Bernard Kiprotich
I don’t mean to drown anyone in a pool of their own tears but this story runs down south. It is a picture I never knew I would ever have to paint. But this is a world of passionate journalists and a shadowing horde of hungry quacks.
I have been in the field for a few years. Every morning I scrap the surface. It is a rush out here – against deadlines and internet bundles, crazed humanity – armed with smart phones and a kind of proximity to breaking stories that I can only hope for.
I have packaged stories on how farmers have been urged to drop that and pick this, on which authority has warned which group and, oh, stories about death and the haunting trail of desperation it leaves behind.
But when a former MCA was abducted, it all felt like a joke bearing no punch line. A member of a sensational Whatsapp group even remarked of a stage managed kidnapping, without saying anything about the director. I maintained a poker face beneath which a storm was brewing.
It was only a few weeks since I last spoke to him. We were having tea at a café, him preferring black tea and I sipping on normal Kenyan tea while imagining it was a brand of whisky. The mist that morning hid the horizon of a sky arching down onto Tugen hills.
He was a vibrant politician. His first and only term as an MCA never slid away unnoticed. At least not for the residents of his ward who are ardent farmers of waru. They will always remember him for saving them from unfair packaging gunny bags through a bill.
They chose to switch off the light on him. They chose to suck out oxygen from his lungs. They chose to deal him a deadly blow on the head.
I tell this story not to expose how journalists can weep more than the bereaved, but to bring this forth unto you how we can wither from within. How it is not always all about sniffing out stories and banging on computer keys.
It is in this profession that I have covered the story of men found shot dead in a forest and the muffled tales from their friends who had survived. I have had to endure the sight of bodies of men who had rolled down a cliff in a Probox and had their vulnerable parts hit against rocks. I have told of a man who went berserk shooting three kids and injuring three more.
None ever got me all numb like this particular tragedy.
It has peeled back my heart like it is a piece of pulp onion. Each memory of him and tale of the kind of leader he was is a reminder of how vulnerable life is. It has spoken to me about how sometimes as a journalist I cease to be the conveyor but part of my news sources.
The writer is Emoo FM correspondent in Elgeyo Marakwet
