|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
“Joshua Arap Sang: The voice that incited a nightmare. Kenya’s 2007–2008 (PEV) claimed over 1100 lives, displaced many, and left deep scars. At the center was a radio host turned alleged instigator. Here’s the chilling story of how words unleashed horror.”
Nyamisa Chelagat, a Kenyan X user, writes this on 20th December. Her post is instigated by Sang’s careless remarks. Sang was among the six who were indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court over the 2007/2008 post-election violence. Sang was a radio presenter at Kass FM then. In her subsequent posts on the same thread, Nyamisa asks a question that provokes me to think of my experience of the 2007/2008 post-election violence. “How could the man whose words allegedly fanned the flames now shape Kenya’s narrative? This becomes the impetus to write this story.
7 December 2007. I am ten years old. As is our tradition, my mother, my sister and I are supposed to travel to the village for the holidays. My dad is to remain behind and will join us on the 24th, a day before Christmas. The evening before we travel, we visit Eastleigh. We walk through the many stores looking for pristine clothes. Clothes that are unique and trendy. Clothes to announce that we are from the city. Our search goes on until my mother finds what is best for us – and within her budget. My sister is tied to her back and she keeps giggling whenever I tickle her shin as we walk down the narrow corridors between the stores. In shop after shop, there are posters. Orange posters. Blue posters.
The orange posters belong to the Orange Democratic Movement Party, a party whose symbol is an orange. Raila is the presidential candidate of this party. His face beams from the posters. In some posters, I see he is pictured with five others. Each of them an ethnic kingpin, as I will later learn. Musalia Mudavadi leads the Luhya nation. Najib Balala leads the coast. Joe Nyagah is for Central Kenya. William Ruto, Rift Valley. They call themselves the Pentagon. The blue posters are PNU’s, “Kibaki Tena” is boldly printed on them. Despite being ten and still only a child, I know Raila and I know Kibaki. Or at least, I know about them. I do because every evening my father comes home with a newspaper tucked under his arm. I do know about them because 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. are for watching the news and everyone has to be silent. Most of the news is about Raila and Kibaki. All the talk in the neighbourhood is about Raila and Kibaki. There is excitement about the upcoming election.
On this evening, as we ride home after a long day of trying on clothes, negotiating prices, a song which has become an anthem plays in the matatu. Onyi Papa Jey is the artist, and the song is a laud to Raila Amolo Odinga. I wait for the parts I have memorised: hammer…. Nyundo…. tena anakata….Balala anakata. I lip sync these lyrics as the matatu manoeuvres the busy traffic from Moi Airbase into Huruma. The last rays of the sun are disappearing. People in the streets walk hurriedly, raising dust with their feet. Many are covered in orange – an orange cap, a scarf, a t-shirt. This part of Nairobi is Raila’s stronghold, my mother says to the lady seated next to her.
*
December 24, 2007. It has been three weeks since we arrived in the village. My father calls. He talks to my mother first. They talk for a few minutes and then she passes the phone to me. My first question is whether he is on his way. He says that he will come but after Christmas. My heart drops. I feel tingles of shame. What do I tell my cousins whom I had promised to spoil on Christmas Day? Dad was to bring us goodies, even money to spend. He says he has to vote first before travelling to join us. “The voting day is on 27th, three days from today. After, I am coming.” His soft, mellow voice reassures me. “Okay,” I say and hand back the phone to my mother. After the call ends, my mother unmutes the TV. The bulletin is mostly about the upcoming elections. We can’t watch anything else except follow the debates about who is going to win, who is going to lose. In the village, Onyi Papa Jey’s song is still an anthem. It is blaring from every radio. I now know more of the lyrics. Raila is the striker. His teammates include the Pentagon. Also, my cousins have told me that the “hammer” which I keep hearing about in the song is not an actual hammer (the tool) but it an expensive car that Raila is riding in. He is going to win, Raila is going to win, they assert.
Election day comes and goes. My father hasn’t joined us yet. Two days later, we are still waiting. My mother talks to him every evening. He sends a parcel from Nairobi. Inside it there is shopping – biscuits, crisps, chapati flour… There is also an envelope with money in it. This doesn’t quell my mother’s anxiety. Village friends and family crowd our house to follow the news. There is no electricity here and so my mother refills the generator every evening.
According to the news, Raila is leading. “Why can’t they announce him?” a brash voice asks. “Keep it cool,” another responds. On the third day we wake up to whorls of smoke rising in the horizon. “They have lit it!” one of my cousins shouts to no one in particular. My mother starts the generator and turns on the TV. What we see is a black soot rising to the sky. “Kenya is burning,” my mother mutters, her hands on her cheeks. She tries to call my father. She can’t reach him. His phone is off. We panic.
