Crimes against humanity didn't begin yesterday

By Ted Malanda

My old friend John Lilako, a witty, literary man with a knack for noticing the absurd, used to say when we were boys that if you want to find a pirate, scratch a (British) gentleman. The thought came to me last week when Mau Mau veterans arrived in London to seek compensation for, among others things, castration by British authorities.

Now mankind can be very cruel but grabbing pliers and squashing someone’s future generations is really sick. Readers who watched Alex Hailey’s documentary, Roots, may recall that when the slave Kunta Kinte was nabbed fooling around with the boss’s wife, he was given two options: They would either chop of his member or his foot. He pointed at his foot. Now you know what I am talking about.

But even as the Mau Mau veterans were freezing in London, details emerged that during our own 2007 post-election skirmishes, some people chopped off people’s heads and turned them into a roadblock.

The wider public, however, never got to know this because our hardboiled journalists sat on the evidence, so macabre were the pictures.

How and where did this madness begin? Look, when God finished creating the universe, I’m told He really liked his handiwork. So where did these rascals who casually chop off people’s heads and castrate others crawl from?

The answer, in my esteemed view, lies in the Book of Genesis. Hey, slow down. I am not at all imputing improper motives against Eve, our beautiful mother who mankind has turned into a scapegoat for all its transgressions. Between us, I think that old business of eating the forbidden fruit has been blown out of proportion.

Methinks our evil arose from our father, Adam and that rascal called Cane.

Here is a fellow who — without provocation — clobbered his brother to death and in so doing created IDPs and careers for millions of future criminal lawyers, prosecutors and jailers. And yet when God asked him where his brother was, the hairy fellow had the insolence to retort, ‘I am not my brother’s keeper’. Would you believe the sheer impunity, the hate speech of it all?

Foreskins

In our age, he would have been dispatched straight to ICC but he couldn’t because Eve had been fooling around with family planning and the criminal had just murdered the only other available leader. That bandit murdered half of the world’s human population, you get?

If that was the beginning of crimes against humanity, things would only get gorier. Sample this from the First Book of Samuel, Chapter 18, courtesy of journalist Peter Thatiah: ‘Wherefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king’s son-in-law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.’

Now if that is not a crime against humanity, tell me another. Over to you, Luis Moreno-Ocampo.