Hotel California
The Prison Industrial Complex that is the Westphalian Nation-State
My abdomen clenched like a fist, my bladder tightened, and any need I had to relieve myself instantly evaporated. I wretched and recoiled in disgust as I reflexively ducked back out of the police prison cell toilets.
I have grown up in boarding school, lived in the poor areas of Nairobi city without sewerage but nothing can prepare you to board in the stench generated by the three foot tall mound hill of human faeces that was slowly decomposing two walls away from the office of the Officer in Charge of Station Kilimani Police Station. How did he survive here? How could he allow this in his police facility?
I fled back to my cell barely 3 metres away. I realised how important it was that the cell had only bars where there had probably been meant to be windows, otherwise, given our olfactory senses are directly wired to our brains, the odour would have driven us, the detainees, insane.
I had never been incarcerated before, but now begun my journey through the so called “correctional system”. All I knew about it I had only heard about or read about or been entertained with in popular television shows and movies.
I instinctively hated school all my life, boarding or day, never understanding why. Now, as a much older man in the prison system it dawned on me just why. School like prison, I realized, is an instrument to break will. It is designed to condition you to surrender not just your rights but your right to choose, your freewill. Voluntarily.
In school, you slowly learnt the questions you could ask and the questions you couldn’t ask, even when you were deviously encouraged and prodded, “Ask any question son”. After a sufficient number years in school, you intuitively self-censored. You intuitively knew what you could ask and what you couldn’t.
The world you were being prepared for as it turned out, was a large school. The truth was irrelevant. The schools rules, syllabus, and textbooks were your truth, they were all the thoughts you were allowed to have. You were not to think let alone speak outside the rules, syllabus, textbooks or else.
I had not learnt the primary lesson of school, probably given I spent it all waiting to leave, and that was why I was now here. Back in school, just school without the false veneer of good intentions, here I was expressly told what I was supposed to learn. There were no covert behavioural conditioning programs, there was no subliminal messaging. I had distributed a leaflet containing thoughts and ideas that were outside “the approved syllabus” to the public, I had read speeches endeavouring to wake my fellow “school mates” up to the fraud being perpetrated upon us. And this, just like in school, was punishable by law.
You do not ask why young Muslim men disappear at the rate of four-a-week in Eastleigh, a predominantly Muslim area, then there tortured bodies turn up dead in the Tsavo National Park and others lost forever.
You do not ask why the leaders who purported to speak for Muslims were silent on the spate of State-sponsored killings but loud on pledges of allegiance and calls to the impotent ritual of Democratic voting during General elections
I had asked “why?”. You do not ask “why?”
“Why?” to the tyrant is “Terrorism”. The tyrant I learnt actually does feel terrorised by the question “why?”. As “why?” isn’t just defiant, “why?” is a direct challenge to the basis of his tyrannical order, the very foundation of his despotic rule.
It is the one question, you can never ask, either in school or outside.
My odyssey was just beginning.
I was shuttled between police station’s cells, a “grand tour” you might call it, but by it I would learn about the ugly underbelly of the territory’s penal system (over and above re-learning not to ask “why?”).
Back to Kilimani Police Station.
The cell floor has steel rings, two thirds of which circumference emerges from the floor, while the other third remains anchored in the cement floor. None of us could tell what purpose they served. They served no aesthetic or functional purpose we could think of. Two days later, an apparent veteran of the prison system, made his regular visit. He explained to us the rings were from colonial times. Rebellious natives wouldn’t just be locked in, they would be chained to the floors of the cells they were held in.
It was horrifying to imagine. We tried to imagine how the chains would have to be passed through them and all possibilities had terrible implications for a human being.
There are many analyses and arguments that endeavour to reveal the continued existence of the colonial state in the incorporeal aspects of “Modern Africa” i.e. in it’s politics, in it’s economics but a tour of the police and penal infrastructure reveals the imperial colonialist state to be also physically intact, whole. Down to the rings, chains and bars that held our grandfathers. There wasn’t even a cosmetic make-over. The buildings are the exact same ones, the cells, even the cells’ doors are the very same ones the British imperialists built.
