allAfrica.com: Kenya: We May Never Know His Name, But He Will Not Be Forgotten (Page 1 of 1)

As the daughter of a professional photographer, I learned to appreciate the power of images at a very young age. My father always carried a camera, even when he was not working, because, as he told me, "some of the best and most memorable photos are taken when you least expect to take them".

Images have the power to transform society. Who can forget the image of the lone unidentified student blocking military tanks from entering Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989 or the images of mothers of political prisoners "cursing" policemen at Nairobi's Uhuru Park in 1992 by baring their bodies?

Even though both events marked a milestone in the history of both China and Kenya, the brave student who confronted an army and the courageous mothers who defied bullets to demand justice for their children have remained nameless in the annals of history. Yet both the student and the mothers will be remembered by generations because their images were so powerful and so poignant that they shook not only the political establishment, but the entire world.

ONE SUCH HISTORIC IMAGE WAS taken just last week in Kisumu. It was the image of an unarmed male protester being shot at by a policeman. This is how the BBC's online news service described the events of last week, whose images appeared on our television screens 17 January 17:

"On Thursday, human rights activist Okiya Omtatah chained himself to the barriers of the Nairobi police headquarters and, as bystanders watched, clutched a rosary chanting: 'You are killing people in this country. That is wrong.' He was soon arrested.

Earlier, television footage had suggested a policeman in Kisumu may have shot dead in cold blood an unarmed man taking part in opposition protests against last month's disputed elections. The protestor was making faces at the anti-riot unit when an officer approached him, armed with a rifle. The young man fell down and the policeman is shown kicking the prostrate man in the back. Within minutes, bullets were fired at close range. The protestor was later pronounced dead."

The police have been quick to defend their actions. Police spokesperson Eric Kiraithe insists that the man was part of a gang attacking police officers, and that there is insufficient evidence to show that the policeman committed an act of murder. He has even suggested that the image we saw could have been "computer-generated".

Was what we saw a figment of our imagination? Did we not see a young man wearing a cap and a black T-shirt being shot at in the shoulder, falling, standing up in defiance, and then being kicked? Before he was shot, he was dancing and laughing, the way young people do when they are happy. He did not look like someone who was about to kill or maim a police officer.

Over the years, Kenyans have become used to riot police turning our cities into war zones. In the 1990s, we got used to seeing police officers and General Service Unit squads shooting civilians with live bullets. We took for granted that people would die during a protest rally. And we also took for granted that officers, who killed protesters, would never be prosecuted. How do people in other countries protest without shedding a single drop of blood? we often wondered. How many people needed to die before we were heard?

At the height of the country's "second liberation" struggle in the late 1990s, we protested against these killings, wrote articles calling for democracy and held rallies in defiance of the Government. And then came December 2002. We were free at last, or so we thought. We believed that the days of police brutality were finally over.

Until last week.

Now the anonymous man in a black T-shirt has become the source of our inspiration. Tears are being shed for him by people he never met or knew. On the day after the shooting, my e-mail in-box was filled with tributes to him. That young man, whose name we might never know, has become a hero. A writer, who uses the pen-name Ayo Bole, wrote him a beautiful eulogy hours after the shooting, parts of which I now quote:

"Some deaths become our own. They become us, however, many words are used to try to wash them away. Some deaths move into and reside in our souls, and can is being played out in various arenas - in the boardroom, in the office canteen, even in our neighbourhoods.

DEEP-SEATED FEARS AND PREJUDICES are having devastating consequences in the poorest communities, where gang warfare is resurfacing as ethnically-driven terror. Last week, an irate reader from Kibera asked me to explain why his favourite liquor den was reduced to ashes yet the one down the road was not. J.M. Mate, whose Yahoo address is ominously named "ghettoaftermath", says people in slums are now "sleeping with their clothes and shoes on and a rod/machete at their head ready to go not only to stop, but if necessary, to kill the oncoming friend now turned ethnic militia".

We have reached a stage now where we can no longer pretend that economic and political injustices have not occurred in the past, that we are not an ethnically-divided nation and that our interactions with each other are not informed by our prejudices.

How did we get to such a place and what is the way out? We got here because our colonial and post-colonial rulers encouraged us to think along ethnic lines. We can only get out of this morass if we stop using ethnicity as a badge of honour that comes with goodies attached.

Ms Warah is an editor with the UN. The views expressed here are her own.

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