Yes and No, A Lawyer's Tool of Trade

Day one at KSL. What a crowd! I mean, 876 or something KSLees to undergo the Advocates Training Programme (ATP). I, Lorot Son of the Hills, is lost in the lecture hall.

Lawyers will always be lawyers. I mean, I noted the clever use of the words 'Yes and No' employed by the Director of the CLE Prof. W. Kulundu-Bitonye in our orientation as KSLees. The question was on whether the 'astronomical fees' were used as a deterrent, something akin to cut on the number of KSLees. And the answer he gives is Yes and No. I won't go into the polemics of that, the whys and wherefores of the 'astronomical fees'.

Forthwith, hot on the lips of the good professor Kulundu-Bitonye, I will add the words 'Yes and No' as answers to questions shot at me in class, firm meetings, KSL precincts or anywhere else.

Similarly, I will also adopt the words 'It depends' as one of my answers to questions directed to me.

For instance, if I was to be asked why I came to the law school like they did to one of my colleagues, I would not worry about the legal mandate that is bestowed upon the Council for Legal Education or trace the history of the legal profession in Kenya or some philosophical underpinnings to legal knowledge, articled clerkships or the practical aspects that the school imbues on the future advocates. No, I will not bother on that.

Instead, I will assume a contemplative face of a philosopher who has seen-it-all-done-it-all. If I wear a pair of glasses, the better. I will look into space as if some legal theory is escaping my attention, look around and with a slow voice say:

"Sir, uuhhhhm. It depends"

Of course my good course instructor would want to know more. Half of the class, realizing my mischief, would laugh. But I will not be deterred. Then, (Well, honestly, a question like why I came to law school is so much pointed that it requires some careful thought. How do you say that you came to 'test the waters' for instance and see how long it takes before you request for an academic leave?). Ok. I was at the point where I was saying that I will not be deterred. Thus after saying 'it depends', I will immediately assume the position of my course tutor, that of being the questioner, the interrogator. So I will launch my barrage of questions:

"I have been asked why I came to law school. That question also invites us to ponder on other questions  which I deem fundamental. What is my drive, my impetus, my motivation in submitting myself to a rigorous process of the ATP? Is my drive genuine or false? If the former holds, will it be right to say that my reasons are valid? And if they are valid are they in tandem with the ethos and aspiration of the legal profession? And if the latter holds, will we then say that I am in the wrong place? Well, what if my aspirations and expectations would have been false but true in the eyes of the legal profession? Will these be valid or invalid?"

By this time, I have lost my listeners and my tutor is trying to trace where I am headed to. But the intention is to sound clever and to confuse. To have no logical basis is the golden rule and it has to work out. So I plow on:

"Let me put it this way ( Apparently to make things easier but in reality not to), ceteris paribus ( I heard that term from an advocate coming out of court. My sharp colleague said that that is a Latin term for 'if things are held constant' so why not put them to proper use?) the crux of your question befits this analogy. If a man boarded the famed Clapham Omnibus on the mistaken belief that it would take him to  end A of London and it turns out that erroneously it actually drives him to end A, what shall we speak of his reasons and justifications? What if upon boarding the Clapham Omnibus, he jolts to the reality that it is not headed where he supposedly thought? In other words, reasons are many and varied, some are fleeting and changing, others are fixed and permanent? The question really is: Where do we find the nexus in all these? ( While pronouncing the word 'nexus' I would have gesticulated with both of my palms and roll over nexus in the typical fashion of  a man who knows what he is talking about.


But I would not be. My mind would be a mish-mash, a disarray of scattered thoughts.

Of course, the next question the tutor will ask will be:

"Lorot Son of the Hills, is this nexus possible to be found?"

And like Professor Kulundu-Bitonye, I will pause for some seconds ( for academic commercial break) and finding that saying either Yes or No will put me between a rock and a hard place, I will conveniently say:

"Yes and No." To save myself from other piercing questions, I will quip quickly, "For the sake of time, my colleagues and clarity, the reasons as to why I say yes and no should be a topic for another day. Ceteris paribus, I can talk about these things the whole day."

