This Is How I Remember You

Writer, Tonny Ogwa, reflects on the death of a friend and the struggle with coming to terms with the unexpected loss.

Even in the Kanjo (City Council Police) uniform, he looked plain, unremarkable, like a little stone you mindlessly kick on your way to wherever. Now, as he leaps from one matatu to another, hurling infamies and pocketing crumbled currency notes from filthy matatu touts with filthier mouths, you can tell this is a man who has never qualified for anything in his life. A man whose only redeeming quality is that there is a possibility he was also created in the image of God. You look at him, his squinty eyes darting inside his puffed face, and you wonder if he knows his own vacuity.

He saunters along Tom Mboya Street with false braggadocio, and the scrawny hawkers selling poverty for a pittance flee before him, stirring dust that crowns his glory. He loves this; he chuckles and rubs his ballooned belly in a sadistic glee as another terrified hawker begs him not to confiscate his stock. He is the almighty Kanjo, the ruler of Nairobi downtown’s poor. Here, he is lord, made so by whoever bribed whoever receives bribes at City Hall to make people Kanjos. You wonder if he recognizes his inadequacy; the deep-seated truth that he is but an inconsequential existence upon the face of the earth. You see his mediocrity in his posturing, in his ill-fitting uniform, in his extended belly that's threatening to detach from his meagre self. His life is, and always will be, unremarkable. Never stood out. Never earned anything good that ever happened to him. Never made a mark on the sands of time. You suspect he knows this even as he violently pries a suck of oranges off an old woman’s shaky hands. Even as he snarls at two teenage girls, video recording him as he yanks a helpless woman out of her car for parking in a space reserved for his giant ego...