I love cross border travel. One of my frequent destinations is Rwanda. Kigali, that beautiful, serene city cradled by hills is my Mecca. A visit to the genocide memorial site is always the highlight. It is my grounding place. The place for reflection where I set my heart and priorities right. Underneath the serenity of that beautiful city lies a remainder of how far down a people can fall when ideals, feelings and convictions are left unchecked.
Fast forward to Monday morning. Commuting along Mombasa Road, my eyes caught sight of something that is stilling haunting me. A man lay on the ground, motionless, covered by a leso. What attracted me to notice the body were two heavily armed officers in camouflage. Watchful. Alert. They seemed out of place standing there.
It perplexed me, still does, how all of us seemed to have moved on barely hours after the mayhem that reigned barely hours ago. Life moved on. We were busy catching matatu, navigating traffic to get to the office on time as if just a few hours before, there weren’t bodies strewn on the streets. At the stage, everyone seemed busy minding their business. There wasn’t a single sign that lying on the dirty street was someone’s son, someone’s brother, maybe even a father.
We have moved from the beautiful nation of people with hearts full for each other to zombies functioning on auto pilot amidst the tragedy around us. We have trained our brains to compartmentalise and put far away things that we find too terrifying to face. We wake up, prepare for work, have breakfast and carry on; a people slowly dying inside. Completely desensitised.
Our conversations reflect how far gone we are. Online, you read posts of people excitedly sharing how they watched “three people being gunned down”. Their tone jubilant. In their eyes, they deserved it. In their understanding, it was a message to the leader on the opposite side. A show of power and a reminder to dissenters to comply or perish.
We pile the numbers of those dead in our heads. We analyse the trend in our mind not because we crave for a stop to the madness but simply because we need numbers to quote when the next cycle of violence visits our country. Slowly, bloodshed no longer terrifies us.
We are not okay as a nation and this calm we are living in amidst the bloodshed and chaos should terrify us. We are slowly losing our humanity and the oneness that once defined us is slipping. Like robots, we move forward refusing to internalise what is happening before our eyes as if, by ignoring it, we will magically go back to the Kenya we were before all this started. (When did all this start by the way?)
As our leaders keep silent for fear of upsetting their political alignment, as our religious leaders stay away and only come up for air when it suits them, we need to recall ourselves as citizens and refuse to allow our country to slide to desolateness. We do not have to experience a full blown war, we do not need to have our country torn apart to fully understand the devastation that blood spilling brings. We have seen enough already.
At this point, I am not even sure who I am talking to but I do know one thing, where we are at as a country is tragic. And if we citizens have any shred of patriotism left, we must refuse to let our hearts be hardened by what is going on around us and be humans first, be Kenyans first. We cannot normalise terror. We must choose to feel again. To break.
Because if we don’t, if we continue to casually talk of bodies in the streets, there will come a day when there will be no school to attend, no office to rush to and no Kenya to call home.
Ms Wekesa is a development communication consultant. [email protected]
By Faith Wekesa