Only a nation running on empty can be so unfeeling towards victims of State terror

By Peter Kimani

Kenya: A Google search of Nyayo House trawls half a million files in 0.20 seconds, with specific prompts of Nyayo House Torture Chambers or Torture Chambers Pictures.

A click on the pictures portal leads to an array of https://cdn.standardmedia.co.ke/images aggregated from years of memorials, when the group going by the impossible name of Nyayo House Survivors and their families assemble there and recall their pain, and their good fortune of having lived to tell their stories.

If ever there was a shrine of tears, to paraphrase the late Francis Imbuga’s novel by the same title, then it is Nyayo House.

This week, more survivors and their families congregated at Nyayo House and recalled their suffering once more; grown men speaking in trembling voices, tears rolling freely as they remembered their traumatic experiences.

That happened years back, now the new torture for the survivors is to remind us not to forget their pain, and also remind us they are yet to be compensated for the violations.

Many, it was reported, have been given financial awards by the courts that the Government is yet to honour, perhaps because the State is waiting to collect cuts from parastatal chiefs to replenish our national coffers which, in all estimation, must be running on empty.

The absurdity about our country is that no one feels upset at all about the dehumanising spectacles that we subject fellow citizens, especially those that have been humiliated before. It is as if we revel in humiliating them further, taunting them for more details, much the same way a rape victim is raped anew every time an insensitive policeman seeks to hear the details of their ordeal afresh.

But the mitigation that you are likely to hear from the Jubilee administration is that those are “historical” injustices that took place before they took office, and plead for patience and promise to settle everything in the fullness of time.

I want to propose such pronouncements should be met with a little anger, and a demand that we deserve better, but I remembered that might be misconstrued as intended to cause disaffection against a democratically elected Government.

So I will hold the thought and say, as our people sigh collectively: Ni sawa tu (It’s alright).

It is alright to pick men, largely on account of their names and suspected political affiliations, keep them in darkened, water-logged cells for months, squeeze their testicles with pincers, and once they are free, listen to their stories for entertainment.

I think the latter motivation is particularly apt; there is nothing as therapeutic as laughter, especially when it is at someone else’s expense. And the beauty about the Nyayo House tales is that invention is not necessary; you access it raw, to invoke the comic show, Churchill Raw.

Talking of which, there was something poignant on the show recently. Churchill toured a school and asked his routine questions: what do the children make of this or that word. Recently, he asked: “What’s Mau Mau?”

“Compensation,” trilled a little girl’s voice. All she has heard all her life about the former freedom fighters is their quest for compensation. It’s a struggle that has lasted 50 years and many of the fighters will go to the grave without tasting justice.

But the greatest injustice that most have lived through is not the lack of compensation, but our collective failure to recognise that a grave wrong was committed to them, and in our silence, we are complicit in the charade.