Dear Steve, I will be Dead When You Read This

(Short Story Submitted to Storymoja Blog on Romance and Dating)

Dear Steve,

I am sitting in this dark room with the aid of a flickering candle writing to you what will be my last letter to you. Inside this small cubicle I will spend the last minutes of my life, a solitary lone figure with no compassion to the pretences this cruel world offered me. Much later when the door to my cubicle will remain closed and the stench of my rotting body will hit the nostrils of my neighbours, the sad news of my death will filter. May be much much later you will get to hear of my shameful death. But I will be DEAD.

Consider this a suicide note written in prose, not the hurriedly sketchy message that passes for the ordinary suicide note. I am writing this in the silence of the night. Crazy thought: Isn’t it figurative to die in darkness and in silence away from the glare of man?

I am trying to picture how you are going to react upon receiving news of my death. Will you phlegmatically look at the bearer of the message and stand aloof? Will you scratch your head and mumble inaudible words of desolation? Will you lock yourself in your room and cry in the secrecy of your bedroom? Will the news of my death be another insignificant statistic of a relationship gone sour? Will you come to my funeral? What will you say to mourners? When it will be dust to dust and ashes to ashes will tears finally sting your eyes and let you release two balls of tears just for me? Will you miss me? Will you mark my anniversary?

Well, those questions don’t matter to me a jot. If they mattered to me I would have taken a rope and ran crazily in broad daylight to a mugumo tree to hang myself and of course get intercepted mid-flight. If they mattered to me I would have bought sachets of rat poison and summon all in the neighbourhood to witness firsthand how one voluntarily swallows poison and succumbs to death in the name of love. But these don’t matter to me for all their glare and bravado. Till now, no one knows what I will do next to end my life. I never believed in bubble popularity in my life and I expect the same in my death.

I was walking today in the streets. In the privacy of my thought, I imagined the power that lay in knowing when I am dying. As I trudged on busy pavements, I took in the beauty of sunset, the fading glory and its ultimate death. The sun also dies! How I loved that thought. Shops were getting closed, the busy streets getting forlon and forgotten, darkness enveloping alleys. Town life also dies! I also loved that thought. I felt like to sing Till We Meet but on second thoughts I restrained myself because I was in no mood of divulging my secrets to the cocky-eyed townpeople.

Steve, if my death was a novel, you are the prologue. For you introduced me to this thing called love five years ago when we were at campus. I was never much of a love convert for I had been taught to believe that it was sin and that I had to wait till I get married. But I hid my heart in the company of bad girls and smoked to conceal my true identity. Most of the times it worked out. I pretended to be carefree and outgoing but if you scratched me deeper I was the most careful girl I could ever be—against love-struck boys.

Then you came in. You turned all my love rules on its head. In the Campus Cafeteria, you could come with a pack of cigarettes and crack the latest jokes and spill the juiciest gossips in camposphere. I kept the distance but you still kept your cool. You did what all campuserian men never did: break the first barrier of defence, the girlfriends. Soon, if my girlfriends never saw you even for a day they would call you to confirm if you were alright. And boy, did you have a way with your words? I bet that first poem you wrote me was the second barrier of defence you broke and it was just a matter of time before I exposed my heart to your whims and fancy. You did your homework and always talked about what we wore, what was in the Pulse Fashion Cop and which celebrity was chipsfungwad. If other boys talked about the Abu Dhabi and English Premier League, you talked about the Wedding Show and the latest episodes of Soap Operas. Where some egotistical braggart talked about the legal implications of the Ocampo Six, you talked about how trendy it is to have Mohawks nowadays( May be I could be wrong). Of course we could disagree, but soon you became the centre of our lives, Steve.

Soon, we hopped from one nightspot to another. In your state of inebriation, you could recite me silly love poems that drew me even closer to you. We could go to Open Mic Sessions together, Slam Poetry and every other event your poetry taste buds wanted to savour. Soon, I was also addicted. At the end of one such event, you took me to the Nairobi Animal Orphanage. As the two of us stood on the wooden bridge, as the wind blew I saw in your face a Prince Charming. When you opened your mouth, Steve, to speak, my heart was in ashes, incinerated. You sang to my heart. Your voice was not loud and not so low, barely a whisper but it strummed the strings of my heart and yet it was so loud that it shook the walls of my being. You spoke as honestly as a Chaplain did. You revealed the vagaries of love, of empty promises and its lies. As you held my hand and recited the first stanza of your favourite love poem, for once I felt love for you and I remember saying to myself that if you ran away with me to the sun I will not mind the heat.

