Recollections from a retired prison executioner

By Francis Ngige

His wizened, old face and strained eyes give him the look of one struggling to remember things from his past.

Lean and standing six feet tall, Mr Kirugumi wa Wanjuki cuts the image of an ordinary village elder. But until he starts telling his story, there is little to show that he is Kenya’s first post-independence hangman who, for ten years, oversaw the death of condemned inmates at Kamiti Maximum Prison.

With a strained smile, the elderly man welcomes visitors to his two-room, mud-walled house at Kahigaini in Tetu, Nyeri District.

The lowly village tucked in the outskirts of Nyeri town has a stake in the history of Kenya. This was the place where freedom fighter Dedan Kimathi was shot and captured during the Mau resistance in 1956.

But to Wanjuki, Kimathi was not just a freedom fighter, but also a neighbour, a man he personally knew.

Death Row

He takes long breaks between his story recalling how he came face-to-face with death row inmates at Kamiti and executed them.

For two decades, he manned the gallows at the prison and sent many death row convicts to their last appointment with the noose.

Kirugumi wa Wanjuki inside his house in Tetu, Nyeri. [PHOTOS: George Mulala/STANDARD]

Wanjuki, 86, says he never hesitated in doing his duty in accordance with the training he had received from colonial jailers. He was the last man condemned inmates saw and talked to before he pulled the trap door through which they hang.

"I got used to hanging people and at one time thought that killing people was as simple as slaughtering a chicken," he says, a sad look enveloping his face.

"No, I am not haunted. I sleep well at night and it never disturbs me," he responds to a question whether the memories torment him. Demonstrating how the execution was done, the old man says despite his failing health, he would still do the job again.

Although he retired from the Prison Department in 1974, earning Sh800 per month, after working for ten years, Wanjuki narrates with ease what went on in the death chambers.

"I still recall some of the names of people I executed," he says. He was recruited into the Prison Department unwillingly and working as a hangman was the last thing that Wanjuki would have thought of.

Without batting an eyelid, Wanjuki recalls his first assignment. He says: "One morning, at about 8am, my colleagues and I were called by our superiors (white jailers). We stood outside one of the special cells in the death row convicts’ yard.

"A young man emerged from the cell and I was ordered to tie his hands behind his back with a rope."

Hands tremble

He goes on: "I could feel my fingers and hands tremble as I tied the man’s hands. My knees started to shake and beads of sweat ran down my armpits."

Wanjuki says he nearly let go of the inmate had he not been urged on by the commanding voice of a corporal supervising the execution.

"He shouted at me and I continued with what I was doing. Within minutes, the man, who had killed his three children, was pushed to the gallows’ trap door. I was ordered to place a hood over his face. Then the corporal released the trap door and the prisoner fell through. His lifeless body went limp, hang by the thick rope attached to the wooden gallows," says Wanjuki.

As he got used to the gruesome task of leading prisoners to their death, life became so normal for him that he started doing it as routine.

The Mau Mau war veteran said he joined the department through default. During the war against the British colonialists, Wanjuki recalled, he got a job at a white settler’s farm.

"Although I worked for a white settler, I was secretly involved in the Mau Mau war. I managed to deliver two stolen guns to our comrades in the forests," said Wanjuki.

He was arrested and jailed at Nyeri’s King’ong’o Prison in 1952. But in 1956, he was released and taken to a college in Nairobi where he was trained for nine months by the Prisons Department.

Service Man

In 1958, he was then posted to King’ong’o as a service man. In 1964, he was transferred to Kamiti Prison as a warder.

After the first execution, his seniors bluntly told him he was being moved to the death row block, which comprised hardcore criminals, most of them Mau Mau freedom fighters.

According to him, it is a job he accepted with little enthusiasm.

"I feared I would meet Mau Mau inmates I knew," he said.

But nonetheless, he got down to work. One of his earliest assignments involved escorting an Asian to the gallows and stood him on the trap doors.

"I put a black hood on his head. He cried aloud and begged for mercy, but I said not a word to him though I felt so much pity. I went ahead and executed him, locked myself in a room and cried all morning," Wanjuki said. Wanjuki, whose wife died in 1988, lives alone supported by his sixty year old son, James Wanjuki.