Nairobi — Once, on a research visit to Kigali Central Prison in Rwanda, I met a man who had killed during the 1994 genocide. I asked him why he had done it.

"The devil made me do it," he said.

I didn't believe him.

I wanted worldlier reasons. I wanted to hear that history or economics were responsible, or that cynical politicians had manipulated him. I spent years trying to understand why this man strangled a woman in the back of a pick-up truck.

I pored over records of Belgium's colonial administration of Rwanda, sought the income distribution between Hutus and Tutsis, and read lengthy expositions on state building in an attempt to explain how my interviewee found himself in that truck with that woman.

Learned men and women spoke of Rwanda having a culture of obedience that turned ordinary civilians into killing machines. Others pointed a finger at the Belgian colonial machinations that had turned neighbour against neighbour, while some suggested that my interviewee was ultimately a victim even as he killed.

Such was the accretion of analysis and comment, I was convinced that adequate explanations for that murderous moment had been given. But then in early 2008, similar acts of violence were committed in Kenya and the explanations that had seemed to work so well in Rwanda now seemed inadequate when used in my own country.

Perhaps my Rwandan interviewee, even if he was only trying to avoid guilt, was not far off the mark in pointing a finger at the devil, in admitting that the forces that allowed his hands to close around that woman's throat were a mystery.

His act stood on its own, unapproached and unapproachable through the logic of figures and dusty archival files. His actions extended to a further reach than any part of his life and its experience allowed.

As his hands squeezed the life out of her his ability to look into the woman's bulging eyes and withstand the mute appeal of her heaving body was more than the political propaganda he had been subjected to, more than the language of hatred and violence that he had heard throughout his life.

I now think that the transcendental quality of his action, how it stood starkly outside its justifications, is like an island in a sea of social relations: it was preceded by many reasons to do it and followed immediately after by justifications that took their life from the location of the act vis-à-vis society. Yet the monstrosity of that moment when life was destroyed, stands outside time, outside cause and effect.

The violence directed at defenceless civilians by militias and the security forces in Kenya since January has led to at least one thousand moments when a life was deliberately extinguished. The killers in most instances still walk among us, tending to their daily lives -- conversing with their friends, having sex, turning up at their jobs.

It is as if they stepped outside the normal flow of their lives when they struck their killing blow. The fact that many among us daily shake hands that have gripped a descending panga or caressed a trigger means that we have made room for that killing moment in our lives.

Someone once told me that death is like the sun. We cannot bear to stare at either for a prolonged period. Finding the courage to approach the moment when our fellow human beings met their end at our hands may make it clearer that there are very few things in our society that weigh as much as a single life taken violently. Is Kenyan life precious enough to be protected from the murderous urge that comes from the pursuit of our vendettas?

Our answer to this question depends on how we choose to regard the witness of what happened in January and February. Her testimony comes to us through the fracturing and disembodying effect of the media and our ever-buzzing rumour mill. It demands interpretation.

We need to collate these fragments of words and images and then use our imagination to create an understanding, a truth that does justice to the enormity of what happened to those Kenyans whom our politics robbed of life and livelihood.

Most Kenyans believe in good and evil. But I now see that the latter requires far more discernment than I had ever assumed. In the past few months, as politicians have debated amnesty for the killers or opined on the need to create jobs to prevent similar explosions, they have echoed my own desire to look away.

It is difficult to make space for evil, to know how to hear it and see it in the many testimonies that we have and to respond in a way that does not suppress it or deny it its place at our table where it most certainly belongs.

"If Kofi Annan cannot bring us an acceptable solution, men will fight and there will be shedding of blood," said a 29-year-old militia member who identified himself only as Andrew, speaking on February17 in the small town of Iten (better known for its Olympic-champion high school students) to reporters writing for the Daily Telegraph of London.

He was at war in the same way that the confessed genocidaires I interviewed in Rwandan prisons persisted with describing the mass killing of 1994 as war. They were engaged in self-defence, they said, and the Devil became a presence driving them to acts of inexplicable evil.

Even in this admission, they wished to duck their ultimate responsibility, just as Andrew, if asked why he was willing to shed blood, would have had a host of reasons, injustices suffered, to give as an excuse.

Whether he argued that the devil made him do it or that he was merely reacting to unfair land distribution or even a desire to punish the "arrogance" of the "enemy ribe," he was doing nothing more than trying to flee the obscenity of his actions. We become similarly culpable when we absolve his sin by refusing to recognise the enormity of his actions

AN UNNAMED MAN WAS interviewed on K24 television in the second week of January this year. The camera only showed the shaved back of his head, bobbing ever so gently with his anguish. He spoke of having just come from the hospital where he had been to visit his wife, who had been raped and seriously beaten by a militia that operated in Kibera -- the largest of Nairobi's slums.

His voice joined others that had similar stories of terror. The pain in his voice, his slim back hunched as if with the agony of his knowledge lent gravity to the facts of his wife's rape, his beating, the fire that consumed the little they owned. Here was the witness testifying, telling his story and bringing alive the facts that we read in the newspapers and heard on television.

