The last of a dying breed

It is a Saturday evening and Johanna Karanja has just finished setting up mole traps on a farm in Kamutiini village in Lower Kabete, Kiambu County. The timing must be right, he says; moles tend to feed early in the morning and the first few hours after dark. Satisfied, he begins narrating how his work as a mole catcher began.

One sunny morning in December 1971, an old friend visited Karanja at his house in Lower Kabete. The man, who had come from Lavington in Nairobi where he worked as a groundsman at the home of a British family, wanted to discuss a job Karanja might be interested in.

Just before Karanja climbed onto the back seat of his friend’s bicycle, the man warned: “We are going to catch moles; that is the job and you have the knowledge. But if you do not catch any, you will walk home. I will not give you a ride on my bicycle.”

And with that, the two men left for Nairobi, catching up on the past.

The White man who owned the home in Lavington had expressed concern after mounds of red earth began springing up all over his well-manicured lawn.

THE MOLE CATCHER

Suspecting moles, he had ordered his groundsman to find a way to catch the creatures. Karanja’s friend had already laid more than 20 traps, none of which had yielded anything, so the moles had continued churning more soil.

After puttering around the lawn, Karanja concluded that the problem was his friend’s skill – or lack thereof. So he quietly laid his own traps and waited. That first day, nine of his 11 traps yielded results. While that was a good thing, it led to a conflict between Karanja and his friend; apparently, Karanja’s friend had gone to his employer with the moles, claiming some of the credit saying, “He worked under me, he was my assistant.”

“No, I don’t want the moles, I want the man!” ordered the White man.
And that’s how lowly Karanja was received into the house. The next three days he caught more moles – 36 in total. Before he left for home, the house owner’s wife took him aside and handed him a piece of paper with something typed on it. It was a “certificate” acknowledging his skill and bore the words, “This is to certify that Mr Karanja is most efficient at catching moles…”

“I was paid Sh9 for each mole, plus bus fare,” Karanja reveals.

Armed with the “certificate”, he no longer needed help finding work. In Lavington and Karen and the areas in between, new homes were being built, as were golf courses, and moles seemed to be everywhere. With every success Karanja registered, a satisfied owner would spread the word about the catcher with the magic traps at the club.

“I went to the home of Wambui Kenyatta (former president Jomo Kenyatta’s daughter) in Lavington and the guard stopped me,” says Karanja, smiling at the memory, “so I removed the letter and showed it to him. He waved me in with some respect.”
After a remarkable haul of 68 moles at the home of Jeremiah Kiereini in Karen in 1989, Karanja received another “certificate”, this time signed by the former Cabinet secretary himself.

In Kamutiini village, and indeed, the other villages that make up Lower Kabete, Karanja is fondly referred to as “Johanna wa huko” (Johanna the mole man). He is a familiar sight, heading home from an operation, his old bag slung over his shoulder. A personable, calm man with wool-white hair, Karanja is considered something of a celebrity. Politicians seeking goodwill pose with him for a photo and in the age of the selfie, he has appeared on Facebook, although he might not know it. Motorists who recognise his stoop as he makes his way home from an assignment hoot and wave in greeting, and his local fellowship group, the Catholic Church’s jumuia, will not begin its sessions until he arrives.

For 46 years now, Karanja has used his knowledge of moles to earn a living Although he could have retired and lived off the stipend from the constituency development fund or a little money from his large, extended family, he is not about to retire.

“The works finds me, I hardly look for it,” he says.

A HONED SKILL

Karanja’s schedule follows a strict routine. From Monday to Saturday he wakes up early, makes breakfast, then receives guests, mostly old friends or church members; there is always a visitor. But at 10am, “around the time moles prefer to rouse from their morning naps” he goes to set traps or inspect those he installed the previous evening.

Karanja charges a flat rate of Sh100 per mole, plus an additional fee for transport. For example, if he works in Wangigi and the surrounding areas, he charges the standard fee. However, the charges go up by Sh200 for a job in Limuru and by Sh250 in Karen.

“To get paid, I have to show the ‘harvest’,” says Karanja. “I have to take the trapped moles to the farmer. He counts them, I get my money.” On a good day he might make Sh2,000.

Karanja attributes his reputation and longevity in his profession as much to skill as integrity.

“It is my office. I know of people who swap dead moles caught elsewhere and present them as their own catch. God sees this,” he says. After getting paid, he gets rid of the moles. “I don’t need them.”

However, he says, there was a man living in Kibichiku village, across the valley from Kamutiini, who would ask him to deliver a mole or two to his house. The man didn’t admit that he ate them but Karanja got to know, nevertheless. When he refused to pay for some deliveries, Karanja stopped supplying the moles.

