The man who raped a chicken

I had this friend. Ben.

A big South African serious and funny at the same time.

Even if he was born in SA he pretend to be a Dutch, but the way he was drinking beer and talking about the African Governments left little room for doubt about is real origin.

He came to Tanzania from South Africa by car to take up a two months job, and when I met him, he was in Arusha since 5 years.

He was curious, passionate about technology and extremely suspicious. He was one of this exhausted white thinking that in every man was a thief. He made this IT Company and the guy working for him used to go around visiting the client by motorbike. Well, Ben put a GPS in each motorbike and then he used to monitor constantly where his workers were. And if a motorbike stopped where it was not supposed to, or taking a suspicious way, Ben was calling the astonished guy, like he was the Big Brother or a kind of minor God.

But as a friend he was fantastic. Always present when you need him, always ready to move his connections to solve a problem and, at the end, very proud of himself when able to help a friend or solve a situation.

As a good South African, he LOVED to organise barbeques with tons of different dead animals, and his speciality was the “Raped Chicken”: open a can of beer, take a chicken (already dead and plucked) and ‘sit it’ on the beer. Salt, oil and spices on the skin and then on the barbeque, cover. When the beer in the can is finished, you will have to most delicious chicken ever.

He also had a very strange sense of humour. More than strange I would say overly bastard. If you accidentally left your mobile unguarded, even for a single second, on the bar table or in the jacket pocket, he took it and start to send embarrassing messages to whoever in the list. Your boss, friends, other’s girlfriends, providers.

When it was possible, he preferred to send those messages from and to people in the same room, to spy secretly the reaction and taking reason for intimate fun.

Once, at 4 in the night, a message woke me up. It was from my boss, the one I deeply dislike. “I feel horny, please meet me now. I won’t tell anybody”.

“Fuck Ben, I was sleeping...”

Then I lost him: he moved first to Dar es Salaam and then he got a better job in a security company in Nairobi. I moved to Haiti and then to Nepal.

The other day he was chatting with my spouse: he was getting back to South Africa soon to get married.

This morning I received a mail from a common friend: That night Ben was shot eleven times in his house in Nairobi by a bunch of robbers.

I hope they did it quick.

What people want to see of Africa