Your morning hanging

I've been up in Naivasha for the last few weeks working on a documentary with a director named Henry Singer. It's been lots of fun.

Except for Friday morning at 7:30. I was speeding along the South Lake Road on the back of a motorcycle taxi on the way to do a few interviews, and noticed a bunch of people standing around staring at something. "What's going on over there?" I shouted to James, my driver, as we whizzed past.

"Didn't you see the guy hanging from the tree?"

"Turn around."

Back we went, and James was right. There was a guy who had been hanged. According to James, who had stopped and done a little snooping on the way to pick me up, the guy was a matatu tout who had run afoul of someone else, so they hanged him. Fortunately I am no longer a wire service reporter, so I was not duty-bound to snap a picture or get to the bottom of it, and I left, feeling sickened by the whole thing.

Several hours later, I was on my way back to base camp, and the man was still hanging there, and I was even more sickened. Apparently the police had been around to ask questions but had not bothered to take the man down. Eventually, several hours after that, the body was taken down but the rope was still dangling from the tree branch. Awful.

I don't know what the hell to make of this. Naivasha is a microcosm for Kenya _ it's a huge tourist draw, and in fact some of its most popular hotels are just a few yards from where the hanging happened. At the same time, it has a reputation for being a sometimes-nasty place. In Kenya, where the justice system is so horribly broken, mob justice is a relatively common thing. The guide books warn you not to raise too much of a fuss if someone swipes your bag because the guy might end up getting beaten to death.

That dichotomy is part of the reason we're up there doing this documentary. And it makes me realize that, after nearly two years here, I'm still no closer to understanding Kenya.

Comments

[Toaf]

A pretty chilling post, Nick.

(I wanted to leave a trackback here but can't for some reason. Anyway, I have linked to this post from my own entry of 31 July. Cheers.)

[g]

Just go with the flow...if you spend too much time trying to understand Kenya, you will not cos we Kenyans don't.

[s]

here's a bit of who we kenyans are made of:-

http://howdidigethere-kenyanchick.blogspot.com/2006/07/kenyans-guide-to-kenya-vol-i.html