Totty Heels to the Rescue

Disaster always strikes at home when D is unavoidably off doing something lofty and highminded. There was the time when the water mains flooded the kitchen [in Sierra Leone evaluating peace building initiatives for the United Nations]. When the baby and the three year old got chicken pox [out of phone contact for 3 weeks monitoring human rights abuses in Democratic Republic of Congo warzone]. The compulsory gender-mainstreaming workshop which clashed with both children's nativity plays and a Christmas party for which complicated cakes, fancy dresses & lift rotas were needed. So with the alarm set for 5 am and a car sweeping him off at 530 to election-monitor in a local by-election, you can be sure its not just the children's plaintive wails of psychosomatic illnesses to seek to evade the compulsory school cross country on the agenda.

645 am and L, our 60plus year old homehelp, upstanding devout churchgoer, pillar of the community, phones in considerable distress.
'I've been arrested. With everyone on my matatu. We don't know what for. I'm in the police cells at the central police station. Please can you come and get me?'
Quick change from jeans to a suit and totty heels. Gather results of agony-aunt strawpoll from friends in the know - 'Don't go on your own.' 'Take someone with you who knows what they're doing.' 'Don't pay any bribes, but you might need lots of cash to pay a fine.'  This is where I discovered that our emergency phone numbers for D's work duty officer & for the Diplomatic Police have been reallocated to suitably baffled sounding Kenyan civilians. So its Catrin in her totty heels on her own. Plus a quick whistle stop tour of Kenyan law down-the-line briefing from D in a distant polling station: 'Cite the new Bill of Rights. - And don't pay anything without getting a receipt.'

Off to the Central Police Station. And there in a grim black maria with prison bars, parked at the front entrance, were those upstanding people of L's matatu who had refused - or been unable - to slip the arresting officer a bribe.  From fourteen seven were left, picked up en route to work, several in tears, waiting to be carted off to court, and back for a night in the cells if they & their networks couldn't pay the fine. They thought they were there for not having worn seatbelts, - but no one had checked their seatbelts before arresting the bus-full - and the driver of the bus had done a deal, paid a bribe, and escaped scotfree. They hadn't been charged, just rounded up and sat in a smelly, scary van.  Another income-generating scam to raise money at the most expensive time of the year, as school fees fall due.

There's a section of the privileged classes here in Kenya which use the same tone of voice on which the empire was built. You hear them in supermarkets from 200 paces being imperious down the phone to unfortunate underlings.  You see their children at school offloading bookbags, cricket bats and trombones onto staff without greeting them or addressing them in any way.  Its not a persona that I respect. I want to be Catrin, not Madam or Memsahib. Not Madam from D's work, Memsahib with the diplomatic plates on the car or 'Do you know who I am?' I strive for parity and equality in my dealings.  But Kenya is such a stratified society, and status matters here.  So I can use my best Swahili and enquire after the health of the receptionists, and the custody sergeants, the District Traffic Officer and the Officer in Control of the Police Station, - but in the end, when push comes to shove, and when L is in tears in the black maria with only me to call on, I'm using my best Swahili to ask their names, to flash my diplomatic identity card, to note that half the alleged malefactors have disappeared from custody after payment and to cite the recently voted in Bill of Rights, the right to bail without fee, the right to be charged, and for legal process to be applied fairly and equally to all the bus, not just to those who don't pay the bribes.

It was scary. And brutal for those without power or assets. While one police officer let me speak to L in the van, learn her story & pass her some cash in case they were driven to court before I could sort it out, two later ones, in plain clothes, tried to usher me from the steps of the van 'for causing a disturbance' because I noted 'Your Bill of Rights hasn't been upheld here' and asked their names.  I had to march through the hot, full, very smelly holding cells to get to the senior officers. And wandered Kafkaeque corridors painted in East German shades of paint searching for the OCPS 'what does one of those look like?' and the 'DTO'. 

My mate T grew up in Kenya & returned here with her family last year. She remembers the time when the bottom floor of Nyayo House, a skyscraper not half a kilometer from the police station,  was used for torturing prisoners and 'troublemakers'. 'You were very brave to go there on your own' she said tonight. 'You did very well to get her out.' But I wonder what about those left behind? What about the rest of the bus the senior officer wouldn't release?

I didn't grow up in a country where random torture was a potential hazard for sticking your head above the parapet. I was brought up to try to be inclusive, to seek to stand up for the underdog. But I know that much of made it work today, what meant that L got off with a written warning not a night in the cells was my white skin and the status bestowed by D's job.  And I was only able to use that 'status' for one person, my person, and what good does that do for the rest - or for the Kenyan police system which D is working hard to strengthen? 

On the other hand, maybe it did make a difference that I went. As I marched through the holding cell people muttered, 'Mama io amekuja.' 'Her boss has come to get her.'   As I held the hand of the young woman in smart suit in tears in the van who was scared no one would come to get her out, maybe it did make a small difference that I cared. When I told the senior officer how we had celebrated that 67% of Kenyans had voted in the Bill of Rights last month, but that sadly the Bill of Rights wasn't being upheld in the case of these people, and by the way half of the matatu's passengers were no longer in custody, yes, he thought I was a troublemaker, but maybe, maybe, maybe he'll have given the arresting officer a talking to.

On the way home in the car, L said she'd never been arrested before. 'What would I have done in court?', she said. 'The others, they said you have to plead guilty, and then you get off with a fine, if you can pay it. If you plead innocent, they said, and the police say you were guilty, you have to stay in the cells for a long time. I know I had my seatbelt on, I would be under oath, I don't know that I could tell a lie under oath.' 

My attitude to Truth is maybe more flexible than that. I don't know. But she made me think of the Brecht play, the Good Person on Sechuan. In it, an owner of a cafe, a single woman, tries to be kind to the weakest, to behave justly - and is taken advantage of by those around her, till her debts rise inexorably.  She invents the persona of her evil cousin who bullies and collects debts on her behalf so that she can carry on trading.

Brecht's point is that if it's impossible for the mildmannered and kind to flourish, then the structures of society need to be changed, and we need to act to bring this about.  Is it right to use the power of a white skin, of a diplomatic identity card to override the Kenyan systems - which are being wrongly applied - to help one person and leave the others? Or does it offer support to those honest police officers, if we show we too know their new regulations and quote them with respect? Does it offer hope to the others in the holding cell that people with power do sometimes care? And surely it matters that senior police officers are reminded what is right, what 67% of their population have just voted in to great celebrations, - even if it is done in a strident voice?