The court bailiff doesn’t ask us to stand when the judge walks in, we just do, a collective reflex of the condemned, and the judge sits down kienyeji style. He is not wearing a robe which is part of the problem, and his mallet is small, which is the other part of the problem. Whatever happened to ostentatiousness?
The judge hasn’t stopped writing since he sat. What is he writing? Who knows? It’s half Vioja Mahakamani, half expecting kiongozi wa mashataka to turn to the gallery and tell us to shut it. He doesn’t, mostly because no one is talking, and you can feel within the walls, the crushing weight of the law.
The judge looks boring. Sober even. Talks in a drab monotone, but his words hit with the relentlessness of Joe Frazier’s left hook, no mercy, pure malice. Maybe that’s what you need to be a small god, deciding, with a stroke of a pen to sentence someone for the rest of their life in the time it takes to finish reading this sentence. Liwalo na liwe. The case, if you must know, is that the accused killed his wife, and therefore has a case to answer. R— is shooting a documentary, and we are in court because somewhere one of us had heard that the law wouldn’t begin to hear a complaint unless you stood before it in person. Violence for her; drama for me.
The accused and co-accused share one cuff. Serikali is tightening the belt, austerity measures, yada yada. Someone at the back audibly clicks. The lady in front of me with the bouncy hair throws a cursory glance, and with one sweeping move, takes in the whole courtroom. I am impressed. The judgement file is big. Shit is impressive. Hiyo yote ni makosa? I ask whoever can be asked.
The accused and co-accused don’t look stressed, or worried. If anything, they look sober, leather for a heart, like they could have just walked out from a budget meeting at a loss-making government parastatal. The judge is stroking his pen. What the fuck is he writing?
The accused has the sort of face that asked to be punched. Something about the curve of his mouth, I guess. People think it’s in the eyes where evil lurks. I disagree. It is the mouth. The gnarl on it. It made him look like he was being cute with people, smirking at them, a permanent half-snarl that can be translated as contempt. He looks like Wanugu, or a cousin of the shot-dead Edward Shimoli, and his son Leon Shimoli, a lesser gangster, and man. Yet I figured he would be a big man in prison, in no danger of having his bread or butt taken.
My ass is itchy and it makes me think that I would not survive in jail. Being someone’s bitch. I’ve heard stories. Sure, in the gazeti, Uncle Moody Awori, when he was the guy for Home Affairs, had gotten rid of prison food, put a TV in jail, even got mattresses for conjugal visits, making crime popular again, making prisons cool again. Back in my day, I have pilfered here and there; pocketed the loose change, handled stolen phones, borrowed money with no intention of ever paying it back, but everyone’s done that, and in that regard I am nothing special. To me, it was fair game: finders keepers, losers weepers, that kind of shit. The Prophet Muhammad says, trust in Allah, but tie your camel. Besides, it was all petty crime, nothing where I would end up in jail, having sex only with my right hand.
Sitting on that hard bench got me building castles. I had been the captain of my debating team in high school when the Schools had such things. I would have made a good lawyer, everyone said. I was a fair man, believed in “justice”, good with words, yada yada. But the son of a peasant farmer man rose only so far.
The boring judge wants to defer the case now, till August something, a proper egress, when he’ll be back to put the law on the accused and tell him what is what. My Anglican subservience checks my Nairobi impatience. Maybe the reason I couldn’t survive the prison is not the sodomy aspect,—though that too—but because of the waiting. Justice, like prison, seems mostly to involve waiting. Waiting for? Who the fuck knows? Maybe the judge to finish whatever the fuck he is writing. That’s the real life sentence.
