Toni kamau’s Blog

When I was younger, my family loved going on trips together, visiting relatives or going for nyama choma at Sports view hotel or Villa Park. I preferred the nyama choma trips, though sometimes the visits to the relatives were sometimes interesting when they had kids our age. One day my family went to visit my uncle at his old colonial home situated in the leafy tea town of Kiambu, which is on the outskirts of Nairobi, where we live. My sister and I were seven and ten years old back then and very adventurous; nothing scared us. (Anyone who knows me know will wonder how I could ever have been fearless! I’m still very adventurous, but even butterflies scare me! I’m a walking paradox.) So when my parents were downstairs talking to my aunt and uncle, we sneaked upstairs to explore the house, which had darkly lit, long corridors with creaky wooden floorboards.

We opened a door, thinking it was a cupboard, hoping to find treasures from the colonial past,; things like the body parts of old slaves, maybe whips, things that colonialists like to hang on to. What we saw instead was more exciting and less perverse. We saw narrow stairs leading upwards. A shaft of light, presumably coming from a window, or a hole in the roof, broke the darkness.

My baby sister looked up at me questioningly, “Twende?” I nodded yes.

Being the oldest, I went first. We tip toed, not wanting to disturb anything or anyone.

Finally reaching the top of the stairs, after an agonizingly long 30 seconds, we stopped and stared in awe, at a crowded, dimly lit attic full of old unused knick knacks and broken furniture. Light was seeping in through cracks in the roof.

We stood transfixed; our trance was cut short by the sound of a loud noise in the far corner of the room. We looked at each other. “It’s just a rat,” I assured my sister.

We heard some more movement in the other corner of the attic and turned our heads in that direction. The noise stopped. “Didn’t that sound like someone waking up,” asked my sister.

“Well I…” I stopped midway, because my sister was staring at the other corner of the attic with a look of frozen horror on her face. I turned to see what was scaring her so. A figure was walking slowly towards us!

I looked back at my sister; we had the same instinct, to run away from the loud noise, as would most normal people. We tumbled down the stairs, pulling at each other as we made our way towards freedom!
Two seconds later but not too late, we reached the bottom of the stairs and quickly shut the cupboard door behind us.

“What was that?”, my sister cried out, holding onto my arm tightly.

I had no answer. Her grip was tight and her nails was cutting into my skin, but it was comforting knowing that she was next to me, with that thing or things (gasp) on the other side of the door.

“Mumbi, Koi, where are you?”

That was our mother. We dashed downstairs quickly, running away from whatever was in that old, dark attic.

“What were you doing?” my nosy mother asked.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing….just looking around.” I quickly replied.

“Ah! Do you want to see the rest of the house, there’s an old…” started my uncle.

my sister and I looked at each other with horrified expressions.

“It’s OK, you don’t have to, anyway we need to leave now,” my father came to our rescue. I think he missed the noise of the city, Nairobi.

We kissed our uncle goodbye and ran back into the car. That was the first and last time that we ever entered that house, and to this day we don’t know whether it really happened or whether it was the result of an overactive imagination. Either way, I’m not going back into that house, because I turned out to be a bit of a coward in my later years, so no thank you!