I have a cousin, let’s call him Farouk. He’s about 5’6’’, slim, chocolate. Farouk is a people’s person. He is the kind of guy who gets along with anyone! The life of the party. Fun loving guy. Loves his booze. Even better loves his booze in his women (that doesn’t make sense to me either). Although small in stature Farouk has got a personality of three men. Farouk is the shit. Anyway I can hear a murmur “Ok, we get it, why don’t you marry him Jackson,”
Farouk is in the transportation business, which means he drives one of those trailer-lugging containers from Coast-o to Rwanda. Yes, how many diminutive men do you know who drive them big machines? Talking of big machines, Farouk is drawn to them big-boned women, the ones who have wrists the size of his thighs…both his thighs. I don’t know how that works, but it seemed to float his boat. Anyway needless to say, Farouk, like most of those guys transporting goods through three borders, is always on the road making mad cash. He is the kind of guy who you can call on a weekday at 4pm and ask, “Chief, where are you?” and he would be silent for a second or two (perhaps looking around) and mutter, “Man, I don’t know…but Kaplong is about 75kms away.” I bet you are hearing the town Kaplong for the first time here, if you drove a truck for a living you would know more of your country.
Farouk is in jail now.
Look, settle down no need to get excited now it’s not like he has the clap, he is just a guest of the state. The thing with having your cousin in jail is that it’s cool to say it. It might make you look like you come from a maladjusted family, but it also means that you come from a hardcore family, which simply means people are more careful about owing you money. Having a cousin in the slammer means you can always throw it casually in a conversation and watch people cringe from fear…or respect, who cares. “Biko, what are you doing Sato afternoon?” “Well nothing much, will be visiting my cousin in jail.”
Beep, beep, beep…Dialing tone.
Having a cousin in jail means that you have a dormant gene for truancy, of being on the wrong side of the law. So yes, I’m an outlaw in waiting. I’m bad. Farouk has turned all the men in our huge family into bad boys, dangerous and capable of committing heinous crimes which in essence makes us all marked men. I bet my phone is tapped. Whenever I’m going home, I always suspect that I’m being trailed by men in dark cars. I bet there is a security agent who monitors this blog hoping to get a clue, if only he could read. I love this feeling, this feeling of being a marked man.
There is a question you must be asking yourselves; what crime did Farouk commit? I’m sure this crime will put a lot of things in perspective. I won’t go into details for obvious reasons (hint: Farouk’s buddies paying me a visit). So here is the rub, and please be open minded about this, something the judge who presided over Farouk’s case should have attempted.
So Farouk goes down coast and picks a container packed with merchandise, destination? Burundi through Uganda. The container is checked and locked. Farouk jumps in the truck with one of his boys and they start driving out at 3kms per hour. As you would expect such trucks are monitored by these new technology thingamajigs that can locate on a monitor the precise location of their fleet. So this means you can’t make a detour along the way and go check out some bird in Maralal, something I suspect Farouk wouldn’t mind doing. So anyway, this is where the story starts sounding like a scene from Prison Break.
Somewhere in Mubira forest in Uganda the truck disappears from the radar. Poof. Gone. The truck just disappears of the radar. Now you see it, now you don’t. My cousin calls the main office and says he was jacked. The cops come, they comb the area. They put up an APB or whatever they do when an alarm is sounded. The Ugandan security, in their ridiculous green gumboots, helps in the search. Roadblocks are asked to be on the lookout for the truck. A chopper hovers overhead…Ok, I lie, there was no chopper.
The truck is not found. Blimey! A whole, what 20ton truck, just disappears in thin air like that, my word, I would say the Bermuda triangle just moved to Uganda. So cops being cops, because cops – especially the ones who wear gumboots – don’t want to look bad when they can’t solve a crime, call Farouk and ask him to disclose where he had hidden the damned truck. Farouk empties all his pockets and swears he doesn’t have the truck. They make him say aaahhh to see if he had hidden it in a false tooth….great investigative work officers.
Between the time the truck went off the radar and the time my cousin called the main office was something like two hours. You would have to be a magician to make disappear a truck like that in two hours. I’m no cop, I’m just saying.
Here is the part I find hilarious (I’m sorry), but that truck contained wheelchairs. Yes, many many wheelchairs and crutches headed for the crippled in Burundi! Come on, how can you pretend that there is something very funny at a whole truck of wheelchairs and crutches missing? I imagine some guy who been waiting for a crutch for two months being told that his crutch disappeared in Uganda. “It must be Kony, I know it, it’s that rebel Kony!” he would sniff.
Look I don’t believe my own cousin would nick crutches and wheelchairs…I mean how do you sell stolen crutches and crutches, isn’t that just sad? We don’t have Special Olympics in the region either. I mean the only thing worse than stealing crutches and wheelchairs is stealing someone’s wooden prosthetic leg. I believe you only steal wheelchairs after you have sold your soul to the devil. Even if my cousin was a thief (and this is very hypothetical and ridiculous because the only thing we steal is hearts. We are in the heart business) he wouldn’t steal crutches, and certainly not a whole bloody truck of em. Did the judge care? No, he threw the book at him; 2yrs in the slammer!
