NDERITU: Oral stories an art of keeping indigenous knowledge

I asked a mother whose two sons joined Al-Shabaab why she thinks they did so. Holding back tears, she answered, “It’s the ideology.”

‘By ideology, you mean what those who radicalised your boys taught them, don’t you,” I asked gently. Shaking her head from side to side, she said, “no, it’s much deeper than that. It is the power of those radicalising to tell stories in such compelling ways that listeners feel obligated to commit violent acts.”