By Syovata Ndambuki
When we moved to the prison camp at Industrial Area, Nairobi it must have been December 1998 or January 1999. I was just a bubbly toddler who knew nothing more than her name. I had been to the prison camp before. Sometimes I accompanied Mama during her visits to Tata. Other times we went there when I had numerous doctors’ appointments. I was a sickly child, during these first formative years.
Whenever we visited, we had to stay in a tiny, windowless, one-room shack of a house. It seemed cramped, even to my inexperienced eyes. There was only a bed, a small two-seater couch and a stool. One corner of the room had been set up to serve as a kitchen. The ceiling, above this corner had a black circle from all the soot produced by the kerosene stove Tata used to cook. There was a shared bathroom outside; a makeshift structure made with rusty mabati sheets and a gunny bag serving as the door. To prevent the wind from blowing this “door”, a large log was tied to the bottom of the gunny bag. The makeshift bathroom was shared amongst several neighbours.
Right next door, there was Mama Peter’s family. Mama Peter was not a correctional officer, but she was married to one. She cooked and sold buns every morning, outside her house, but we never bought from her, as I recall. It was an open secret that she was the dirtiest neighbor. She had a battalion of children and every time someone used the bathroom as a toilet, especially when they did the big one, they were the usual suspects. The tiny houses were lined up in a long row, but my eyes never wandered past Mama Peter’s house. This was not my home, and I had no interest in getting to know more about my surroundings. We always went back to the village in Kitui. And when we overstayed, I cried. I demanded to be taken back home.
But the December 1998 trip was different. We arrived at the camp on a late afternoon.
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