×
The Standard Group Plc is a multi-media organization with investments in media platforms spanning newspaper print operations, television, radio broadcasting, digital and online services. The Standard Group is recognized as a leading multi-media house in Kenya with a key influence in matters of national and international interest.
  • Standard Group Plc HQ Office,
  • The Standard Group Center,Mombasa Road.
  • P.O Box 30080-00100,Nairobi, Kenya.
  • Telephone number: 0203222111, 0719012111
  • Email: [email protected]

The day before the bomb went off in Nairobi

My Man
 Photo; Courtesy

We were new in college and I was a vagabond and because mom was gone and dad had decided to move us to the farmhouse she had been building in Ngong for her retirement (and would never get to live in by dying before age 50), I had devised a way to stay in the city by circumferencing relas.

 So on the Thursday of August 6, 1998, I had taken supper at my pal Bobby Mkangi’s place (his mom had been colleagues with my late mother, and they always made me feel welcome at their Kimathi home) and then we had gone for a couple of beers at a neighborhood pub – Pilsner Ice was all the rage those days – meeting up with my cousin Fred Nyabuti there.

At midnight, we left the ‘local’, parted with brilliant Bobby at their gate before Fred and I departed for his mom Aunt Agnes’s (whom we used to call ‘Aggie Nessy’ in the Kisii way) still in Kimathi.

As always, I slept on the sofa (and, as always, woke up at about four am to watch CNN in low volume, not aware that in little over six hours, it would be Kenya on every global news outlet in the world). By six am, the ‘Aggie Nessy’ household was stirring as people got up for breakfast, preparing for work. There was no way I was going to Campus that day.

I had organized a T.S. Eliot Poetry Day at the British Council that day, open to the poetic public (aka, people idle enough to come listen to readings of a complicated mzungu poet by college students) and that beat going to listen to (Mr. X) lecture on the delights of Tax Law in Parklands.

Anyway, after a leisurely breakfast – tea and bread – and a pass by the bootblack to give a gleam to my shoes (in those days I sported an afro, trench coat regardless of the weather, black combat boots and a briefcase full of books like any respectable Marxist eccentric intellectual, how I kept my pretty college girlfriend Carol then is still a matter of considerable mystery to me!) I jumped into a noisy town bound number 23 matatu.

By half past nine, I still remember that clock at the round-a-bout, we were on the road just outside the American Embassy. I ‘shukad’ there ‘with the jam’ as the matatu touts call it, returned a book I’d borrowed from the American Library at the nearby National Bank building whose title I forget – and borrowed a Lincoln biography before strolling to the British Council then based at the ICEA building at 10am, smack-bang in time for the event I’d organized with my friend (prof) Alfred Omenya.

About 35 minutes into the reading (and I’ll never forget the TS Eliot poem we were reading, The Hollow Men, with the words ‘the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper’) BC Arts’ Officer George Muruli rushed in to tell us the American Embassy had been bombed; and we were ‘evacuated’ out onto the sunny Friday mid-morning streets of Kenyatta Avenue.

Almost 300 innocent people perished in that event 18 years ago that we’ll commemorate tomorrow (and that I will do a personal poetry reading at the August 7 Memorial Park, morrow). The people I often think about most are those that died in the PSV from Ngong, at the same spot that we had ‘shukad with jam’ at a mere hour before Sometimes though, as Omenya pointed out on that dark day, the world does end with a bang!

Related Topics


.

Similar Articles

.

Recommended Articles