Cut down along an invisible line

A man lay on the road, his body twisted. He was so still amid the flying rocks, rising smoke, rubber bullets, screaming women and youths waving machetes that you could walk right by him.

His name was Dishon Omondi. There was a scarlet pillow of blood under his head.

In Kenya’s deadly postelection violence, a terrible spasm that pitted tribe against tribe, he had ambled unknowingly across an invisible border: a Luo man in Kikuyu territory. A week earlier, nothing would have happened to him on that road.

“Leave him there to die!” someone yelled.

“They deserve that kind of medicine!” shouted someone else.

Then details leaped out: crimson splashes soaking his shirt; his pockets turned out and emptied; a golf ball-sized lump over his right eye; his jaw misshapen and ballooning; his head caked in dirt and blood.

“I didn’t know it was this bad,” Omondi said as we walked slowly to the car, the crowd, suddenly silent, watching.

“Friends, friends, am I going to reach the hospital?” Omondi, 40, said, groaning as he lay in the back of the car, his eyes awash with blood. “Am I going to die?”

When we arrived at the hospital and he struggled to sit up, it was obvious that his injuries were worse than they had seemed. There was a pool of coagulating blood on the seat, and a wound, not visible before: a 4-inch machete gash on his head.

In the lobby of Kenyatta National Hospital, nurses put in a drip, stanched the bleeding and wheeled his gurney to one side, where he would wait his turn to be X-rayed and stitched.

Omondi felt lonely and afraid, far from his wife and three children.

“I’m doubting, I’m doubting for my life.”

Tribal boundaries

When Fred Otieno wants to cause havoc, he carries a machete. The 25-year-old Luo and his gang call themselves the Samurais for Kenya.

“We have arms, like pangas,” he said, referring to the 2-foot-long machete used to chop coconuts and hack at roots, trees or, in troubled times, people. “When you are a fighter, there are many things you need. Are you there for fun? Or are you serious?”

Like a boulder ready to roll with a little push, Kenya has been teetering on the edge of full-out tribal conflict since the disputed presidential election late last month.

Overnight, in one of Africa’s stable and peaceful nations, young men picked up machetes and began hacking up their neighbors. There was open talk of war. To save democracy, the young men said, they would tear their country apart, no matter how many people died or how much the country lost.

Otieno is one of the opposition supporters who poured into the streets after President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of the presidential election. Riots erupted, people were attacked and shops, churches and shacks were burned down. They attacked Kikuyus because Kibaki is Kikuyu, and they thought he always gave his tribesmen the best jobs.

But down in the slums, Kikuyus and Luos lived side by side, facing the same arduous conditions.

Otieno, a struggling hip-hop musician who has no job, grew up in the Kibera slum, an undulating sea of shacks sliced up by narrow alleys decorated with shredded plastic bags. You can stand in a valley and see only an arc of rusty roofs rising to the horizon on all sides.

Homemade TV aerials claw the sky, in the areas that get electricity. A baby cries somewhere. But under the bubbling voices, there is silence: no engines, no air conditioning, no machines, no birds except for the wheeling eagles above.

In times of peace, it is the usual vibrant, heaving pile of life you find in any African township: people frying fish heads to sell; children playing in the dust; small stalls with tomatoes and purple onions; tins of charcoal for sale; and everywhere the drifting smell of open sewers.

But it can turn in a second. One sunny Sunday, all seemed quiet. But then a wild-eyed young man marched up, armed with a machete and surrounded by a posse of thugs. He whacked our car with his machete as the group screamed at us to leave.

A chunky, muscled fellow, Otieno swears he is ready to fight and die for democracy. He said the Samurais for Kenya operate in groups: Some attack enemies, some police the “borders” that have sprung up between tribes in the slum, and others are the defenders.

He knows tribalism is taboo in Kenya and rambles on with vague platitudes about peace, democracy and uniting all people. But the longer he talks, the more the reflexive resentment against Kikuyus surfaces. He calls them “Kiuks.” Tribal hatred seeps through.

“Kiuks stole my prosperity,” he said. “The Kiuks tried to take everything for themselves. Most of the shops are taken by Kiuks. They’re thieves. If they want to take your property, they’ll just go to the government and get a letter and get your property.”

