THE CHILDREN OF THE RIVER:

In July of 1993, I was transferred out of Mt Elgon National Park to lead one of the platoons of 'Charley Coy ' based at Baomo primate Reserve in Tana River District of Coast Province.  We had Uni-pots for housing and our hands were so full such that we only slept in them twice in a month.




The author and his team while preparing to cross Tana river by canoe to the east bank.



There were elephants in the reserve and some rare monkeys which were not found anywhere else in the country, such as the Tana river red colobus (Procolobus rufomitratus) and the  Tana river mangabey (cercosebus galeritus) .The Reserve was gazetted in 1978  solely to protect these rare species and to stop habitat loss and degradation due to human encroachment and the  rare monkeys occupied a 60km stretch of the lower Tana River from Nkajonja to Mitapani along the mighty Tana river.

Garsen center was the center of bandits who target roads in the district to rob motorists , and it was also the meeting point where every aspiring poacher met the seasoned ones for introduction and recruitment into the trade. Garsen was and still is the place where every poacher from Somalia will come to and recruit idle, readily available youth who would then lead them into the Tsavo National Parks where they believed that ivory could be collected in every river bed and where one could  always shoot down an elephant if he desired the fresh commodity straight from the source.

There were four ethnic tribes in Tana River; the Pokomo people who were fishermen and seasonal farmers whose life entirely depended on the Tana River waters and only planted their farms after floods, and they hunted the hippo,  the crocodile and sometimes they use snares to capture the elusive warthog when it came to the river for a drink and to cool off during the searing heat of the day. These were the people who were responsible for the destruction of the habitat of the endangered monkeys by cutting down trees the monkeys use for food and shelter to make charcoal and clear the under growth to make farms. The other tribes included the Orma , the werdhei , and the infamous Galjahel community who migrated to these parts not very many years ago from Somalia , and they are the link between the Somali poachers and the other tribes. 

The Pokomo villages dotted the western river bank from Hola which they preferred to call Laza, through Kone , emmauss, mikinduni, chalani, lenda, hadamphia, bondeni, duayo , bububu, to wenje just to mention a few. They became a great source of information to us because it was only through them that one could cross the Tana River. They were the river people and they had canoes for fishing and for transport. So we made friends with them and recruited many of them as informers.The other tribes hated them for this,  so we became their keepers and they gave us information on every person who requested their services to cross the river, either armed or not. This helped us in recovery of weapons from the local communities and to keep tab with every gang new or old in the entire Tana River basin.

Our data base on poachers was always updated and we hunted them at will. The highway gangs were few thus hard to monitor, but they always came back to Garsen village to chew miraa after every successful robbery and when they were high on the stimulant, they always tell their tales to willing listeners , and we always had friendly ears close by and one or two of them will be picked later that night for questioning , and we would almost all the time recover the guns they used and the goods stolen. An informer will take us to the victims house where we would knock and call the man by his name and tell him that we had a message for him from one of his men , and by the time he recognized us he would certainly cooperate. This became possible after we learned to use some tricks we perfected overtime and it has always worked  when the poacher realizes that we know where he hid his firearm, and at times we also mention the number of ammunition he has. 
This proved to be very effective and word went out that the KWS were only disarming and did not take prisoners such that there was total cooperation and trust in us to the extent that we were called as far as Masalani, Ijara and Bodhei to retrieve the surrendered weapons. We could recover up to 50 assorted rifles per month and the police loved it , for credit always went to them, but that didn't bother us for our wildlife remained safe, and the roads were free of banditry. The locals nicknamed me " Ibren", a name close to the angel Gabriel , whom they believed only visited at night with messages from God.

I was in Tana River for only three months before being transferred to Meru National Park and during that time we managed to recover more than 95 guns from the locals as surrenders, not to mention the many we retrieved from the ambushes we mounted on the two crossing of Hadamphia and Bondeni , and on the Sera and chuma mrefu cutlines. Idassa Godana ranch will always be imprinted in my mind due to the ugly incidents that we encountered there, and the Orma community of mnazini village gave me a farewell party when I was leaving and one of them gave us the following story as a parting shot to me and to welcome the new platoon commander, Mr Abdi Doti. 

 " A long long time ago, there lived a man who was crippled and had no teeth to the extent that his wife did every thing for him. He would crawl to the bushes to relive himself , but he could only eat light foods and he depended on the wife to soften hard foods for him to munch and swallow . His wife was everything to him and he worshiped her for the kindness and dedication she had for him. But as fate has it, one day, the wife got very sick and died. The man was devastated and wept for many days and he cursed all the combined Gods of his people for letting her die and challenged them to also take him for he saw no future without her. Neighbors helped feed him but he refused to eat and opted to die, so the men of his clan came together and tried to convince him to remarry, but he could not believe that any other woman could equal his beloved late wife''.

"Eventually reason got the better part of him and he agreed to remarry, only this time, the wife was from another village and she was an orphan and had never been married. She came to his house with nothing, for she had nothing to offer, but she won his heart in a very short while.  No one has ever loved her, nor has anyone ever relied or looked upon her for kindness, but here she was , in a house she could call her own and a husband who depended on her for everything. She took him without reservations and nursed him like she would never do it again. She gave him everything, and she chewed hard dried meat then dipped them in gee before feeding him. She hunted for wild honey and  smeared all his helpings in the pure sweet jelly. The man saw heaven right at his door step and he proclaimed it to the rest of his brethren loudly . He wondered why his late wife took long to die. He asked God why he had allowed him to suffer that long under the hands of his former wife. He was in love for the first time."

We were told that the meaning of that story is that leaders were different and that each man had his or her way of doing things. Two people are never the same and that my success in Tana River might never be replicated by any other man . It means that the incoming officer would come work with the community and they would never compare his work with mine , and this helped him settle very fast after taking over.

It had taken me three months to win the confidence of the Tana River communities , yet I was not one of them nor could I even speak any of their languages but they learned to trust me, confined their secrets and their fears to me , and I listened , and I did what was expected of me , and they accepted me, and our work was made simple. They were simple societies which were looking for space to survive the harsh life they were subjected to , for they only chose it for lack of an alternative. My future with these people was cast in stone as our trust in each other was tucked deep in our dark hearts. I thank God for leading me to them , and for giving me a honest soul that made me fuse effectively with them. 

This relationship with the Orma community paid off a few years later during my tour of duty in the hostile Lamu District where buses where hijacked every day in broad day light between garsen and lamu and passengers robbed of their belongings with impunity.