My chains you unlocked, my loathe for love you thus reversed. And instead of offering me a pack of cigarettes, you offered me company. You never lectured me on the effects of my smoking but talked to me as a friend would. When I harangued about my back-pains and how the tap ran dry in the morning before I fully showered you just listened as if you were a crime detective extracting crucial evidence that could unravel a mysterious murder. You gave me attention and pandered to every girlish tidbits even when they were nonsensical. And Steve, when I was assured of your love my heart I gave you on a silver platter. I had fallen for your love—hook, line and sinker.

You still kept thrilling my girlfriends. You still made them laugh—even more. What more could a campus girl dream for after watching movie together with you at Sarit Centre? What more could I ask for when you bought me a teddy bear and fancy dresses? What more could I expect after a crazy goat-eating party somewhere in Kiserian? How much more could I expect to feel when we swam together in a swimming pool a whole afternoon?

Steve, when I think about all these my resolve for death is piqued. The sweet memories fill my heart with happiness and sadness, joy and bitterness. The movies we watched for all the joy they brought me don’t outmatch the horror that play in my mind in gory images of blood, skulls and screams. Your gifts look like rugged toys of a beggar’s child, dusty, worn out and an eyesore. The goat we ate, the mere thought of it constricts my throat in pain and bad memory. Inside the pool we swam in, all I can envision is dirty water, broken rails, a smelly bilge of useless water and useless idiots.

That night will forever be etched in my memory (Do dead people have memories anyway?). A Friday night. It had barely started as a normal date and I was enjoying myself in your sweet company in your hostel room. I had insisted that I bring my girlfriends along but you countered that you never minded that but we still needed our lone moments. As the night wore on, I had politely urged you that I had to leave. I meant it, seriously I meant it, Steve. You had to respect my decision.

But you didn’t. You came closer to me and I edged further and soon it was a small little game of move-and-I-move-further. I had stopped and told you matter-of-fact that we will not have sex. I meant it. But what did you do? You held my hand and forcibly kissed me. I had to push you but you came back with more vigour and stubborn determination. I had pleaded with you. I had beseeched you, Steve, not to hurt me. As I moved towards the door, you had bolted to the door and locked it and pounced on me as a tiger would a prey. Your hands grabbed me and as you ravished me, I kicked around and screamt. I never felt such pain in my life.

You took my innocence away, Steve. You crushed my being to smithereens and replaced it with a shadow of a haunted ghost. You lured me to your dark pit and buried my soul. You took away my dignity, my self-worth. There is nothing as debasing and monstrous an atrocity than what you did to me Steve. You sucked the thrills I had of life and left behind a bitter lemon of bitter past and hatred for men. That night Steve, I died. My mind and body died. What I will do tonight is simply a completion of what you started five years ago. 

All I request of you is to stay away from my funeral. Don’t shed me crocodile tears. It is past midnight and I have to end here. I wish you well Steve.

Troubled Heart,

Prudence

C) Lorot Salem 2011

Daughter of a Woman

(Short Story Submitted to Storymoja Blog on Romance and Dating in Kenya)

There was no doubt behind the hills that I was in a relationship with Chenang’at, the daughter of the chief, Lokwang’ole.  You could see me on the way to the river in the mornings and evenings walking aimlessly or pretending to be straightening the barbed wire of the fence where livestock was sold every Market Sunday. Sometimes, as situation dictated, I could go pretending to be hunting for hyraxes and hare while the apple of my eye, Chenangat, fetched firewood. It was open knowledge that I was in love with this daughter of the chief, the one chief who once chased me with an arrow.

It all started in a simple way, actually. I had been sent to buy jembe and panga and on that single Market Sunday I carried with me a sum of three hundred and forty shillings. As I was weaving through idlers in shuka and walking sticks, I heard somebody shouting namba ya pesa, namba ya pesa. I inched closer. The man, in stubble of beards and exaggerated hat that resembled a hut, could slap cards on a table and somebody won money.  Money won once, twice, thrice. I told myself, “Lorot Son of the Hills, by the snuff bottle of Loitabela, you can win too”. But I didn’t win, once, twice or thrice and all the three hundred and forty shillings were gone. Not even my cry of “haki ya Mungu nihurumie ni pesa ya jembe” (By God have mercy on me, that was money I was to use to buy a hoe) helped the situation. That evening, both my dad and mum united in moment of combined anger to teach me a lesson. My buttocks ached the whole week.

