As he walked home on March 10 evening, just a few days before the start of Ramadhan, Khamis Mkoka was accosted by a gang of about five boys.
Covered by the darkness of night, the boys, deceived by the feel of the pangas they were carrying, had no idea who they were dealing with.
Before they realised it, one of them had lost his panga to Mkoka and was under lock.
The rest, confused by what they had just witnessed, took off.
Mkoka disarmed the attacker and placed him in a helpless position. He was under Mkoka’s mercy.
However, Mkoka did not do anything else.
“I could have easily killed him. But my conscience could not let me. So I just called people to come and arrest him. Which they did,” he says.
That is the level of discipline he has.
“My body is a weapon. But I have been trained not to fight. I only do self-defence,” he says.
He has been doing martial arts since he was in Standard 7 at Ziwa la Ng’ombe Primary School.
Now he has majored in pencak silat, a highly disciplined hybrid Indonesian martial art that incorporates striking, grappling and weapons.
“Most of my activities are community-based. I have formed youth groups, women groups and umbrella CBOs [community-based organisations]. Those are some of the things I do on the ground to empower women and youth,” the 46-year-old says.
He also uses martial arts to empower women and youth in terms of physical fitness.
But how did he start pencak silat?
An ex-soldier introduced him to martial arts after seeing Mkoka and his friends idling around after school.
One day, as the ex-soldier walked to Frere Town’s Chandaria Hall in Nyali subcounty for his martial arts practice session, he asked a group of 12 youths, including Mkoka, to accompany him.
“We had been seeing him go to the hall every evening to train people taekwondo. When he asked us to accompany him, he said he would pay for us to join his taekwondo club," Mkoka says.
“I got interested because I liked martial arts movies and my favourite actor was Jean-Claude Van Damme. So the opportunity to learn some of the moves I had been seeing him do in movies fascinated me.”
Mkoka fell in love with taekwondo and worked his way up the ladder until he got to the black belt first dan category.
At Ganze Secondary School, he introduced the sport, teaching students the art and even got a contract to teach neighbouring Administration Police officers three times a week, while still in high school.
After high school, his father died and he had to start fending for his family and taekwondo was not bringing him any income.
“I became a performing artist, playing the keyboard, which I learnt from a friend, while singing at social events at a fee,” Mkoka says.
Unfortunately, after three years, his keyboard teacher died and that was the end of his career because he did not have a keyboard of his own. The one he used was taken away from him by his friend’s widow.
In 2008, as he was about to lose hope in life, some of his taekwondo friends came together and decided they should revive the taekwondo club.
“The reason was that the youth had started going astray. There was no discipline. So we had to revive the taekwondo club to take the youth off the streets and idleness,” Mkoka says.
He was then incorporated into the Frere Town community policing committee and he would talk to the youth in the area and in Mgongeni neighbourhoods to shun hooliganism.
“While talking to the youth, I realised many go astray because they mostly have nothing to do and peer pressure gets to them while they idle around. I found the opportunity to introduce most of them to taekwondo,” Mkoka says.
As with most of the sports in Kenya, politics got into taekwondo and killed his zeal.
Then came pencak silat in 2012.
“A friend of mine, whom we trained with in taekwondo, approached me and introduced the Indonesian pencak silat to me," he says.
“I saw this as an opportunity to start afresh. Ten people from Mombasa were selected to go to Nairobi to learn the new form of martial arts.”
Pencak silat is not just a form of martial arts, he says. It is a way of life and part of the Indonesian culture, which instils a high-level of discipline in the people.
“Indonesia is a highly disciplined country because training of pencak silat starts at one year of age. It is taught right from the primary school level to the university level. It involves shaping ones behaviour to that of respect and self-discipline,” Mkoka says.
Apart from discipline, it helps one become physically fit, thus lessening the chances of one getting sick.
Training of pencak silat, which carries all physical fitness activities, helps the blood vessels and muscles in one’s body regenerate, which improves the immune system.
Mkoka says pencak silat training makes one able to control any part of the body to achieve certain health desires. It also has training for the old age to avoid joint pains.
For instance, it involves training how to control breathing, so one is able to enhance certain functions of the body parts like hearing.
“I can control my breathing in such a way that it enhances my hearing so that I can hear things that you would not normally hear or things that are happening very far away,” Mkoka says.
It is this high level of discipline that he uses to help youth get away from vices like drug abuse, criminality and early pregnancies for girls.
There are certain moves in pencak silat that you cannot do if you are taking drugs, Mkoka says.
There are certain foods you will be forced to do away with when training pencak silat. These foods will prevent you from doing certain moves.
“The training gives you a habit of avoidance. Though we are trained to fight, we are forbidden from fighting. The first rule of pencak silat is no fighting. If you train pencak silat and you fight, you are given a lifetime ban. The only time we are allowed to fight is when we are in the ring,” Mkoka says.
EO (name withheld for legal reasons), one of Mkoka’s students, was one of the most dangerous members of a juvenile criminal gang in Likoni.
Mkoka, who knew EO from when he started training in taekwondo until he joined pencak silat, says his discipline gradually improved, leaving behind his life of crime and got to embrace education.
“The Indonesian embassy one day contacted me asking for one student so they could sponsor him through university in Indonesia. I chose EO because he had come a long way and was now highly disciplined.
“But since EO was an orphan he was yet to get his exam results from the high school he was in because of a Sh24,000 fee arrear that he could not raise," Mkoka says.
“The embassy paid the fee arrears, helped him acquire his national ID card and sponsored him for a four-year pencak silat course in Indonesia. He left early this year for Indonesia.”
EO shed tears of joy at the opportunity as never in his life had he imagined going to university, let alone a university abroad.
EO and two other young people from Nairobi got the scholarship. The three will represent Kenya in the Paris Olympic Games from July 26 to August 11.
“This will be the first time that pencak silat will be in the Olympics Games,” Mkoka says.
After their four-year stay in Indonesia, the three will come back and help form a pencak silat board in Kenya.
Currently, there is only the Kenya Pencak Silat Association.
He says he has been tasked by the Indonesian Ambassador Mohamad Hery Saripudin to help form pencak silat clubs in Somalia, Uganda and the DRC, which are also under Saripudin.
“I take EO as a case study. We want to have him as an example because he left all the drug abuse and criminal activities because of pencak silat,” Mkoka says.
Mombasa youth are prime candidates for juvenile criminal activities and his mission is to either get them back on track or prevent them from going astray.
“I have started with Kisauni and Nyali subcounties. There are 10 such youth now that I am mentoring and I hope they will follow in EO’s footsteps,” he says.
His biggest fear is the rate at which youth in Mombasa abuse drugs and substances like miraa and muguka.
“Very soon, we may not have sports people from Mombasa because of miraa and muguka,” Mkoka says.
He has a vision of starting pencak silat in school from the primary level where the learners are still moldable.
