Kenya Burning Review In The Daily Nation

When Kenya Was Red, and It Wasn’t Valentine’s Day

By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO in The Daily Nation 4th March 2009

When Kenya Burning, the book of photographs taken during post-election slaughter was launched last week, a colleague who had an early peek remarked that it was a must have — but that one should not take it home where the children might land on it.

Kenya Burning is a very uncomfortable book to look at. But I have seen as bad, or worse from the Rwanda genocide of 1994 that killed nearly one million people, and the grim work of the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels in northern Uganda.

The book, however, should not be kept away from the children — not forever. It should be kept and given to them as a coming of age present, because it will give them an education about their country and its people that nothing can equal.

Kenya Burning, like other similar chronicles of savage rage are like giant onions with endless layers. You keep peeling off one, and another one confronts you.

Last year, we thought we had seen the worst of post-election photos, and now we discover, with photos of people with knives sticking out of their faces, a severed hand on display, and a young man whose mouth was opened with a machete up to the back of his head, that we haven’t seen it all.

Yet, even with its shocking photos, there is more. There are still many layers to peel and reveal the ugliness that befell Kenya in January 2008.

I remember first meeting the Sierra Leonean documentary journalist Sorious Samura in late 2000, after CNN, and BBC and ITV in UK had aired Cry Freetown, perhaps the most harrowing tale of savagery captured on film.

Later, he told me that Cry Freetown was only the tip of the iceberg he had recorded. He told me things I couldn’t believe, and asked if I wanted to see for myself. I said No.

And that is why those who are able to reconcile after such atrocities, are exceptional human beings. For while they are willing to forgive, they probably always live with the burden of forgiveness.

One might forgive, but many years later learn that his uncle was not just slashed to death with a machete, but was disembowelled and left, still alive, for the vultures to finish the job.
So he might be able to “understand” and put behind the murder of his uncle, but can never come to terms with the bestiality of his killers.

And so to forgive, is also to be haunted.

And because there are many layers of onion to peel, every other year exhumes the memory of the crimes, with new stories about how the victims met their end.

Like in Rwanda, when they started the relatively more “lenient” gacaca (traditional justice) courts, the alleged genocide perpetrators revealed mass graves no one else knew existed.

Not too long ago, on one of the anniversaries of the genocide, I went to a small rural area that thought after more than 10 years, it had found all the graves of the genocide victims.

However, this area that is smaller than Nairobi, had found the remains of 360 people secretly after suspected killers confessed at a local gacaca court.

Every man or woman who takes part in these killings, is a walking secret. And until they all speak, the truth of what happened can never be fully known.

Like other records of mass killing, Kenya Burning serves up many anonymous victims. In the heat of the moment, the rush by photographers, the flight of the would-be-victims, no one has time to ask for names.

So the first pictures we see are of just that, dead people. Lots of them. They have no names. We don’t know them.

Then Kenya Burning comes out, we recognise them, and soon we know their names. We find out about their relatives and friends. We put stories to their blank stares. Which is just as well, for no innocent person should ever die anonymously.

Real and wild tales about how they were killed, and whispers about the people who murdered them follow.

At the next anniversary, the Press interviews the loved ones they left behind. And then there will be more books, and films, and in this way, the memory of the victims somehow lives on.
So, the good that books like Kenya Burning do is, they enable us to be afraid of ourselves. Of the evil that we carry inside us. The depths of evil we can sink into. And to fight not to be the worst that we can be.

cobbo@nation.co.ke