"Each man was paid 4,500 shillings [$62] a month, all by Joan," says Barry Gaymer, who occasionally accompanied the Task Force on its raids. Hiding in the papyrus, the Task Force would bolt out into the waist-deep water and pounce on poachers who, "drunk on kumi-kumi [home brew] or high on bangi [pot]," according to Gaymer, wouldn't even have time to raise their machetes in defense. "We'd whip them, beat them, yelling abuse," says Gaymer, showing me a photograph of the Task Force victoriously huddling around a tarp filled with fat fish, tangles of illegal nets, a confiscated boat, and trapping implements. "The Task Force carried stays—like pickax handles—that you clobber people with, which, in this case, was quite necessary, because the fish poachers weren't averse to pulling knives," says Cholmondeley. "They're real desperadoes."And then she shut down the security force, making them also her enemies.
After Joan cut off her support, Chege was reduced to driving a motor-scooter taxi through the dirt streets of the Karagita slum. "He had been walking around like a tin god, and then he was nothing," says Gaymer. "Chege was a madaraka ndogo, a little man with a little power, but he thinks he's a king," adds Parselelo Kantai. "It's not a lot of money you're giving someone like Chege, but it's a lot of power. And when you yank them out of the gravy train, boom!"It cannot be surprising that someone killed her or that reliable witnesses were hard to find among the people who had to go on living around there after the trial. She was doing something the government should have been doing, but the government preferred to let her take on the cost and the trouble.
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posted by mkultra at 9:43 AM on August 10, 2007