Surviving Westgate

September 27, 2013

Posted by James Verini

For years, Khadija Adam had gone to Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall on Saturdays. She had her hair styled at the Ashley Salon, attended to her mobile-phone at Safaricom, shopped at the Nakumatt supermarket. Sometimes she stopped into the Millionaires Casino. Adam, a former model and a warm, boisterous talker, knew many shop owners by their first names, and always bumped into friends. Often, she would get caught up for hours in conversationâ€"she speaks Swahili, Somali, English, and some Arabicâ€"at ArtCaffe. Like many in Kenya, Adam is part Kenyan and part Somali, and a Muslim. “You know how Somalis are,” she told me, “we always have to get the story on everything.”

Adam arrived at Westgate a few minutes after noon last Saturday. She parked on an upper terrace in the building’s rear. Nearby, around some tents, a crowd of children and their parents were assembled for a junior-chef cooking contest. One of the mothers invited Adam over. She said that she would come back after her salon appointment. She walked into the mall, whose interior is shaped like a “d,” with stores and restaurants surrounding a central atrium. She went into the Safaricom store.

“Then I heard the sound,” she said. “PAH! There were three shots.”

Adam works at a mining company in Garissa, a city in northeast Kenya, near the border with Somalia. In the last few years, Garissa has become used to bombings, shootings, and kidnappingsâ€"most of them blamed on the Shabaab, the Somali Islamist insurgent group. She knows the sound of gunfire. But this was different. “I’ve never ever heard such gunshots,” she said. “These guns were amazing.”

Adam rushed to the entrance of the store. She saw a Kenyan policemen crouching by a pillar, aiming across the atrium. There was another deafening volley and bullets tore into the policeman: “The pillar was literally looking like it was on fire.” Then running and screaming. She backed into Safaricom.

At Ashley Salon, a level above, where Adam had had a 12:30 appointment, Simon Kinyanjui, a stylist, was washing a woman’s hair when he heard the gunfire. “We thought maybe the water-heater had blasted,” he told me. Kinyanjui and a coworker left the salon and peered into the atrium, where they saw police with their guns drawn. “That’s when they were rained with bullets,” Kinyanjui said. They ran back into the salon. Kinyanjui told the customers inside to hide. One got under a massage table. Others crammed into the bathroom. He locked the door and turned off the lights.

Two other stylists, Godfrey Njoroge and Thomas Kamau, were on the other side of the atrium, on a smoking patio beside the Java House restaurant, facing onto the rear terrace. Njoroge was putting out his Sportman cigarette when “massive, massive gunshots” rang out from the far side of the tents. Kamau ran to the other end of the lot and looked over a low wall. Below him, he saw two men with rifles and what appeared to be ammunition draped over their shoulders. Black cloths were wrapped around their heads. One was shooting at a security guard, the other toward the mall. One of the men looked up at Kamau and raised a hand in the air.

“He screams ‘We are al-Shabaab!’” Kamau told me. “When he said that I repeated to the guys behind me, ‘Did they say al-Shabaab?’”

Kamau decided not to wait for confirmation. He and Njoroge moved toward the Java House, along with the frantic children and parents from the cooking contest. Just then, gunfire from inside the mall emptied the restaurant. “People were running with cups of coffee still in their hands, spilling it all over the floor,” Njoroge said. “People were screaming. Bangs inside, bangs outside.”

The two groups collided on the terrace. Kamau suggested that they try to climb down a wall facing onto a residential area behind the Westgate. Njoroge didn’t like this idea. “I’m going back inside,” he said, and dashed into the Java House.

When Khadija Adam had walked onto the escalator, at about 12:15, she’d looked down and seen Janet Mulonzia at her usual place behind the counter of the African Lady leather-goods kiosk, on Westgate’s ground floor, near the main entrance. Mulonzia and her coworker, Rosa, were attending to an order of handbags.

When shooting broke out in front of the main entrance, Mulonzia’s immediate thought was a robbery. A large Barclays bank branch was near the entrance. If a robbery ever did occur, Mulonzia had thought in the past, the safest place to hide might be in the cupboard below the kiosk counter. So, without much debate, she and Rosa kneeled down and crawled in. They listened as the gunfire increased and then became constant. Mulonzia could hear firing and screams coming from ArtCaffe, too, on the other side of the kiosk from the entrance.

After the running and screaming died down, she heard people speaking in a language she didn’t recognize, accompanied by deliberate, slower footsteps. Through the gap between the bottom of the cupboard doors and the floor, she could see feet. She heard loud whistles, perhaps signals, and then people conferring in Swahili, the common language of Kenya. Next to African Lady is a beauty shop. “Someone, I think maybe one of the gangsters, was yelling at the people in the beauty shop to open the doors,” she said. They yelled in Swahili, “We can get in there and you can make our faces!”

Upstairs, at Safaricom, Khadija Adam heard yells from the atrium. “When I heard the words ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and the gunfire, I knew we were in trouble,” she said.

