Aiki(do) Adventures in Africa

By Aspen Apgaia

Edited By Miku Lenentine

Last February I was visiting friends in Nairobi. We were out late, unable to get a cab to pick us up at the YMCA where we’d been training aikido that night, and had walked down into the city looking for dinner and to walk our friend to the bus depot so she could get home.

While walking through the city, two police officers stopped us to check my travel documents. The Kenyan government has made great progress towards fighting corruption, but it’s well known that police will still sometimes threaten people in order to try to get a bribe. I was carrying a photocopy of my passport in case my wallet was stolen, but that wasn’t enough for the officers and they told us to walk with them.

I was trying to stay positive, keep grounded, and frame it all as a part of the adventure.

I was told that by not having the original document on me, I had broken the law and would be processed, have to stay in jail overnight, see a judge the next day, and likely be set free with bail and/or a fine of several hundred dollars. I wasn’t excited about the idea of a night in jail, or being separated from my friend Nancy. But, I was trying to stay positive, keep grounded, and frame it all as a part of the adventure. I was respectful to the police, open and honest with any questions they had, and tried to offer potential solutions that might have avoided me spending the night in jail. But they weren’t willing to work with us to find a solution. 

I was dehydrated after the training session earlier in the evening and the officer who was watching me while his partner dealt with someone else was willing to let Nancy leave to pick up a bottle of water from the store for me. While we waited, they kept telling me about how much this was going to cost me, and the fines went from 300 dollars to 500, and then when they started doubting that Nancy would return, started insinuating that perhaps I was paying for her company, which could cost me thousands of dollars in fines, and even more significant charges if they thought that my asking for water was a ruse to help her escape, aiding and abetting a criminal.

I had faith in Nancy, even while they tried to tell me that I didn’t know Kenyan women, and assured me that she was long gone by now. She did take a long time to return, and I was starting to get nervous. They wanted to continue on to the police station without her, but if we were separated, she didn’t have a way of getting back in touch since I hadn’t gotten a local SIM card for my phone while I was there. It was a bit of a delicate balance to request that we stay and wait, while they wanted to push on, and luckily, literally as we were walking away, I saw her across the street, looking for us where we had been standing before. She returned with the water, and I was very grateful for both. 

I had to play a difficult balance here. While I was confident in my ability to defend myself, I didn’t want to come off as violent or arrogant. I was honest with them, that I didn’t want any of those things to happen… As we walked through the dark, and now deserted streets, I started to wonder if we might be safer in the cell.

It was getting late, and they walked us away from the downtown core. I wasn’t familiar with the part of the city we were in, but we’d walked quite a ways, and there were fewer and fewer people around. I was starting to get nervous about being out of view with two men carrying an AK-47, at this point I would be grateful to be at the police station, just for the visibility that might offer us some protection from a physical threat. They made it clear again and again, that I could pay them my bail/fine money, and they would let us go. But we remained firm that we would rather go through the official process, even if that meant being booked, and spending the night in jail. Integrity that was made easier by the fact that we didn’t have the cash on us anyhow. 

I thought I saw the police station, but we kept walking past it, and the officers started talking about how unpleasant a night in jail would be for us. They talked about the kinds of people we could expect to meet there, criminals, people looking for a fight, they told me someone would probably pee on me while I slept, and joked that I might be sexually assaulted. I had to play a difficult balance here. While I was confident in my ability to defend myself, I didn’t want to come off as violent or arrogant. I was honest with them, that I didn’t want any of those things to happen, but also had to accept that I might very well find myself in those circumstances and was essentially powerless to prevent it. As we walked through the dark, and now deserted streets, I started to wonder if we might be safer in the cell. I kept my tone light and positive, making jokes where I could. At one point one of the officers was trying to clean his glasses, and I offered him the cloth from my sunglasses case. He thanked me and said that he could see much more clearly now. I laughed and asked him if he could see clearly that we were genuine people. Referencing their earlier justification for demanding our identification to determine if we were genuine tourists and not terrorists. He laughed at the joke and gave me a fistbump. We could tell that he was even trying to talk to the older, bigger, decidedly grumpier officer to let us go with a warning. But we hadn’t won over his companion yet and he was still pushing for the bribe. As we continued walking, we talked about his pursuit of higher education (I work at a university) and his study of the martial arts. (We’d both trained some of the same arts.) 

My teacher once told me that true aiki is unavailable to us when we’re acting from the fight / flight … With true aiki, by maintaining our own peace, and through connection and non-agression, we are able to help our attacker transition from the stress response side of their nervous system to the rest / rejuvenate side.

After about two hours of walking around, and our best efforts to demonstrate that we were honest with them, didn’t have any money to give them and weren’t a threat, they eventually decided to walk us back to the downtown core and let us go. They made one last pitch for a smaller bribe, asking us to buy them a coffee. Which I was willing to do, but when they realized that I wasn’t going to give them the cash directly, but was instead offering to literally buy them a cup of coffee, they just kind of faded away behind us and were gone. We got back to the apartment safely, and didn’t end up spending the night in jail or paying any fines or bribes. 

It’s easy to assume that physical interaction is the extent of martial arts. If an attacker throws a punch or attacks in some way, you need to move so that you don’t stand in front of their aggression. The movements, and techniques of aikido operate on that level, and while the physical aspect of aikido is important and contributes to the second layer, it’s not necessarily how the conflict itself is resolved. My teacher once told me that true aiki is unavailable to us when we’re acting from the fight / flight or stress-response side of our nervous system. With true aiki, by maintaining our own peace, and through connection and non-agression, we are able to help our attacker transition from the stress response side of their nervous system to the rest / rejuvenate side. The movement and techniques of aikido allow us to stay physically safe while our connection with our attacker allows us to share our peace with their troubled heart. 

While there were no punches thrown that night in Nairobi, with two corrupt police officers. We stood in our integrity, spoke our honest truth, and kept our hearts open, even to those who were threatening violence to take from us. Certainly, the training helped give us the self confidence to do so, regardless of where the night might have taken us. But to me, there’s no question that how we showed up and interacted with those officers reflected the principles that are the foundation of aikido and that they were the reason that we escaped violence, incarceration or exploitation.   

Aspen is an Aikido instructor and Aiki practitioner living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. 

Aikido (合気道)  literally means “the way of harmonious spirit” or the “the way of unifying with life energy”

The 道 “Do” character is the same character as Tao in Taoism, also translated to the Path, or the Way of.

And, yes, the same “Do” or 道  from The Way of Vibrantly! 😉