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Kinamba town lies some 50km north of Nanyuki town. It is a small agricultural town. When the rains fall, it is covered in lush vegetation.
Here, almost everything grows. The farmers do not use fertiliser to encourage their seeds to sprout.
“The soil is good,” Esther Wanjiru says. “We have rain and water,” she adds.
What she doesn’t say is that they have tears, scars and open wounds from a conflict that continues to eat at their existence leaving many residents with tales of fear, torture, death, rape and loss. One night in May, her husband Simon Gitonga Wang’ondu heard noise outside.
“It was around 1am. We were all asleep. We heard voices outside. Then heard our cows and goats moving around in their pen,” she says. Wang’ondu, being the man of the house, he asked who the people outside were.
“They said if I wanted to die, I should dare step outside,” he says.
He peeped through a small window and saw two dozen men roaming around in the moonlight.
Then suddenly one of them beat down his door with the butt of his gun. “More than ten of them came in. Four came to our bedroom and pointed guns at us. They then started ransacking a metal box that had all our clothes,” Wanjiru says.
What followed was surreal. Wanjiru says the men kept trying on different clothes. One would put on Wang’ondu’s shirt, another would pull out her skirt and put it on.
As she talks, their youngest daughter seats next to her mother, he face cupped in her right palm. A sadness slowly sits on her. What her mother says next opens up the well of tears behind her eyes.
Rape victim
When the men in the parent’s room were putting on her clothes in jest, four others were in their 18-year-old daughter’s bedroom. They took turns on her. Three hours later the men with guns went away leaving behind a bleeding and unconscious rape victim.
“I will never forgive them for what they did,” Wang’ondu says.
“We had heard what politicians were saying. We just didn’t know they would do this,” he adds.
Kinamba town borders the Laikipia Nature Conservancy, what was once Ol Ari Nyiro, a 98,000-acre farm that licks lake Baringo on one end and Samburu on another.
Kinamba sits on the ranch’s eastern bounder. And for as long as the residents of the town can remember, has provided some sort of buffer between Pokot rangeland and the blocks of farmland that Wanjiru and many others occupy.
When the raiders perforated the buffer zone and made it into LNC, where they looted, burnt and shot at Kuki Gallman, they then roamed free into Kinamba.
“The worst thing is that we knew of the political rhetoric on the ground. We told the police. But they never responded in time,” Joseph Njuguna says.
Njuguna no longer lives in his house. Dozens of other families have left their houses, to seek refuge in the town.
“They have taken everything from us. Our farms, businesses, dignity,” Njuguna says.
On July 13, a contingent of senior policemen were deployed on fact finding mission. They were on strict orders to try and find lasting solutions for a larger Kinamba peace keeping mission.
One of the tasks was to identify grounds large enough to accommodate another police post. But they underestimated the enemy.
As the police land cruiser drove up the surrounding hills from Kinamba town, past Wanjiru’s house towards the LNC fence, a single shot rang through the air. Passing clean through the wind screen of the police Landcruiser.
It seemed like the attack was coming from the front. The police vehicle came to a screeching halt and the officers, who numbered eight in total jumped out from the side of the vehicles readying themselves for whatever lay ahead.
Unknown to them, the raiders, who had all along been on a vantage point had eyes on them. As soon as their boots hit the ground, bullets came flying from every direction.
The surrounding thickets had provided perfect camouflage for what is thought to be Pokot raiders.
“We heard the gunfire for three hours,” John Nyongio, another Kinamba resident says.
“It only stopped when reinforcement was sent in by the military who all along had been having an operation in the area,” Nyongio says.
Only the sight of an APC made the raiders retreat, leaving behind bullet cartridges from the Kenya Ordinance factory, six dead policemen and two injured ones.
“If they can do this to policemen, what can we do with our spears and rungus,” Nyongio says. On another night, he lost four cows, seven goats and four sheep. He says he feels like a man who has lost his life savings.
Through its residents, Kinamba is trying to rise again. But before it moves from the floor, gets on it knees and stands up to face the world again, long days lie ahead. Days of suffering and heartache. Days of loss and hunger.
