I will always be there for you, my little brother,” George says. “What you have done for this community is so huge.” He speaks slowly and gently.

Everyone is quiet as George speaks.

I am crying for the love that George has for me.

Although George is a Luo like me, I had asked him to help protect the Kikuyus in Kibera from being attacked. The previous night he hid several of our Kikuyu SHOFCO youth in his house, even as people were baying for their blood.

“At first I thought I did it for you, but later I realize I did it for myself and for humanity,” he says.

George touches my heart. He risked his life by hiding others from a different tribe.

Afraid to leave us alone, George vows to stay with us until the next day. We share a little food and I am able to charge my phone. I am dead tired.

“You and Antony go to sleep, Kennedy. It’s only a few hours to dawn.”

After spending just one night away from Kibera, I can’t take it anymore. I want to go comfort Helen and be there for Angel’s funeral. In the early morning light I make my way back to Kibera. I call my friend John and make a plan to stay with him in Lanisaba, the part of Kibera farthest away from my house.

As I’m cautiously crossing the railway line, my phone rings: Jessica. I answer, bracing myself for her barrage of questions.

“Hi,” she whispers. She sounds very far away.

“Hi,” I say, trying to muffle the phone to mask the sounds of Kibera behind me.

“Where are you?”

I am so tired that I take the easy way out and tell her what I know she wants to hear.

“I’m with Antony. We stayed in town.”

There is silence on the line, and I know she’s trying to listen to the noises around me—she’s smart. It is one of the many reasons I fell in love with her.

“Are you sure?” Her voice wavers, like she’s on the edge of believing me, but knows me all too well.

Please make this easy, I beg in my head. I’ve been through too much in these last hours for an argument. I need to feel connected again, to her, to anything.

“I’m sure.”

“I don’t believe you. Please, Ken, be careful. We haven’t had a chance to do any—to do so many things. Please take care of yourself.”

Her voice is soft, and all I want is to put my arms around her, to bury my nose in her sweet-smelling hair. Then the line cuts out, and I am left with a choice. Her voice and the thought of holding her again both compel me to stay alive, to keep out of the fray, even if this means distancing myself from my community. Then I am overcome with anger. She isn’t here. She doesn’t understand the devastation right before my eyes. Even if I make it out alive—how do I live past all that I have seen?

But I can’t shake the feeling inside me telling me to listen to her. So I call John and say I won’t be coming. I start making my way back to Olympic. Several hours later I am finally back at Antony’s house.

I wake up in the middle of the night covered with cold sweat. I reach for my phone and call John. He doesn’t answer. I call Chris, my friend who saved my life by warning me the police were looking for me. I know Chris is spending the night with John—but no answer from Chris, either. Now I am completely filled with dread. I can’t fall back asleep. Hours later, Dennis calls me. As he speaks, the tears flow down my face. It is what I had feared, only worse.

In the middle of the night, members of a gang broke into John’s house and killed the four young men who were fast asleep. The gang members killed my friends using forced circumcision, cutting them and then letting them bleed to death. My four friends were Luo like me, and we are among the few tribes in Kenya who traditionally do not circumcise—something often denigrated. My friends were killed in the cold blood of hatred. If I had been there, it would have been me, too.

Somehow, Jessica saved my life—her warning kept me from being with them—but I could not, in turn, save my friends.

As I dial her number, I am overcome by choking sobs. She answers on the first ring and when I hear her voice, I only cry more.

“They killed them, Jess—they killed them—”

“Who?”

“Yesterday, you told me not to do anything that I’d regret. I lied. When you called, I wasn’t with Antony in the city. I was in Kibera. Somehow you knew. I wanted to join my friends John and Chris. I don’t want to be special. I want to be there. My community needs me; I don’t know where I am supposed to be. We were going to sleep in John’s house, but I couldn’t ignore your warning. Now they are dead. Dead and how they killed them . . .” I trail off.

