Aspiring Kenyan boxers face fight for life itself

Dallas Boys Boxing club members pose for a picture outside their training hall in Muthurwa. PHOTO | ROY GACHUHI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • There was a time, in 1982, when I frantically hammered away on my typewriter keyboard in the dead of night from the eastern Australian city of Brisbane to file a report that our national boxing team had retained its crown as Commonwealth champions, in the process winning more medals than its athletics counterpart.
  • That year, Boxing Illustrated, the authoritative American magazine accepted as the bible of the sport, placed eight Kenyans among the top 10 best amateurs in the world. They were led by the peerless national captain of the day, the southpaw Kamau “Pipino” Wanyoike, who had won the prestigious Thailand King’s Cup gold medal three successive times.
  • The magazine’s other top Kenyans were Commonwealth Games champions Ibrahim “Surf” Bilali, Michael “Spinks” Mutua and Hussein “Juba” Khalili followed by John “Duran” Wanjau, Charles Owiso, Mohammed Abdalla Kent and the super heavyweight, James “Demosh” Omondi.

If you want to know the story of Kenya boxing, follow the railway line.

It will take you from the port of Mombasa where its first clues can be traced around the start of the last century, to the city of Nairobi where it spread rapidly, to Nakuru where it reached such a high point and for so long that the town was rightfully acknowledged as its capital but mistakenly taken as its cradle, and finally to Kisumu in the west where its seeds germinated but flowered poorly.

I followed the railway line. Starting from a point of knowledge gained from practice for decades as a sports reporter, I knew I would come by a sad story.

I was wrong. It was worse. It was heartbreak.

There was a time, in 1982, when I frantically hammered away on my typewriter keyboard in the dead of night from the eastern Australian city of Brisbane to file a report that our national boxing team had retained its crown as Commonwealth champions, in the process winning more medals than its athletics counterpart.

That year, Boxing Illustrated, the authoritative American magazine accepted as the bible of the sport, placed eight Kenyans among the top 10 best amateurs in the world. They were led by the peerless national captain of the day, the southpaw Kamau “Pipino” Wanyoike, who had won the prestigious Thailand King’s Cup gold medal three successive times.

The magazine’s other top Kenyans were Commonwealth Games champions Ibrahim “Surf” Bilali, Michael “Spinks” Mutua and Hussein “Juba” Khalili followed by John “Duran” Wanjau, Charles Owiso, Mohammed Abdalla Kent and the super heavyweight, James “Demosh” Omondi.

There were only three countries ranked ahead of Kenya in the amateur ranks in the world. They were the United States, Cuba and the Soviet Union, now Russia.

I’d scarcely seen happier sportsmen. Budding boxers covered miles of road and bathed in their own sweat in the gym trying to become like them. Their peers did likewise, only they were sworn to dethrone the famous champions from their high pedestal.

POWERFUL TEAMS

At that time, Kenya used to raise three powerful national teams simultaneously – one could be in Algiers taking part in an African championship, the other in Thailand competing for the Kings Cup and the third at home preparing for the East and Central African title.

I thought the future was bright. But that was then. Along the railway line 33 years later, I came upon four young boxers, two from Nairobi and two from Nakuru. The choice of Nairobi and Nakuru was deliberate; the story of who we were once upon a time and who we are today reposes there.

Anywhere else is peripheral. The four boxers, like their forbears, had visions of conquering the world. But their stories just reminded me that high aspirations sometimes turn very cruel. Whoever said that the simplest measurement of human progress is that the standard of life lived by children, benefiting from new knowledge and old experiences, must be higher than the one lived by their parents should follow the railway line.

Here, he will see that this noble sentiment has been lived in reverse.

“Nothing worse ever happened to us than the destruction of Kenya Railways,” says Girald Ndirangu, a man whose nerves must be made of wire rope for you do not take on Nairobi’s almighty land grabbers entrenched in the political and business establishment, hold them at bay on plots neighbouring the central business district, and still walk the teeming streets free.

“Coaches”, as the impoverished, grateful youths of Muthurwa call him, is a child of the railway. His father worked for the corporation for 33 years. Then, in May1998, he received a retrenchment letter, which promised to pay him his dues for all the years worked.

To this day, old Simon Mahugu Ndirangu, along with scores of other workers, is still in court litigating for that money.