We heard of flames, sharpened blades, flying arrows, poison, raping penises, mocking laughter, screams, smoke, stones, blood, mucus, trucks to carry relatives, teargas, beheadings, phone text messages, rumours, farms, burnt houses, churches, police batons and hate graffiti.

These words, for they are nothing but words stripped of those who witnessed them and survived them, were dragged from witnesses as if by a gigantic funnel and then disgorged into living rooms in Lavington, Shanghai and New York.

We learnt that soon after December 30, when the presidential election results were announced, a packed Kenya Assemblies of God church in Kiambaa, in the Rift Valley town of Eldoret, was burned down.

The men who lit petrol-soaked rags and shoved them into the church wanted to kill the men, women and children who had sought safety inside. The church building caught fire quickly: Dozens of those inside died in the blaze, others choked to death on the smoke.

Still others managed to open the doors and tried to make a dash for their lives, but their hunters had surrounded the church. Lucy Wangui, her husband Joseph and their two daughters were inside, according to a story that ran in the Monitor newspaper of Kampala.

She was one of those who rushed out of the burning church and in the glare of the flames witnessed her husband Joseph running with an arrow sticking out of his back. He fell and the three men who were giving chase came up to him and "chopped him to pieces.' She covered her daughters' eyes.

In the weeks that Kenya appeared to teeter on the edge of all-out war, most people felt a need to keep tabs on the rising body count, on the numbers of attacks recorded, of the towns and villages thousands were fleeing from.

We wanted to know how many trucks could no longer carry their cargo into the Rift Valley, the percentage points that were being shaved off national economic growth with every passing day. It was important to know how the burnt buildings looked, to see the petrol bombs being flung at them.

The machete, that everyday instrument, became an object of fascination. There was the burnt church on the television screen, the boulders blocking the roads. The lines of men filmed uprooting the railway line in Kisumu and Kibera were of immense visual interest even if we did not quite understand what the message was and what those men thought they were uprooting.

On January 2, Abdalla Bujra, identified by a New York Times reporter as a "retired Kenyan professor who runs a democracy-building organisation," was quoted in that newspaper as saying, "We've had tribal fighting before, but never like this ... it reminds me of Rwanda." The reporter went on to note that, "The violence has been a mix of hooliganism, political protest and ethnic bloodletting."

Photographers and reporters gathered at the Serena Hotel in Nairobi before rushing to those areas that promised the goriest images, the ones that would fit the never ending African story of chopped bodies and drunken youth manning crude roadblocks. Their images came with a large helping of explanation claiming many forms of expertise.

On one hand was the Western reporter who still carries in his toolkit the "primeval tribal tensions" banner, while on the other the social scientist deployed scholarly tools to produce appropriate interpretations of the murder scene.

Variations of these filled the airwaves and dominated for a while at least headlines around the world. Experts used a curious alchemy to link youth joblessness to flying arrows entering backs and rigged election results to burnt buildings and raped women. I joined in the venture.

Writing in The EastAfrican, I turned to the 19th century writings of Clausewitz to warn darkly that the principle of escalation in war was upon us: That one side's paranoia would be ceaselessly matched by that of the other ,until all was reduced to ashes.

I turned to Hobbes, holding out the possibility of a "war of all against all" and then invoked Nietzsche to warn that the country was staring into the abyss. Only a last-minute change of mind made me retreat slightly from cliché and delete a sentence on Kenya staring into the abyss only for the abyss to stare back at us.

READING WHAT I WROTE THEN, I am struck not by whether my explanations were correct or not but rather by their blithe assumptions, and especially by their unruffled and knowing tone. The sentences unfurl with a tightness that will admit no mystery, even though I was writing from a great experiential and perhaps even moral distance from the events the unnamed man or Lucy Wangui experienced. It is this ability to interpret the events with such a tone of easy authority that most bothers me, because it suggests a refusal to come to moral terms with the events themselves.

I turned to these historical thinkers not so much to clarify but rather to obfuscate. I took it on myself to take the facts and to then use theory as a housepainter uses his brush to cover up a stain. My explanations were meant to create a world from the witnesses' testimony, a world that I could still bear to live in. A world without evil and with killings and maiming that were directly traceable to tangible, rational causes.

The killings were signs to be read rather than profound events in themselves. I took Joseph and Lucy's experience and "raise(d) it up to the level of the debate." This is what the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann called the move by intellectuals of the post-World War Two era to understand and explain the Holocaust.

He was so irate at the projects to "understand" the Holocaust that he coined the phrase, "the obscenity of understanding." Lanzmann rejected these attempts as an impulse that tended to silence the fact of the evil that the survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide had witnessed. "Raising up" evil for academic analysis was one of the ways of dulling the horror and of silencing it through the sheer volume of speech and opinion.

Lanzmann further pointed out that for the Holocaust survivor, the "truth of the event may reside not just in its brutal facts, but also in the way that their occurrence defies simple comprehension." The trauma of the event to Lanzmann is an "affront to understanding," and it makes the survivor, the witness, reluctant to turn their experience into speech.