That small incident gave birth to sympathy, then a passing acquaintance and finally affection—from Chenang’at! She could tease me on her way to the posho mill by calling me ‘Pesa ya Jembe’ (Hoe Money). She could always pass by where we played köchiy (the equivalent of the Maasai’s bao) to ask where her small brother or her friend had gone to. As for me, I could go to their home and if I met the chief himself I would say something like “We have been looking for a lost goat for two nights now and have come here to spread word”.  But soon, I became forgetful and that line brought me trouble.  Lokwang’ole said to me coolly: “Son of Lokwangura, when I had energy I could skin a leopard. Now I don’t. Go search for lost goats elsewhere. If you step on this homestead, I swear by my bull Lomerkal, I will make porridge out of you”.

But if Lokwang’ole thought I was done, he was mistaken.  And I am not to blame. Chenang’at stood tall like the cap of a hut, elegant in her walk while letting her lorwaa flutter to stutter the heartbeats of village boys. Her set of white teeth put to shame modern Colgates and Close-ups thanks to kamsityan (traditional brushing stick), charcoal and ash. And her voice! There was something rugged that romanticized it. I used to joke to her that if she was the Angel of Death and called my name I could shout ‘Here I am, Angel of Death, your dutiful servant’. I repeat, I am not to blame for being the target of her killing-me-softly-beauty.

One night, I had gone to kidong’a, the traditional night dance. This is the place that separates men from men. Husbands win their wives here. That night was my moment of truth. I had to sing and jump and woo my Chenang’at. I had to praise my bull and win the apple of my eye. Songs were picking up, rhythm was catching up and the incessant clapping and jumping into the air gave that night a crown, almost a deceptive crown, of jubilation but my heart was aching. Kipsang, my love-arch-rival, was at his element: bare-chested, a white ribbon tied around his head, ostrich feather standing like an antennae as if on wavelength with demons of love. Kipsang was our village tyrant, he limped around like a bull spoiling for a fight in a watering hole. I hated him. I used to imagine him dead of constipation or goered by a horn of a crossed-horn bull—dead. As the night wore on, I could envision Chenang’at happily in the arms of Kipsang and I felt like to vomit. 

My turn finally came. I threw the shuka that was restraining my jump and all that I was left with was my small pair of shorts. I circled the dancers around me while chanting and dramatizing myself as a gallant warrior holding an AK-47 in an armed combat. I went round twice then poured my being into the centre. I was also in my element, Son of Lokwangura. As I stood at the centre, I envisioned myself with Chenang’at in the same hut on the same mud-bed, her radiant eyes lighting up my heart and her palms touching the deepest depths of my bosom. I could hear her whisper in the dark calling me by the name of my favourite bull Longolemwai or teasingly call me Pesa ya Jembe (Hoe Money). With this in mind, my mission was defined and the battle lines had been drawn.

The other dancers were still clapping and humming in unison. I stood like the cap of Kacheliba Hill, placed my palms on my temples and in an emotional way I could summon, I chanted a song that could awaken the spirit of my dead ancestors. The song came from my heart, it was a praise of my bull, my love song for Chenangat. It went like this: 

