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And the well raised child became a devil

News

It was extremely foolish to kill the man walking home to his wife after sunset.

But if you talk to old and wise people, they will whisper the secret of the ages; that a gene of idiotic proportions runs in each family.

This gene, say the sages, is mostly dormant. But it occasionally erupts in some wild and evil child. This is why hoodlums are generally daft people, even when they come imbued with a dash of evil genius.

If they had a wee little brain, they would be involved in politics or evangelism of the shiny suit type, where one lives to a ripe old age, wallowing in the fat of the land. If there is anything ripe about old age.

But thugs are daft, so they become thugs. Their existence is as colourful as a butterfly’s but as short-lived as the slug that dies squashed in the gutter by bullets and boots on a rainy day.

It is that sort of stupidity that made those fools shot and kill a man going home to his wife on narrow path leading to a polluted steam, itself not an award winning case of stupidity.

But after the sound of that gunshot receded into the night, and the slimy miscreants scampered to wherever it is that criminals scamper to before bullets and boots catch up, we learnt that they shot a police officer; a big one. That was the stupid bit.

Snarling police men, hell-bent on unfurling an otherwise short arm of the law, sent eight-man teams armed to the teeth. For weeks, they turned my neighbourhood upside down, as a man hunts within his decaying boxers for an itchy louse buried deep within the sweltering depths of his animal farm (gender equality be damned. Women simply shouldn’t have pubic lice).

Not surprisingly, they swept through the lower income sections of the estate, kicking doors open and hauling every able bodied man without proof of employment to the cells. As if those with jobs where the human resource department hands out cute staff IDs would choose to reside in a place called Kisumu Ndogo.

Police avoided the middle income areas, though, assuming, like society always does, that crime only drifts into town from the slum. But a month later, a ‘most wanted gangster’, who lived next door in our nice little ‘middle class’ flat, was shot dead.

“He was living right here, imagine!” we gasped with horror.

Shrinks, sociologists and the local barber would have said with certainty that the most-wanted criminal and the gangster who shot a senior police officer became evil because they grew up in a slum. Why, they had absentee parents who were violent drug addicts and alcoholics and single mothers as well. Oh yeah,

You know Eddie Murphy, right? Barack Obama? Demi Moore? Angeline Jolie? Halle Berry? Jon Stewart? Mariah Carrey? Pierce Brosnan? Jodie Foster? Samuel L. Jackson? Barbara Streisand? Shaq O’Neal? Mary J Blige? 50 Cent? Alicia keys? Just so you know, these bad people were raised by single women. Oh yeah. Bill Cosby was raised by a single mum, too. That is why he thought sedating and raping women was funny.

Look, you can have folks whose family is the envy of all. They eat and pray together so many times it becomes a chore. Kids are not spanked, but showered with hugs, pecks, pancakes and love. Food is in plenty. School fee is an abundance. Every day is bonding day. The kids are tucked in every night. The only violence in the home is when the woman of the house screams, “No! You are killing me, Baby!

Stop! No! Yes! Stop!” from the family bedroom in the wee hours of the morning once every six months.

And guess what? One day, the evil gene that runs in each family erupts in one of these cute, sweet nicely raised children. The quiet and respectful one. The one who never raises a voice or disobeys. Then one named after his grandpa who was a pastor. One day, without warning, he quits school and vanishes without a trace.

Until one rainy morning, when society wakes up to the news that he is dead, squashed in the gutter like a slug by hundreds of boots and bullets.

He was not only a ‘radicalised youth’, anti-terror police say, but murderer who made his bones in Somalia before crawling back into Nairobi like an alley rat, bristling with hate, to bomb people who didn’t know he exists.

Yeah, go on. Wag your fat finger and blame parents and single mothers. But some kids were wired to be evil and no amount of tender loving care can fix the twisted thing in their heads. That is just the way it is.

 

Ted Malanda is the Associate Editor, Nairobian

Visit his blog at www. tedmalanda.com

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