Tomorrow Will Come: Getting Justice in Kenya
The film Tomorrow Will Come: Getting Justice in Kenya is about civil society’s struggle against impunity and the International Criminal Court’s work in Kenya.
Participating in both the film and in the subsequent discussion is
Mr. Maina Kiai, a Kenyan human rights defender and newly appointed Special Rapporteur on freedom of assembly and association by the United Nations.
Discussion led by Mr. Robert Hårdh, Executive Director at Civil Rights Defenders
Date: Wednesday May 4, 2011
Time: 18:30 – 20:00. Coffee/tea and sandwich served from 18:00
Location: Stora Nygatan 26, Stockholm
Sign up via info@civilrightsdefenders.org
The seminar will be held in English.
The event will also be broadcast live online via Bambuser. You can ask questions to the speaker directly via the chat.
About the Author
Mr Maina Kiai has fought for the rights of oppressed Kenyans for so long a time.
Maina Kiai has created a great enemity in govt circles and mostly the ruling Kikuyu thugs & mafias who views Kiai as a traitor to the Kikuyu people.
Mr Maina should continue with his human rights good missions to the bitter end.
IDPs A scar on Kenyans’ conscience .
Thursday, 21 April 2011 00:04 BY NGUGI WA THIONG’O . As a newspaper reporter working for the Nation in 1964, I and a photographer were sent to cover an event at the Gatundu home of Jomo Kenyatta, the first President of Kenya.
It was a fundraiser for the victims of the devastating floods in Kano plains in Nyando, Nyanza. I expected to find big donors dishing out tonnes of cash and cheques.
But instead, Jomo Kenyatta and his Vice President, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga stood in the compound surrounded, not by the big donors of my imagination, but by a crowd of ordinary men and women from Murang’a. They were contributing whatever they had – in cash and kind.With compassion they wanted to help ameliorate the painful suffering of fellow Kenyans.
I had never met either of the two legendary leaders, face to face – individually or together – before. The photographer captured the only picture in which you’ll ever find Jomo Kenyatta, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o together.
But that is not the reason I have kept that picture with me the last 46 years. It’s the image of ordinary men and women from one part of our country extending a helping hand to their compatriots as a declaration of a shared pain and hope.
Unfortunately, we seem to have lost that sense of common hope and deliverance. Nothing exemplifies this today than the existence of internally displaced persons (IDPs). IDPs in Kenya are a continuing reminder of the wound we inflicted on ourselves. Death of the innocent is horrible, no matter the causes.
But, surely, no Kenyan should ever die in the hands of another Kenyan on the basis of their ethnicity. Nobody chooses the biological community into which they are born. It’s just a fact. Being Luo, Kikuyu, Kamba, Kalenjin, or any other of Kenya’s 40-something ethnic groups is one of the coincidences of history.
Political differences will never and should never end. Without clash of ideas and visions we would circle around same ideas…going nowhere. Let there be a thousand competing visions in Kenya. But let them be visions of how best to effect empowerment of the poor, the landless, the jobless, the working people, small farmers, fisher-people, and the herds-people of Kenya.
Every effort at all levels of our society must be made to heal the wounds by ensuring full restoration of the property rights of the victims of post-election violence. That must be the first and necessary step in the process. We must not forget these victims.
Unfortunately we Kenyans have a history of amnesia. Mau Mau guerrillas fought for our independence. Come independence, we forgot about them. The deaths of Tom Mboya, JM Kariuki, Robert Ouko have been forgotten.
In 1992, many people were killed and driven out of their properties. Again we forgot them, only to reenact the carnage that resulted in the current IDPs. If we don’t deal with our national wounds, then the wounds will just fester inside the soul of our body politic with terrible consequences for the future.
Kenyan leaders should have used the last tragedy as a national teaching moment – by what they say and do. No responsible leader should talk, behave or act as if he is at war with another community. None should target the customs of another community as some kind of political crime.
We must stop referring ourselves with the colonial word “tribe”. We should refer to communities by the names they call themselves. We talk of English people or simply the English; the French people or simply the French.
There are only two tribes in Africa: the haves and the have-nots. The haves are a very tiny tribe. The have-nots are the majority tribe. The gap between haves and have-nots is widening and deepening. That gap is the root of all instabilities in Africa. J.M. Kariuki once warned: You cannot build a society of ten millionaires on the shoulders of ten million beggars.