I was told Kilimani Police Station was the preferred holding facility for native elites, they asked to be held here when on their tour.
I feared to imagine what the rest were like.
I was hauled before a magistrate, early Tuesday morning, for her to determine how long the Anti-Terror Police Unit could hold me while conducting investigations on my supposed “Terror activities”. My lawyer endeavoured to have me incarcerated at the Anti-Terror Police Unit’s holding facility, explaining to the Magistrate that the devilish intention of the arresting officers to hold me while innocent in Police Station cells, was to inflict mental torture as they knew what a few weeks in their stinking decrepit infrastructure would do to a sane human being. The Magistrate granted our appeal, but how could she follow-up to monitor implementation? Once you are out of the Magistrate’s sight, the police did what they well pleased.
My arresting officer was a vindictive banshee from Mt. Kenya, my native homeland, but this was not going to be any boon. Her interrogations with me were not going well, at least according to her, and she was going to punish me for what she perceived to be absolute insolence, that could only be daring to answer her questions with the Truth.
I was slowly learning that there was nothing that the oppressor hated more than the Truth with a Capital T. That is, the Truth that holds the answer to the question “why?”. It was because there was no where to run, there was no where to hide, within or without of the Self, from the Truth. And worst of all there was no road beyond the Truth, there was nowhere to advance beyond the Truth. The Truth was final. There are only two possibilities in the face of the Truth; submission to it, where it engulfed you and possessed you and all you owned, changing you forever. Or folly, you attack it and disintegrate. For nothing can withstand the force of pure Truth.
She chose the third option. She’d deal with the messenger. She screamed at me louder and scaled up the oppression by holding me in the worst Police facilities she knew.
I was transferred to Muthaiga Police Station over the weekend after a week of interrogations about everything but a felony or misdemeanour. Not once was I asked or told what crime I was being held for, but just like in school, I intuitively knew.
Three questions were repeated in different order and context,”Do you believe in Jihad?”, “Do you support Kenya Defence Force’s war in Somalia?”, and “Have you ever been to Somalia?”. It struck me then ATPU didn’t mean Anti-”Terror”Police Unit, it actually meant Anti-Thought Police Unit. I was living in Orwell’s 1984, the ATPU were Thought Police!
They knew I had committed no criminal offence, that is why there wasn’t a single question about anything I had done. My “Thoughts” were the crime! It is one thing to read Orwell and a complete other to live it! How were they content to persecute me? How did they live with this moral dilemma? How did the police go home everyday to their children and manage to find sleep knowing they had their fellow innocent countryman locked up in a cell? Paul Laurits writes in his blog that police training and institutions are designed to completely destroy a human beings moral agency. To know this from reading and to experience it were completely different phenomena. Was this the dissonance Nabii Yusuf (as) suffered as his brothers lowered him into a hole in the wild?
The Muthaiga Police Station outhouse was literally outside the cell block. We had to beg, bribe, grovel, hurl insults and vitriol at the on-duty officers to let the desperate visit it. The corridor ended being the temporary crapper.
I was checked in to Muthaiga Police Station on Friday evening. It was dark, dire and strangely very sparsely populated. I sighed with relief. Ignorance is bliss, my comfort was to be short lived, “Ngoja uone (wait and see)”, my cellmate warned ominously.
At approximately ten o’clock that night there was a loud band and shouting in the yard outside. “Ndani!! ndani!!” (Move in!! move in!!), the three 9 square metre cells were flooded a multitude I estimated to be over a hundred detainees! A few were stoned but the rest seemed like anyone you’d pass by on the street on any day of the week. And as it turns out, they were.
It was dark but we could make each other out in the light reflected from the yard outside. When one of them established eye contact I asked “What is going on? Where are you all from? What are you all doing here?”. He explained to me he was netted in “an operation” while on his way home from work. “How?” I asked incredulously. This world was new to me and his polite tone made me confident enough to ask.
He explained every Friday the police would randomly cordon off different areas o public roads in Mathare, a nearby slum area, and sweep everyone caught in between in to police trucks. If it was your unlucky day, c’est la vie.
