A wrongful conviction and a dead brother made me turn to crime

The events that occurred that morning in 2002 would make 32-year-old Nicholas Cheruiyot, better known as King Kafu, wish he had stayed at home. He had woken up early to look for a menial job so that he could fend for his family.

“I woke up to a crime in my neighborhood. I was well on my way in the search for some manual labour when the police arrested me and ten other young guys, including my older brother, alleging that one of us had stolen a professional camera, money and a phone. On arrival at Pangani Police Station, the camera owner - sports journalist Mike Okinyi - identified me in a line up as the thief and the next thing I knew my fingerprints were being taken and I ended up in remand at Industrial Area for 6 months.

“As I served my term, my other brother found out who had committed the crime and had him arrested, but that did not mean freedom for us,” he says. He was later released on a cash bail, which was paid by his older brother’s friend. His brother remained in remand because there was not enough money to bail them both out.

“My brother argued that I should go ahead since I had a full life ahead of me, and once more money was found, we would bail him out as well,” he says of the brother who died following complications from a disease he caught while in prison.

“We could not afford to bail both of us out. You see, I was orphaned in Standard Four and taken in by my aunt who mistreated me. When I got to Standard Seven, I had had enough and I dropped out of school to deal in scrap metal. With the money I made from selling the metal, I bought second-hand clothes and hawked them in my neighborhood. I was also a regular at jam sessions (daylight discos) where I met some of the people I eventually got into crime with,” he explains of his childhood days.

“My time in jail made me believe that there was no justice in this country. Crime or no crime I would still end up in jail, so why not get jailed for a crime I actually committed?” he says. And with that his life in crime started.

“I harbored the bitterness of a wrongful conviction and a dead brother. On my release, I got together with a friend who I had met at a jam session and we started robbing people on the streets. We stole chains, watches, wallets- you name it. After a while, I felt the need to upgrade. My team and I shifted our focus to the use of guns and carjacking. The gun we had was given to me by a friend. Although it was an original, it had a faulty firing pin and could not actually fire any bullets. We just used it to scare people into giving us what we wanted. Besides carjacking, we would gatecrash events; fundraising events were our favourite. Once we collected the spoils, we would share them out among the team. As the leader, I always took the lion’s share,” he says.

“I was good at reading peoples’ body language, and I was not mentored into crime like most people are. For instance, I know that someone walking the streets with valuables instinctively tends to be tense, fidgety and very self-aware, constantly touching their pockets or bag for reassurance that the possession is still there.”

During his time in crime, he was thrown in jail many times. Then one day in 2006, as he was watching TV while serving a one-year sentence for robbery with violence, he saw something that made him vow to quit crime for good.

“As I sat there watching a news report, I saw my team members being shot dead. I did not want to be a statistic. Soon after, a neighbor of mine, Robert Ochola, bailed me out of jail. Coincidentally, just as I had decided to turn a new leaf, Robert sat me down and asked me what it would take for me to quit this life of crime before I found myself dead. I told him to find me a job, and he did. I started off cutting business cards, calendars, magazines and posters for Sh100 per day, and then worked as a carpenter at the city mortuary making coffins. Robert told me to hold on for an opening that would be coming up at a radio station, which at the time was yet to be launched. When Ghetto Radio was launched, I was hired as a messenger in 2007,” he says.

As he went about his work as a messenger, he would stop to take a break and have a chat with his colleagues on the office balcony.

“All the while, Rapture the Scientist, who I had once met in jail, was recording our conversations and playing them on air. That segment that aired our conversations was such a hit that I was called in to be a presenter. I was trained on the job, and started the Drive Show - the highest-rated show at the station at the time - before being promoted to the Morning Breakfast Show.”

In addition to being an on-air personality, King Kafu started a youth project dubbed ‘From the Grave to the Ground’ where he brings together colleagues and well-wishers to visit prisons in the hope that through mentorship, they can save many youths from a life of crime. He supports the project with income he receives from houses he built to rent, but is always hopeful that it will become self-sustaining. At the same time, he keeps his family close.

“I visit my two sisters in Kariokor every day after work before heading home to my wife and three kids in Pipeline.”