Beautiful Black Bodies; or how a Kenyan kid discovered his fleeting worth.
It’s the 80’s Nairobi, and I’m about 5 years old, trying to figure out how the world works, as all kids do. We learn from our parents first, watching them ceaselessly so we don’t miss a thing. We catch on pretty early that the world outside is rough. Our grownups come home, and the scuffmarks show on their bodies and faces. Their scars become more perceptible to us the older we get, and then we start to develop our own. We discover that our socialization is focused on getting us ready for an unforgiving world where our worth is negotiable, but more on that in a bit.
My peak observation time happened at 9pm. News time. That was by far the most intriguing adult ritual to me. The aggressive shushing at 8:59 (“Mnafaa kuwa mmelala ata!”) led to a sacred half hour, when a talking head in a grainy box told us what happened that day. I learnt quickly that all that stuff was important. Mum and Dad (and visitors if they were there) would stare at the screen, involuntary facial expressions on, Dad frowning and Mum squinting. In between stories, there were zealous interjections, analyses, and firsthand accounts, from the people I trusted the most, prompted by a stranger on a screen.
We would echo those very thoughts on the playground the next day. Early on, we’d simply mimick what we heard, then we’d catch on the patterns – who was bad, who was good, who was despicable, who was to be laughed at, who was to be feared (notice, all Who’s, because ours is a politics of persons and personalities). When our “opinions” were subjected to scrutiny by our peers, we’d get enraged, because it was our infallible parents’ thoughts being brought into question. Before long, we were uttering thoughts that sounded like our own. And maybe they became us. Who knows for sure when this version of the world exists on the doctrines of a powerful few?
So, the news broadcasts on KANU’s VOK/KBC followed a standard format: Moi news first always, then local news, then international news, which was mostly from outside the continent. But sometimes, they talked about South Africa…
Friends, the broadcasts from South Africa were something brutal. When you heard the buzzwords – South Africa, Johanessburg, Soweto, Mandela, ANC – the vibe in the room changed instantly. There was a collective bracing; a sucking in of air, everyone sitting up, and more shushing of an already silent room. It was almost a sure bet that the footage — current or archival — would include its own sordid format: black people bounding through the townships, chanting and singing, making their way to the barricades manned by white policemen, sitting on those unsightly armoured vehicles while others stood in formation; helmets on, rifles and truncheons raised. Every time we wondered why those poor black people couldn’t see what was coming. Then the inevitable savagery would begin, and what was left was smoke and dust, and black bodies lying in the sun, blood seeping from them, pooling in the dust or trickling on tarmac. The injured or deceased person – young, old, male, female – was caked in dirt, their body twisted and mangled. And sometimes, you watched the killing happen. Those images of Africans taking bullets and falling mid-run were beamed worldwide. It wasn’t Cry Freedom or Sarafina! There was no score or film grain or slow mo. It was real blood, real mourning and wailing, real dead Africans. My sheltered, young brain couldn’t perceive the levels of suffering being wrought on people who looked like me. On colour TV, in that sacred half-hour ritual.
Those images became a landmark in our subconscious. We saw no such treatment of white bodies in the media. We were learning in our formative years that black people were expendable, and images of their mutilation were an authorized public affair. When we were sent to the TV set to turn up the volume, the room steeled itself, adjusting for hardship. As I backed away from the TV and the footage played, a physical sensation set in. A tightness in the chest, an involuntary tremble of the body, a sick taste at the back of the mouth, a freezing of the muscles. It was trauma that I was desperate to adapt to. And “trauma” is as far as the language can go with that feeling. There was something else under it. Another dialect being communicated here, one where those Broken Black Bodies cried out to you through the screen.
“See me.”
