To really understand how my story turned out, it’s important to go back to the beginning. A tree can only be borne of it’s seed after all, or some African proverb along those lines, but you get the gist.
Picture this. It’s pitch dark, the only sound accompanying the panicked beating of your heart is the rickety bleating of an aged truck engine. This truck is laden with hastily salvaged belongings and the souls of everyone you hold dear. To avoid discovery, the truck has to travel with it’s headlights switched off, relying on the driver’s sixth sense and the benevolence of a sleepy moonlight. You are not on a highway, that would be too dangerous. It would mean being ominously exposed to the many roadblocks that could either be manned by edgy security forces or vigilante hired to ‘finish’ foreign tribes. You just happen to belong to the wrong tribe, so no highways.
Every few kilometers the truck stops. In the eeriness of a starry night, which in better circumstances you would have considered quite beautiful, all you can hear in the distance are screams, shouts and blasting guns, echoing from miles away, carried along by an agnostic wind. How far, how close you don’t know. To keep moving means the risk of hate-filled death is always a looming presence, but to remain is certain demise. An impossible situation to find yourself.
It took 3 days, several tire bursts, multiple engine fixes, repeated negotiation and renegotiation between my Dad and the driver whos fee seemed to go up with every mile, and what my Mother will tell you was the grace of God, transmitted through the Rosary she held on to fervently as she nursed our last born, to finally close the 600 KM gap which gave my Parents assurance that we were far enough from harm.
Fast forward, nearly 30 years.
The tribal clashes of 1992 were long gone, the memories of which were unearthed when Kenya went berserk in 2007. We had occasionally talked of visiting Kapenguria, our birth place, but the thought never quite resulted in a coherent plan of action. What would we see? What wounds would we have to contend with? Was it worth it to echo the What ifs of a life long forgotten? Was it worth the trip really?
Eventually we took the trip back in time.
Our former home, the one Mr. Muriu proudly built before he was 30, complete with commercial front facing shops, rental houses at the back and the Landlord’s house at the far back was exactly as we left it, save for the OMO Advert at the front that had since been painted over. The premise is now a vocational training college run by the Catholic church. Apt.
We stood there, together, yet alone in our thoughts of what this edifice of long abandoned glory meant for each of us. As a first born, probably the one with more vivid memories of the life we had here, I couldn’t help but replay the last 30 something years.
Like a painful photo reel, I recalled the 6 of us cramped in a tiny room donated to my Dad by his step brother once we landed in Gilgil town. I recalled the venom filled landlady who seemed to think everything I did was an affront against her, and would knock my head any chance she got, until I had enough and one day came this close to serenading her with stones. I recalled the 6 different primary schools I went to because my Dad (the teacher) couldn’t stand the run down nature of the various public primary schools that were within his affordability range. I recalled the loans my Parents accumulated as they effortlessly got all 4 of us through school, and which I would later have to help shoulder the moment I had the tiniest of earning power.
What would life have been if we didn’t have to hastily leave this life that my Parents had built in this remote corner of West Pokot?
I would never know.
And I couldn’t conjure up an emotion to associate with what I was seeing.
