The Recruit - A Short Story by Mary Kimani
- By Mary Kimani
- Published June 17, 2009
- Fiction
- Unrated
Mary Kimani
Mary Kimani is a journalist. She covered the Rwanda genocide trials at the UN court in Tanzania, as well as the peace processes in Burundi and the DRC for Internews and Reuters. She has been writing poetry from a young age. One of her earliest pieces, Children of an Inferior God, was included in a British Council Anthology published in 1991. Recently, she published a collection of poems under the title - He Didn't Die Easy: The Search for Hope Amidst Poverty, War and Genocide. Her website
View all Entries by Mary Kimani
The New York Times carried a headline about it. “Kenya’s Brutal Murders linked to Sect,” it read. But Njuguna didn’t read, and even had he been literate, no one he knew read the New York Times.
They showed the images of the two men on local TV. But Njuguna owned no such luxury, nor did his accomplice that night, so he never saw any of them. They heard about the TV coverage from Kihika, but he might as well have not told them about it, really it didn’t make a difference. They knew how everything had happened, down to the very last detail, who needed an image on TV?
But someone must have cared, because by week’s end it was all over the foreign news channels. They were talking about it on BBC, and even CNN had something on it, but neither Maina nor Njuguna saw or heard about those broadcasts. Some minister did issue a statement, and that made it into the local press. After the statement many young had been swept up in police patrols. But there was nothing unusual in that, it happened all the time, and in any case, they were all released in a few months.
In itself their act had not been that unusual, well… Not anymore at least, just read the papers, it really does happen quite often. Such “gory events” as everyone seemed to call them, had been going on for quite some time now, but this one seemed to have struck a nerve. Maybe it’s because the foreign channels had showed interest and no one in government liked such bad press.
In any case, it had never been Njuguna’s plan to end up as world news. To be quite honest, he really had no plans at all. He was not what you would call an ambitious person. Njuguna left the small dusty town of Ndumberi for Nairobi city on August 10th 2006, at 12 noon. He was 16 years old and he was fed up with the toiling. If you have ever tilled through an “ibuti ”, you will understand why. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, I will explain. An “ibuti” is a square area, ten feet by ten feet. Villagers use it as a measure of how much tilling a worker has accomplished. Njuguna had worked through hundreds of those ten by ten’s in his quite short lifetime. The reward was negligible, fifty shillings for each square, 200 shillings if you could squeeze four into a day’s work. The strain was killing him. He was tired of working, and bored. “There has to be a better way to make money,” Njuguna thought, and left Ndumberi in search of it.
Njuguna had landed at his cousin’s place in Majengo. It was a tiny mud shack whose roof consisted of tarpaulin and some rusted iron sheets. The roof leaked, and the smelly, dark and mildew filled room he shared with his cousin, Njuguna realized, was not much different from the one he’d left in Ndumberi. But it was too late to turn back, and he had no money to go back anyway.
His cousin sold chang’aa, an illegal concoction of the kind that only poor people drink – strong and fierce — so much so that it burst into flames if you struck a match near it. Such accidents routinely burnt down Majengo’s tin shacks. Njuguna didn’t mind the drink but he found the stench from its brewing both overwhelming and nauseating. He wasn’t much help in selling that. His cousin however, wasn’t about to let him hang around, idling. Njuguna soon found himself rolling out carefully prepared bhang joints. Each sold for 25 bob, and Njuguna was in charge of debt collection. When people didn’t pay their debt on time, his cousin expected him to get the money somehow. It took a bit of learning how to do it right, but soon he was collecting reliably and not having to slog the whole daylong. “Things are looking up,” he thought. He had found a good job for himself.
Njuguna was not given to a lot of reflection, but he sure was nobody’s fool. Nairobi, he realised, was not for the weak of heart. Those that did well were often hard and merciless and at least, he figured, those were two qualities he had no problems cultivating. All that was driving him towards a collision with fate, but it wasn’t inevitable until December 10, 2006 at 1 p.m.
Njuguna was waiting for a minibus driver who owed his cousin some money. The man was of a type easily intimidated and could reliably be approached by day, “unlike others who were best approached at night, when alone,” Njuguna thought to himself. When the man brought his vehicle to the bus stand, Njuguna waited until all passengers alighted. The driver parked, waiting his turn to collect new fares and Njuguna strolled over nonchalantly. He opened the passenger door to the driver’s cabin and sat himself next to the surprised driver, who immediately recognized him. Njuguna beckoned to the man, and opened his jacket so that the man could see the knife sticking out of the inside pocket. Calmly, he leaned sideways, and in a low, cold tone whispered… “You have something that belongs to us.” The man paid up.
Njuguna couldn’t have known that the whole incident was being watched keenly by another. He had been spotted. The man that watched and studied him knew exactly how to recruit Njuguna’s type and approached the young man within days.
