AlexKeto.com

The East Africa Aero Club doesn’t believe in making it easy for the guests.

First you negotiate the airport military checkpoint where a gaggle of bored Kenyan soldiers lounge with their worn Armalite rifles. The Club itself consists of a clubhouse, a series of guest bungalows, and swimming pool with a jet kerosene sheen. The rooms have the charm of a penitentiary with bare concrete floors, an iron frame bed and barred windows. Green skinned lizards climb the cistern above the toilet.

But it’s the ghosts that attract you.

You sense them in the club house with its red cedar plank flooring and the slowly revolving three-blade fans that might have been lifted from Spitfires. Large wood plaques hang on the walls. In that peculiar British fashion, all the names of the club’s chairmen and presidents are written in neat gold and silver script. Karen Blixen and her lover Dennis Finch Hatton could have just stepped out for a stroll, even though their names are fading even in Kenya.

Maybe that’s because Kenya has so many new ghosts, it’s hard to remember the old ones.

Amid the cacophony of our own election, few took notice when a little over a year ago, Kenya slid into near civil war after a clearly rigged presidential election sparked weeks of rape, murder, and ethnic cleansings. And this spring, I flew back to Kenya to track down friends and found some of the country’s newest ghosts.

***

As 2007 closed, I took a mild interest in the Kenya’s Dec. 27th elections which pitted the opposition ODM headed by Raila Odinga against incumbent president Mwai Kibaki of the PNU. One of the problems with Kenyan politics is that the same old names just keep getting shuffled around, and the campaign, unlike its 2002 predecessor had been peaceful. Even in the three day lull after the balloting while the government allegedly counted the votes, people waited. But then, on Dec. 30^th, Kibaki announced against all evidence that he’d won. To make sure he got the point across, he had himself sworn in minutes later.

And by dawn the next day, the killings had started. The clashes between ODM and PNU supporters, neatly drawn along ethnic lines, spread south through the Rift Valley to Nairobi and then ricocheted north again into the Highlands.

The ferociousness of the attacks stunned most Kenyans. In one case, women and children were locked in a church and burned alive. The weapons of choice were pangas, or machetes, and Molotov cocktails.

Two weeks into 2008, I started getting what I came to think of as “The Emails” from friends in Kenya.

Please, pray for us! Pray for Kenya! We don’t know what else to do! read one from a German friend who ran a guest house in the highlands. I sent her a few travelers checks wrapped in a sheet of paper so she could help some of the victims.

And then I received an email from Eric Eshikumo, a tall Luo friend who lived in the highlands, the traditional homeland of the Kikuyu.

Dear Mr. Alex,

You said when you left that if you could ever help, you would. Now would be a very good time to help.

Sincerely,

Eric.

I managed to send him some money and the next thing I had heard, he had fled to the shores of Lake Victoria, a Luo stronghold, along Kenya’s western border.

.

Eric Eshikumo

Now, in March 2009, Eric and I walked down a dirt track in the Highlands. He’s returned to his old job and says everything is calm again. But I’ve noticed that he hasn’t brought his family back. He points to a thicket of acacia thorn on the left side of the road.

“This is one of the spots where we put people to watch at night.” Eric said. “We had people here with cell phones. If they saw the gangs coming, they called to warn us.”

We stood about a mile from the guest house where Eric works, in the midst of the highlands a few miles from the village of Mweiga and its grassy landing stripe.

“Did the attackers come from around here?” I asked

“No one really knows. Maybe they were brought in from outside. Brought in by politicians. But they said they were here to take revenge. They said, ‘You have killed our people in the Rift Valley. Now, it is your turn to die’." Eric pauses before going on as if searching for safer topics. “Do you know, we hid many people during the worst of it? We had many, many non-Kikuyus here. But then word got out, and it became very dangerous.”

We turned back towards the guesthouse again. The air is still and the brilliant midday sun makes you squint. A group of Kikuyu men and women work in one of the fields to our right, wielding their heavy pangas, lethal looking machetes that are curved like a scimitar, with a deft expertise as they chop down weeds.

“When word got out, I became very worried because my family was at the airfield on their own. Everything was very tense. I wanted to send my wife and children back home before something happened. But I did not know how to get out because of the roadblocks,” Eric said.

During the worst of the clashes, the gangs stopped traffic with boulders and tree trunks and then checked the national identity papers everyone carries. A person’s last name or birthplace is enough to show which ethnic group they come from. The militias running the roadblocks were merciless.

“I heard about a white pilot who was flying people to safety so I talked to him by phone. He said he was exhausted because he had been flying all day, and he didn’t have any aviation gas left. He didn’t want to fly me and my family out, but I talked to him a long time. Finally, he said he would do it if I could get petrol for his plane. This was a problem because it was already almost night.”

Taking his chances, Eric drove the guesthouse’s Land Rover to Mweiga’s Kobil gas station. By luck, he didn’t run into any roadblocks, but when he arrived, the Kikuyu owners refused to sell him the gasoline. They said that if word got out they had helped a Luo, they would be good as dead.

“And I have been working with these people for many, many years, buying their gasoline and bringing people to their business. I had to talk to them a long time,” Eric recalled shaking his head. “Finally, they sold me the gasoline.”

With the plane fueled and his wife and children huddled in the back, the pilot lifted off from the blacked out, grass landing strip and “we hopped over the Aberdares,” the 13,000-foot mountain range to the west. On the far side, the plane sped over the wide Rift Valley. “I saw the fires from the roadblocks up and down the valley, and I knew I had made the right decision. I would never have gotten to Kisumu (by Lake Victoria) alive if I had taken a car.”

At the time, Eric couldn’t dwell on this because “the pilot told me he was too tired to fly. He showed me the heading, handed me the controls, and said wake him up outside of Kisumu. Then he went to sleep. Can you believe it? I became a pilot and flew the plane.”

Eric let's out a quiet laugh and shakes his head at the absurdity of it.