My bull with crossed horns, Longolemwai,

Witness this, Witness this, Longolemwai

When we were trapped in the crossfires of the bullets

Trapped in panyirit thorns in no-man’s-land

Trapped in steep gulleys with no food to eat but among’oo and angalalio

We did it the two of us, just the two of us

Witness this, Witness this, Longolemwai

The daughter of a woman has trapped my heart, Longolemwai

The daughter of a woman is making my heart go in circles

The daughter of a woman, my bull, is like sour milk

Served in dry season

The daughter of a woman is millet porridge with milk and pyöpay

The daughter of a woman has the eyes of gazelles

The daughter of a woman goes to the river and oh, the way she moves her hips

The daughter of a woman makes my blood boil

I can jump and hit my head on heaven

I can jump and make a hole on earth with my feet

The daughter of a woman has trapped my heart, Longolemwai

Witness this, Witness this, Longolemwai

My bull with crossed horns, Longolemwai,

The daughter of a woman has trapped my heart, Longolemwai 

I had conquered the heart of my beloved that night. I remember that night the moon shone on the dry riverbed as I sat close to Chenangat. I don’t remember what I was telling the daughter of a woman. All I know is that I spoke and she listened. I had then stared into her eyes and touched her palms and told her something to the effect that ‘if she was in the battlefield and the enemy fired her a bullet I would gladly take it on her behalf’. I even went ahead to say that I could remove cud from a snake and never care about the fangs. She had laughed and said that I was talking a lot. I had inched even closer and my heart was beating faster I sensed it could shatter my ribcage. Then Kipsang came. 

There he stood defiantly, still with his white-ribbon but with no ostrich feather. His towering frame dwarfed us and his bare chest sent an eerie feeling shooting down my spine. As I was collecting my scattered mind on what to do, I suddenly realized that I was dangling before Kipsang, feet hardly on ground. Chenangat was standing eye-ball to eye-ball daring him to ‘even slap me’. He ignored her.

He asked a question. “Egret, since when did you learn how to follow cows and pluck ticks on the backs of bulls?”

I took it as some rhetorical question asked by old men in kokwo for the audience to go mull them over in their homesteads. I kept quiet.

“You have no answer, huh? I am not surprised. Let me make it easier to you. Who is Chenangat to you?”

I felt like to tell him that she is a daughter of a woman that I will marry and that he can as well hang on a tree but Chenang’at quipped:

“Kipsang, since when did you have the authority to ask questions. What if I say we are lovers? What will you do?”

I knew I will be dead meat if this line of conversation continued. Swallowing my pride, I rushed in to intone:

“Kipsang, my hero, who can fight you? Aren’t you the horn that can split a tree-bark? Who am I to talk to you? If you beat me up I will die. If I don’t die in your hands today I will die of the wounds and internal injuries eventually, you know that. Leave me, Kipsang, Chenang’at is for the brave like you, not weaklings. Don’t make me food for vultures.”

Somewhere in the shrubs we could hear the voice of Lokwang’ole, the chief. He was calling ‘Chenang’at’ ‘Chenangat’ ‘I will spear this son of Lokwangura, I will spill blood tonight, let the moon bear me testimony’. 

C) Lorot Salem 2011

Reflection on Sunrise #2

Mornings are symbolic of a birth. It is the womb of unborn promises of a new day. In the silence of the morning, man is brought close to nature and in such serenity and tranquility he can hear his heartbeat, feel the pulse of the morning and glean from the secrets of a brand new day. Man is at his creative best at around this time, buoyed by the rest of an uneventful night sleep.

This pristine set-up of the sunrise might be varied in cities and town but not in the villages. The city robs man of the picturesque rise of sunshine above the hills: moving cars, morning madness, jam headaches, blare of car horns, mad rush, cacophony of human noises. In the village, sunrise is like a sacred ritual: morning rise to milk cows, trip to the river, trip to the abattoir where a goat is slaughtered. But in all this, the noises are those of human whistle, rustle of leaves, chirp of birds, lows of the cows, bleat of goats and generally moderate if not slow and haggard approach to the morning.

Amid all these, such a morning is a harbinger of either good or bad news, good luck or bad luck, blessings or curse. It is shrouded in the mystery of a previous night that was veiled in darkness. Looking at the sun, one can’t help to think about the secrecy that it conceals even in the glare of its rays.

How beautiful a sight it is then as children sit on the ground, head resting on the mud-wall of their hut, to bask in the warmth of such a morning sun? How does it feel taking a steamy cup of tea exchanging pleasantries as the morning wears on? What a sight it is seeing goats and cows leave the homestead to go to pasture and shrub fields, in full confidence whether nature brings them good tidings or ill?