Anyway, I go to visit him in Industrial area prison where the government of Kenya is hosting him. It’s my first time to visit anyone in prison, and for that matter, someone accused of stealing crutches. The waiting room is full of women. Women who are there to see their sons and husbands no doubt. They wear depressed faces. They seem anxious. A prison warden summons me. He looks sleazy, like a gecko. Most prison wardens are sleazy because they are in close proximity to scumbags, it sort of rubs off you. He asks me for my cousin’s name. I tell him. What is he in for? I want to say, “The judge insisted he stole crutches.” But I don’t think jokes are taken lightly in prison. So I tell him. He says I will have to chuck some little money to facilitate the meet. He walks away. I go back to the waiting room which looks like a prison itself; cemented slabs for seats, scribbling on the wall, no windows.
I’m called after 10mins. I follow the warden. I’m anxious now, I haven’t seen Farouk in over 4yrs, even though he has only served a year of his two year sentence. There is another metallic gate (prisons are full of gates) manned by this toad of a warden who you can tell immediately is not a nice guy. He is the don. The warder who I was dealing with whispers to the big-ass don with a bulging belly. He looks at me through snake eyes as his underling whispers in his cauliflowered ear. He sort of reminds me of Bellick, that badass prison captain in Prison Break, a character I sort of learned to love.
Snake Eyes summons me with his fat pudgy finger. He smells like overnight carrot juice. I guess that’s the cologne of choice for prison wardens. He says I will have to part with 100bob for him and 50bob for his underling, do I understand, he asks? I say yeah, these are guys you don’t want to owe money, they might just force feed you overnight carrot juice. I’m led into this area teeming with wardens, to the left is a room with small compartments with small holes where loved ones converse with inmates. There is no phone, a glass compartment, or a chair like in the movies. You stand, and you peer at the person you are visiting through a hole. I think to dissuade kids off crime they should be brought to this room and have a good look. It’s a deterrent in itself.
I hear my cousin before I see him. He has one of them deep baritone voices. I hear him convincing one of the wardens to allow him to come out instead of talking to me through the hole. The guy says it’s out of question. He starts waxing, the warden gives in. I smile. They might lock him up but he still has it.
I expect some withered chap to walk out of the gates. Withered and bitter. The guy who walks out is all smiles and is strong. He hasn’t lost an ounce. He seems healthier than me. The only thing different is that he is bald. All cons are clean shaven; they look like characters off Star wars. He laughs when he sees me. Farouk is one of those people who can start laughing and you find yourself laughing even if you aren’t sure what is funny. So I start laughing. We hug. I tell him he smells like shit, he tells me it’s the new Armani. “They test it on us prisoners first before it’s unleashed on the general population.”
I tell him I love his new clad (prison clothes), he laughs hard at this and says If I love them then I should see him on Sundays. “What, they are ironed?” I joke. We sit on a staircase and chat and laugh. I ask him what he misses most about freedom and he retorts, “Sausages.”
“Roast or deep fried?” I ask
him. He looks at me puzzled and chuckles, “I haven’t thought of that Chef Ramsey, just damned sausages, even smoked or roasted in the sun, I don’t care.” I ask him what he does throughout the day, he says he is stationed at the dobi, which is laundry services for ye who are reading this in freedom. He is paid some money by working in the dobi, about Ksh 140 a day he says. “When I leave here I will be so rich I will buy my own truck, ” he jokes. “No you won’t” I tell him, “not with inflation.”
Thing is they read papers somehow, so he knows what’s going on. He can even make a phone call from jail. I ask him what he hates most on the inside, and he says squatting. “They make you squat all the time man, that and the whole thing of walking in a line. I’m so used to squatting that when I come out I think I will be squatting in the middle of town when I see a traffic cop.” That killed me.
Of course I ask him something that is both insensitivity and rude. But I want to know damn it (and so do you damn it), so I ask it in form of a joke. “So whose bitch are you in here?” I’m afraid he isn’t going to find that funny but thankfully he does. We have a good laugh about it before he says more seriously. “Here is the thing, when I came in I had money, and I bought allegiance and protection. The trick is to get the main prisoner on your side, the guy who runs the prison. Once that guy is on your side nobody will touch you, all them cross-eyed gay pervs will not dare come close to me. So no, I ain’t nobody’s bitch and I don’t have any bitch. I don’t swing that way.”
“Well keep it that way,” I tell him, “I mean it’s bad enough that you are in for losing crutches and wheelchairs than to complete it with being gay.” More laughter. I ask him about his ex-girlfriends and whether they come to visit or call. He says they don’t (women!), but admits that some Mpesa him money once in a while. “You have Mpesa in here, man what don’t you get in here, strippers?”
“That can be arranged,” he chuckles.
“So have you bumped into Onyancha in here?” I joke.
He laughs and says that murderers are not in maximum security prison not where he is. I want to ask about the truck and what happened to it but I can’t seem to broach the subject. Maybe next time. We talk about family stuff, boring stuff. After 30mins Snake Eyes shouts across the room that time is up. We stand up. I want to give him some money, but he says he can’t take it from me directly; I have to give it to snake eyes who will make sure he receives it. “What if he plays you man?”. He assures me he can’t as long as I tell him how much I will leave with Snake Eyes. What do you know, there is honor in the prisons.
We hug again. I tell him he smells like shit. He laughs. He thanks me for coming; I tell him he is welcome. He asks me how the missus is; I tell him she is fine. He asks why I didn’t come with her, I tell him “because I don’t want her to think we are a family of bald, shitty smelling cons.” He laughs as he walks away back to a life of squatting.