Leaders of all parties must promote policies that are on the side of the have-nots. Uniting these people and harnessing their energies for positive, common good must constitute the most urgent task and challenge of all leadership in Kenya and Africa today.
We must rebuild that Kenya of shared hopes and common deliverance which is symbolised by that picture of Murang’a people, who heeded cries of Kano Plain floods-victims, in 1964. They looked up at me, asking me to tell to the nation and the world their story of solidarity. It’s the picture of Kenya that I still hope we can build.
This is an abridged version of Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s remarks delivered this week in Los Angeles to welcome Prime Minister Raila Odinga on
We Need to Find the Unsung Heroes of the Election Violence Before it’s Too Late
By MAINA KIAI
Posted Friday, October 21 2011 at 18:55
On the evening of January 2, 2008, Dorothy Auma Muga was brutally gang-raped by five men in the Karagita area of Naivasha as she walked home from work in a flower farm. After finishing with her, the men told her to run saying in Kikuyu language, “thie ngui ino” (run you dog).
Damaged and weak, Dorothy took refuge in a Kikuyu neighbour’s house for the night, hiding under the bed. The next day she went back to the farm and spent four days in the woods by the lake hiding out, with no food, water or cover, shivering in the cold nights and fighting off mosquitoes, contemplating suicide.
On the eve of this year’s Mashujaa Day, Dorothy died in a Kisumu hospital, after more than three years of battling illness, poverty and joblessness. She, and the hundreds of others like her, was forgotten and ignored by government and local leaders. Local politicians, aware of the plight of IDPs in Kisumu, resolutely refuse to raise their issues publicly, because, as one of them told me, they “do not want to embarrass the Prime Minister.”
I met Dorothy in Kisumu in June 2009 as we made the documentary Getting Justice: Kenya’s Deadly Game of Wait and See, in which she featured. We had gone to film IDPs collecting their Sh10,000 stipend that the government had been giving out to them, reaching Kisumu a year after the process started in Eldoret and Nakuru.
I learnt a lot from Dorothy, including the fact that though the common narrative is that violence in Naivasha was supposedly “retaliatory” after the horrors of Eldoret, it had actually started there as early as December 30, 2007, increasing daily and targeting not the Kalenjin, as one would expect from “retaliation,” but Luo and Luhya in the area.
Dorothy talked of the increasing presence in Karagita from December of strangers — who she called “Mungiki” — and who always walked in groups, visibly armed with pangas, intimidating and beating up people.
She witnessed, the day after her rape, the slaughter of a Luo man she knew who was trying to escape with his wife and two children. She saw the two children hacked to death, before the group turned on him, slashing him and cutting off his penis. They then made his wife “eat” the penis.
Dorothy eventually made her way to the Naivasha Prison. But it was not easy there, and she told of how she drunk her own urine to ward off thirst. Unable to afford the Sh1,200 to get on the buses and coaches for Kisumu, she got into a refrigerated truck that took her to Migori where she was promptly hospitalised. She was eventually transferred to the “Russia” Hospital in Kisumu before finding her younger brother who took care of her until she recovered.
But her troubles did not end there. She still had to find a job, take care of her teenage daughter and herself and those struggles led to depression and frustration. We maintained contact and Dorothy’s refusal to give up, or to be bitter was inspiring. Her empathy for other victims and survivors was totally heartfelt.
Last year, we connected her with Mary, whose baby girl was burnt alive and she herself horribly disfigured in the Kiambaa church atrocity. They spent hours together, exchanging their experiences, both shocked that their narratives were so incomplete — understandably given their personal experiences — but comforting and encouraging each other to fight on.
And after that, every time we talked with Dorothy, she always asked after Mary, and insisted that we send her regards and best wishes. Dorothy told us afterwards that she felt a lot better after talking about her ordeals. She was part of a group of women in Kisumu raped in various parts of Kenya during the violence, including in Kisumu, but that group has dwindled from the 50 I met in 2009 to about 24 now as survivors die off, often from preventable and treatable causes.
Dorothy’s story is not unique. And the worst of it is that ordeals similar to hers continue, affecting thousands of women, whose only crime is to be poor and therefore invisible. The regime wronged Dorothy. And it is wronging the thousands of women, men and children whose stories and narratives can help us heal and understand each other better. These are the unsung heroes of Kenya, and our problems of intolerance and animosity toward each other will continue if we don’t recognise and deal with the issues they have and symbolise.