Njuguna liked how his new friends talked about education. He had always known it was a useless waste of time, but it was good to finally confirm that books were a white man’s creation, whose purpose was to deny the black people’s natural wisdom. He had always wondered why it was so hard for someone like him to be rich when there were so many people with a lot of money around him. Now he understood that people like him had been robbed of power. The rich were keeping young people like him down. “That is why you could never find good jobs. They kept them for their spoiled children and their kind. If you were poor you toiled endlessly for no money while they kept all the good things to themselves,” he thought. He liked it when they said there was need for young people like him to sacrifice if they wanted to bring the old ways back. He liked the meetings. He also liked the fact that there were so many other young people like him, all struggling, like him, and all now understood how they had been duped by the government and all the rich people around. Never had Njuguna felt himself to be part of something so powerful, so important, and so monumental. This was God’s gift to him. God had sent him from Ndumberi for this. After six months of listening and learning, Njuguna knew he was ready to take the next step.
It was July 12, 2007. Mochama woke up late that day. If he had known better, he would have stayed in bed and saved himself from what was to come. But we human beings live minute-to-minute, in total ignorance and unaware of whatever calamity or glory awaits us around the corner. It is just as well. We may not like what we find.
There wasn’t much to wake up to anyway. Mochama’s entire life revolved around his bed-sitter, located above a bar at Corner in the low income neighbourhood of Kayole, and his work place, a minibus. He owned a stove, two sufurias , several plates and spoons, a bed with old bed sheets and a handful of shirts and trousers that hang on a sisal string clothes-line in the middle of the room.
On that fateful day, Mochama got up and went downstairs, to backrooms of the bar, to haggle for hot bathing water and the use of a bathing room. The price changed daily. When the barmaids were in a good mood they gave him the bucketful of water and bathing room free, when they were cranky they made him pay for it. He was lucky, he thought, the girl on duty had only asked him for ten bob. Soon he was bathed and changed. He didn’t know what to do yet, his ‘squad ’ didn’t begin until after noon when the morning driver handed over the minibus to him. But men like him are not used to sitting around indoors, so he got out and went to his equivalent of a workplace’s drinking fountain - the Kayole Corner bus stop.
Otich was already at work when Mochama woke up. He had dressed and walked half an hour from Kibera slums to KBS bus station before Mochama had even bathed. One of the drivers was looking for a ‘konda’ because his usual partner had not yet arrived. “It pays to be early,” Otich thought.
He rarely stayed in bed beyond 5 a.m. And each evening, it took all his energy to will himself back to his house. It wasn’t so much that he liked being at work; far from it! He left early and returned late to keep away from wife’s vexing demands, complaints, and the children’s incessant squabbling. He hated looking at the tattered state of their belongings, the bed sheets stained by many nights of bedwetting by their young children, the haggard woman that had once been his young bride, and measly servings that masqueraded as meals. Never be cheated, nobody gets used to being poor, and Otich hated it. Just as he hated passengers who squirmed when he stood or sat close to them. Water is expensive in Kibera and Otich couldn’t bathe often. Each time someone cringed because of his body odour, he wanted to bash his or her head in.
The women irritated him most. But there were compensations. Like the mad rush of excitement he experienced when he came across a timid looking female. He could tell if they were by the way they avoided meeting his eyes, and the way they tried to make themselves look small and inconspicuous. When he met one like that he could barely contain himself. He would go out of his way to pick a fight and then insult the stupid female to his heart’s content. He had even managed to beat one up, and nobody even dared to intervene. “One of these days,” he thought to himself, “I will get one of them, one of the nicely dressed ones, and I will show them what a real man can do to them in the dark.”
It was 4 p.m on that very day as the rush hour kicked in that fate set her clock in motion. Mochama got his minibus after waiting most day; chatting and hustling fellow drivers. He should have started at noon, but was delayed because of the minibus owner, a local leader of the Matatu Owners Association, was a stingy Kikuyu man who never wanted to pay for anything. He had not paid the monthly fee that the Kamjesh enforcers demanded of all vehicles plying the route, and they were not allowing the vehicle to move until the fee was paid. No driver, not even Mochama dared to go near it until the matter was resolved. The owner, rather than pay up, had come to the stop, demanding to see the person responsible for denying his minibus the right to work. A man called Kihika stepped up.
The conversation between the two was lost on Mochama since it was carried out entirely in Kikuyu, a language he had never fully learned. But you really didn’t need an interpreter. As Kihika spoke he moved ever closer to the minibus owner, and his voice dropped lower and lower until one could barely hear what was being said, but you could see the minibus owner start to sweat profusely and his eyes dart back and forth like a caged rabbit’s. Whatever he was told must have been effective. He’d paid up.