Karanja makes all his traps himself, fashioning them from old metal tins. It takes patience to get the art right, understand moles, know what they like, and best them. Moles still wreak havoc on many farms. They are perhaps the single most destructive and wasteful of all burrowing creatures, seriously damaging roots and tubers. A farmer might see a seemingly upright stalk withering and, upon pulling it out, realises who the culprit is and sends for the catcher.

Notably, the skill is not being passed on.

“It is a skill that is hard to train people in because many people are impatient,” laments Karanja, “and since moles are intelligent enough not to bite on poison, traps are the most efficient way of killing them.”

For a man who still remembers Nairobi when mules clopped the growing city’s dirt streets and was already married when the first guns boomed across Europe marking the beginning of the Second World War, Karanja is truly a remarkable man. His memory and recollection of events is nearly encyclopaedic. His eyesight is sharp and he says his heart pumps like a young man’s.

“When friends invite me to a party, I end up eating the most meat,” he says amidst a round of his signature cough- a-lung-out laugh. “People soon realise I have all my teeth.” He doesn’t drink and hasn’t smoked in decades.

Karanja walks with a stoop that makes his back look as if it is pliable. Many people think it is a result of ageing but he says he developed the problem after slipping on wet ground while working and hitting his back hard.

Little has changed.

“That is me outside my house, without shoes, looking like a calico (bumpkin),” Karanja says, pointing at a framed black-and-white picture on the wall, a bout of laughter playing on his lips. The photo was taken in 1958. He is a young man, sitting cross-legged on a folding chair, a neatly laid-out table nearby.
“Same table, same seats,” Karanja says, pointing at the furniture in the sitting area. Indeed. The chairs have grown sooty with age but like the owner, are sturdy and full of character. We are sitting in his tiny, one-room house up the hill from the Kamutiini bus stop. The wooden house has no electricity or running water.

But it is as neat as a 99-year-old can keep it.

The sleeping area is separated from the rest of the room by a bedsheet. A tiny transistor radio shrills with the sound of Sunday morning worship. A pot of coffee on the charcoal stove struggles to pick up warmth from the weak embers.

He is certain the traps he laid last evening have yielded results but he will let them be. He does not work on Sundays. He will inspect the catch on Monday morning. Karanja is getting ready for church. He has picked a red tie to go with a grey suit. Though he could walk to church, a parishioner usually offers to pick him up and drop him after mass.

He loves it here, he says. He does his laundry and wonders if his rosary is hanging right over his tie. The church takes care of the Sh1,600 monthly rent, while income from his mole catching covers food and travel. Karanja has been living here for many years since he doesn’t own any ancestral land; a paternal uncle dispossessed the family of its inheritance soon after Karanja’s father died.

A few years after his first wife left, Karanja remarried and had two sons, but that marriage also failed. His descendants run into the fourth generation. He keeps in touch, travelling to Narok and Ngong for family gatherings. Whatever gaps there might be in his life are somewhat filled with pictures. The walls of his house are a mural; framed pictures of his younger brother in a flowing preacher’s robe, his sister, his two daughters, pictures of long-dead friends, his certificates.

There is one in which he is standing straight, a mole trap slung over his shoulder. He is looking ahead, a proud man, but his expression is slightly wistful, even urgent, the look of a man guarding a secret he’d rather not keep any more.

Recently, he bought a large sauce pan, which he soon converted into a food store.

A SKILL LEARNT THROUGH OBSERVATION

Johanna Karanja Ndung’u was born in 1918 in Kanyoni village in Mang’u, Thika, the third born of four children, three boys and a girl. His father was a feared medicine man, who was reputed to cast terrible spells on the enemies of his clients. It was as result of this reputation that soon after the old man died, Karanja’s mother, fearing reprisals, gathered her family and fled east to Embu in 1931.

The relocation signified the first of several stops in what would become the family’s itinerant lifestyle. When the family hit the road, they carried little besides food and the blankets and shawls they wore. There was little iby way of formal learning for young Karanja, but what he picked up would come to define his life.

As a boy he had observed as his paternal uncles tracked and caught the moles that raided their farms, ruining sweet potato vines and sorghum stalks as they headed to their burrows. He filed away tiny bits of useful tips: the feeding and reproduction habits of the creature, its calendar, the correct measurements of a trap.

Karanja was soon making his own traps, and when he caught his first mole, he held the wriggling animal by the tail and showed it off proudly. While it would be four decades before he would apply the ancient skill, the knowledge remained safe in the recesses of his mind.