IN MEMORY OF DENNIS

(He is that guy who died during the 2009 Moi University demonstration)

And when you let out your first scream whilst the nurse proclaimed it is a boy, no one knew that you were letting out a symbolic scream. No one knew that you, like everybody else, had set foot in the world to look for your death—and look for it you did. Then, as you had a taste of the bittersweet worldly air and cried, no one was aware that you would one day join Moi University, Main Campus as a Language and Literary Studies student.

So it came to pass that JAB jabbed you into this prestigious institution, and you chose to specialize in linguistics, to consummate your love affair with words. Boy, you had a way with words! I remember that morning you made a presentation in an Art and Communication class. The things you said about Immanuel Kant encoded themselves with indelible ink in my memory, and it is for that presentation that your memories are most fond. “To effectively judge a work of art,” you lectured, “the perceiver has to look at it with disinterestedness.”

 The presentation got so embedded into me that I nicknamed you ‘Disinterestedness’. Friends as we were, I would call you by the word, and you would reply back with it—and we could laugh. And ‘Disinterested’ you were to me till that fateful day when death came knocking at your door, disinterested of the vista of a future that lay ahead of you.

Well, death has always been a sadist but there are times it does whatever it does with contempt of biblical magnitudes. And it had the audacity, like a stalker, to trail you from wherever you had been to the Kesses junction. That is the place ‘Mr. He Who Kills When Life is Most Prime’ called you for a tete-a-tete. We don’t know whatever he told you, because he made the pick-up overturn and dent your head in the process. Funny how paradoxical fate can be. See, you were trying to escape death dressed in police uniforms but met it ennobled in metallic bluntness. Talk of final destination.

In a matter of seconds, a student who had marched with others to air his displeasure about a shamba that had patches of tarmac on it was no more. Then hell broke loose in a manner I can’t state here.

It has been a year since. Time flies, huh?

The next time I will pass by that junction, I will observe a minute of breathlessness and think deep; think of a colleague who perished in a way outsiders termed stupid if not reckless; think of the ridicule students collectively received for ‘demonstrating for the right to go and take beer in town’. I will think of the police, those bite-happy dogs, the teargas, those rungus, the barbed wire. As the bus will be moving smoooooothly (because the road is better now) I will remind myself that you are among the ones who aroused peoples’ conscience to sort out the mess that was—and in a most special way. Then I will visualize how it feels to be some sort of a sacrificial lamb. It’s not an easy task, I reckon. I will then sigh, shed a tear or two before handing my 50 bob note as fare to the Da Shuttle conductor.

Now, as you finish a year under the sod; as the memories of what you were fighting for become wan and cobwebbed; as vehicles vroom on that route unmindful of the price comrades paid for it, and as water passes under the Lelmolok bridge and the Cheptiret one, I have a word for you: IT WAS WORTH THE WHILE, COMRADE.

Let me see whether the song Seasons in the Sun can play again on this computer. It might be the millionth time I will be listening to it today.