Adam and the othersâ€"she estimates that there were more than forty of them in the storeâ€"piled into a back room. Among them were several white people. “If they come in and they see white people, they won’t care, they’ll kill all of us,” she said. There was a small cubicle with the store’s surveillance-camera monitors in it. She told the white customers to go in it and hide, and reminded everyone to turn off their cell phones or put them on silent mode. “As we were sitting there, you could hear everything.” Between bursts of gunfire and explosions, she heard what sounded like people moving around in air ducts. She wanted to call out to them. But a man who identified himself as U.N. security personnel said it could be the assailants. So they waited, in silence. They passed around cups of water and held each other’s hands.

Adam’s husband, in Hong Kong, texted her. “He said ‘These are terrorists, and they’re killing anybody who’s non-Muslim. Tell all the foreigners with you not to go out,’” she said. “I started crying at that point, when I realized it was al-Shabaab. I suspected before, but you know you self-doubt. When I heard it on a text coming from Hong Kong, then I know it’s in black and white.”

In the drafts folder on her phone, she saved a series of textsâ€"to her husband, relatives, friendsâ€"in case the attackers got into the store. “I was waiting for the last minute to press send.”

One level above, in the salon, Simon Kinyanjui quietly climbed up a ladder to a loft area, which had a television and a sofa, where he and his coworkers normally relaxed between appointments. Now they sat looking at each other and their phones, listening as the gunfire approached and explosions rattled the building. On the wall was a vent with adjustable blinds. Kinyanjui slowly opened them and peered out. He saw three people, dressed in black and camouflage, carrying rifles, approached the salon. One pulled on the door. Finding it locked, the group moved on to a neighboring store, Planet Media, and began shooting at its display windows. The person who appeared to be the leader of the three, who also carried a pair of knives on a belt, had what looked to Kinyanjui to be long hairâ€"like a woman’s. (Reports that a woman, possibly a Caucasian woman, was among the attackers, have not been confirmed.) Kinyanjui texted his coworkers who weren’t in the shop. He found most of them. But not Godfrey Njoroge.

After parting from Kamau on the rear terrace, Njoroge had run up the stairs to the mall’s fourth level, into a men’s bathroom, and into a stall in the far corner. He called the salon receptionist, who had escaped from the mall, and told her where he was. Then his phone battery died.

Above him was a small window. He stood up on the toilet and looked out. He had a clear view of the rear terrace and the crowd of children and parents who’d been caught there. “A woman was saying, ‘Calm down, calm down! It’s O.K.!’” he said. Njoroge paused. “Then I saw these guys.”

Men with large rifles or machine guns fired into the crowd, he said. Some children fell, shot; others lay down. He described the gunmen firing into their backs. One of the attackers took up a stone and slammed a man, who was holding a child, in the head. Then he picked his gun back up and fired more.

The men stopped shooting. One yelled, in Swahili, “Kama wewe ni Muslamu amka uende!”â€"“If you’re Muslim, get up and go!” Some people got up. Then the gunmen opened fire again. Done, they ran into the mall. Njoroge went into another stall, away from the window, and crouched on the toilet.

On the ground floor, in the cupboard, Janet Mulonzia and Rosa huddled together. “We tried to cry. We could not cry, because we were so scared,” Mulonzia said. “We were praying and all along we were holding our hands together. I could not let her go.” In the next cupboard, Mulonzia’s phone was ringing. The closer the attackers got, the more the phone rang, it seemed to her. She was too frightened to reach from the cupboard to get it. “I was wishing the battery would die. I was afraid they would come to look for it and they would just get angry and just shoot.” Smoke wafted into the atrium, and for what seemed like hours, Mulonzia stifled a sneeze.

A few weeks before, Mulonzia had read “Left to Tell,” a memoir about the Rwandan genocide, in which the author, Immaculée Ilibagiza, describes hiding in a bathroom for ninety days. She had liked the book so much that she’d given it to Rosa, who’d just finished it. “So when we were in there we were saying ‘Oh god, we are in that situation.’ But then we said, ‘If Immaculée emerged victorious, we are going to get out.’” They also comforted themselves with the music on Westgate’s sound system. Throughout the afternoon, it never shut off. Nor did the booming recorded voice that announced “Welcome to Westgate shopping mall.”

“That was good for us,” Mulonzia said.

Through the gap between the cupboard doors, Rosa could see through the atrium and up to the second level. Suddenly she froze, her eyes widening. Mulonzia whispered to ask her what was wrong. Rosa wouldn’t say.

When Simon Njoroge and Thomas Kamau had separated on the terrace, Kamau had climbed onto the hood of a car and pulled himself onto the wall facing a residential area. Other people were jumping onto a patch of soft soil about two stories below. Kamau debated, but “the guns were getting closer and closer.” He jumped. He got up, and looked down at himself. He was O.K. He looked up and saw a salon coworker. “He’s up there telling me, ‘I’ve left my glasses!’ He wants to go back,” Kamau told me. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, what the fuck is wrong with you!?’” The coworker jumped. They were in a dirt lane. They found a small door and squeezed through it, to safety.

