Being on death row didn’t kill my spirit

Following a presidential pardon last year, Peter Ouko was freed after 18 years in the cooler. He had been jailed for murdering his wife, a charge he challenges.

A lot has changed, with himself and the world, since he was locked up at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison.

While incarcerated he studied and earned a Diploma in Common Law from the University of London. He is now pursuing an undergraduate degree in law.

His children are all grown up and working. While in prison, he and two other inmates formed Crime Si Poa, an anti-crime advocacy group.

We met in my office. He is a big towering man and distinctly eloquent and charismatic.

----------------------

Nice shorts!

Thanks. You wear shorts for so long in prison that even when you come out, it’s all you find yourself wearing. (Chuckles).

Describe that feeling of walking out of death row and into the sun a free man after 18 years.

It was humbling. You know I’m a man of faith. So I was just like ‘‘this is a phase I’ve completed in my life, so what’s the next phase?’’ I was always looking forward to the next phase in life. My mum and my sister were waiting for me outside the gate when I walked out, so was my 24-year-old son. My daughter, now 23 -years- old, didn’t come because she didn’t believe I was coming out. She thought it was a prank.

What was the first thing that your mum said?

Mum cried. She just hugged me and cried, and it was very emotional because I’d never seen my mum cry .

Did you cry?

I had to comfort her. I don’t know. I didn’t cry. I don’t tear easily.

Do you find that the world has changed drastically since you were jailed in 1998?

Yeah. Drastically.

What is the most shocking change for you?

The highrise buildings, plus all the greens that I left is all gone. I mean Kileleshwa, Lavington – we used to call it Lavington Green back then, but now it’s apartments. And it’s so hot and dusty. Nairobi is very filthy. Then there are so many people in the streets. When walking you have to squeeze to get space past somebody. That’s the shocking thing.

The other day I took a ride upcountry, and the good thing that surprised me is that I saw splendid roads. Not the roads I left. Roads everywhere. I went through the Rift Valley, Nyanza, Western, just really beautiful roads.

What’s the one thing we don’t know about Kamiti?

There is no tribalism in Kamiti. I met a lot of respectful people in there, regardless of the crime they committed. And they all love each other.

There is no race or tribe in prison, we only read about tribalism out here. (Laughs). The most amazing thing is that during the 2007/08 post-election violence, it really affected guys there because we couldn’t understand all that hatred and we were helpless to do anything. It’s sad really. In prison you are your brother’s keeper because the guy next to you is the one who’d help you.

When Moody Awori (former vice-president who was in charge of the Home Affairs ministry) came in 2003, he changed the system completely. He said he wanted guys to be treated humanely. He changed the diet. He brought buses. We got new uniforms.

What will you miss about prison?

The warmth and the genuineness of people. The friendships, if someone is a friend in prison he is a real friend. There’s no two ways about it. They are not like the two-faced guys you see around.

Do you believe that prisons reform criminals?

I believe it does. It helps you calibrate. There are all these motivational programmes they have introduced that help one to change their mindset.

For example, I didn’t go to prison loving farming, but I helped shape the greenery of Kamiti by planting trees and flowers. I learnt arts in prison. I even learnt about computers in prison. I didn’t know anything about cinematography, but now if you give me a camera, I’ll show you things. I shave myself. I don’t go to a barber, I’m that mean. I’m a changed man.

You insist that you didn’t kill your wife. If you did and you did time, would you say differently?

I’m an open book. I don’t go hiding anything. It’s the saddest phase of my life to do time for something I didn’t do. That I had to lose Jane at that young age. The people who did it know themselves. I’ve served 18 years for other people. Jane will get her justice. That I’m sure of.

Are you bitter?

No. I believe God puts you somewhere for a reason and a season. So I just had to find my reason for being there and I found it was not about whatever I’d been taken in for, it was about service. I went to a school where I was taught strong values to serve, body, mind and character.

What is the state of mind of somebody who’s on death row?

I will speak for myself. In death row you never know when you will be hanged. Imagine that. You wake up and you don’t know if you have two days or two months to live. You live in a sense of trepidation and foreboding. You could allow yourself to be stressed, depressed and start getting ulcers and lifestyle diseases. But then there’s a person who doesn’t believe in not dying on death row. That was me.

I started Crime si Poa on death row. In 2005, I organised inmates on death row and we took the campaign across all prisons in Kenya, and we donated to the Save a Life Fund. It was 2006.

If you check your records on January 5, 2006, I came over here to hand over foodstuff on behalf of all inmates. So you could choose to live on death row as ironic as it may sound.

What’s your stand on the death penalty?

It should be abolished. I believe in second chances.

How do your children relate to you now? I mean you were gone for ages!

We’re best of friends. We do dinners, we do lunches. You’d think my son is my brother, you’d think my daughter is my sister. But these kids hadn’t seen me for 18 years, I left them aged three years and five years. I can’t just come and jump into their lives like that.

They have also to be cognisant of whatever they’ve gone through and the challenges they’ve gone through. They have to be alive to the fact that they’re now adults as well. There could be some friction sometimes, different views about issues, but we debate a lot. And my daughter is a lawyer so she debates a lot.

Do you feel like you’re starting your life afresh?

I feel like I’m continuing. I don’t want to start afresh because that would drag me.

So now that you had friends inside, do you now have to make friends out here?

No, most of my friends are actually outside. I never lost any friend because I went to prison. Not one. I mean, they know me, they know what happened.

They are people I was with at the time I was accused of having committed a crime. So they came to court, they gave the alibi that ‘‘we were with Peter at a certain place.’’ I never lost a single friend. Friends from school were visiting me at Kamiti. I think I was one of the most visited inmates in prison.

Look whenever we receive a dodgy message we always say it’s from Kamiti. Are there guys running businesses from their phones inside?

I’ll be frank with you. And this is something that I speak about very frankly. There’s a time we had that issue. It was a major issue. But surprisingly, you wouldn’t know that just like many things, the Kenyan system we believe in devolution, right? That thing got devolved from Kamiti. (Laughter)

And once it got devolved from Kamiti, the Kamiti tag remained. The real thugs are out here, not in there because for guys inside it didn’t make sense to be caught doing another crime, you wouldn’t leave there for a long time.

My last question might come out as a rude question, my apologies. But, look, 18 years in there without sex with a woman...I mean, how does one handle? How did you handle?

Sex is all in the mind. So if you switch off and say that a time will come for that, that will be. You know, because it’s not a life and death issue. The way it was designed, right now, we intend to take that issue about conjugal rights to court. There’s nothing in the law that says sex is not supposed to be there.

The only thing that the prisons department does not have are the facilities for that. Besides if I’m locked in surely my spouse who is innocent shouldn’t be denied her rights, but I will say that sex is overrated. It’s all in the mind. Sometimes back, when we were much younger we went around a bit and when I went to prison I was like okay, fine, I think I had enough to last me for the next 30 years. (Laughs).