In this first hand account of the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi, International Writing Program alum Okiya Omtatah Okoiti describes the morning of the explosion and his efforts with others to rescue victims and secure the area. Included as well is audio of the interview Peter Nazareth conducted with Okoiti during his time at the IWP. Read the account below.

August 7, 1998: The Day I Will Never Forget

Though it has been 11 years since it happened, the bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi is etched in my mind as though it happened yesterday. At this time of the year we are likely to be asked or to ask the question, “Where were you on the morning of August 7, 1998, when terrorists bombed the then American Embassy in Nairobi ?” As innocent as the question sounds, where one was in Nairobi the moment the bomb exploded was a matter of life or death. I lost a niece, Bonita Achola, who had stepped into Ufundi Cooperative House to greet a friend. She died when the building collapsed in the explosion. And I nearly got caught up in the hellish inferno, but I was a few minutes lucky.

I went to the Co-operative Bank House (the bellbottom house next to the then US Embassy) that morning to deliver copies of documents to my former classmate. He worked for the Teachers’ Service Commission, and I was to request him to intervene so that an application by a friend who was a primary school teacher for a transfer out of the then Busia District, back to his Narok home district, could be fast tracked.

My former classmate was not at his desk in his First Floor office. His co-workers, who were no strangers to me since I had been here several times before, told me that he was on sick off until Monday. I requested for and they give me a piece of paper and an envelope. I wrote a note, sealed it along with the documents in the envelope, addressed it to my friend, placed it on his table, bid his co-workers farewell and I left, promising to be back on Monday.

I decided to walk to the City Square Post Office to check if there were any letters in my letterbox. But as I walked past Extelecoms House, hardly fifteen metres away, I heard a deafening explosion followed by a gust of an extremely strong wind that knocked me off my feet and sprawled me flat on the ground. When I got up a few moments later, the area was engulfed in a choking cloud of dust and smoke. People were screaming and running chaotically away from the source of the explosion. I took to my heels and ran like I had never done before towards the Central Bank building, where I stopped having “reconnected” with my environment. I impulsively turned begun running against the fleeing crowds towards ground zero.

The scene bore no resemblance to the serene one I had just left a few minutes ago. It was totally chaotic, like it had been hit by a hurricane, and an air of death hung heavily in the air. People were dead, including some in their mangled cars. Water pipes on Cooperative House had burst. Electrical cables had snapped and were emitting sparks. A number of matatu drivers and touts had run to the site and were urging each other to get in and start rescuing people. My thoughts ran to the group I had just left on First Floor. But I could not get in because of the sparks. Some of the dazed survivors fleeing out of the building were being electrocuted.

Some of the matatu guys threw all caution to the wind and made for the building, navigating their way carefully around the cables. Then somehow I remembered that some buildings have the mains switch somewhere in the basement. So I ran to the basement looking for it. The alarms on the vehicles parked at the basement had been triggered off by the explosion and the basement was a riot of all manner of artificial noises. After sometime I found it. But shock of all shock it had been secured away by heavy a metal grill mounted on the wall, and locked with a heavy padlock. I could not reach the switch to turn off the power. Then I noticed that the cables ran across the wall into the switch. An idea came to my mind and I bolted off to the Uchumi Supermarket on Aga Khan Walk. I purchased a panga, four batteries, and two torches and ran back to Cooperative House. At the entrance to the cooperative house, some of the matatu crews had begun getting the injured out of the building and into matatus for transport to the hospitals.

There was a visibly traumatised and shaken White American marine screaming at the top of his voice, asking for anybody with a torch to give it to him so he could get to the dark basement of their bombed out building. I gave him one of the torches and he ran off as I ran down back into the basement of the Cooperative Bank House. Once there, I threw all caution to the wind and hacked the heavy electrical cables running into the switch, plugging the basement into darkness.

I flicked on my torch and found my way out to ground floor where I joined the matatu crews in the impromptu rescue operation before the ambulances, paramedics, and other experts arrived on the scene. With our bare hands, without even gloves, we ran up and down the stairs in groups, rescuing the injured, and putting them into the matatus. All the people in my friend’s First Floor office were dead.

To this day, I have never known why the Kenya Power and Lighting Company, which has offices next door to the Cooperative Bank House never switched off the power supply to that area after the bombing. How many people were electrocuted as a result of this criminal negligence? And has the power company put in place emergency measures to turn off power in the event of such disasters? Or is this not necessary?

I will never forget this day. And not just because of the death and mayhem, but because of the human spirit that welled up in all of us, united by tragedy, to win the day for humankind. I pray that God continues to bless and comfort all those who were affected by this indelible blot on our history.