30 hours on a gurney

Nine hours after he arrived at the hospital, Omondi was wearing the same bloody shirt. He was lying on the same gurney in the hospital lobby, with other patients on gurneys lined up like boxcars in a rail yard. His head and jaw had been X-rayed (he’d not been told the result) and gashes had been stitched.

He had not been given anything to eat or drink. After finding one of the few shops open that night to buy food, I looked for a nurse to tell me whether it was safe for him to eat. I spoke to five nurses before finding one willing to look for his admission card. But it had been lost. She had no idea whether he had been treated, could be sent home or could eat.

Late the next afternoon, there was no sign of him amid the chaos in the lobby. One young patient clutched a blood-drenched shirt. Others had head wounds. Men had stickers on their foreheads, red, yellow and green, sorted according to urgency.

Omondi, his eyes swollen shut, had been wheeled to a corridor upstairs, Ward 5A. Thirty hours after he arrived, he was in the same shirt, on the same gurney and still had not been given anything to eat or drink. Dozens of people sat around a TV watching news of the day’s violence.

‘It was war’

An hour before Omondi was attacked, and about 50 yards away, a Kikuyu man named Naftari Irungu was standing guard on a street corner holding a stick with a couple of bent nails on the end. Dozens of other Kikuyus carried metal bars or sticks. Just after 10 a.m., a battle erupted with the Luos in the next neighborhood, and young men with machetes materialized everywhere.

Some of them stood waiting on the edge of the battle, like swimmers reluctant to jump in.

Irungu, 33, has a wife and two children: a 4-year-old girl and a baby boy. He described his terror when Luos from a nearby area attacked his neighborhood when the election result was announced, burning shops and houses, beating people and forcing them from their shacks.

He said the election violence “caught us up like a storm.”

“Me, I feel I hate them. The Luos want everything to be theirs. They were threatening to take people’s businesses. I just hate them,” he said, in an eerie echo of Otieno on the other side.

The Kikuyus launched their own attacks, forcing Luos from their houses. When you are attacking, Irungu says, there is no fear, just anger and manly pride.

“It was war. . . . We went there with pangas at night. We slashed the Luos. We were cutting them on the neck. Others we circumcised. You just cut them and leave them.” He made a slashing motion with his hand in the air, as though cutting tall grass.

“You just cut them and leave the person to die. You just cut, cut,” he repeated.

Unlike most Kenyan tribes, Luos do not practice circumcision. There have been many rumors and a few confirmed reports of Luos being forcibly circumcised. Kikuyus believe an uncircumcised man is a child, lacking in wisdom.

“Everyone was angry. I felt no fear because we were protecting our children and our wives. I just wanted to face them and fight them. I felt proud of myself, protecting my family.”

Irungu grew up in Muranga, a rural area in central Kenya, the son of a policeman whose most important message to him was to be a peaceful, loving person.

“He gave me some advice on how to live. Ever since I was in primary school, he told me to live peacefully with people and not get involved in chaos and not to lead people to destroy property.” It was a matter-of-fact statement, without any awkwardness about the fact that a few minutes earlier he’d been describing a wild panga attack.

“In this case, I don’t have to be calm or loving the way I was taught by my father. There comes a time when you have to protect your family and your children.”

Brush with death

On the third day after Omondi was attacked, he had taken off what he called his “butcher’s shirt” and lay bare-chested in a hospital bed.

He recalled how close he had come to death.

Everything had seemed normal in the street that day, until four young men with machetes and clubs stopped him, demanding his ID to check whether he had a Luo name. Omondi was cold with terror.

“After seeing that I am Omondi, one shouted to the rest. He shouted, ‘We must kill him! He’s a Luo!’ Now they came, more than 50. I didn’t even have a moment to think. They started immediately hitting me. It was so painful. One cut my head and there was blood everywhere.”

As he lay in the hospital bed, his head hurt and his eyes were puffy. He’d fainted that day when he tried to walk. He had been given a transfusion, but doctors said he needed three more pints, so he was trying to find a family member who could donate blood. But all his doubt and fear were gone.

“I feel OK,” he said, pronouncing the word with that particular African relish that renders the word as “Great!”

“I feel at home. You know, things happen to people and they die. But me, I am alive. So, I feel OK!” He placed his palm gently over his heart and smiled.

“I am alive.”

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robyn.dixon@latimes.com