“I’m so sorry, Ken . . . we will get through this.”

I hear her words, but I don’t know. I don’t know how we will make it through.

Through the phone I can tell she is crying too. For a moment I feel sorry for all that she’s been put through because of me. I grew up with violence, and still I will never become used to it. But she’s never known anything like this, except in the abstract, except on the news.

There is nothing more that we can say, so we sit on the phone in silence. I know my life is still in danger—it will only be hours, or days if I’m lucky, before I’m found. If I am going to stay alive through this tumultuous time, I have to get out of this country.

“Tanzania,” I tell her, my voice quiet and resigned. “Please, I need help. Help me get out, to Tanzania.”

She promises to do everything in her power, and Jessica has a lot of power. She is like a lioness. Still, in this case I’m not sure it will be enough.

Vigilantes have established checkpoints and are asking people at random for their IDs. If a person happens to be from the “wrong” tribe, the individual is killed on the spot. Luckily I don’t have my ID on me, and I speak both Kikuyu and Luo perfectly, the languages of the main two opposing groups. I pray that no matter who stops me, I can use whichever language will allow me to leave with my life. The police have built a barrier at the end of the road to keep people from leaving Kibera. At the barrier, the fighting is brutal—tear gas and bullets fired indiscriminately into the crowd. No medical aid, no food, nothing comes in or goes out. When I think about how many people have already died, and how many more to come, I am sick. What a waste. And what are we fighting for anyway? Neither government party cares if we, the people, live or die.

Jessica e-mailed everyone we know, everyone she knows—Odoch and Donna, our friends from the World Social Forum who introduced us, her family members—and collected money to buy me a plane ticket. She sent me the money using Western Union and, worried that the airport might close if we delayed longer, booked me a flight to Tanzania leaving tomorrow.

I call my taxi driver friend Mbugua to come and take me to Olympic, as I kept my passport in the SHOFCO office. I am kicking myself for leaving it there. Mbugua suggests that we should go there at around ten P.M., and so we are stuck, waiting at the edge of Kibera.

As we near the barricade, the police stop the car, check if we have any weapons, and ask for our identity cards. After reviewing our documents, they tell us to go on without even asking for a bribe. We are elated.

“This is the first time the police never asked me for a cup of tea,” Mbugua says.

“Mbugua, we are lucky.”

I thank Mbugua for always taking risks for me.

“Kennedy, you are a good man.”

We arrive at the Olympic gate. I rush into the SHOFCO office and grab my passport, my phone charger, some books, and a few clothes.

Olympic Estate is so silent. I try to call Antony to let him know that I’ll be leaving the country, but I can’t reach him by phone.

As we drive back to the city, we see a line of four cars stopped by the roadside. It is almost midnight. Men walk toward us with flashlights. I look through the window. Someone is plucked from the first car. The men are asking for everyone’s national identity cards. Reading someone’s last name is an easy way to determine the person’s tribal affiliation.

“Please don’t kill me!” someone is screaming.

They chop off his head. I’m speechless, stunned. Such an atrocity is more than I can process. My breath comes quickly in short panicked bursts.

Mbugua is closing his eyes as he can’t believe what has just happened. I’m trembling with fear.

Death is really following me. Twice now I’d missed it, and yet today it finds me again.

Mbugua cannot move the car forward or backward, as we are surrounded. I know the second car in front of us is occupied by Kikuyus, because I hear them speaking Kikuyu. After their IDs, they are allowed to move on.

Now the men are on to the next car, a white Subaru. The passengers are not responding in Kikuyu. I hear them being asked to produce their identity cards.

“You guys think we cannot find you. You are killing our people, now we are dealing with you,” says one of the young men in charge of stopping the traffic. He is wearing black sunglasses, even though it’s dark.

“One by one outside,” he orders.

People are now wailing in the car in front of us. They are being slashed with a machete. Each falls on the ground, lifeless; their screams and pleas for mercy reverberate throughout the night. We can’t believe our eyes.