Mochama was eager to get started. He drove to town with a konda who was ending his shift and as soon as he arrived at KBS bus station, asked if there was any other person available to fill the shift. At the same time the conductor Otich had been filling for had just shown up. Thus it was that Otich and Mochama met up and began the evening rush back and forth, from Kayole to the city, hustling to make money. All the while, fate awaited them patiently.
They showed the images of the two men on local TV. But Njuguna owned no such luxury, nor did his accomplice that night, so he never saw any of them. They heard about the TV coverage from Kihika, but he might as well have not told them about it, really it didn’t make a difference. They knew how everything had happened, down to the very last detail, who needed an image on TV?
But someone must have cared, because by week’s end it was all over the foreign news channels. They were talking about it on BBC, and even CNN had something on it, but neither Maina nor Njuguna saw or heard about those broadcasts. Some minister did issue a statement, and that made it into the local press. After the statement many young had been swept up in police patrols. But there was nothing unusual in that, it happened all the time, and in any case, they were all released in a few months.
In itself their act had not been that unusual, well… Not anymore at least, just read the papers, it really does happen quite often. Such “gory events” as everyone seemed to call them, had been going on for quite some time now, but this one seemed to have struck a nerve. Maybe it’s because the foreign channels had showed interest and no one in government liked such bad press.
In any case, it had never been Njuguna’s plan to end up as world news. To be quite honest, he really had no plans at all. He was not what you would call an ambitious person. Njuguna left the small dusty town of Ndumberi for Nairobi city on August 10th 2006, at 12 noon. He was 16 years old and he was fed up with the toiling. If you have ever tilled through an “ibuti ”, you will understand why. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, I will explain. An “ibuti” is a square area, ten feet by ten feet. Villagers use it as a measure of how much tilling a worker has accomplished. Njuguna had worked through hundreds of those ten by ten’s in his quite short lifetime. The reward was negligible, fifty shillings for each square, 200 shillings if you could squeeze four into a day’s work. The strain was killing him. He was tired of working, and bored. “There has to be a better way to make money,” Njuguna thought, and left Ndumberi in search of it.
Njuguna had landed at his cousin’s place in Majengo. It was a tiny mud shack whose roof consisted of tarpaulin and some rusted iron sheets. The roof leaked, and the smelly, dark and mildew filled room he shared with his cousin, Njuguna realized, was not much different from the one he’d left in Ndumberi. But it was too late to turn back, and he had no money to go back anyway.
His cousin sold chang’aa, an illegal concoction of the kind that only poor people drink – strong and fierce — so much so that it burst into flames if you struck a match near it. Such accidents routinely burnt down Majengo’s tin shacks. Njuguna didn’t mind the drink but he found the stench from its brewing both overwhelming and nauseating. He wasn’t much help in selling that. His cousin however, wasn’t about to let him hang around, idling. Njuguna soon found himself rolling out carefully prepared bhang joints. Each sold for 25 bob, and Njuguna was in charge of debt collection. When people didn’t pay their debt on time, his cousin expected him to get the money somehow. It took a bit of learning how to do it right, but soon he was collecting reliably and not having to slog the whole daylong. “Things are looking up,” he thought. He had found a good job for himself.
Njuguna was not given to a lot of reflection, but he sure was nobody’s fool. Nairobi, he realised, was not for the weak of heart. Those that did well were often hard and merciless and at least, he figured, those were two qualities he had no problems cultivating. All that was driving him towards a collision with fate, but it wasn’t inevitable until December 10, 2006 at 1 p.m.
Njuguna was waiting for a minibus driver who owed his cousin some money. The man was of a type easily intimidated and could reliably be approached by day, “unlike others who were best approached at night, when alone,” Njuguna thought to himself. When the man brought his vehicle to the bus stand, Njuguna waited until all passengers alighted. The driver parked, waiting his turn to collect new fares and Njuguna strolled over nonchalantly. He opened the passenger door to the driver’s cabin and sat himself next to the surprised driver, who immediately recognized him. Njuguna beckoned to the man, and opened his jacket so that the man could see the knife sticking out of the inside pocket. Calmly, he leaned sideways, and in a low, cold tone whispered… “You have something that belongs to us.” The man paid up.
Njuguna couldn’t have known that the whole incident was being watched keenly by another. He had been spotted. The man that watched and studied him knew exactly how to recruit Njuguna’s type and approached the young man within days.