Now, to be sure, the scale and intentionality of the killing in Kenya was far from genocidal. However, Lanzmann's film Shoah, which is about the Holocaust, interests me precisely because of his sensitivity to the futility and even immorality of the project of understanding. The murders in Kenya can be arranged in linear and tidy forms, then surrounded and undergirded by the powerful tools that we have evolved to explain the world around us.

Our explanations are one way of considering them, an attempt to use intellect to tame experience and rule out those parts of it that are unpalatable to us. Yet the experience of murder or surviving it resists such taming.

The single life, Joseph's life and his death, are immensity itself -- not a mere signpost to be quickly read on the way forward. The project to explain is a claim on the inner truth of the moment of killing and dying. A claim made from the comfort of a library chair and the distance of television.

It marshals such puny tools as economic analysis and sociology to confine to the periphery the unheard and silent witnessing of the dead and the deliberate silences and secrets of Kenyan survivors.

THERE IS AN ELUSIVE QUALITY to what has been witnessed that resists the ability of language to convey it. The words -- arrow, in the back, pangas, three men, running, falling, covering eyes, two young daughters, mud and wooden structure, fire, smoke, scream, cry, the ground, the soil, the land, warrior, election, Kibaki, Ruto -- remain approximations, part journeys to a destination that is very rarely glimpsed.

These slivers of testimony are like light striking a glass prism so that they are refracted to create different forms of knowledge depending on their recipient. The violence of 2008, coming, as it did after similar explosions in the 1990s and as recently as the last election of 2002, suggests that whatever we learnt in all the different ways from those events did not stop us from killing this time around.

The images of internal refugees and their terrible stories are repeated every few years and each time we assume that our horror we feel will prevent future recurrences. But this has not been the case; without producing a drastically different reaction this time around, we may have to live through a repeat of January and February in the near future.

The wife of the unnamed man on K24 television was not interviewed. We never heard a word from her, meaning that her husband was one more screen through which her testimony had to pass before it reached us.

My imagination combined his words and the silences between them, and all the other facts I had heard for weeks and all that I knew about our history. I could see, if only from the corner of my mind's eye, something dark and looming and that I had known intimately as a Kenyan all my life.

It was a partially felt truth that I cannot clearly make out most times but whose mere presence I feel powerfully. This, I want to suggest in the simplest terms, is the evil that hides in plain view. We are very familiar with it and in fact have built a world that embraces it and directs it at individuals and populations.

Those who have witnessed it or survived it have been rendered anonymous by the wilful blindness of the "Kenya is peaceful and peace-loving" mantra. When this evil breaks out into open view, as it does with great regularity, it is paid only momentary attention. There is much regretful nodding of heads and some breastbeating and then it is quietly but firmly shunted off to the sidelines.

The Luo family of a friend of mine (who prefers to remain anonymous) lived in Limuru in the turbulent days that followed the assassination of Tom Mboya. She told me that, at 6.25pm one evening, they fled for their lives as many Luos were violently chased from their homes in Central Province. Their friends, a family of four, did not survive to tell their story: they were hacked to death in their home, 10 kilometres from Uplands.

Those are the only facts that I know. More could no doubt be added to that meagre store, but my interest, for now, is not in what I know or do not know. Rather, my interest is in their silence. I feel it now as an immense, reproachful weight after the events of January 2008 plunged us back into the suspicions and hatreds of 1969, to which I had paid little mind, which I had assumed to be distant and barely relevant to our time.

This silence, I now believe, may be an act of witnessing, of refusing to give away a precious trauma to those of us who were not there to share it and may deny it the place that its owners have given it. What would I do with it anyway? Wouldn't I turn to my political science to explain it, to tidy it up and therefore reduce it to a comfortable size? My friend wrote that they made an "odd oath of silence" after they fled for their lives -- as if they feared that a language of understanding that denied the evil done to them would be one more affront, one more trauma to live through.

Truthful testimony will only be forthcoming if there is a place in our world for the witnesses' suffering. Otherwise, they retreat from a shared community and a shared destiny, and their silence makes it impossible to lance the boils before they explode into murder.

Evil hides in plain sight. It exists in the moment between cause and effect, folded between words, and is very often impervious to easy explanation. It is like the smell of a rotting carcass that is instantly recognisable as such even when it has never been encountered before.

The evil that showed its face to Kenyans in January and February is present when experts speak of poverty as the reason that an arrow was shot into Joseph's back. You can hear it when justifications for the murder of Kikuyus or Kambas or Luos or Kalenjins or Somalis or any of the many victims of Kenya's history are judged expressions of political dissent.

Ultimately coming to a reckoning of what has happened to us and what we are, and indeed whether we can live together peacefully, will require more than erecting commissions named Truth, Justice or Reconciliation.

The challenge is to use our imagination to sharpen our moral awareness of evil's presence. It is our mind's eye and ear that must take those bits and pieces of testimony that come to us via a hundred paths so that we reconfigure them into a powerful sense of right and wrong.

The witness is not merely a witness to her own experience but has experienced what we collectively are and have done. She is therefore a repository of who we are; she retains in herself an essential part of our nature that we can only commune with through our imaginative sensibility.

This re-imagining of a Kenya in which a single life is too precious, too monumental, to sacrifice at the altar of political expediency, demands courage and openness to the power of our imagination.