Martin Kimani
2 November 2008
opinion
Bernard Orinda Ndege is an exceptional man in his capacity to forgive those who have so grievously hurt him.
Early on the morning of January 27, this 56-year-old Luo fisherman's nine children and two wives were murdered by a troop of young men.
Chanting war songs and brandishing weapons, they approached his small two-room house in the Ndigiti neighbourhood of Naivasha.
Their intentions were clear. They wanted Luos out of an area Bernard had lived in for 30 years. Fearing the worst, he urged his family and some neighbours to squeeze into his house, hoping the gang would not be able to get to them.
"Leta hiyo petrol, leta hiyo petrol," the attackers began shouting. Bernard told the Nation that they barred the door from outside, then doused the walls of the small house and set it on fire. Bernard and 19 other people were trapped inside.
As the smoke and heat built up, they screamed for mercy, choked on the smoke, felt the heat searing their flesh.
Terrified, disbelieving, Bernard, bearing the raw pink marks of the flames on his dark face somehow managed to struggle out of the house to go in search of help. But it was too late.
They lay dead, the children next to their mothers.
Bernard recognised them in spite of the horrifying charring of their flesh. Mary Atieno Orinda Ndege with her four children -- Silas Ochieng, who was turning 18; Alex Ndege, 13; Stephen Ochieng, 5; and the two-year old last born.
Janet Anyango, his wife of 14 years, lay on the ground with Hellen Atieno, Dan Omumo, Lawrence Omulo and Kennedy Omondi. She was pregnant, a week away from delivering.
Bernard had come to Naivasha as a young man, started and supported a family with his modest earnings from fishing in the lake.
This was the end of that journey. He told the Nation and the BBC that he was left with one last responsibility:
To take their bodies to his rural home in Karachuonyo for burial. That act of love, driven by the desire to preserve for his people and himself a final measure of dignity, granted their murderers the final foul victory.
They wanted to rid the area of this Luo man and his family who in their struggle to make ends meet, their hopes in their children and all the dreams that come with them, had somehow become part of a vast drama of bitterness and politicking that was not personally their own.
Bernard forgave the killers, noting that nothing could compensate him for his loss and swore to never to go back to Naivasha. The matter, according to him, was now with "God and the government."
This story is appallingly common. From rape in eastern Congo to genocide in Rwanda and the campaigns of terror in the Rift Valley, there is always a victim, a survivor, who tells reporters that she has forgiven the wrongs done him or her.
It is a story that allows its media vendors (if we are generous-minded about their motives) to demonstrate the resilience of the human spirit and the possibilities of reconciliation where none appears possible.
And with men and women like Bernard, such magnanimity is possible to believe in; they seem to point us toward a brighter dawn after an unimaginably dark night.
We witness them staggering painfully under a load that most of us cannot imagine, before they rise shakily to their feet and make for a distant point in the horizon that we call hope and goodness.
But, alas, they must be burdened with more.
They must carry the self-serving agendas of "forgiveness" for the rich and powerful who have driven our countries deeper into the grip of the cynical and destructive politics that we inherited from a distant colonial master.
On top of the pain of our Bernards and the destruction of their lives is heaped one last duty. To help us hide from our responsibility, to allow us to turn away from our duty to take courage and strike out at the destroyers and thieves to whom the lives of nine children and their mothers is an acceptable price to pay to hold on to their ill-gotten gains.
It is an obscenity to wilfully conflate Bernard's personal forgiveness with how we need to respond collectively. It is woefully insufficient to act as if the killers of his family were acting out personal pathologies when they were in fact pursuing a political project.
To confuse this fine man's expansive spirit and faith in God's justice with political reconciliation is to get it wrong, dangerously so.
Bernard has sworn that he will never go back to Naivasha and placed his earthly case before us. It means that the forgiveness he extended the killers is not the end of the matter. It is merely the act of a man who understands that personal vengeance will only add to his woes, and by this understanding asks that we deliver a justice that will leave him psychologically whole.
His act is not generous in the sense that he wants to soothe the conscience of the killers (and their sponsors) nor is his new life in Oyugis a sign that we are ready to march onward as if what happened on that morning in Naivasha is behind us.
Rather, Bernard is calling out to his God to deliver on his promise of heavenly justice, to repair and make whole the battered spirit. From us -- yes, us, because government is nothing but an assembly of individuals that we have chosen - Bernard demands we deliver on the promise of Kenyan lives as sanctified by the bitterly earned right of citizenship that underlies our struggle to forge a nation.
If Kenya is indeed a commonwealth and not a jungle of all men versus all men, where flames lick at the flesh of the innocent while their killers gorge themselves on roast meat, then Bernard needs to see justice done here on earth.
What of the killers of his family? What is the relation between their individual act of murder and the political project that they and their bosses were pursuing?
They may be racked with a crippling guilt but the turning of their personal universe does not address the rupture that they have caused to the broader values of community and nationhood.
Their sin is at once personal and social. They may fall on their knees and bang their foreheads on the ground to expiate the former but we, as a collective of people, are forced to respond to the latter.
How does an entire country go on its knees to ask forgiveness from Bernard and his family for having produced and stoked the political equation that visited him in January?
Surely the answer is that it is not for the president or the prime minister to express apologies from a dais.
Surely it makes intuitive moral sense that workshops and speeches on the need for "forgiveness" are not sufficient. Especially because Bernard has already taken that convenient arrow out of our quiver.
He has forgiven, so what is left to us but to pursue that call of justice that he has so forthrightly laid at our door?
If Kenya is to excise the lethal cancer of January from its body, instead of greedily attempting to live a false peace on the back of a forlorn Bernard and his personal courage, we should eject the word amnesty from our conversation.
To our ear, it should sound like the crackling of flames and the screams of pain that rent Kenya in January. Amnesty for the powerful should look like a panga dripping with blood or the televised police shooting of young men in Kisumu and Nairobi. Bernard has done his bit for his soul. Shall we do ours for the soul of Kenya?
Whereas Bernard forgave personally, we need to resent politically. His faith in God and us is strong enough to give us pause before we blithely move to betray it.
We should refuse to forgive those who killed his family and the people on whose behalf they acted. To love him, and surely that is what we most feel for him, is to resent them and that part of us that allows them to be our leaders.
We can express these sentiments concretely by insisting on the creation of a strong tribunal based in Kenya that draws on the Waki recommendations.
We can use our respective pulpits -- professional associations, church groups, unions, et cetera -- to tell our MPs and Cabinet ministers in no uncertain terms that to protect the chief perpetrators of the post-election violence from standing trial will destroy their political careers.
Should we, however, attempt to mirror Bernard's personal magnanimity with a public one, we shall be spitting on him and those who were victimised in January and the years past. It would be to go the way of communal cowardice, cursed to burn homes and vote in criminals for ever and ever, amen.
We are called to resist amnesty because it is what is humane and honourable. It is the call of our better natures and our only lasting national hope.
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