Recently, a friend reached out to me requesting if I would join a peaceful protest over the death of George Floyd at the US Embassy here in Kenya. This got me pondering on how we are too quick to condemn and castigate police brutality elsewhere and not here - back at home. For the record, I don’t have an issue whatsoever with people protesting about the incident that happened in the US. Floyd’s death ignited worldwide protests and sparked conversations that made me reflect on our Kenyan case.
Being in the doldrums of poverty is criminal enough in the eyes of the Kenyan Police Force, much as it is being Black in the Southern States. Many police brutality casualties here in Kenya are the poor. The genesis of police brutality is mainly the orientation at training perpetuated by the institutional desires to criminalize both poverty and the black race. Sadly many of us crying foul of the Minneapolis incident fail to realize that the same thing has been happening right at our doorstep and for the longest time.
Police brutality and institutional violence are Kenyan realities! According to the Independent Policing Oversight Body (IPOA), 15 Kenyans have been killed by the police since the government imposed the dusk -to- dawn curfew back in March. Yassin Moyo, a 13 year old boy was shot by the police from his family home’s balcony. An elderly homeless man alias Vaite was gunned down by police in Mathare.He was old and frail, missing most of his teeth, usually drunk or tipsy but always friendly. He never bothered anyone in Mathare where he slept outside a shop with his knees curled up to his chin.He’d been a fixture for nine years, always collecting plastic bottles and bags to make ends meet. In another incident, a tomato seller died in Kakamega after being hit by a tear gas canister.
So why does an incident of police brutality (informed by a manifestation of racism that very few of us understand, are imminently affected by or will ever experience first hand) gain traction and capture our imagination on social media, more than say, an innocent young man being shot on his family home’s balcony?
To understand this interesting phenomenon, one must look at the genesis of our policing system. The Kenya Police Service is a relic of the British colonial system. The primary objective, informing its formation was the need to protect the power, wealth, interests and lives of the minority white settlers. Every other function the police served was secondary and subservient to this primary objective.
The minority white settlers were Invaders Lording over a heterogeneous population of black people whose ethnic, cultural and economic diversity meant that different groups of this population presented separable, unique threats to the system. Furthermore, very few of these threats were purely criminal in nature, in fact, many of them were a manifest agitation for social, economic and political rights and freedoms.
As such, the only way for the police system to effectively achieve it’s primary objective was to criminalize the one thing that the black majority had in common, ie poverty! The more extreme the poverty was, the higher it ranked on the criminal scale. This was the philosophical foundation behind policing Kenya then. Poor people were deemed guilty even when proved innocent by judicial mechanism.
Unfortunately, this philosophical foundation not only carried over after independence, we allowed it to permeate and infiltrate our society, beyond the security system and apparatus. Many of us subconsciously criminalize poverty. It’s not a comfortable reality to confront, because we are wired to think of ourselves as good. But Alas, that is our attitude.
What that attitude does to those of us living outside of poverty is it allows us to separate ourselves from the brutality that our security apparatus metes on the poor. It allows us to think that they deserve what they get. It frees us of the burden of empathy! It frees us from the burden of anger and condemnation.
And because majority of us on social media aren’t poor, because very few of us will have an interaction with the police (save for those in the traffic department), it takes an incident in Minneapolis, for us to be angry at oppression that is so abundantly manifest at home and deeply perennial.
So unless we decriminalize poverty in our hearts and minds, we shall never be as angry at how brutal our police service (read force) is, to our Kenyan brothers and sisters, as we have been, at the Minneapolis cops, these past few days.
Ours is a traditional problem intensely embedded and whose foundations we have fearfully failed to interrogate.Poverty and race or any other calibration of sorts is not a recipe for such intolerance or prejudice.As a matter of fact discrimination must not subsist.