Kabaya cast his eye towards a separate group of around twenty squatters, men and women alike, who had been selected to take part in tonight’s ceremony, and he nodded to the one at the head of the line. He was thin and gangly, no more than eighteen years old. With a young man’s reckless bravado he had volunteered to be the first to take the oath. But as the gravity of his decision weighed upon him, his courage was giving way to anxiety and trepidation.

Kabaya approached him and put a fatherly arm upon his shoulder.

‘There’s nothing to fear,’ he said, speaking quietly so that only the youngster could hear him. ‘You can do this. Show them all that you are a man.’

The five men Kabaya had brought with him to the ceremony glanced at one another and gave nods or smiles of recognition as they watched the young man straighten his back and hold his head up high, his confidence restored. They had all served with Kabaya in the King’s African Rifles, a British colonial regiment, during World War Two, campaigning in Ethiopia against Mussolini’s Italian armies and then in Burma against the Japanese. They had watched as he had been promoted from private to company sergeant major within five years. And for each of them there had been times when Kabaya had found the words to keep them going in times of hardship, or given them courage when the fighting was most fierce.

When they came home to East Africa to discover that their military service had earned them neither human rights, nor decent jobs, Kabaya and his men had turned to crime. Their gang was one of many that emerged in the teeming shanty towns that had sprung up around the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, but it swiftly became the most powerful. The gangsters had become rebels and still they followed Kabaya. Whether a soldier, a criminal or a terrorist, their boss had a genius for leadership.

Kabaya stepped back to leave the young man alone in the middle of the floor. As he did, his second in command, Wilson Gitiri, sat beside the goat, placing the wickedly sharp, long-bladed panga knife with which he – like all of Kabaya’s men – was armed, on the floor by his right hand.

Kabaya was a tall, handsome, charismatic man. He was highly intelligent, confident in his ability to win people over by reason and charm as well as fear. Wilson Gitiri was malevolence personified. He was shorter in stature than his commander, but he was as barrel-chested as a bull. His face was criss-crossed with thick welts of scar tissue. His eyes were permanently narrowed, forever searching for possible threat. His hair was plaited into tight braids that were gathered in a ridge that ran from the back to the front of his scalp like a soldier’s forage cap. His presence in the chapel was an act of intimidation.