When we finally reach him, my father explains that there was an electricity blackout which is why his phone was off. His voice is faint but we can hear the thumping of his heart from all those kilometres away. He tells us how, earlier in the day, he had peeped from the balcony and seen a mob of young men carrying cudgels, machetes, rungus and stones. He fears that his garage which is in downtown Nairobi will be vandalised. My mother consoles him. She urges him to be safe. “Are you eating?” she asks him. The hesitance tells her that he hasn’t been eating. He burps, then a series of hiccups follow. My mother, in her science, thinks that this is because my father is also not drinking water. “Please eat and drink some water.” I imagine my sinewy father taking on a gaunt physique. I imagine him frail, his gait slowed down from exhaustion and fear. We hear a loud bang from his side. “What is that?” my mother’s wail floats in the air, her question going unanswered. My father is off the call. She calls him back, but he doesn’t pick up. His phone rings and rings and rings. He calls back hours later, “I couldn’t pick up for my safety. Their footsteps were too near.” He is clearly affected. His voice says it all.
We no longer watch the prime-time soap opera on TV. Every channel is stuck on broadcasting the election. The images we see are of houses being torched, shops and wholesalers and supermarkets being looted. Of the docile faces of old men and women and children. We see men with bloodshot eyes walking around in towns and cities as though they own these spaces, their dreadlocks shaking as they bounce with sprightly steps on the deserted roads. Fleeing families are running away from places they have considered home for years, some with all their belongings tied onto bicycles. The camera catches children like me with blisters on their feet from the long distances walked. Many of the displaced have no food, no water, their bodies are wilting and becoming scrawny. “When will Dad join us?” I ask my mother as she walks out of the house to turn off the generator. “I don’t know,” she responds just as the wheezing noise of the generator stops.
*
I was five in 2002. I do not remember Raila saying Kibaki Tosha. I do not recall the morning or the afternoon, or the evening when Kibaki had the accident that left him wheelchair-bound. But I remember the day President Mwai Kibaki was sworn in. The overwhelming excitement was palpable in our neighbourhood. My father was part of the crowd that filled Uhuru Park, where the swearing-in was to take place. After the ceremony he came back home with a cap with rainbow colours imprinted with a photo of Kibaki, his sunny eyes and smile in sharp contrast to the wrinkled face of the outgoing President Moi. His demeanour was subtle, harmless, welcoming. Even as a child, I somewhat understood that his presidency meant a new hope for Kenya. With Kibaki’s coming to power, Kenya was ranked the most hopeful country in the world. The journey of rebuilding after the political subjugation we had experienced during Moi’s tenure was to start.
In 2005 I was eight. The collective euphoria of three years before had waned and “referendum” was the word that occupied many mouths. Allies turned foes were now against each other. Kibaki’s camp was saying “Yes” to a new constitution that would vest more power in the presidency while Raila was saying “No”. Their party symbols were Banana for Kibaki, Orange for Raila. My father was supporting Raila. The unity from 2002 had fizzled out, the country was fracturing, mostly along tribal lines. Kibaki was no longer in his wheelchair. In schools and playgrounds, we sided with the colours our parents supported. Most of my friends from the central Kenya region went with yellow. Most of us from Kenya’s western region chose orange. When the referendum was done and the votes counted, “No” carried the day. It was clear; Raila was going to win the 2007 general election. None of us, including our parents, would have imagined that the division from this referendum would culminate in post-election violence that would claim the deaths of thousands, and displace thousands more.
*
It is almost two decades since the post-election violence but the images of that season still remain. One particular photo still stops me in my tracks whenever my memory flashes back to that period. A grey-haired granny, mouth agape, teeth stained brown. She is crying. Possibly wailing, her greyish-brown sweater hanging on her hunched shoulders. This image speaks of the desperation a government can bestow on its people.
*
The Kenyan post-election violence story has mostly been archived silence. This silence is so profound that it has been weaponised and used to hide our traumas – both individual and collective – under the veneer of respectability. This is portrayed in the way the political class – has reprimanded us, especially following the Gen Z protests, calling us disreputable and urging our parents to discipline us. According to this bunch of politicians, criticising the government is bad manners. Gen-Zs, however, are stepping out with boldness and courage and resolve. We are walking trusting the words of our national anthem: justice be our shield and defender. We sing these words in devotion whenever we are out on protests, not minding the disharmony of our voices. This is how we inspire unity among ourselves. Deep down we fear that any of us could be arrested and disappeared, to be retrieved as a dead body floating in a dam, body parts cut into pieces, stashed in a sack. We fear that those abducted may never return. But we remain steadfast, speaking up is our way of re-storying the injustices that have for long been perpetrated by the state. By speaking out, we are stepping out of the fold, this fold of silence which has been described by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor as an official Kenyan language.
*
January 5 2008. My father joins us in the village. “How is Nairobi?” A majority of those who come to see him ask iterations of this question. “What I saw….” He never finishes this sentence; shaking his head from side to side tells them all that they need to know. Until his death in 2010, not once did he tell us how he managed to escape Nairobi. Not once did he tell us what it was that he saw. Maybe his silence vindicates Marianne Moore in her poem, Silence – “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.”