“What!? No!” That sounded just preposterous. In my mind I thought “there must be legitimate reasons for these so called “operations”. These dragnets could not just be mass shakedowns, it was unfathomably malevolent. It was simply unbelievable. And he nonchalantly told me this happened every Friday!
We fell into silence, with the occasional scuffles and fights as the drunks were disciplined by their sober comrades, who in this space had little patience for their shenanigans. It was so cramped that we had to lock into each others thighs in squatting positions to settle in for the night and try to get some sleep. But the cramps and the freezing cold wouldn’t let any come. Why on earth would they do this? Who on earth would do this to his fellow human being? I knew police to be inhumane but again, to know and to experience, is worlds apart.
At about 2 a.m. there was a loud shouting and banging on the steel doors of the cell block. We could hardly see, the lights in the yard had been switched off. The police stormed the cells with torches and ordered everyone who heard their name to cross the floor where they stood, arms holding rifles and batons. Apparently it was roll call. I felt thankful for the rude interruption, the movement would allow us to walk and relieve the cramps, little knowing the open door was the gateway to another trial.
As names were called out, the police would randomly beat up detainees as they crossed the open space between them. Roll call was running a gauntlet, literally.
Nights are long when out in the cold, but in Kenya’s jail cells nights last forever. As you are certain death from cold will find you long before the dawn does.
But our will to live is stronger than we often think, and dawn does come, even in hell for a believer. When morning arrives, you are served two slices and hot tea, and most importantly, a chance to visit the lavatory. You are locked up again, to begin the wait.
“Wait for what?” you might naturally ask. Not for your sins to be read, not for redemption, not even for damnation, this is the Kenya Police Force not God. You wait for extortion, you wait for your ransom to be read.
The caricature of an OCS (Officer in Charge of Station) waddled in to the yard outside our cell block at 9 p.m. We were swept out of the cells double time. Everyone could tell by the obsequiousness of the constables that he was the King here, his word was law.
He held out a two foot long book like a scroll. He read out the names of about seven of us, who did not fall within his domain of control given we were “Terror suspects” and glared at us like we were criminals as he ordered us to be escorted back to the cells. We stretched our necks to watch the proceedings through the elevated barred windows of our cell block.
The list of approximately one hundred plus detainees was read out without pause. At the end of which, in the guttural voice of a terribly unhealthy two hundred and fifty pound bully he announced every single individual whose name he had called out was charged with being “drunk and disorderly”, and would have to pay two thousand shillings for their freedom, and he cued the police constables to herd them all back into the cell block.
“Why on earth would they do this?” I had wondered the previous night. This was why the cells were empty when I’d arrived, they’d been cleared for the herd that was to be brought in for the night!
The one thing you have plenty of in jail, is time. We all got to know each other. I sat next to the polite young man I had talked to the night before and got talking, sometime asking probing questions looking for contradictions that would reveal deceit, but none availed themselves.
John worked as a temporary worker at the Coca-cola bottling plant in Nairobi Industrial area and was on his way home from work the same route he used everyday. He told me he didn’t take alcohol and I believed him, I could already tell because he had a homely “mommy’s boy” kinda feel to him. He left work to go straight home to his wife every day. He was a decent human being in every sense of the word and definitely a law-abiding citizen. He told me it was not the first time he had gotten caught in these “operations”. His wife new what to do, they had a process. He would call her from the Muthaiga Police Post jail cell, the police availed a cell phone for detainees to use to call their loved ones to come and bail them out, she would go to the drawer where he kept his ATM card, she’d withdraw some money and come to bail him out. Yes, they had kidnap insurance.
But as luck would have it. His wife’s phone had been stolen and he had lost his ATM card, therefore even if he could reach her, she had no way to access the emergency fund quickly enough to bail him out in time to go and save his temporary job at the Coca-cola plant. Yes, not only was he going to lose his money for no reason other than extortion, he was also going to lose his job as now he was not going to report to work not just on Saturday but possibly also on Monday. Without reason as far as his employer would know.
