I am terrified of the police. If I lose my life, naturally or otherwise, I hope the void is really an empty space where I will never have to interact with a human law enforcement agent again. Anytime I see a uniformed man or woman, I grow vigilant and almost always think, “Fuck the police!” I understand they are someone else’s mother or father, uncle or auntie, a niece or nephew, a husband, a wife, a lover, but the Kenyan police have also been someone’s killer; murderers.
After the digitized and televised death of Boniface Kariuki. After the image of Eric Shieni’s brain matter on the street outside Parliament. After the overnight cleaning of its streets, Nairobi CBD is a graveyard. One whose fucked-upness does not end at Kenyan borders.
It is 2025. We are in Soka University in Hachioji, Tokyo. Three students from the University of Nairobi. Kerubo and I are seated outside the Student Market, a small cafeteria of sorts. The date is June 28th, and I am crying, sobbing really. After a year since June 25th, someone new has been shot on live TV after demonstrations break out over kidnapping and abduction in Kenya. Kerubo understands this but does not break a tear, and the third of us, Patrick, is somewhere in Soka enjoying baseball practice, watching and playing FIFA or planning a karaoke night for the weekend. Patrick has been socially busy since we came to Japan in late March, just in time for spring.
But the beautiful Sakura fell fast and many more days have passed. Kerubo and Patrick are younger than me, growing apathetic and don’t see the point of my crying, especially publicly. So far, Kerubo and I have folded into the Japanese woman’s meekness. We speak when spoken to, keep our opinions to ourselves and have earned the ‘good people’ characterization. Today, I don’t want to be a good African woman. I want to protest and shame my government abroad. But am I willing to brave two bus rides and a train ride to the Kenyan Embassy in Central Tokyo? Am I willing to be labeled crazy and risk my visa revocation all because I want to feel like I am doing something? Anything to participate in proclaiming, Ruto Must Go!?
Patrick and Kerubo don’t think there is anything to do and spending prison time in Asia is too risky an after-effect for a democracy you, a 27 year old, can barely understand, let alone vaguely change. “But have you seen how Albert’s body was being handled at Mbagathi Hospital in that video? Ni kama si binadamu! And how Kariuki has been shot hapo Moi Avenue, juu tu anauza masks?”
They have seen the videos but the institution we are in for a semester abroad is internationally populated and sadly, Kenya’s problems are not global. The Iranian-American war takes precedence in conversations and to say a country in East Africa is burning, again, will only leave you with more questions than comforting. Why are they demonstrating? Is William Ruto that bad a president? What is wrong with Kenya? You too do not have answers and this is not the first time you feel like you are losing too much. Losing what you did not even know you had to hold dearly: your sanity.
In 2024, a part of me died on June 25th and I suddenly woke up in August. I barely remember July and my memory of the last half of that year is spotty. However, I do remember Saba Saba day. For once, I was not at the protest alone. Prior to July 7th, I had met and befriended a young man on a WhatsApp community. He was a medic who worked at Mbagathi Hospital and during the previous weeks, he and others in the field had done their best to keep track of the gunshot-related wounded victims but how do you save lives while protecting your own?
On this day, outside the House of Leather behind the Bomb Blast Park, we caught our breath after an afternoon of fleeing the cops near City Hall. There, a General Service Unit officer had stopped the group of what appeared to be corporate workers who we had joined and demanded we present our IDs. The young man from Mbagathi Hospital and I were terrified, our ID cards would show we were 28 and 26. The very definition of Gen-Zs. Fortunately, the older women in the group pleaded how they were only leaving work and did not have any business with maandamano. In the few minutes of this brief exchange, the officer had been joined by four others and there we stood: a group of Kenyans begging a group of armed men to let them pass and walk through their own city.
Behind Bomb Blast Park, with a view of Haile Selassie Avenue, the young man from Mbagathi Hospital and I watched as a policeman dragged an unarmed young man onto a waiting truck. “What have I done?” the young man was asking the policeman.
In Kenya, there is very little to do before you are shot, abducted or disappeared. An online post will get you killed and while half the country will riot, the other half will watch on screens, sympathize and warn you, Kenya is not for fools, shut your mouth if you want to live. It does not matter if the life you are living is pathetic, at least you have it.
After the truck pulled off onto the Express Way, my Mbagathi Hospital friend and I made a silent decision: we were not going to die for our country, not on that Monday at least. So we walked towards Bus Station, where I could catch a matatu towards Manyanja Road and he, towards Mbagathi. While we crossed Tom Mboya Street, everywhere we looked were thugs and goons who did not seem Kenyan and definitely were not Gen-Zs or young millennials. At the junction behind Afya Centre, we cautiously walked past a group of GSU officers watching as the Quick Mart store was vandalized and looted.
We shook our heads, walked on and understood, we had lost.
