Scary Stories to Tell in Mombasa

This story is the reason that I had originally decided to hold off on updating my blog for a while.  There were a few people who I wanted to tell the story to personally first, so they wouldn’t read about it and get worried.  It’s actually a pretty short story, and it goes like this:

A few months ago a friend and I were riding in a matatu.  We had gone out a late dinner because we were in the library with my students until their bedtime (9PM).  Dinner was good, and we were on our way back.  We got off the matatu at its normal stop closest to my house, at the intersection of my school’s street and the nearby main road.  Within a matter a seconds of our matatu driving away, I noticed that a man was walking toward me.  His body language suggested that he was adamant about something, but he said nothing, and did nothing initially but grab my arm.  Arm-grabbing is much more common here, generally speaking, so it was easy to imagine that this could have been a drunk or crazy man who could just be ignored.  It became clear rather quickly, however, that this was not the case, and the man was refusing to let go of me, and was in fact pulling me off of the sidewalk and into the road, and, in fact, toward the back of a truck.  I looked over at my friend, and another man was pulling him toward the truck as well.  At this point, my struggling became more spastic and I shouted things like “What are you doing?” and “This is not OK!”  It was also around this time that I saw a police officer on the sidewalk, watching.  Of course I only had a moment to process this, and by this point the struggle was fully in the middle of the road, and due to some turn of events, I found myself free of my abductor.  I ran over to my friend, who was a this point missing his shirt, which had been pulled off by the man who was still dragging him toward the truck.  I sloppily threw the weight of my arms onto his, so that the two people separated and my friend fell onto the asphalt.  He got up and wisely announced, “Paul, RUN!”  So I took off the one sandal I still had on my feet and we ran back to my school, about a minute away.

The end.

Not exactly, of course.  There was some followup with Peace Corps and the police, and the most likely explanation for the whole thing was that the police hire goons to hang off the backs of trucks and capture people without warning or explanation, and then take them to jail to demand bribes, which is reassuring, since kidnappings have occurred in Kenya’s capital, but the explanation is only somewhat reassuring, since it changes my opinion of my neighborhood police from incompetent to malicious.

I did let this event bother me for some time, and I still fear that I might punch someone who grabs me in town, even if they just want to sell me some trousers.  That being said, at the time of this writing, it’s just a story long past, and it doesn’t really affect my day-to-day except that I favor door-to-door transportation after the sun goes down.

The good news is that the morning after this happened, we went back to the scene of the crime and I recovered my sandal and my friend got his shirt back as well.  So nothing was lost, and knowledge was gained… a win-win!