It’s our turn now. I’m trembling and crying like a baby, but Mbugua is still.

Mbugua knows he will be considered a traitor. As a Kikuyu, he too could die for trying to shield me, a Luo. We are no longer friends, no longer individual people, reduced to symbols of our tribes, of a struggle that is not even ours.

Something possesses me, and I start speaking Kikuyu to the man in the sunglasses.

“The Luos have killed my family, they burned our house, and now we are escaping! They have burned everything, even our IDs!” Tears run down my face.

Mbugua jumps in and says terrible things about the Luo.

The men look at us and feel sorry for us. The man with the sunglasses tells us to go, to be careful on the road.

I can’t believe it. I have tricked death once again.

Mbugua says that he will start going to church. God has saved his life and that is a story that he will share with his family. He could have been dead. He was going to be killed for collaborating with the enemies.

We arrive safely at the cheap hotel where I will spend my last night before leaving for Tanzania. Mbugua explains that in spite of his great love for me, he will no longer drive me to Kibera. He has escaped death twice.

“We can’t be lucky again the third time. That was death’s last warning.”

Still, Mgubua does promise to take me to the airport, as that will be during the daylight tomorrow.

That night I also pray to God to thank him for saving my life. I don’t even want to ever tell Jessica what happened tonight. Some experiences are too much to bear.

A few weeks later I am staying at a run-down hotel in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. Jessica galvanized friends and family, raised enough money to help me escape from Kenya, and I slipped out. Here in Dar, I don’t know what to do with my free time. When I stop for tea in a local shop, an old Tanzanian man recognizes my accent as Kenyan. He tells me how sorry he was to hear of our troubles and buys me my first cup of chai as a welcome. His kindness only reminds me of how out of place I feel, seeking asylum away from everything I know. As the violence rages at home, I am by myself in a foreign country, the future entirely unknown. I don’t know when or if I will be able to go back to Kenya. There is no way to tell how long the fighting might last. My days here consist of wandering throughout the town, checking my e-mail if there is power (Dar has frequent rationing and outages), trying to reach friends and family still at home despite the intermittent cell service, and talking to Jessica. I read the books I have brought with me—Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey. I devour them. Sometimes I can’t forgive myself for leaving. Other times, I know I had no other choice.

Today, I eat rice for breakfast—a Tanzanian custom that I must admit I love. The rice is soft and melts in my mouth. I take a sip of tea, and the rice and sweet liquid go down perfectly together. I walk to a local cybercafé, hoping the power is working today. Luckily, the cybercafé is open and I eagerly log in, hoping that Jessica has sent me a note, something I can read and reread throughout the day.

But there is no love note waiting in my inbox. There is only one short e-mail from Jessica. I open it to find links to several long applications to American universities. The subject line is only one word, all in caps: APPLY.

Jessica sends me all the forms, and I fill them out. I only comply because I’m in love with Jessica and I want to make her happy. I have nothing else to do, so I figure I might as well use up time filling out forms. I cannot believe anything will result from these efforts. Jessica seems to be crazy, a crazy American lady. In America, kids are raised to believe that they can do anything. I try to be hopeful and motivated, but the difference between American kids and me is that I am realistic. I know filling out these forms and writing these essays is a waste of time. I can’t get into a university in Kenya, let alone an expensive American university. But Jessica is so persistent, I fill them out all the same.

There’s a form asking about my parents’ property and income. Questions ask if my parents own a house, and what assets we generally hold. So many times I write zero. How much is your family income in a year? So now I decide to write $900. I fill in everything. I scan it and I send it back to Jessica.

Immediately I get a phone call.

“Kennedy, how much do your parents really earn?”

“Jessica, we earn nothing.” I say. “We have no regular, consistent money. You know I’m the one supporting my family. But as an African man, I must have some pride. I was tired of writing zero, zero, zero.”

Jessica sends the form back to me.