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Life and Times of Kenya's Last Hangman

Gallows
His name was Kirugumi wa Wanjuki, not known to many but those who are keen on history, and those who were unlucky enough to go through his hands.

He lived in a cold village at the foot of the Aberdares, a poor and desolate man surviving on a meagre pension and a decayed mud house, a reward for his service to the state.

Kirugumi joined the Prison Service in 1937, where he was stationed at Kangumbiri Work Camps for seven years before he was moved to Kamiti Prison. There, he replaced a retiring Indian hangman and served in that capacity for 11 years.

After that, he had a short stint at the King'ong'o maximum prison, where he served as the official hangman for 4 years before calling it quits in 1974.

Before he joined the Prisons' Service, Kirugumi was a tracker and a professional game hunter. He was among the men who helped the Askari track the Mau Mau freedom fighters during the struggle for independence.

The last executions to take place in Kenya was in 1987, with the last victims being the alleged masterminds of the 1982 coup, Hezekiah Ochuka, and Pancras Oteyo. Kirugumi wa Wanjiku admitted to being the one who hanged them.

"I got so used to hanging people that at some moment I thought that killing people was as simple as slaughtering a chicken," he said in a KTN interview a few months before his death.

The death penalty was repealed in 2016 when President Uhuru Kenyatta invoked article 133 of the constitution, officially commuting the death sentence to life imprisonment. This was not the first time this act was done.

Mwai Kibaki had invoked the Prerogative of Mercy and issued a directive to commute the death penalty to life in prison on August 4, 2009, but President Uhuru made it official.

The declaration in 2009 sent Kirugumi wa Wanjiku into a frenzy, and he even offered to hang the prisoners for Kibaki if he would let him. His opinion was that the death penalty was a deterrent to serious crime, but life imprisonment will dilute the purpose of punishment for a serious crime.

In an interview conducted by The Standard in 2009, he recounted the last moments of prisoners before they headed to the gallows.

"Inmates had to be clean before they went to the gallows. We had to ensure that their nails were well-trimmed, their hair clean-shaven and bodies clean," he said.

The convicted prisoner was woken up before 5am and led to the gallows, his legs and his hands bound.

"Some walked in silence, others prayed, some cried and some just went wild," he added.

Kirugumi expressed the fact that he had no regrets over the prisoners who had lost their lives through his hands, for all he was doing was delivering justice as it had been prescribed. His biggest regret, he said, was having to hang a young person full of potential.

He died on November 2nd, 2009, a desolate and abandoned man, ironically, at 0230hrs, more or less the time he prepared prisoners for their execution. He did not go out the way he had lived. Instead, he succumbed to pneumonia in the loneliness of his crumbling house.

His death did not stir excitement in his neighbourhood. His only son Ngung'u Wanjuki was the one that mourned him, with the villagers giving his compound a wide berth. 

The stigma that came with his job trailed him to the last days of his existence, even as demons tortured him in the night and forced him to drink heavily just to gather some sanity.

Not many knew about him when he lived, and not many will know about him long after his death. His name has been plastered in the halls of infamy, to be remembered as the Last Hangman that this country had.

Source:  kenyans.co.ke, Staff, August 15, 2019


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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