As tears dry in uneasy Mpeketoni, residents confront cold reality

John Otuke was having a nice, hearty evening with his wife, Rachel Okello on a warm evening earlier this year when the unthinkable happened.

After a day out and about in Mpeketoni, Lamu County, he had brought home a few corrugated iron sheets for the new family home he was building. The cosmopolitan nature of the area had given them a reason to believe that they could find a better life here, hence the plans for a more permanent, iron-roofed home.

The family was about to retire to bed when three men barged into their small house. Frightened, Otuke stood up to shield his family. The men asked him for his gun, and he told them he had never owned a gun in his life. They told him he must be joking and asked him to step out.

“I heard them ask him whether he knew that we were living here illegally,” Rachel remembers, “and that’s when I knew things were about to get thick. Suddenly, I was no longer picturing life in a new house anymore, but life in a new land where I felt was welcome to stay.”

The men tied her husband’s hands behind his back and started pushing him into the dark. He pleaded with them to allow him to stay with his family only one night, promising to pack and leave the next morning. But he was wasting his time...

The night was dark, its eerie calm broken every now and then by the wails and laughs of the nocturnal animals that shared the skies with the Otukes. And it was into that crawly darkness and ghostly calmness of the Mpeketoni night that Otuke disappeared, his pleas having fallen into deaf ears.

As he was led away, he turned back one last time to look at his family. His wife had stepped out of the house, but their eyes could not meet. Behind her, the silhouettes of their five children stooped in a combination of shame and terror; shame that they could do nothing to rescue their father, and terror that this might be the last image they will ever see him.

A short while later, the attackers came back and asked for Otuke’s mobile phone. Rachel handed them the gadget, all the while pleading with them to spare her husband’s life since she was cooperating with them.

After they left, she called neighbours on her mobile phone to seek help. Every call that was answered shattered her heart with the pain of 1,000 hammer blows to the chest.

The attackers were rounding off all the men at Block 270, the disputed piece of land where hundreds had squatted for years, and herding them into a nearby forest. Some villagers had called the police, but it was not clear whether help, any sort of help, would arrive in time.

The women and their children, knowing all too well that the gunmen would knock on their doors again, scampered into the forest. A few minutes later, a police officer called one of them and promised them that a squad was being mobilised to rescue their husbands.

“That was such great news,” remembers Rachel. “Help was coming, my husband would be back in my arms in a matter of minutes.”

But that help never came. At midnight, two hours after the gunmen first struck, the ominous sound of gunfire cracked the air; the execution had begun.

They were going to kill all the men they had frogmarched into the forest, and they were going to do it the most brutal way. With their hands still tied to their back, the men had been ordered to stand shoulder to shoulder, like soldiers at ease, before the gunmen started shooting them. One by one. On the head. At close range.

No one will ever know what was going through the minds of those helpless men, herded into the thickest part of the forest by their captors, their wives and children praying for them, and then, like targets on a shooting range, being felled one by one.

“I don’t even want to think about it,” says Peter Kabita, probably the luckiest man alive in Mpeketoni today. Kabita, like the tens of men executed here, had been ordered into the forest, his hands tied with a rope at his back.

As they weaved their way into the slaughtering field, a mosquito bit him on his back. Now, if you have been to Mpeketoni, you know how irritating the mosquitoes of this coastal region can be. They are slightly bigger than those on the highlands, their bites more itchy. And one had just bitten a man on his way to his death.

Kabita instictively reached out to scratch his back; and at that moment discovered that the knot at the back was not as tight as his captors thought. He could release himself if he tried, and he had but a few minutes to steal that chance. He timed the moment well, waiting until the men holding automatic rifles behind him lost concentration and then bolting into the night.

“One of the gunmen followed me but I melted into the dense forest,” he says. “I had keenly listened to them as they conversed in a mixture of Kisomali and Kiswahili to know what they had in mind about us, and I knew they were going to kill us. They knew us by our names, and when you have a captor who knows you that well, it is never a good sign.”

From his hiding point, Kabita watched as the gunmen ordered their captives to stop, consulted among themselves, lined them up and started shooting.

He could have been among those men facing the barrel of a gun, but his feet had saved him. But was it worth it? he wondered to himself. How would life be after all this?

Could Mpeketoni, the once peaceful area known more for its fertile soils and cosmopolitan streak, offer him the peace of mind he had known since he settled here?

The place had changed. Gunmen were having a party here and the police seemed clueless about how to ward them off. Every night women and their children would leave the warmth of their homes and head to the forests, and every morning they would make the long journey back, jumping over the bodies of men they had called husbands, fathers and brothers along the way.

In Nairobi, the government announced the deployment of additional police officers to the area. More boots on the ground gave Kabita and Rachel a sliver of hope, but the killings continued.

The nation, tired of the gory images coming from Mpeketoni, demanded an end to the madness, described by the government as politically motivated. But the bodies kept piling up. Fourty-eight in one night. And then tens here, and tens there.

Then, as suddenly as it had all started, all went quiet. The hundreds of families displaced from their homes emerged from their hideouts and headed to back home to find nothing. Their houses had been razed and their farms plundered.

Last week we found these fractured families trying to rebuild their lives. They still do not know what hit them, and the government has not been helpful in the search for answers.

There is anger in Mpeketoni. The village paths are deserted, the energy sapped from the spring of the people. The green of the trees, however, still survives; but it is soiled by the red of blood. It will be a long, long time before this land forgets the killing orgies of June 2014, and Kabita hopes to be alive to see that great day.

Rachel, on the other hand, just buried her husband. The tears have dried from her eyes, but the last image of her love being frogmarched to his death still haunts her. She finds comfort in their children, but the dreams of moving into a new house are now gone.

There are more pressing issues to deal with now, stuff like where to get the next meal, or who will help her repair the leak on her roof before the rains come.