Worse, he and his family has been fighting eviction gangs month after month, always beating them back after sometimes spending nights in the cold, as the corporation’s houses were taken over by land sharks within its ranks.

MEGA CORRUPTION

Some people associated with this land grab are currently facing investigations after having been required to step aside in the Jubilee administration’s current war with mega corruption. These are people who took advantage of the World Bank’s structural adjustment programmes of the 1990s to grab the railway properties and sell off hundreds of thousands of tonnage in engines and wagons as scrap metal, becoming billionaires overnight.

The younger Ndirangu, a true man of steel, falters in speech and his eyes well up when he speaks of the superhuman battles that one constantly engages in just to have a roof over his parents’ head or in the alternative, to get his father’s dues paid.

He shuttles between the home in Land Mawe that is constantly under grabbing threat and Muthurwa Social Hall, the venerable Dallas Club, which he and coach Charles Mukula have literally held onto one end while the jaws of voracious crocodiles are holding the other.

It’s a David versus Goliath battle but so far the two coaches are holding their own. But just a little slip up and the hall that gave Kenya Stephen Muchoki and Robert Wangila and which today is a beacon to many youths who do not wish to get into drug and prostitution rings, will be gone.

“This hall has saved many lives,” Ndirangu says. “That is why it must be saved.

For us, it must be declared a national monument. We won’t rest until the government does this. I was taught that if you beat a man with a club, he will return. But if you beat him with justice, he is gone forever. We shall beat land grabbers with justice.”

Among the many youngsters whose lives Muthurwa Social Hall has transformed is a young boxer named Issa Mwangi (pictured), who used to sleep inside parked wagons because he was homeless, who washed matatus to eke out a living and who taught himself to read and write and is today one of 10,000 youths who are reporting to Kiganjo Police College for training after the latest recruitment.

Issa’s story shows indeed that the seemingly impossible is actually possible. Over in Nakuru, Madison Square Garden, the club of Maxie McCullough where Philip Waruinge, Sammy Mbogua, John Nderu, Peter Manene and all those others too numerous to fit in this space came from, the fight is not an existential one.

SAFE CLUB

The club is safe. In fact, it is the only private members club with a ring in the country and which generates an income part of which the members generously give away to help raise poor youths and hopefully prepare them for employment, mainly to the armed services.

Madison Square Garden is an icon of the town, as emblematic as the flamingos that line the shores of Lake Nakuru. Since 1957 when its Irish founder picked the first youths and put them in a converted motor garage for their first lessons, it has been a permanent fixture in Kenya’s boxing landscape.

I wish somebody could sponsor an international tournament called the Maxie McCullough Cup in honour of the old soldier, just like we used to have the Brunner’s Urafiki Cup between Kenya and Uganda. It’s about time.

We have in a previous column told the story of John Kariuki, the former national lightweight champion who heaves bags of farm produce heavier than his own weight at Nakuru Wholesale Market to sustain his family. He is still doing it, and is still hoping for a better job to help him focus on his boxing career so that the sound of the national anthem being played to honour his victory does not grate on his ears.

Mary Muthoni, his Madison team mate, is the national women’s lightweight champion. She has been to Barbados and to China, representing Kenya. She let me into her life. She is a motor mechanic by profession, a part time boxer who happens to be the best in the country in her weight and a single mother of two whom she innocently got because she was too young to know what was happening at the time.

It has been a tough life for her, still is, but hope stirs eternal. When the optimism is at its height, she talks of reaching the highest high where boxing could take her.

But her life has also at one time reached such a gloomy low that she once contemplated using her skipping rope to hang herself. “After all,” she reasoned, “at 23, haven’t I lived long enough? What more do I want with this drudgery of a life?” You breathe out and feel grateful that it didn’t happen.

Life along the railway line is tough. This is a life shorn of any pretence. There is no pretence at appearing cool, no effort towards subterfuge.

Substance, in its bare nakedness, is everything.

It is like travelling on a path beaten along the edges of a cliff. Every step is taken with great care and a powerful hope that overrides all feelings of despair and exhaustion inches you further up and closer to your salvation. But just a small misstep or slip up and you disappear into oblivion.

Many have. Many are rolling down as you read this. They are beyond help. It is a grim fight. It is a fight for survival. It is the last fight.