If Kenyans must die, let it not be like hogs

The killing of a city lawyer, his client and a taxi driver this week called to mind the late Jamaican poet and policeman, Claude McKay. And more specifically, his poem, ‘If We Must Die’. Listen to him: If we must die/let it not be like hogs/Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot/While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs/ Making their mock at our accursed lot...

Of course I do not advocate violence, as McKay did, when he toured America at the dawn of the 20th century and saw the dog’s life that blacks had to endure there. I however share the Harlem Rennaisance poet’s obvious message that human life, irrespective of one’s station in life, must surely count for something. In a normal week, we see many stories that should make us sad. Every day, people die as a result of accidents. There are also cases of violence over pasture, love triangles, baseless ethnicity, illicit brews, cattle rustling, wrong medication and all sorts of things. From the time you clock in on Sunday to the time you call it a week on Thursday night, you have seen and heard so much you fear for your sanity and sense of empathy.

Not even the old man’s warning – that ‘no news is good news’ – could have prepared one for this. Of course there is the occasional story of someone who triumphed in sports or innovation, or some other uplifting story, but the feeling you get is that we have a lot of avoidable issues as a country to handle, which we dutifully cover every waking day.

We try to be objective, and to detach ourselves from stories, as per our teaching. We even try to gauge which story is bigger than the next, all the while taking care not to be carried away. But the truth is that we slowly get anaesthetised against the ugliness and full meaning of these horrific occurrences. So much that if you are a newspaper copy-editor, you run the risk of being so ‘unfeeling’ in the layman’s world that, to you, an event that sends a whole village into panic may be just another ‘small story’.

But even for the most battle-hardened newshound, there is that one story that is so horrifying it reduces you to a mass of grease around the knees. The kind of story that shatters your ability to focus on doing your editing job, and makes you very very afraid. Yes, a story that scoffs at your pretensions to objectivity and scares you back into the reality of a terrified, thinking, feeling and loving human being.

The killing of the three, at a time when unexplained and unresolved murders are slowly becoming a run-of-the-mill affair, was one such story.

It all started with an ominous report on their disappearance after a court session. Then the car that ferried them was found dumped somewhere in Limuru. I cannot go into the merits of the case, but I must say I found myself asking: Where could the three men have disappeared to?

So I moved to the next story on the editing queue, trying with difficulty to blame my long history of watching movies for the fear and foreboding that tugged at my heartstrings. For while I long stopped believing in coincidences, I have never for the life of me brought myself to imagine that the kind of murders rocking the country right now could be happening in our times. Or even outside the TV series and Wild West movie scripts.

It’s not only the lawyer, his client and the taxi driver. Just this week, a trader’s body was found dumped by a roadside in Kiambu. There are also many cases of people disappearing only for their bodies to be found dumped somewhere. The frequency of these murders, especially among the ordinary folk, is so jarring it leaves you with spooky echoes in your ears. And the horror of it is this: Given the brazen manner of these killings, which don’t even spare those in fairly higher stations in our class-conscious society, what is happening to the nondescript villagers who have no one to stage ‘respectable’ protests over their plight?