Ruling evokes memories of the quiet village warrior

The polished corridors of the United Nations Environment Programme headquarters are not the sort of place a villager expects to bump into a juicy African proverb.

One expects to meet expensively perfumed, highly educated people talking about saving the world in crisp English laced with the disparate, guttural accents. It turned out be a stereotype.

So while I was minding my business along UNEP corridors, a Kenyan gentleman ambled by and engaged me in a technical conversation which somehow veered to politics. Then, as now, the country was boiling with political fever and some young thing was rearing to take on a senior tribal chief.

“He is going nowhere,” the UN staffer scoffed with barely concealed contempt. “Where I come from, they say when a boy is bathing in a stream, he routinely checks the size of his testicles by cupping them in his hand. The day they fill his hand, he roars with pride and says, ‘I am a man! I can now take on elders!’ That is what this silly boy is doing.”

The UN man was right. After lots of back and forth punctuated with verbal gymnastics, the tribal chief ran the quisling out of town. He has never been seen or heard of again. For some strange reason, that saga reminded me of an old warrior who was closely related to my grandfather. Okay, let me say the two did not share a stomach but descended from one testicle, which is to say, in English, that they were step-brothers (the word does not exist in any African tongue).

Close relationship aside, those two were as different as land and sea. Whereas my grandpa was a wildly extroverted chap who loved his drink and never to the best of my knowledge stepped into church after his wedding in 1920, his step-brother was a taciturn, staunch Muslim who prayed religiously and never touched liquor.

What the two gentlemen shared, however, was a penchant for violence. But whereas grandpa was wildly dangerous, his step-brother was a man so withdrawn that his violence was sensed, not seen. While it was custom for men to walk swinging walking sticks or draping them over the shoulder, this warrior preferred to clamp it behind his back with both arms. A short stout man with a gruff barely audible voice, his steps were slow and measured, his eyes perennially cast almost shyly to the ground. Yet he radiated such silent force that those who knew better kept out of his way.

I was fortunate to witness the force of his power three times. On one occasion, he shuffled blank-faced into a fight at a funeral, a trusted walking stick behind his back. I still chuckle at how grown men scattered like flies even before he had cocked his walking stick! On another occasion, when his son was arrested by cops on the instructions of the headmaster, the old man shuffled into school, his face cold as steel.

“You brought policemen to my home. They shot at my son. In my homestead,” he rasped his voice barely audible. “As an old man, I am not happy. When the chickens come home this evening, I want my son back. In his hut.”

That evening, when the chickens came home to roost, his son was home. Such was his power.

But there was this memorable time when his son, like that quisling who challenged a tribal chief to a fight, decided his testicles had become big enough and took on the old man. He had taken to brazenly tilling his father’s land without permission and when ordered to explain, the drunken lout bunched his fists and charged.

The old man (he was in his 60s then) met him head on, grabbed him deftly with skills horned through decades of battle, hoisted him sky high and flung him to the ground. Then, with a stiff knee stuck into the scoundrel’s neck, he growled, “If you ever attempt to fight me again, I will slaughter you.”

It was no idle threat and my uncle never touched alcohol because the old man slaughtered cows for a living. In fact, it used to be whispered that he was always moody because he was haunted by the spirits of the animals whose necks he cut. Boys who were older also whispered that people who slaughtered cattle meet a painful end because on their deathbeds, all the cows they killed file by, mowing, “Why did you kill me, mow? Why?”

While it’s always been my prayer that that peaceful man of war met a kind end, my present hope is that those who killed innocent people during the post-election violence of 2007 will suffer gory nightmares for the rest of their stupid, sorry, little lives.