‘I Counted More Than 25 Bodies Strewn Around The Place’

By Dominic Wabala,

NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 22- Sometime in March 2002, I was the designated late-night reporter at our then Town House newsroom along Kaunda street in Nairobi’s CBD.

It had been a long day what with the palpable political tension. This period marked the end of the Moi’s 24-year rule and the ushering in of a new dawn by the or so Kenyans thought.

Opposition leader Raila Odinga’s National Democratic Party (NDP) had been swallowed by Moi led KANU but the ‘Jogoo’ puked the irritating ‘tractor’ along with some of its officials.

On this evening shortly before 10 pm which was my official clocking out time, I received a call from a trusted cop source who asked me to rush to Kamunde road in Kariobangi where some people had been killed.

The photographer assigned to me had left for the night so I called my partner in crime then photojournalist Felix Masi to accompany me to the scene on condition that we pick him up from his Umoja estate residence.

We jumped into the office car and sped off to Umoja in record fifteen minutes.

We were the first and only journalists at the scene and Masi’s pictures were generously used by the Standard newspaper.

The scene was eerie and fear was written on the faces of the handful of cops who had arrived shortly before us. Whatever the cops had seen must have been scary.

Bodies were strewn all over Kamunde road, behind kiosks, along narrow alleys, parking lots and in the nearby market.

Felix had jumped out of the car and was busy taking photographs.

My curiosity drew me to this pile of milk crates that every cop went to peep into.

When I finally stepped over to get a look at what they were looking at, I took a step backwards.

Inside one of the crates was a human head with eyes bulging out in surprise. It was evident that whoever had severed off the head had done it in one quick and powerful slash that the victim didn’t have time to react.
If he had felt any pain, it must have been in a flash. The headless body lay few meters away from the crates.

I counted more than twenty-five bodies strewn around the place.

All the victims had been brutally hacked either on the head or the nape of the neck.

We watched as the bodies were loaded into police vehicles and taken to the City Mortuary before being driven to our residences.

Despite our efforts, an indecisive late-night editor failed to make a crucial decision to ‘stop press’ and wait for our story.

It later emerged that members of the dreaded Mungiki on their way to their shrine in Laikipia, marching from Dandora and Mwiki through Korogocho and Kariobangi to a pick-up point along Thika road met members of a rival and equally dreaded Taliban gang.

In the ensuing confrontation, many people including residents returning home from work or buying foodstuff for dinner were caught up in the melee and killed.

Moi and his then appointed heir apparent Uhuru Kenyatta visited the scene the next day to console families of those affected.