Day when time stopped in Nairobi, and memories left

At about eleven the day before the bomb blast, I casually walked past the American embassy building, Ufundi Co-operative House, and the Co-operative Bank Building, to the office where I worked at Cannon House few metres further up on Haile Selassie Avenue.

Had I been at the same place, the same time, the day that followed, chances are high you wouldn’t be reading this today. And my name would have a prefix, the late.

As I celebrate being ahead of almost certain death by mere 24 hours, I remember lives of two girls I had come to know just few months before the blast and who went to be with the Lord on the fateful day.

I was driving down Kikuyu Road just past Kikuyu Campus of the University of Nairobi in early 1998, when a beautiful girl flagged me down and asked for a lift.

I was a young man and can’t possibly think of any reason I would have declined to give lift to a lady who, in the words of novelist Mark Twain, would have set a river on fire. As we rode to Nairobi, she told me her name was Terry Wairimu and she was attending college in the city where she studied accounts.

GREAT HOPE

I dropped her in town and gave her my contacts with great hope she would honour me with a call.

She did and we’d lunch and agreed to meet later. But in absence of modern ways of communication – mark you that year you could count with fingers of one hand Kenyans who owned a mobile phone! – I lost touch with the girl.

The next time I met Terry was a month to the bomb blast. We accidentally met outside the Co-operative Bank Building.

Our excitement was unstoppable and there and then we decided to have lunch at the Berbers Restaurant, opposite the Co-operative Bank Building.

As we’d had lunch she told me she had just been from the American embassy to follow up on processing of her visa to travel to the US where she intended to settle.

She offered to invite me to join her in the US once she got settled. Being a gentleman, I politely accepted her kindness without telling her I wasn’t, and have never been, interested in living anywhere else outside Kenya.

FAREWELL PARTY

She also invited me to attend her farewell party at a date she would be informing me soon. A week later the bomb blast happened.

Leafing through obituary pages I saw her picture and my heart sank. I attended her burial where I learnt she was on the queue to enter the embassy building when the blast came.

***

Like with Terry, I had come to know Ms Pity Mwihaki, hardly a year before the blast. She worked with Consolidated Insurance Brokers which was housed at the fifth floor of the Ufundi House. Her employer and owner of the company Mr P.G. Mureithi, was well known to me and I would go to see him from time to time. In the process, Ms Mwihaki, who was his secretary and I became friends.

Only days to the bomb blast, I also bumped unto her at same place I had met Terry few days earlier.

There and then, we also decided to have lunch at the Berbers Restaurant. She too, had a disclosure. She was getting married and was in process of organising a pre-wedding fundraiser and where I was invited. I happily accepted her invitation and promised to attend.

SIX COLLEAGUES GONE

Then the bomb blast came. I learnt the same day she and six of her colleagues were gone. My only consolation is that Terry and Mwihaki were nice girls, so they must be with the Lord in heaven.

Today I also like to celebrate another unsung hero of the Nairobi bomb blast. His name is Joash Okindo. I met him seven years after the bomb blast and the first thing he asked is that we thank God he was still alive.

On the day of the blast he was standing guard at the rear underground entrance to the American embassy building, when a pickup truck pulled up and it’s driver and passenger demanded that he pull up the barrier for them to enter.

He declined and demanded they first identify themselves. Defiantly the pair jumped out and hurled a grenade at the barrier as they ran away.

GRENADE ATTACK

He followed in chase but couldn’t go far with injuries from the grenade attack. Then the big bang came.

Architects and geologists interviewed later said that had the terrorist bomb exploded from the underground of the American embassy building, it would have pulled down the entire building. Worse, it would have caused and earthquake effect very high on Ritcher scale and which would have brought down several other buildings in the neighbourhood, and not just the seven story Ufundi House.

 Another hero I request you to celebrate with me today is Israel Army officer called Gil Wiener.

He is the man who rescued the last survivor to be pulled from the rubble, the banker Sammy Ng’ang’a. I call him a “boy” because that’s how the Israeli officer struck me and colleague Sammy Wambua when we met him at the Hotel Ambassadeur where the Israel Rescue Team was accommodated.

BOYISH LOOKS

He was a happy go-lucky charming man with boyish looks. We requested him to join us at our table which he did with relish. We’d carried enough money to drown him but, luckily, he like us, had capacity and we did justice to the products of the Ruaraka people.

A thing I have never forgotten is that the boy-looking officer was so delighted that they had saved that single life.

This is how he put it: “In Israel, we are born expecting to be blasted dead long before the first suckle. For us even one life living is a great joy!”

A happy Mr Ng’ang’a had echoed almost similar words as the young solider held him immediately he was pulled from the heap of death. Ng’ang’a had said: “Now, I will live to remember what you’ve done for me.”

GREAT KENYANS 

But maximum tribute goes to the great Kenyans who showed that we are, after all, brothers and sisters, and that what unites us as brethren is much more than the little that divide us especially when incited by politicians during elections.

On that day, Kenyans demonstrated great love for one another than can never be told by words. The picture of Cabinet minister Joseph Kamotho carried shoulder high and rushed to hospital by a PSV vehicle perhaps is best reminder that we are all our brother’s keeper.

HEROINE OF ALL TIMES

But the heroine of the day we shall never forget is Ms Rose Wanjiku. For six days she kept us hoping that she was still alive and would be pulled from the rubble.

Her cry for help under the rubble for days encouraged the rescue teams with hope that one more person would be found alive.

She was finally found dead but her spirit lives.

The cover words of the Daily Nation on August 13, 1998, couldn’t have put it better. It read: “This is Rose Wanjiku: Kenya’s Candle in the Wind”. She taught us to be strong against all odds. We shall overcome.

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