The irony of this is that soon man is consumed in his daily activities, whether in the office or in the field. As his energy dissipates in the labour of his work, the sun in tandem grows unrelenting and stubborn. It is as if it is some conspiracy to pull worst surprise on the enterprising nature of man. One thing I have never understood about the sun is that at one minute it is one of the friendliest buddies to stay close to and the next minute it is one of the fiendliest chap you want to stay away from. 

As the sun dies in the West, it is a befitting Elegy to the travails of the sun in the life of man, of its radiance, glory, incandescence, of its beautiful lessons, of its inconsistencies of being one time fiery and next time fully spent and of its last glory in its warm glow.

Reflection on Sunrise #1

There is no beauty that parallels the glory of the Morning Sunrise. As the warm shafts of the sun lick the caps of hills and mountains, the birth of a new day is heralded. Much earlier, the darkness of dusk and silhouette of nothingness progresses to the chirp of birds and crows of cocks. As the lights of a new day engulf the expanse of nature, confidence is restored. Predators retreat, preys run about to celebrate yet another triumph over death, evil hatched in the darkness of the night takes refuge in unlit woodworks and ledges.

As one watches the sun rising in the East, one can’t help but marvel at the ironies of nature. Darkness gives way to light, coldness gives way to warmth, and the dominance of the stars and the moon are soon relegated by the iridescent rays of the morning sun. The artificial neon lights designed by man are soon dwarfed by the natural light, all-night-long bonfires die at dawn and candles blown off.

To add to this beauty, animals and man in full spleandour wake up as if to bear testimony to this marvel. Soft music from radio, cow-bells, the whistle of the herdsman, troop to the well or the river by women, all these are the accoutrements of the morning glory. 

As dawn quickly fades, the morning music of Amka Kumekucha by Maroon Commandos will filter into my ears. Uvivu ni adui mkubwa wa ujenzi wa taifa, kamata jembe na panga uende shamba/ Hata wewe karani amka kumekucha/…. Uvivu ni kiini haswa kisababishajo njaa…When I hear this song, sleep deserts me, all over sudden some feeling of hidden potentials of a new day attacks my spirit and soon I am awake.

I bolt from the bed with a revived spirit to carry me through the day. In the next hours that lie before me, I know all that I need are the right ingredients: time consciousness, right attitude, determination, unity of purpose. Mornings don’t discriminate, they are not tribal, they are not racist, they visit upon man equally. Mornings can’t be split, they are whole and in this wholesomeness man is reminded an important aspect of life in selflessness and achievement of one’s full potentials. 

The sun never spares its spleandour, it just shines as the day progresses. In fact, its rays progress from feeble, bask-friendly to the scorching, sultry, burning itself up, exhausting much heat it possesses as if to make man learn that the sun also means business. Conversely, could such scorching heat also portend another hidden message that the sun bears too? That of intolerance, show-off, a competition in the galaxy? Could such also reflect on man’s excesses given ability in position of service? Could the habit of the sun reveal how man’s self-same talent could bring about fellow man’s triumph or ruination? What shall we say of how the sun creeps into wall cracks of people’s houses without invitation? If man wants to sleep in the dark, pray, what right does the sun have to shine its light and disturb such a man’s privacy? Could we also glean mankind’s nature here too?

What Passes Through The Head of a Mad Man?

I met a mad man today. Dirty, disheveled, rugged. He walked around naked, collecting dirt and talking to himself. I saw this mad man and I felt pity for him. But a curiosity gripped me. What passes through the mind of this lunatic? For he is a calm man, walking alone, talking. He troubles no one. What goes through his mind?

Does he wonder about the scorching sun? Does he wonder about the misery of other fellow men who are also gripped in their madness too? Does he console himself in the solitary world where he is not worried about his nudity and people’s thoughts about him?

Does a mad man wonder about the indifference he sees when he is denied food and warmth? Is he incensed by his loneliness? Does he miss love, affection? Does he think about tomorrow? Does he think back on how his day has been? Does he actually get irritated by the smell in garbage mounds and dustbins? Does he dream of bigger garbage mounds and dustbins? Is he jealous when he meets other mad men in the same marketplace? Does he remember what he used to be, his sanity, his lucid intervals?

What actually passes through the head of a mad man? Is he scared of his life when he witnesses an accident?  What does he think of us? The ones who are really mad? Does he accept that he is mad? What keeps him going? Is he an optimist or a pessimist?