In Safaricom, Adam watched the surveillance monitors. She saw two people clad in black approach the shop and look in, then walk off. Later she began seeing what appeared to be police or soldiers. But terrorists, she knew, often acquired official uniforms. So she stayed still. Finally, at about 6 P.M., a store manager arrived with police. Adam and the others were led to the rear terrace, where ambulances were queuing. Through the flaps of a tent, she could see the bodies of the children and parents she’d passed on her way in, six hours earlier. Then the shooting started again, and she scrambled for cover.

Above the terrace, Godfrey Njoroge was still crouching in the stall when smoke began seeping into the bathroom. “I decided to move,” he said. At about 5:30, he opened the door and dashed into the stall with the window. He could see the ambulances, police, soldiers, bodies. He yelled out. “Please help, please help, we are here!” People on the roof motioned to him to get down and shut up; they were snipers. Njoroge summoned his courage, left the bathroom, and rushed downstairs and outside. A pastry chef from ArtCaffe, whom Njoroge knew, was helping the medics, and gave him water. He was told to get in an ambulance and register with the Red Cross, but he didn’t. “I wanted to be out of that mall.” He got into a taxi. The driver asked if he’d been in Westgate. He said that he had. The driver took him home without charge. Njoroge had been in his apartment until he left it to meet with me, four days later. “I don’t go out,” he said. “I don’t like hearing loud noises. I don’t even watch TV. I drink a lot of beer.”

At about 6:30 P.M., a coworker of Simon Kinyanjui’s climbed down from the loft area in the salon and hesitantly went to the glass doors. He saw security agents and cameramen outside. The other employees didn’t want him to get their attention, but he waved anyway. The agents trained their guns on him. When he and Kinyanjui came out of the salon, they were told to put their hands up and were patted down. There was still gunfire coming from the levels below. The agents escorted them across the mall and to the terrace, where they were put into ambulances.

After five hours in the cupboard, Janet Mulonzia steeled herself and inched open the door to get ahold of her phone. Her brother had been texting frantically. She texted him back: “Inside s drawer bro. ptsy for us.” (“Inside a drawer bro. Pray for us.”) A friend outside the mall, also trying to reach her, texted to say that the Kenyan military had control of the ground floor. She texted him: “…tell someone atutoe hapa. Groundfloor.” Atutoe hapa is Swahili for, basically, get me out of here. But her friend, like everyone else outside, was being kept from the scene and from police. He texted to tell her that terrorists were inside, not robbers. There might be bombs.

“I told Rosa instead of being burned here, we’ll surrender, and whatever happens, happens,” Mulonzia said. “We were waiting to hear an announcement that it’s safe to come out. You know like what you see in the movies? We were waiting for that. But it never happened.”

Hesitantly, they emerged from the cupboard. The only people they could see were medics, near the Barclays bank. The floor was covered in glass and blood. Mulonzia had lost her shoes. She put on a pair of flip-flops from the kiosk, and they raced for the main entrance. It wasn’t until she and Rosa got outside, and saw all the soldiers and lights and cameras, that she nearly collapsed. “We just realizedâ€"and our legs could not walk.”

Later, in the triage center, she asked Rosa what she’d seen from the cupboard when she froze up. Rosa told her that it had been a man on his knees, his arms lifted in the air, blood running down them. He appeared to be begging for his life.

As of today, the official count of the dead at the Westgate mall includes sixty-two civilians; the government’s rough numbers for dead shooters and security personnel are five and six, respectively. But a good portion of the buildingâ€"including part of the rear terraceâ€"has collapsed, perhaps from fire, perhaps from explosives, perhaps from both, and it’s feared that there may be many more bodies in the rubble. The mall is still being searched for bombs. The Kenyan government, along with the F.B.I. and British and German agencies, have begun forensic investigations.

After the shooting on the terrace stopped, Adam was put into an ambulance and driven to the triage center. Finally safe, she started shaking uncontrollably. “You know, you lose it. I don’t realize you actually lose it. But you lose it,” she said.

“They’ve made me question my religion,” Adam told me of the Shabaab, which has claimed to have carried out the attack. As we were speaking, A.P.C.s rumbled onto the road behind us, on their way from Westgate. Adam considers herself an open-minded Muslim, but her experience at Westgate has changed her. She said that she could now see the logic in the mass deportations of Somali immigrants that the government has been threatening since attacks began in Kenya. “Right now, I feel like they should all be sent back. Let them go and burn each other in their homes.”

She hasn’t been herself in other ways. “Ever since then, if I hear a bang, or I hear a noise, I just start crying.” The night before, the wind blew open her bedroom door. She jumped from bed and crawled under a table, screaming. “That’s what we have now on our hands.”

Witnesses, including David Ndereytoh (back left) and Simon Kinyanjui (back center, in profile), look on while authorities search for gunmen at Westgate mall in Nairobi. Photograph by Tyler Hicks/The New York Times/Redux.