Police should tell about their world in memoirs

People from different professionals have authored books about their careers and life, something police officers can also do, writes ABENEA NDAGO

As we go into the next elections with the stench of a mysterious, well-connected character that lived by hiring and firing his ‘juniors’ for five long years.

 It reminds me of the mad knight-errant Alonso Quijano in Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605). Our ‘cop artist’ only lacked a private squire to represent loyal Sancho Panza. But while we reel from it, someone should encourage our police force to write about itself even if it means doing so in mother tongue.   When the Briton Sir Robert Peel cobbled up the first professional police force in 1829, society discovered a priceless method of preventing crime, protecting lives and property, enforcing the law and maintaining order. The force is, therefore, a priceless invention.

No one wants to live in a society of eternal lawlessness where everybody else is a goon who throttles and robs you in broad daylight.

Yet that argument depends largely on where you stand. The same police force was the cat’s paw with which the British Empire greedily plundered the world all the way to colonisation. Our own memories of police brutality here at home are impossible to erase.

Heinous occurrence

 I have yet to hear of a heinous occurrence where – rightly or wrongly – a word that begins with ‘p’ was not accused of crimes of omission or commission. If you still doubt it, please ask Morgan Tsvangirai’s supporters what they saw in Zimbabwe’s elections of 2008. Alex La Guma’s literary oeuvre of A Walk in the Night (1962), And a Threefold Cord (1964), The Stone Country (1967), In the Fog of the Season’s End (1972), and Time of the Butcherbird (1979) all show the lethal face of that same force. However, we must still refuse to see only the dark side of the police. We can be certain that, in our force, you could still find innocent souls who – in spite of the public image of reckless bribe-gathering between narrow road blocks – always insist on nothing but integrity.

At any rate, the police menace is not unique to Kenya. Nigeria launched a new Code of Conduct for her police force on January 16, 2013. India’s case was even horrifying because a young woman nicknamed ‘Damini’ was gang-raped (she later succumbed) in a New Delhi bus on December 16.

Part of the reason we are prejudiced against the police force is that it never speaks for itself. They have never told us their story. We do not understand their world because their psychology is eternally turned away from us. We cannot possibly understand how a plain imposter could have had his way for sixty months, and why guns keep being aimed at fellow policemen.

I advise the police to begin to write because art is largely inborn (the very reason I pity the priests of Baal – a narcotics realm – who bleed themselves and drench onto the zero sacrifice). True creativity solidly disobeys formal education, pisses on vain workshops. That is the truth which authors like Amos Tutuola and John Steinbeck (the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature winner) keep proving each day.

In the Kenyan literary context, we have read autobiographies by repented criminals who took courage to tell their story – Saga MacOdongo (though in her case I doubt if repentance alone is enough), Kiggia Kimani and John Kiriamiti.

Whether the books make us empathise or not isn’t the issue.  It is that ours is a warped perspective since the other side of that crime has not yielded itself to literary scrutiny. The full picture would obtain if the chasers of these criminals also recorded their experiences.

Collide face-to-face

I would not resist a book whose characters ‘die completely,’ are ‘burnt to recognition,’ and whose vehicles collide ‘face to face.’

 Such a novel would surely ferry me to Okot p’Bitek’s world. A policeman called Eric Arthur Blair (the one we know simply as George Orwell) once fought totalitarianism, social injustice, and poverty in his books 1984 (1949), Animal Farm (1945), Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Burmese Days (1934), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Coming Up for Air (1939) and Homage to Catalonia (1938).

True, Orwell went to Eton, Britain’s elite school. But I do not think any of our police officers must go to Alliance and Starehe before they can realise that the biggest tragedy in Kenya is that a few predators at the top literally steal flour from the torn baskets in our huts.

You need no national school classroom to see the facts as they really are. And if the wonderful deftness of fingers, which I see every time a passenger vehicle goes past a public roadblock, is anything to go by, then our police have no handicap when it comes to creativity.

I do not know if the police force is guilty of the mountains of accusation often piled on its back. Nor can I swear that it is innocent. But our officers must not dismiss the point that, by writing their own memoirs, the force stands a chance to sanitise its image and bequeath us a ripe harvest of humour.

The writer teaches Literature at Bondo University College.