Njuguna liked how his new friends talked about education. He had always known it was a useless waste of time, but it was good to finally confirm that books were a white man’s creation, whose purpose was to deny the black people’s natural wisdom. He had always wondered why it was so hard for someone like him to be rich when there were so many people with a lot of money around him. Now he understood that people like him had been robbed of power. The rich were keeping young people like him down. “That is why you could never find good jobs. They kept them for their spoiled children and their kind. If you were poor you toiled endlessly for no money while they kept all the good things to themselves,” he thought. He liked it when they said there was need for young people like him to sacrifice if they wanted to bring the old ways back. He liked the meetings. He also liked the fact that there were so many other young people like him, all struggling, like him, and all now understood how they had been duped by the government and all the rich people around. Never had Njuguna felt himself to be part of something so powerful, so important, and so monumental. This was God’s gift to him. God had sent him from Ndumberi for this. After six months of listening and learning, Njuguna knew he was ready to take the next step.
It was July 12, 2007. Mochama woke up late that day. If he had known better, he would have stayed in bed and saved himself from what was to come. But we human beings live minute-to-minute, in total ignorance and unaware of whatever calamity or glory awaits us around the corner. It is just as well. We may not like what we find.
There wasn’t much to wake up to anyway. Mochama’s entire life revolved around his bed-sitter, located above a bar at Corner in the low income neighbourhood of Kayole, and his work place, a minibus. He owned a stove, two sufurias , several plates and spoons, a bed with old bed sheets and a handful of shirts and trousers that hang on a sisal string clothes-line in the middle of the room.
On that fateful day, Mochama got up and went downstairs, to backrooms of the bar, to haggle for hot bathing water and the use of a bathing room. The price changed daily. When the barmaids were in a good mood they gave him the bucketful of water and bathing room free, when they were cranky they made him pay for it. He was lucky, he thought, the girl on duty had only asked him for ten bob. Soon he was bathed and changed. He didn’t know what to do yet, his ‘squad ’ didn’t begin until after noon when the morning driver handed over the minibus to him. But men like him are not used to sitting around indoors, so he got out and went to his equivalent of a workplace’s drinking fountain - the Kayole Corner bus stop.
Otich was already at work when Mochama woke up. He had dressed and walked half an hour from Kibera slums to KBS bus station before Mochama had even bathed. One of the drivers was looking for a ‘konda’ because his usual partner had not yet arrived. “It pays to be early,” Otich thought.
He rarely stayed in bed beyond 5 a.m. And each evening, it took all his energy to will himself back to his house. It wasn’t so much that he liked being at work; far from it! He left early and returned late to keep away from wife’s vexing demands, complaints, and the children’s incessant squabbling. He hated looking at the tattered state of their belongings, the bed sheets stained by many nights of bedwetting by their young children, the haggard woman that had once been his young bride, and measly servings that masqueraded as meals. Never be cheated, nobody gets used to being poor, and Otich hated it. Just as he hated passengers who squirmed when he stood or sat close to them. Water is expensive in Kibera and Otich couldn’t bathe often. Each time someone cringed because of his body odour, he wanted to bash his or her head in.
The women irritated him most. But there were compensations. Like the mad rush of excitement he experienced when he came across a timid looking female. He could tell if they were by the way they avoided meeting his eyes, and the way they tried to make themselves look small and inconspicuous. When he met one like that he could barely contain himself. He would go out of his way to pick a fight and then insult the stupid female to his heart’s content. He had even managed to beat one up, and nobody even dared to intervene. “One of these days,” he thought to himself, “I will get one of them, one of the nicely dressed ones, and I will show them what a real man can do to them in the dark.”
It was 4 p.m on that very day as the rush hour kicked in that fate set her clock in motion. Mochama got his minibus after waiting most day; chatting and hustling fellow drivers. He should have started at noon, but was delayed because of the minibus owner, a local leader of the Matatu Owners Association, was a stingy Kikuyu man who never wanted to pay for anything. He had not paid the monthly fee that the Kamjesh enforcers demanded of all vehicles plying the route, and they were not allowing the vehicle to move until the fee was paid. No driver, not even Mochama dared to go near it until the matter was resolved. The owner, rather than pay up, had come to the stop, demanding to see the person responsible for denying his minibus the right to work. A man called Kihika stepped up.
The conversation between the two was lost on Mochama since it was carried out entirely in Kikuyu, a language he had never fully learned. But you really didn’t need an interpreter. As Kihika spoke he moved ever closer to the minibus owner, and his voice dropped lower and lower until one could barely hear what was being said, but you could see the minibus owner start to sweat profusely and his eyes dart back and forth like a caged rabbit’s. Whatever he was told must have been effective. He’d paid up.
Mochama was eager to get started. He drove to town with a konda who was ending his shift and as soon as he arrived at KBS bus station, asked if there was any other person available to fill the shift. At the same time the conductor Otich had been filling for had just shown up. Thus it was that Otich and Mochama met up and began the evening rush back and forth, from Kayole to the city, hustling to make money. All the while, fate awaited them patiently.