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Kenyan police have a history of doing unspeakable things to their own people

Saturday January 24 2015

Some drug-crazed Pakistani thugs don’t like the idea of children receiving an education; so they burst into a school and murder scores of pupils.

An American cop on a street patrol spots a black youth minding his own business; he thinks the young man, being black, is menacing, so he shoots him and the authorities decide the cop has no case to answer.

Thousands of miles separate these two crimes, but they are brought close together by the madness informing the actions of their perpetrators.

A proper education – we may argue about what that means later – pushes back the curtains of ignorance, obscurantism and superstition. That is dangerous for any ideology that is totally committed to backwardness.

A black youth walking the streets at night represents a threat because he could be hungry, jobless and seemingly without a future. At the very least, he must be angry at the world and the rotten hand that history has dealt him down the centuries. So he could burst into deadly action at any time, and the white policeman, knowing he belongs to the race that wronged the young man – or so the young man must think -- is taking no chances.

History has the nasty habit of burdening the present with the deeds of the past, and, at several removes, these past experiences are bound to be misconstrued by individuals finding themselves with choices to make.

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For the Pakistani ignoramuses, a modern education makes for inquisitive minds, and this must needs lead to questioning old dogmas and ancient taboos. The sooner you nip it in the bud the better. Centuries of indoctrination are not about to be unlearnt in a weekend.

The memories of slavery and its attendant dehumanisation are still fresh in the minds of most Americans who care to remember, and random acts of discrimination against black people in that country will not go away simply because a black man sits and sleeps in the White (sic) House.

Plus, the trigger-happy culture of a significant section of the US means all too often that one has to shoot one’s way out of one’s (real or perceived) problem.

Children and young people become easy targets for the kind of bigot I’m discussing here, because they are usually unarmed and their resistance may be nil. Most times, all they can do when faced by their assailants is either run or duck under tables. Or shout slogans.

It’s the last that those kids did in Nairobi when they confronted the forces of “law and order” wielding tear gas canisters. The elementary school pupils were protesting against a “land grabber” who they claimed had invaded part of their school land and constructed a wall around it; they leaned against the wall and it came tumbling down.

This was apparently enough to bring in riot police who proceeded to lob tear gas canisters among the little learners, some of them as young as seven. This scene was televised across the globe, making many viewers wonder how such a thing could happen.

Yet there’s no surprise here. The point about history informing our present applies here as well. Our police forces, all of them vestiges of the old colonial order, have not changed since the days when they were told to meet any threat to “public order” with force.

The threats may be from political opponents of the regime, rioting hawkers, terrorists or little schoolchildren disrupting the plans of an “investor.” The police did not shoot, but there’s no telling what they may do next time.

Though the Kenyan police force is no different from the others in the region, it has a special pedigree, having been steeped in a unique culture of brutality back in the days of the so-called Pipeline during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. The British made them do unspeakable things to their own people, and bad habits die very hard.

Yet there was a redeeming factor. The force apologised, and the president castigated their actions. For which, kudos to Uhuru! In our neighbourhood, police never apologise, and politicians don’t dare criticise them.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]

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