Kwach Yambo: A Father's Tribute

In one of his epic songs, Jimi Hendrix sings: “The night I was born, Lord I swear the moon turned a fire-red.” He was too little to know, of course, what kind of moon there was that night. But his folks might have told him, years after the fact. More likely, it was an imagined night.

Kwach was born in the morning, and died in the night. I don’t know what kind of sky Thika had that fateful night.

He was born on September 16, 1983, under the watchful eyes of doctors and nurses, who carried out a cesarean section at Aga Khan Hospital, Nairobi. He spent his first three days on this earth in an incubator, to fight off a touch of jaundice.

He died with massive injuries to the head, trapped for hours in a car, alone, as Kenya celebrated Obama’s landing. The driver and second passenger, who survived, had long been admitted to hospital. It took the effort of the Fire Brigade to free his lifeless body. A body without life is still the body of someone we should, as a collectivity, know and feel for.

No, I am not celebrating Kwach’s death. This is a mourning moment, and a loss. I am not telling myself that he is in a better place. I am devastated by his going. I wanted him to be in this place – to keep walking this earth and overcoming adversity and realizing his dreams, as they evolved – till he was in his eighties or, better still, nineties. The unconditional acceptance of death (of loss of life), regardless of circumstance, is an example of extreme, even morbid, despair.

I wanted him to be here with his siblings and friends and his own family, and to live and grow old with and like his peers, long after his mother and I were gone.

That’s what parents dream for their children, and so for themselves. You don’t nurture them with all that tender loving care for this kind of horror. 

That’s what human progress promises. Yet he died at the hands of the very sort of technology that progress delivers, and that delivers progress.

I know that millions and millions of parents have, throughout human history, endured and continue to suffer the fate that has now befallen us, and worse.

I know that from the facts. I just don’t want to accept the facts right now; because this is personal, not statistical. This is flesh and blood, not human history. Not trending news.

The morning that news of his death reached our house, Chikka, my only daughter, rushed into the bedroom where I had gone to change, screaming: “Daddy, Daddy, we have lost Kwach!” And she told me, amid the sobs, “Sorry.” I imagine she sensed what Kwach’s loss must mean to me, the father. I was sorry for her too, and saddened by her indescribable anguish. A tragedy of unfathomable magnitude had found its way into our closely-knit and reasonably secure house.

I understand that since Kwach died, his paternal grandmother (Ny’Opeyo) has cried desperate tears for her first grandson, who is also her father.

We are, all of us, stardust, still. We are specks of impossibly distant things of light such as we see twinkling in the heavens on cloudless nights. Things which, where we will bury Kwach, I have had the sensation as a younger man that you could reach up with your very own stretched hands and grab a handful of. Theology talks of “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, but, like Kwach, we are only partly of this earth.

The outpouring of emotion that Kwach’s passing has wrought has reinforced the thought that the twinkling is not the property solely of distant stars, but of certain specks of dust right here on earth, too. Such as Kwach.

We are, all of us, stardust, KWACH.


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P.S.

1. You may also wish to READ THIS.

2. ADDED (Aug 20, 2015): Hear Kwach's voice, doting on his daughter (Video taken on Nov 7, 2013)