The Foreign Service Journal, October 2010

A t the consulate in Mombasa in the early 1980s, part of our reg- ular maintenance on housing involved pumping out the septic tanks. Paul Mwana, my general services ex- pert, hired the city team composed of Digo tribesmen, the only ones who did this work, for the job. Most houses had large tanks for sewage storage that were accessed through a slab in the parking area. The task went well until the team arrived at the house occupied by a U.S. Navy lieu- tenant commander. The workmen adamantly refused to proceed as soon as they recognized the house, Paul re- ported with some dismay. Both of us knew the cause of their refusal. The house in question was just across the street from mine. It was a pleasant villa on spacious, beautifully planted grounds. A year or so earlier, when I was looking for houses to rent in a tight market, it had been readily avail- able. As I learned, that turned out to have been on account of a tragedy. The house had been owned and oc- cupied by an older Asian couple. Ap- parently, two killers arrived at the house early one evening. Finding only the cook at home, they murdered himwith machetes. They waited for madame to return from her bridge game, then killed her. They waited even longer until the man of the house returned, to- ward midnight, and killed him, too. The killers then stuffed at least the first two bodies into the septic tank. Because the perpetrators of the crimes were obviously not there just to rob the premises (they had ample op- portunity to ransack the house after the first death), it was assumed that the murders were a contract hit. Furthermore, police supposed that the motive had to do with the old man’s alleged involvement in various com- mercial transactions, some of which were shady deals related to gemstones. (At the time rubies and tsavorite were mined andmarketed illegally.) Perhaps some deal went awry, or a large sum of money was thought to be available. One of the killers was later appre- hended and confessed to the crime. But he never identified whoever or- dered the hit, and the case remains un- resolved. The specter of the triple murder had kept the house empty before the Navy family arrived and was, of course, the reason the workmen refused to pump out the septic tank. I had con- tacted the Navy couple before I signed a lease to apprise them of the house’s history, but they said to go ahead and rent it. I did, and they were quite happy there. But the septic pumping quandary remained. Paul proposed a solution. He suggested that we employ a Digo medicine man to perform a purification ceremony to placate the spirits of the dead. He assured me that once that was done, the workers would pump the tank. With my concurrence, he found the right practitioner and negotiated a fee for his service — plus a goat and a chicken for sacrifice. It was an odd ceremony. The work- ers stood before the open septic tank in the sunlit parking area, flanked by blooming red, white and purple hibis- cus and bougainvillea, as the doctor chanted, invoked his authority and called on the spirits to depart. He then sacrificed the goat and chicken (which were later eaten) and sprinkled blood. Once the site was purified and the spir- its were appeased, the crew promptly cleaned the tank. I decided that we could not detail the services performed, or the goat, on the invoice for reimbursement, for that would certainly raise eyebrows in the embassy’s financial office. So we classi- fied the transaction as “special clean- ing services.” ■ Retired Ambassador Robert Gribbin spent many years in East and Central Africa, first as a Peace Corps Volunteer and then as a Foreign Service officer. He was principal officer in Mombasa (1981-1984), and later ambassador in Bangui (1992-1995) and ambassador in Kigali (1995-1999). He is the author of In the Aftermath of Genocide: The U.S. Role in Rwanda (2005). The specter of the triple murder had kept the house empty. 76 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 R EFLECTIONS Appeasing the Spirits: Across the Cultural Divide in Kenya B Y R OBERT G RIBBIN