‘I could feel my life ebbing away slowly’

Jonathan Kaingu Ngoa fought o his attackers in Kakate village, Lamu, but was left with a cut at the back of his head. [PHOTO: JONAH ONYANGO/ STANDARD]

Mpeketoni, Kenya: Jonathan Kaingu Ngoa and his boss Bernard Njiru had just finished taking their supper and were waiting for tea to be served when the attackers struck.

One of his colleagues, a watchman whom he identified by the name Maasai, rose to find out what the noises outside were all about.

But as he approached the door, he was met by a group of 15 attackers, their high-calibre guns trained on them. They barely moved and they froze in their seats.

It was June 24, and they had heard of the terrorist attacks in Mpeketoni a week earlier on June 15, which had claimed 60 lives. Al Shabaab had claimed responsibility for the attacks.

But they had thought it was one of those one-off attacks that would never reach their secure home in Kakate village in the interior of Lamu County.

And so they had little reason to worry – until the attackers came calling.

They ordered them to lie down on their bellies and asked them to remove their mobile phones and national identification cards.

Ngoa told the attackers that he had left the document and the phone at Maleli village, his father’s place which is about 10 kilometres away. The attackers bound their hands tight behind their backs with white manila strips and took the three of them outside the house.

Meanwhile, some of them ransacked the house for household items such as sugar, salt, cooking fat and clothes. Others went to the neighbouring homes and fetched three more men.

When they reached Garama Charo Mbovu’s house, he declined to cooperate, instead choosing to put up a fight. They shot him in the stomach and he died instantly.

Meanwhile, the six men were asked which religion they belonged to and all except one, Bakara, a Samburu who converted to Islam, said they were Christians.

Bakara was told to recite the Shahada, the Muslims basic profession of faith (There is no god but God and Muhammad is the prophet of God). He did and was let go.

“For you, your day has come,” Kaingu Ngoa remembered one of the attackers telling them. Lying on their stomachs, it dawned on them that what they had thought impossible was about to pass in the most painful manner.

The attackers then removed swords from their pockets and five of them took their positions behind the five helpless men before them. They first began with Ngoa. The man behind him held him down by the neck and began slicing him from the back, the way one does to a goat. “The pain was unlike anything I have experienced before,” he said. “Worse still, I could feel my life ebbing away slowly as the knife cut deeper and deeper.”

Unlikely challenge

When he reached the cartilage, the attacker struggled to cut through it and on an impulse, Ngoa decided to mount an unlikely challenge that would save his life.

“I don’t know where the strength came from, but I pulled apart the binds and cut them and in a flash, rose up and hit him hard on the chest,” he said.

The knife fell off the hands of the startled attacker and as he recollected his senses, Ngoa crouched to the nearby bushes, blood streaming from his neck. The attacker followed him but a determined Ngoa turned around and landed a heavy kick on his chest that left him sprawled on the grasses.

He threw himself into a grassy patch as the other attackers lit a flare to locate him. He stayed still, briefly, until it was safe and lying on his stomach, he couched until he found a pathway to his home.

It was around 10 o’clock in the evening when he escaped bloody clutches of his attackers and after two hours, he arrived at his father’s home almost at the point of death.

“I was bleeding so badly and I had to remove my shirt to tie it around my neck. I had to walk. I had survived the worst and I told myself there is no point dying on the way,” he says.

He later learnt that five people, including his boss Njiru and colleague Maasai, had been butchered by the attackers.

For his deed of bravery, Ngao becomes the first person to have successfully liberated himself from the hands of a killer group that has brought much pain and suffering to the people of Lamu County.

Although Somali’s militant group Al Shabaab has claimed responsibility for the attacks, the government has blamed local politics. Whatever the truth maybe, it is evident that whatever group is carrying out the attacks is not intent on stopping its brutal activities any time soon.

Since that attack in Kakate, the group has carried out four more attacks in which it killed 22 people, including a police officer.

For nearly a month now, this faceless group has made a mockery of the State security machinery by launching repeated attacks despite heavy security presence.

When night falls in Lamu, men, women and children take to the bushes or temporary camps in fear that this brutal enemy might yet return as they have promised.