Martin Kimani
3 August 2008
column
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.
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