Kilometre – The Snob

I would like to start by informing the reader that this is a true story. It is about a snob who is still alive as I write this. His name is Kilometre.

Not many are sure about when and where Kilometre was born, but he was alive during Kenyatta I’s regime, and he was born around Kigumo in Kiambu County, the exact village unknown. I have seen this man with mine own eyes and therefore I believe what I was told about him since I do not see any reason why anyone would make up a story about an innocent man, and also due to the fact that the whole story was too good to be a fabrication.

During his youth, he was a conman, a fraudster, and Kenya had a dictator for president at the helm, contrary to what many people mistook Kenyatta for – a statesman. If you happened to look up dictator in Collin’s Gem dictionary during the 70’s, you were sure to see Kenyatta I’s picture and an example in a sentence about him, so I was told. But there are no more dictionaries of that kind – 70’s – these days and you would therefore not see what I am trying to say.

Kilometre was from Kenyatta’s Kikuyu ethnicity and so using the dictatorship to his benefit, he would go around Central Province terrorizing land-owners, telling them that Mzee wanted them to vacate their premises. So he got a lot of land that way – whole coffee plantations. And the people were not that educated to know their rights, nor their lefts, and even if they should have been, Kenyatta I was so busy grabbing land for his future generations that he would not have given a rat’s ass about anyone’s rights. If he needed your piece of land you had to vacate as soon as you possibly could. And so Kilometre enriched himself with stolen wealth. He became extremely rich. Filthy rich.

It is said that he spent money like it meant nothing. Every time he went drinking it is said, he would leave his Land Rover’s engine running, saying that since he was drinking, so should his Rover. And the Rover’s tank was always full. He had all the money in the world. After such drinking sprees, he would often ask the poor what it was like to be poor and would often ask God to send him just a drop of poverty so he could experience what the poor man did.

Those who knew him say he had two more Land Rovers but he would often exaggerate at the bar, saying, “I’ve got four sons, and four Land Rovers, what else would I need in the world? Each son with his own!” They also add that should his Rover Jeep have stopped because of any minor problem, he never tried to start it again. He would have several boys rounded up who would push the Rover home, no matter the distance, with himself sitting as comfortably as if he had not the slightest care in the world. Many say there was quite a close connection between man and car.

I believe you now think that I must be a terrible story teller for not telling you how he got his name in the first paragraph, but everyone has a way of doing things. I believe this is the right time to do so. Well, during his drinking sprees, Kilometre used to boast of his great many acres of land and that a deer would not run a kilometer in his woods before a hunter shot it. In other words the woods were so extensive that a deer would rub a kilometer without getting out. Whether this is true is a matter of opinion, seeing that he would boasts of 4 Rovers for his sons, and yet they were two.

This very day, as if God used to listen to his ‘prayers’, the man is poorer than a church mouse and the only indication of his now gone greatness is his great compound is its size and the ruins. No one knows how exactly he squandered his wealth.