Over the weekend, I watched The Voice of Hind Rajab, a Palestinian film about five year old Hind, who spent hours on the phone with emergency workers begging them to come rescue her after the car she and her family were traveling in was attacked by the Israeli army. Hind was the sole survivor. Stuck in the car with the bodies of her family members, she stays on the phone with workers from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society begging for help as they try to get permission from Israeli authorities to secure a safe route for ambulance operators to reach her.
We know the story of Hind because we watched as it broke on social media in 2024. We know that in the end Hind and the ambulance crew sent to her are killed by Israeli soldiers, and their bodies are only recovered 12 days later after Israeli troops finally withdrew from the area. Yet, we stay glued to the film to end, unable to look away from the grief and anger of the cast as they enact Hind’s last hours alive, and battle with their own emotions to stay optimistic for her. You should watch this film.
Of course, we don’t need a documentary re-enactment to show us the horrors of the Israeli occupation in Palestine, as these horrors have played out on our phone screens for years on end and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight, still- but I am glad that this piece of work exists. It did not win the Oscar it was nominated for and it still hasn’t managed to stop the genocide in Gaza, which is ongoing.
But the film does something very important; it cuts through the desensitisation and fatigue that have made audiences numb to the plight of Palestinians. This story about this one girl does something that witnessing mass killings and torture and dehumanisation doesn’t- it re-ignites our empathy and compassion for Palestine. For the one hour run time of the film, we see ourselves in the Red Crescent workers desperately fighting to keep it together and we are with Hind in that car full of bodies as soldiers advance, alone and scared out of our minds.
This is the power of stories, and Kenya has no shortage of its own tear jerkers.
Very often, we journalists are at the forefront of bringing stories into our homes and hearts. We sit with families who have been devastated by the floods and tell you about their dead kin and their destroyed businesses. We cover fires and conflicts and famines and other preventable tragedies, helping you to count losses and make sense of it all.
Like the first time I saw a human brain.
It was on Thika Road, on a night when I rushed to cover the aftermath of a police shootout near the Traffic Police headquarters. I was a cub reporter at the Daily Nation and the tip had come in through the newsdesk hotline. I got there just before the police cleared the scene, to see the car that the suspects had been driving, so peppered with bullets it looked like a sieve, leaking blood onto the tarmac. Inside were three dead men, one with his head split open by a bullet.
The horrors persist but so do the joys.
While the sad stories stay with you the longest, what keeps you going are the joys because sometimes things work. Like getting the opportunity to observe groundbreaking surgery at Kenyatta National Hospital, standing close enough to an open chest to touch the beating heart within it, after watching surgeons battle and succeed to save a patient’s life. Or sitting with a business person who details how they built their success brick by brick, beating the systemic odds to emerge on the other end triumphant and happy. Or landmark court cases that give families relief after years of battling the slow wheels of justice. And so on.
What is a society without its storytellers?
The ability to tell stories, and the capacity to be moved by them is a uniquely human trait.
Our ancestors told stories orally before the advent of writing. People travelled long distances to bring messages and take messages back with them, an inefficient email thread if ever there was one. In western Africa, griots were the bedrocks of society and culture, functioning as stewards of history, passing stories and genealogies down through narrations and music.
Stories formed identities, creating a means through which we could cultivate shared belief, values and meaning. They help us figure out who we are and why we are here. They did it for our ancestors and they do it for us today.
We are now in the 21st century where billionaires own the media and create powerful machines that are taking over the role of storyteller and story consumer – they are mediating our realities and creating what we consume, then consuming it for us and regurgitating it back to us. We accept it because the thirst for stories is encoded in our DNAs. We cannot do without stories.
We can, however, decide to take back some of our humanity by making better decisions about what we pay attention to. Whose stories are we consuming, how are they created, who do they serve? Established legacy media institutions are important, but they can be fallible, known to be more likely to bend to systemic pressure than be the vanguards of change.
We have seen this happen with behemoths such as the BBC when they declined to air Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, a film about Palestine that tells the stories of Palestinian doctors working in Gaza amid the occupation. And now The Voice of Hind Rajab only exists because an independent film maker thought that it was an important story to tell, and had the gumption to tell it.
Which is why I am encouraged by the emergence of alternative media in Kenya (much as I may be biased because I am a columnist here). I believe alternative media has never been more important as we try to push back on institutional capture, reclaim empathy and compassion, and celebrate the joy of stories. We need more independent media because the stories of our times should be told by as many people as possible, in as many ways as possible, for as many people as possible. They should be by the majority, for the majority.
Billionaires and regimes do not represent the majority.
