FROM RICH KID TO GANGSTER(STORY OF TOMASO GAGULA)

Before the world named him a gangster, before Kayole baptized him with smoke, and before bullets wrote his obituary, Thomas Warui Njoka was just a soft-faced boy born in 1994. The second born child who was first born son, a title heavy enough in our homes to break even the strong backs.

He was raised in a house where prayer was oxygen. His mother, Catherine Timitra, the gentle counsellor of Kenyatta University and a devouted christian spoke to troubled students by day and prayed for her own children by night. She believed sins could be prayed out like fever.

His father, David Njoka, a senior manager at the ministry of health, had outrun poverty and never intended to look back. Together they build a home where morals were enforced, sung and audited

Lang’ata Estate held him like a promise a perfect neighborhood, a perfect family, and a perfect boy. In the early 2000s, Lang’ata was a Nairobi suburb where children played in sandboxes, not yet mad enough to start building their dreams

But perfect children don’t stay perfect. Not in Nairobi. Not in this world.

Thomas was social, charming, the boy who made friends without trying. His Nairobi primary education was flawless. He glided through primary school with the confidence of a boy escorted by angels. High marks. Bright future. People pointing at him and said

“Huyu mtoto ataenda mbali.”

And he did. Just not in the direction anybody prayed for.

At Pioneer School Maragua, a private secondary school designed to manufacture CEOs and obedient sons, Form 2 turned him into a headline waiting to happen. One theft accusation. One argument. And then, in front of God, the teachers, and the ghost of discipline, the boy unleashed slaps across a defenseless teacher’s face. He left school for the idiots.

Expelled.

The news deflated his father, his son had snatched air out of his lungs. The man who fought to escape poverty watched his own son sprint back toward it, laughing. His parents pleaded with him to return to school but Thomas was done the gap between the father and the son widened until it felt like a Canyon with no bridge

Home became a war zone of begging, pleading, threatening, praying, shouting but some boys don’t hear words once their hearts start drifting to darker places.

So one morning, Thomas...