I laughed about it at first, brushing it off as another, if not bizarre, coincidence. But when a friend called me from Mombasa, she almost thought I wasn’t going to take it.
“Thank God you have picked up this call,” she said. “Damn, because that means you are not the one!”
I asked, confused: “I’m not the one? What do you mean?”
“My guess is that you haven’t watched the news,” she said. She told me to turn on the TV.
Last year, near the end of September, a businessman named Brian Kassaine was arrested and linked to a high-profile murder case in Nairobi. It was a gory crime, a bloody body left in a bathtub, like something I had been reading in books or seen in movies. But this wasn’t a book I could put down or a movie I could turn off. I was dragged into the mud for Kassaine’s alleged crime, because our names were the same, save for the extra “s” in his.
A week later I would sink into depression, fighting back tears with the Kenyan sleuthhounds at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations as I pleaded my case. A week later my empty stomach would rumble as my clammy and frail fingers wrote a self-recorded statement at Central Police Station.
A gutter press initially ran the story, fastidious enough to reveal its high standards of irresponsible journalism. The gutter press pulled my photo from the internet and patched it to their hastily posted coverage of the story. The year before, I had published a book of fiction. It’s an achievement, given I was only in my third year at the Co-operative University of Kenya. Naturally, I promoted it. I talked about my debut all over social media. That, plus my trips to offer mentorship and coach rudiments of creative writing in high schools, put my name and face on the internet. So when people wanted to know who this “Brian Kasaine” was, they found me, because surprisingly, the suspect in custody had no online traces.
I would wake up to a mountain of text messages from people who had seen my face somewhere online being trashed. Incessant calls kept coming. It was an uncle, it was my mum, it was my brother, it was my lecturer, it was a friend. One person on Facebook managed to pull an old photo of me giving a speech at the Co-operative University of Kenya. He published it with the caption, “This kid is a murderer masquerading as a writer. What drives these little kids into lives of crime?”
Comments, likes and shares kept streaming in, and every word shredded my heart. When I wrote to explain the situation, he refused to pull down his post. He went on to say he knew me and that I was a nephew to a top-shot government official, which explained how I got a gun. My photo was shared on a Facebook page called “Kilimani Mums” and the caption was a clarion call to ladies to stay away from my kind — the light skinned.