1

In any work of art in which an artist hopes to tell stories, its beginning must be stellar. Without a good beginning, without a good opening scene, a good sentence, the work of art collapses and crumbles.

 

The best example perhaps is the iconic opening scene of City of God (Cidade de Deus). We see the favelas of Rio de Janeiro through a chicken meant for slaughter by gang members. It escapes and is chased through the narrow paths of the favelas. The scene is accentuated by upbeat music and a branch-off shot to the protagonist, a young photographer named Rocket, walking through the same streets with his friend. It cuts back again to the gang members and they get to a street where they see Rocket. The leader of the gang commands Rocket to catch the chicken and as Rocket complies, we see that behind Rocket, police officers have arrived and they are positioning themselves for a shootout. When Rocket raises his head, he realises that he is trapped between the gang members with their weapons and the police with their weapons. The feeling we have of someone being trapped in a cycle of violence is the same one we have even as the movie progresses.

 

2

As the clock turned to midnight, into 2024, I was seated on the couch with my family watching television, watching places whose fireworks were about to go off. I had been scrolling through Twitter on my phone and my thoughts were with Palestinians in Gaza, watching in real time how much they were suffering. One Palestinian user tweeted (and I paraphrase), “As the skies of your cities go up in fireworks, our city goes up in flames, bombed by Israel.”

 

I reflected on this, the distance between myself and the user, how deeply my heart went out to them. The goals and resolutions I had set out for myself felt so insignificant when compared to someone whose only goal was to survive the hour, to survive through the night.

 

The contrast of the world is something which I have never understood, or even if I have understood, it has never quite settled within me and it often leads me to existential questions, questions I cannot answer, whose answers are not forthcoming and may never come, whose answers can only come through faith.

In an essay for The New Yorker titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust”, the writer Masha Gessen argues that the Holocaust is placed outside of history and that people have not learnt from it. Masha Gessen compares Jewish ghettos in areas occupied by the Nazis to Gaza today. At the end of the essay, they write, “It is ever so hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea that someone could have been the enemy of your enemy and yet not a benevolent force. A victim and also a perpetrator. Or vice versa.”

 

3

In January of 2008, the beginning of our school year was partially suspended because of an ongoing post-election violence. Several people were killed and hundreds of thousands were displaced. This came about because the election was stolen. On the day before the results were announced, I remember I’d gone to sleep when the opposition candidate, Raila Odinga, was ahead of the incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, by over a million votes. When I woke up the gap had been completely obliterated and before I knew it, Kibaki was being declared the winner. What followed soon after was violence of a scale that had never been witnessed before. At the signing of the peace deal that was meant to heal the nation and have a coalition government, it was promised that the perpetrators of the violence would face the law.

 

There was a mood of excitement when the cases were referred to the International Criminal Court. The ICC prosecutor, at the time, Luis Moreno Ocampo was one of the most popular people in Kenya. Graffiti portraits of his face could be seen on matatus around Nairobi and as murals on some walls. When he announced the people due to stand trial for crimes against humanity, he was hailed as a hero because he’d listed prominent politicians, the head of public service, the commissioner of police and one journalist to stand trial at The Hague.

 

Unfortunately, the criminal trials ended up never yielding any justice for the victims. The cases against all the accused collapsed, and the only thing the ICC trials gave us as Kenyans was two consecutive presidents who had been on the list of the accused, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto.  What had begun as a quest for justice, ended with what has so far been eleven years of poor governance.

 

4

In her book A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid discusses the beauty of Antigua and how tourists who visit the country are sheltered from the violent realities that exist on the island for the locals. I found parallels in her book to Kenya. At the beginning of the British colonial expedition in East Africa, the British only took the land which forms what is today Kenya because they wanted access to the ocean for what was their main prize in East Africa, Uganda. To justify their claim over the territory, the colonial government encouraged settlers into Kenya and gave them large tracts of land which had been stolen from the local population. In addition, this land which was allocated to them was the best land that was available. The territory quickly became attractive for foreigners to act out the dream of a safari. Thus in the early 20th century, there were tales of Happy Valley set and even the romanticism of the territory continued with the publication of Blixen’s book, Out of Africa and the subsequent Academy Award-winning movie of the same name starring Meryl Streep. The country despite its independence has never shed off its desire to appeal to the foreigner and to keep the locals out of sight. Even now Nairobi has been rated by Lonely Planet as the best city to visit in 2024, even as locals struggle to keep up with the cost of living. The effects of colonisation reverberating through the decades.

 

5

In ending these brief notes on beginnings, I’d like to point out something Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” This is to say that the things which have happened to us constantly define who we are and how we make decisions. However, I believe that in the new year, we can find new things that can refresh and replenish us in ways that were previously unimaginable. And for those who find comfort in words, may you find new beautiful ways to organise your world with language.

 

Happy New Year! 

 

May the odds be ever in your favour,

 

Dennis Mugaa.