Life for ghetto young men is short, nasty and brutish

On Easter Monday I was in Huruma, the sprawling ghetto that neighbours Ngei, Kia Maiko and Mathare slums. It was teeming with exuberance, entrepreneurship and as usual, subterranean endemic criminal activities. Life in the ghetto, any ghetto, anywhere, can never be boring.

To survive to survive the multiplicity of great odds placed against the wretched of the earth in a typical ghetto life has to take a cruel mix of luck, providence and sheer will. Huruma is no different: it is a heterogeneous society that confronts the everyday vicissitudes.

At around 7.45pm, my friend and I were walking on the road towards the infamous matatu terminus, better known as Rounda.

Soon it started to drizzle, but, not before we met the “Babylon Boots”, as the police are referred to down there. They were leading groups of youths.

The youths had been arrested at Rounda, in Huruma estate, where once darkness sets in cops converge at the terminus, to begin harassing and extorting residents on their way home.

The excuse by the police and their command at the Huruma Police Station (I) is that crime is so rife in Huruma area that they must vet each and every person, answering to the classification of young and male.

COURTESY CALL

Two weeks ago, I had been also to Huruma – this time to pay a courtesy call to the police station’s Officer Commanding Station (OCS) – Madam Juliana Nyongesa Wanyama.

I found her in her office, walkie-talkie on the table, whirring incomprehensible cackling sounds to my untrained ear. She was watching a Naija movie from a small muted TV screen. It was in the afternoon and it was blazing hot, and the fan was on, whirling cool air towards her face.

We discussed crime and the behaviour of the station’s officers, which I summarised as harassment and which she vigorously defended as police security operations. “You know Huruma is next to Kia Maiko and in Kia Maiko, there are many foreigners – how would you tell a Kenyan from a Nigerian or Congolese, or even an Ethiopian? Police must vet youths - any youth deemed suspicious,” she said. I countered by telling her that some of the station’s officers had “opened” another police station at Rounda, where it had become standard procedure for ununiformed police officers to round off young men, irrespective of whether they were suspicious or not, indigenous or not and once they felt they had fetched a good catch, frog-marched them to the real police station, not to book them, but to rip them off.

“I’m not aware of what you’re talking about,” snapped Madam Juliana. “Why do they give bribes to the police? It looks like they have a lot of money. They are to blame,” blurted out an angry OCS. I am not sure whether she was truly angry, or she was feigning anger.

“What about the police, are they also not to blame?” I posed the question back to her. “Isn’t the taker just as culpable as the giver?” He asked me to table evidence and wasn’t ready to discuss the matter further.

The young men and the one old man who had been frog-marched to the police station on Easter Monday, were actually not taken to the station precincts. They were hurdled together just outside it, near the entrance and the police men barked at them: “kila mtu sasa ajitetee…na mfanye upesi.” (Each person should argue his case and there’s no time wasting), to mean each person to cough up a bribe fast.

Failure to do so, can mean several things: spending a long time at the police station cells, being hauled to court for trumped up charges, being beaten for being recalcitrant – recalcitrant here to mean refusing to part with a bribe and kujifanya mjuaji (pretending to be a know-it-all…but in real sense for standing up for your rights).

DANGEROUS PLACE

Like the favelas of Port Alegre and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Huruma slum is one of the most dangerous places to live in Nairobi because it neighbours Mathare Valley and Kia Maiko slums known for hardcore criminal gangs and harbouring, for the longest time, Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) insurgents, who oftentimes bring in arms hidden in goat carcasses being trucked to Nairobi, from Mandera, Moyale and Sololo, respectively.

“Young Huruma boys hardly out of their mother’s cosset are being recruited into hardcore criminal gangs, faster that they are finishing Class Eight” said a Huruma social activist. “They live dangerously because they were born dangerously,” added a social worker from Mathare. Some of these boys’ fathers were hardcore criminal themselves (were, because they have been killed by the police or a mob), some are in maximum prisons serving long jail terms (so they are alive but absent). Hence the boys have been brought up by struggling single and widowed young mothers, who eke out a living in some of the most treacherous squalid conditions in Nairobi.

NOTORIOUS COP

It is these boys that Ahmed Rashid, the notorious roving city cop, only answerable to his Vigilance House godfathers, has been killing and terrorizing. Rashid roams Huruma and Mathare like a sheriff around town, spreading terror and killing the youth suspected of being the ghettos hoodlums in cold blood and at will.

In the mosques of Eastleigh (little Mogadishu), dua prayers are said for the ethnic Somali killer cop. A dua prayer is an Islamic supplication prayer pleading for protection. The Somali tycoons of Eastleigh applaud Rashid for his “good work” and pray for his protection from the bad jinnee.

“In Mathare and Huruma, ‘them boys’ have quietly been plotting to spring a surprise on Rashid,” whispered my friend from Mathare. “The day they will catch him, he will also appreciate that there are others who also know how to handle the gadget.”

In one of the alleyways of Huruma, a Huruma Police Station cop nicknamed Otoyo (hyena in Dholuo language), was waylaid by the boys and challenged for a street fight: “Tunasikia wewe ni boxer leo tunataka kujua hiyo blow yako imefika wapi” (We hear you a boxer, today we want to know to what extent you are a real boxer). Otoyo who has been a boxer, was recruited into the police service because of his boxing prowess. What saved him from the gang was his agility and big frame.

In Huruma, as indeed in all the other city slums, life, especially for the young man, is short, nasty and brutish.

Mr Kahura is a senior writer for 'The Elephant', a Nairobi-based publication. Twitter: @KahuraDauti