Riot victims are real God’s bits of wood

I’ve been following with some interest comments on media of anti-riot police action on Kenyans demonstrating against the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission.

This is not to get any new information on the ugly incidents or to write some academic paper. Rather, I’m just trying to find out how ordinary Kenyans read such popular texts as newspaper articles and Facebook updates.

I’m inspired by a writer I came to know about only last week and fell in love with immediately: the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of the 1924 dystopian novel We.

Zamyatin believes that “true literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics”.

In saying this, he is opposing the Stalinist control of the art through censorship boards. He prefers art that would be considered “harmful” in its time but whose profundity would be appreciated “150 years later”.

I read Facebook updates about riots as “harmful” literature not because there is anything weighty in them that we’ll have to wait for more than a century to fully comprehend.

But such updates afford us a glimpse into the true nature of our society, a quality that may not be found in published works, where editors, censors, and other gatekeepers have worked to keep impure elements out. These texts offer us the real mess that is modern Kenya.

From the social-media texts, it appears that ethnicity trumps everything else in our country. Kenyans across ethnic divides have read traditional texts by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Grace Ogot, Francis Imbuga, Jonathan Kariara, Margaret Ogola, and John Kiriamiti with a fair amount of professional objectivity, regardless of the readers’ ethnicity.

ORDINARY PEOPLE

Probably only Henry ole Kulet has been given short shrift by local critics because of his ethnicity. He is not insulted; he is just ignored. However, social media texts and responses to them epitomise narrow and predictable ethnic identifications across the board, especially regarding the anti-electoral commission demos.

Kenya’s opposition would prefer the commission disbanded because it is allegedly compromised and likely to rig the 2017 poll in favour of the incumbents. On the other hand, the government insists that the commissioners can only be sent home within the confines of the constitution.

The irony is that the same constitution allows for the kind of demonstrations that the government is breaking with singular brutality.  Further, one wonders how in Britain individuals convicted of bribing IEBC officials are now in jail while the Kenyan electoral officials alleged to have taken those very bribes are still in office.

Pictures of Kenyans being clobbered by the anti-riot police have made the front pages of both local and international media.

These picketers are what the Senegalese author Sembene Ousmane would praise as “God’s bits of wood”, ordinary people who, contrary to traditional superstitions of their ethnic communities, have stood to be counted among those fighting for the liberation of their country.

The beating one of the alleged demonstrators, Boniface Manono, received at the hands of the police last week was dehumanising. He was kicked on the head, the torso, and everywhere else.  The police punctuated blows on Manono’s body with contemptuous rectal kicks. A slum dweller, Manono, was in in effect, gang-raped in the full glare of the media.

Like the Tunisian Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation that ushered in the Arab Spring in his North African country, the scandal of Manono’s beating would have, in a politically mature nation, catalysed far-reaching changes in Kenya’s leadership. Heads would have rolled.

But all we got from the scandal are jokes and memes even on Kenyan sites that claim to be fighting con-men, thieves, and their equivalent among our politicians.

One virtue we learn from studying literature is to develop a capacity to empathise with others. Any of us could have been Manono, being beaten senseless like a black Sowetan in apartheid South Africa.

Manono must be a hard wood. I’m not sure many of us would have come out of that beating alive. The fact that Manono didn’t die does not make the tragedy any less serious.

But in a country where everyone is aspiring to join the corrupt middle class and to be in the position of those currently taking bribes and running the economy down, even to the poor like me and you, Manono is an unfortunate fool.

To us, the hapless bloke is an animal just as he is in the eyes of the government and the opposition leaders, whose seat at the table of the corrupt he was fighting to secure for them. He and other victims of police violence will soon be forgotten like the plot of a badly written novel.

The ultimate irony, though, is that in denying being part of the demos and rejecting his anti-establishment credentials, Manono could also be ashamed of being part of God’s bits of wood. There is a chance that the demonstrators lack class consciousness. They just want to replace the current thieves with others of their own choice.

I must confess that I’ve not been reading as voraciously as I used to do a few years back. Trawling Facebook for lovers and insulting unresponsive objects of my burning passions on Twitter have taken a toll on my reading schedule.

APPLAUDING VIOLENCE

Be that as it may, besides toying with a little literary theory and criticism, I’ve still tried to read at least three books every week—mainly fiction, occasionally poetry, sometimes drama. I get them from all sorts of places, and I try to get hold of those that I must have missed in my realism-crammed school years.

That’s how I came across Zamyatin’s We, a dystopian novel allegorising post-1917 Russia. In the police state it conjures up, basic liberties, including the freedom to have sex, are frowned upon.

It is an important novel. Influenced by Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (an all-time favourite of mine), Zamyatin’s We is echoed in such later great works as George Orwell’s 1984.

Unlike the fictional science-saturated One State in Zamyatin’s work, Kenyan technology is still in its primitive phase. But our limited advancements serve the same purpose as in that dystopian world: primarily, to curtail our freedoms and force us to conform with what the state demands of its citizenry.

In Kenya, pieces of life-destroying equipment are turned into sex toys. They are maneuvered in Nairobi streets with the erotic tenderness of a naughty man who has not been to Sabina Joy for a long time.

You also see in the police and their admirers the kind of perverse pleasure Vaughan in JG Ballard’s Crash obtains from the sight of body fluids (semen, blood, vomit, excrement, brain matter, etc.) in victims of road accidents.

It is true that police brutality, especially against ethnic minorities, is common even in developed countries. But I haven’t seen any other society that openly applauds such violence the way some sections of the Kenyan society are doing.

In celebrating Manono’s beating because he comes from a “bad tribe” that wants to replace our thieves with their own, we are no different from the brute policemen that beat him or from those perverted others that seem to obtain erotic pleasure from feeding God’s bits of wood with tear gas.