During the rest of the Saturday and Sunday all manner of people were brought in for one ransom, sorry reason or another. From traffic violations, domestic quarrels, exam cheats, business disputes, the list of problems that brought people in was endless but the answer that led out was only one, cash. The correctional system was a revolving door with with free entry but paid exit.
When I thought about it, it dawned on me, that everyone was guilty of some offence. If you were driving and in motion, a traffic violation, if stationary a potential parking violation. If not driving, just walking was potentially loitering or trespassing (as I had actually seen in court earlier). If standing, possibly “vagrancy”. If resisting arrest, well, drunk and disorderly. If in business, tax violation tripwires criss-crossed everywhere around you. Every single action a human being could possibly perform in public was laced with a potential felony or misdemeanour in the system of laws and by-laws. A system was covertly built around us that ensured we were always guilty of one crime or another. All the police needed do was walk out into the street and arrest anyone or everyone they could exercise greater violence on. Everyone has been “educated” to cooperate with the legalized oppressors, it costs less. Therefore ten policemen will easily herd a hundred innocent people like sheep into jail. Once at the station, they can and do charge you or them with anything, and this is exactly what the Police did every day of the week, every week of the year. This was how the Police earned their living, not fighting crime as we had been taught to believe.
The Prison, the Judiciary, Policing it is all one business, it is a large extraction industry. I was being processed not “corrected”. My Freedom was being sold back to me, at least “truncated version” of it.
The “Correctional” extraction industry’s mine is the country, while it’s minerals are the people’s “Freedoms”. The entire territory is a large prison, with ever increasing tripwires and contracting walls configured as laws, by-laws and boundaries that calibrate the extent of the “Freedoms”. The population works to earn money to pay taxes that will keep the walls from contracting on them or their family members individually, and prevent the tripwires from triggering the leg-lock traps. Essentially an endless cycle of purchasing and re-purchasing “Freedom”.
The entire Westphalian Nation-State Capitalist system with all it’s glitter and promise was just one large mine of slaves, run by over-glorified guards and taskmasters. With slaves working in different parts and different levels of the mine, in order to serve time in specific cells and cell blocks with different levels of comfort and space. It is a panopticon equipped with an intricate system of locks and permission levels to control movement either horizontally or vertically within the cells and cell blocks. It is 1984.
For instance, the other six “Terror suspects” I had been brought in with were Maasai herders from Tanzania. They had been picked up in Narok, a town in the southern part of Kenya for failing to show ID. How Maasai herding goats in the Rift Valley, something they have done for centuries, had become a “Terror offence” was beyond me and beyond them given they didn’t even know what “Terror” or “Terror suspect” meant, but here they were, “Terror suspects”.
Fortunately, there is no where angels sent cannot reach you, even in the darkest dungeons of Firaun. Mine was sent in the form of my new Investigating Officer.
The Muthaiga chapter of my odyssey ended early the following Monday morning.
That morning, my name alone was called. It immediately struck me as strange. I stepped out into the yard to find my Investigating Officer waiting for me. He had come to rescue me from my ordeal, I felt an overwhelming surge of fraternal affection for him. I now understand Stockholm syndrome.
I walked out in slow uncertain steps, I was burdened with mixed feelings. Even as my heart soared in what it saw as my escape, it was weighed down by guilt. My fellow “Terror suspect” detainees, the Maasai herdsmen who had suffered with me through out the weekend, had looked at me with desperately hopeful eyes when my name was called out of the first light, “Wametukujia? (Have they come for us?)” they asked in anguish. Hoping we would all be returned to the Terror Unit holding facility with it’s working toilets and urine-free floors. I could hear them calling me, but I couldn’t look back. I still can’t. I knew then, in hell no man will care about his fellow man’s plight. It is not possible. You can barely bear the heat of your own fires, how then can you another man’s? In hell on earth, so to it is, “every man for himself…”.
I do not know if John lost his job at Coca-cola let alone if or when he was released.
I was at the Anti-Terror Police Unit holding facility for only a few more days before being promoted to full remand in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison’s Solitary Confinement Block. To await either conviction and release into the general prison population of Kamiti Maximum Security Prison or acquittal and release in to the general prison population of Kenya.
This is Hotel California, “…you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!”.
