Caleb Mwangi was beaten so severely at his school in Kenya after he took extra food at breakfast that he was put into an induced coma and spent 11 days in an intensive care unit.
“When I got there, he couldn’t leave his bed. He couldn’t speak,” his father Fred Mwangi told the BBC.
This happened nearly two years ago when Caleb was 13 years old. Sitting now between his mother and father on the sofa in their home in Mombasa, a city on Kenya’s coast, he says he tends to zone out from time to time.
The teenager is filled with rage that sometimes makes him punch the wall. The effects, he says, of the trauma caused by the near-death experience.
Mr Mwangi gets his son to stand and pull up his white vest to reveal a thick, angry scar covering almost the width and length of his back.
He says the wounds were so deep the surgeon had to remove large pieces of skin from his thighs to use as skin grafts.
“This is him in hospital,” says his mother Agnes Mutiri, showing pictures of Caleb on her phone, too graphic to publish. Lying face down on the bed, lacerations cover his legs, back and arms, and even his face. There were almost a hundred in total.
“His whole body was like this.”
Corporal punishment in schools has a long history in Kenya, dating back to the era when missionaries and colonisers relied on it to assert their authority.
Source: bbc.com