Now, Kenya wasn’t the island of democracy that those foreign correspondents used to describe. The 90’s alone saw several public acts of police cruelty killings happen, as if a bloody baton had been passed up. We saw footage of bodies fall as Moi’s regime hit peak blood thirst. We heard of how they broke bodies and souls in the Nyayo House chambers. We saw petty criminals get beaten, necklaced, then burnt to death (a street execution method we borrowed from black South Africans). The news carried headline images of a dead politician, his charred remains displayed as the government stated that he self-immolated, shot himself in the head and threw himself into a river. We rubbernecked at traffic jams formed around mangled bodies at accident scenes, lying there before getting collected and carted off in canvas-covered police pickups or the trunks of 504’s; the same ones that carried gunned down thieves and innocent bystanders felled by “stray bullets”. Then there were the 90s’ tribal clashes (a benign term for a ruthless extermination), then August 7th, then 2007 (Kenya owes you forever, Boni), then Uhuru’s regime arrived and now we can’t keep up: Garissa, Westgate, Mpeketoni, Kismayu, Kibera, Moyale, Eastleigh, 14 Riverside, Likoni, Mathare, 2013, 2017 and today, when several killings by police during a pandemic have put us at the top of perhaps the most unenviable global list. These images confront us habitually, and still, they are akin to assault. Broken Black Bodies traumatize us, while they are paraded by Caucasian storytellers like trophies (for trophies).
And let me talk about those white men we’d see in Soweto, beating and stomping and shooting to kill, then issuing statements of absolution. Today, those white men have names and twitter profiles and manifestos. Cameras zoom in on their smirks as they crush the necks of black men. Videos surface of them later being ordinary, doing the same shit we do. They’re granted mics and airtime and back-stories. They are lone wolves and misunderstood celibates, their penance issued via prayer and alms from people who look like them.
You need to understand what it does to us when these fully realised white beings are projected right into the stars, while their black victims’ faces just make it off of graffiti murals. You need to think about how our traumas reanimate and mutate when you exonerate these people with silence and diversion. You need to understand how deep we dig into our sovereignty to tolerate you, and sit at the table with you, and take up justice and not retribution.
And do you think it ends with those white people on that side? I, an African in Africa, sees facsimiles of those terrible humans on my TV everyday. My countrymen. Unbroken bodies that happen to be black, empowered by your secular and sacred creeds and titles. Carrying on your fucked up legacy, breaking us every which way. And you taught them well! They keep their bank balances profuse, their brains disengaged and their consciences intact. No sense of place. Of memory. Of being. Their knees on our neck as our own cameras zoom in on their smirks for hours every single day. Then your people, now enlightened by peace, privilege and prosperity, come back to tell us how to live and love and create and innovate and do business and govern ourselves. There are not enough ways to say GTFOH.
A Google search of ‘Police Brutality in Kenya’ will bring up a multitude of images including this additional take of the picture seen across the world. Creator: CARL DE SOUZA | Credit: AFP/Getty Images
We weren’t created with coping mechanisms to endure the murder of our kindred. We don’t just get over that shit. Our terror doesn’t dissipate into obscurity. It doesn’t transmute, or translate or transfer. As long as the world maintains this defunct version of itself, as long as we are denied recompense, it sinks and spreads until it is an omniscient thing, free of space and time. We are incapable of forgetting, and consequently, neither is the entire damned world.
The trauma suffered by those before me leads the way, almost always, back to that tiny living room, where a trembling kid saw real-life black people disintegrating on the screen. And those Beautiful Black Bodies told us what colour we were. And what kind of world we’re born into. And how our blood changes hues when it hits dust and concrete and gets singed by the sun and camera flashes. They tell us to stay strong and limber and shining, even as we weep and ululate and sing dirges and dance into the morning.
That little kid is me still, confronted by a fresh terror almost daily, and just like then, I want to shift, or adjust. or steel myself or look away. But there is no room to do that any longer. Not until this present stupidity ends. I will turn up the volume and listen and read and watch, and let those picture do what they will. And whatever becomes of that, let it be.
“See me.”
See you.
Title Photo credit: A woman protests a military occupation of Soweto in 1985. Paul Weinberg, Published by University of Cape Town for its “Beyond The Barricades” photo collection.