8 o’clock on a Sunday morning, and there I was, crouched in a prison cell roughly the size of a coffin, sharing it with 11 Somalis and the faint scent of despair. Could this day possibly get any better? Why was I here, anyway? What could I have possibly done to land myself on Kenya’s most wanted list? Running a brisk mental inventory, I couldn’t recall any particularly felony-grade behaviour. But that’s the catch, isn’t it? The moment you step outside your house, you’re guilty of something. Anything. There’s no escape from it.
Once humanity decided that God’s ten rules weren’t enough, we got saddled with a million new ones—an endless flood of regulations that suck the joy out of existence. The unrelenting overabundance of laws—codes, decrees, statutes, ordinances, directives, mandates, you name it—is like a hydra: cut one down, and ten more spring up in its place.
Think I’m exaggerating? Well, let’s take a moment to examine your car.
An opening excerpt from What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Chronicles of Chaos and Courage remains available here. The full book can be ordered here.
The downtown immigration holding cell.
— my glamorous upgrade after surviving a truck crash, airborne Somalis, and a driver who could barely see the road over his own steering wheel.
This room had chairs, a door that almost closed, and a window that didn’t smell like defeat. By Nairobi bureaucratic standards, this was the Ritz-Carlton.
We sat there, me and the remaining Somalis — the three who hadn’t been catapulted into the Mombasa Road ecosystem — while the officers argued outside with the same urgency you’d expect from men deciding who gets the last samosa.
Inside, time melted. No food. No water. No answers. Just a metal bench designed specifically to assault the spine and a questioning officer whose primary concern was clearly making it to lunch before someone else finished the goat stew.
This wasn’t immigration.
This was Kafka run through a blender operated by civil servants who lost the user manual in 1986.
The holding cell wasn’t merely uncomfortable — it was the spiritual waiting room where hope goes to file a missing-person report
“If you're enjoying this disaster… wait until you read the whole book.”
