TEARZ AYUEN: WHY I SHALL NEVER QUIT SAGGING
7 min readBy Tearz Ayuen
“Wewe! Jinga hii. Unafanya nini hapa?! Nakuuliza, what are you doing here?”………That was a Kenyan administration police officer barking questions at me on May 19, 2009, the very day I arrived in Nairobi following my first field trip to South Sudan where I traveled to to cover a seven-day peace conference in Bor.
That day, I touched down at Kenyatta Airport at around 2 o’clock, boarded a taxi cab to the office as required by the organization policy. I greeted colleagues and worked out a few petty assignments. About an hour later, I rode home in another taxi. By then, I was staying at my Cousin Bullen Achiek Ngong’s house at Ngara, about 3 kilometers north of downtown.
I was so exhausted, so, I decided to take a shower in order to freshen myself up. It was after I stepped out of the bathroom I remembered I had no cologne. I had forgotten the only one I had in my hotel room at Juba’s Hamza Inn.
Being a great lover of perfumes, I couldn’t resist going for another one. Hence, I dashed back to town. At Tuskys Beba Beba supermarket, the queues were so long that I painfully spent about 30 minutes standing in the line. By the time I was done buying “Tattoo Junkie” spray, it was already late – that time of the day the light undresses for darkness.
It was on a week day, meaning the evening was characterized by deafening honking, crazy human and terrific traffic jams. I had to walk a few distances towards National Archives building along Tom Mboya Street, loaded with kilos of hopes that I would quickly find route 6 Mathree to drop me off near the house.
In addition to the normal human traffic, it was also that time of Nairobi when hawkers notoriously defiantly display their second and even third-hand wares on the pavements, a behavior that pisses off the city council management because – besides the by-law prohibiting unlicensed selling of goods on the streets – it increases the likelihood of accidents and it also makes it hard for a pedestrian to squeeze his or her way through. Being used to it, I was comfortable doing the squeezing and pushing when suddenly tom Mboya Street turned into a football pitch. Everyone started chasing a ball, an imaginary ball. All the pedestrians ran into different directions. I saw men and women fall down. Upon seeing people with bleeding knees and hands as a result of bad sudden falls, my fear button got turned on, automatically, forcing me to stay put at least to figure out what exactly was going on. I tried hard to catch a glimpse of what the people where running away from or running to, but to no avail.
To my surprise, some voice echoed from behind. Ni nini unafanya hapa? I turned around only to see this sinewy cop dressed up in khaki. He was dark, round-faced, with tainted teeth. I replied: “Boss, natakana hii commotion i-clear ndio nipande matz…..” hardly had I finished answering him when he interrupted me. “hapana! This is idling!!” He landed his rungu on my left knee. “What have I done? I asked. He ignored my question and hit me again and again. And within split seconds, his colleagues, about five, descended from nowhere and joined him. They practiced playing xylophone on my knees till my legs refused to carry me anymore.
I hit the ground with my knees. One grabbed me by my jumper and pulled me up. “nimedo makosa gani? Ni nini nimefanya? Nimewakosea aje?” I fired one question in different ways as the other officer struggled to hold me by the belt. They dragged me towards their truck, parked in the middle of the road. A huge jam had begun to build up as the police truck showed no sign of giving way. It was like they found what they were looking for -Tears Ayuen. Many more officers got drawn to the scene as I refused to climb up the truck, seriously demanding to know where I had gone wrong first. The level of my adrenalin shot up, strengthening me.
I got wild. My muscles tightened up. It was like I just received a shot of heroin. Hence I resisted the three cops who tried to force me into the vehicle. Intimidated by my unruliness, their commandant, a two-star boss breathed fire. I saw him hand his Motorola 77 and his headgear to another officer in readiness to help his juniors. Armed with various skills of manhandling a criminal, this dude grabbed me by the belt and tried to pull me up hoping that I would, with uneasiness, stand on my toes, an attempt that produced no fruits because he was a dwarf, almost the size of Inspector Mwala. In fact, I mistook him for Mwala until we got to the station.
A few seconds later, I felt some hand fumbling between my legs. It was a huge, rough, semi-metallic, bowl-like hand. My instincts told me that it was searching for my young precious fertile balls to squash them, explode them. With balls being very significant to me, I acted swiftly and smartly by deploying a tactics. I was in strong moderately tight pants, and they were almost falling as usual. To counter the ball-squeezing hand, the hand of infertility, the hand of extra-judicial castration, the hand of permanent emotional agony, I stretched my legs a little bit, making it impossible for him to reach out my golden testicles. See? Sagging saved my balls, my baby- making laboratory.
As they roughed me off, I unknowingly kept singing the same question until it became a one-line chorus of a hardcore hip hop track; “what have I done? What I done? What have I done? What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?”
They finally managed to fling me onto the truck and that was after some of the cops decisively climbed up the truck and pulled me up. They held me by my head, arms, collar while the ones on the ground prepared for a push. The force was so powerful that I fell on the floor chest first. “Korou korou”, my flat chest greeted the metallic floor.
Struggling to sit up, I quickly assumed the purpose of a footstool as the officers who were seated, guarding suspects, placed their dirty smelly old boots on my head, back.
One thing that amazed me after I gained humanity while still riding in the police vehicle was the devil that sent me to town, the spray that I bought. Despite all the rough experiences from the police; the pulling, hitting, pushing, yanking, it remained glued to my left hand, safe and intact.
After roaming the streets for about an hour, we arrived at the central police station where we marched into the registration office.
The police officers who arrested us threw a blanket charge: “hawa wote ni hawkers. They engaged in illegal trading. Na huyo kijana ni kichwa kibovu.” “But I’m not a hawker, sir. Mimi ni msu……….,” I objected. “Ati nini? And how did you get herrrr….” The commandant murmured the word “here” as his lips froze with confusion, and sticking his bloodshot eyes on my forehead. He whispered something to the registrar’s ear and walked out. That assured me they had finally discovered I wasn’t a hawker, not a native either. They finally read my number plate engraved on my face.
After they realized that I was a Sudanese, the whole thing took a different course. I wasn’t a hawker anymore, meaning new charges.
“Wee, Galang, iko wapi passport?” asked the registrar, a fat dude who could not pronounce Garang properly. His mother tongue fucked up roman alphabets, especially letters L and R. “Reta kitamburisho, he screwed up words again. “sina sahihi. Iko nyumbani”, I answered.
After I failed to produce my passport, this son of a bitch pressed two charges against me. One, that I was an illegal alien. And two, obstruction; that I obstructed the officers from carrying out their operation by resisting arrest.
“Remove your belt, your watch, cash and phone. Take off your shoe, left,” ordered a jailer. Bang! He slammed the door behind me. In the cell, the strong and the powerful were waiting for me; to frisk me, hoping to find anything valuable. They only got a silver finger ring.
I spent the night awake as the floor was cold, wet and stinking. In the morning, I heard some voice calling out, “Sudanese”. I got out only to recognize faces from my office. I had informed them of where I would spend the night shortly before the cops threw me in.
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