Don’t turn a blind eye to injustice as police tear-gas little ones

The first words I learned in my mother tongue were the ones that meant, ‘I’m going to beat you’. They were never translated because to do so would have watered down the threat of severe punishment considerably. Some things just don’t sound the same in English as they do in ‘Kenyan’, no matter which ethnic community you come from. Much as she said she would, my mother never quite got round to giving me a good smacking. But she threatened so many times that the words themselves became terms of endearment. I laughed them off often. With the benefit of hindsight, I can imagine how frustrated she must have been at this little person who thought she was the master of her mother’s universe.

Turns out that the universe is not in the habit of turning a blind eye to injustice. Courtesy of the little person who now rules the roost in my household, I’m experiencing the exact taste of my own medicine. My frustration levels are clinical because she was born with a laughing gene and it is especially active when I threaten to thwack her behind. Anyone who’s interacted with a three-year-old knows how they do. They stretch your boundaries as far as they will go and just when you’re about to snap, they turn on the charm talking about, "I love you mummy, you’re the best Mama in the whole wide word."

Mischief

This is usually after they’ve scaled the wall cabinet to douse all your books with some suspicious looking – and extremely pungent – lumpy, brown concoction. Cracked the television with a paper weight and then tried to hide the damage with a permanent black marker. Given the walls a fresh coat of crayon. And thrown a few glasses out of the window, all in 10 minutes. You come out of the washroom and walk straight into World War III. Where these little people find the energy and presence of mind to be so creatively destructive is a mystery as old as time. Where their parents find the self-control not to lock them away in a basement until they are old enough to vote is another.

Children of nursery-going age are impossible to manage. If you fancy a few grey hairs without the benefit of advanced age, a pre-schooler will oblige you with unrestrained pleasure. The only reason they make it beyond their early years is because their playfulness is contagious and their ‘good cop’ game is strong. They’ll hit you with a cluster bomb of monumental transgressions and then offer up the sweetest smile, with eye’s sparkling, dimples creasing their cheeks, hands clasped behind their backs and that cute little tilt of the head that says, “How could you not love this angelic face?”

Police brutality

That’s the thing with children, they keep it moving. Just because they used your nail polish to practice drawing on their white school vests, or gave the floor a quality shine with an entire tub of margarine, this doesn’t mean that they will not clamber onto your lap to lay their head on your bosom at the next available opportunity. Little people are beautiful mash-up of contradictions. But no matter what it is that they’re getting up to, at the end of the day, it’s all love. And nothing is more precious to a parent than their child. Parents place such a high premium on the lives of their children that it’s a wonder they let them out of their sight at all. I remember clearly how annoyingly difficult it was to leave my daughter in pre-school on her first day; the tears (mostly mine) were very inconvenient. These days I’ve learned to cope. For the sake of sanity, I try not to think about all the things that could go wrong.

Which is why my brain is still refusing to register what happened at a nursery school in Kisumu last Monday. Which parent can imagine dropping their child at nursery school only to learn from social media that a contingent of reckless policemen charged into the playground and teargassed them? What kind of policemen lob tear-gas canisters at a group of 3 – 7-year-olds and then stand by as they choke on the fumes? It boggles the mind. Fellow Kenyans, state violence against children cannot be our new normal. More outrage is needed. But even if you choose to remain silent, or worse still attempt to defend the indefensible, one thing is for sure: the universe is not in the habit of turning a blind eye to injustice. For those who deserve a comeuppance, it will surely come.

 Ms Masiga is Peace and Security editor at The Conversation Africa