Je Suis Kenyan
A few days ago I heard my father bring up an alleged 'school shooting' as it was breaking news at the time my family was gathering together to have dinner. I shook my head in disgust but made no fuss over it as I thought it wouldn't exactly be an appropriate dinner topic. I hadn't been particulary tuned in to the news at that time and so this particular piece of news hadn't really made any impression on me. As soon as I was asked to pass the rice, the topic was quickly forgotten.
Hours later, while mind-numbingly scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed, I saw an extremely disturbing photo. A classroom, not much different from the ones I had in my own university, but covered in blood. The students were lifeless, sprawled all over the floor. The chairs and desks upturned.
I felt suddenly aware of my brain stalling to process the image before me. Was it one of those jokes about hell week at university? Was it a poster for a dramatic production at the school theatre? Reading the caption, the words stumbled into my thoughts, my brain working hard to put the pieces together.
This is news. This is real. I felt my face fall, the hairs on the back of my neck stand. This really happened.
Yet - hardly anyone is talking about it.
This wasn't your mainstream "troubled-child-finds-gun-and-angrily-storms-school-for-revenge" school shooting. This was a massacre, organized by militants, at the Garissa University College in Kenya.
According to reports, the gunmen attempted to segregate the Christian students from the Muslim students and then proceeded to murder the Christian students. 148 dead.
I do not wish to go into the gruesome details here. Photos and videos of the attack, stories of survivors and eyewitnesses could be found online if you look for them.
Yes, they are extremely distressing. But I suggest you do try to find out about the attack as much as your heart can handle. God knows I am struggling to keep it together as I attempt to write this down, with images of the slain and the prospect of more attacks like this swirling in my head.
Why do I bother? Because I believe discomfort fuels change.
I am a little bit embarrassed to admit that I only learned about this on Facebook. Yet, I also feel a little triumphant that this proves that social media CAN foster positive change. We unsuspectingly scroll through our newsfeeds and are met with distressing images that hit us harder than any type of clickbait link we've ever encountered. And hopefully, we are compelled to know more.
And when we know more, I hope we are intrigued enough to ask the questions that matter. Intrigued enough to challenge what's being done and what's not. Intrigued enough to ask ourselves what else can be done to prevent this from ever happening again, from ever appearing on our newsfeeds again.
How come when cartoonists / journalists who purposefully fostered controversy over religion were shot by religious extremists (or whatever you prefer to call them) in France, the whole world stopped and leaders gathered in solidarity to protest their death and the symbolic attack on freedom of speech?
Does this then mean that those world leaders value freedom of speech more than freedom to live?
Or as crass it may sound, is the lack of outrage due to everyone thinking (but not admitting) that "people die all the time in Africa"? If it happened in France or in America, how different would the reaction and media coverage be?
How come the world's reaction would be different at all?
I don't have the answers to my own questions. And yes, it bothers me that I don't. But I am determined to let it bother me enough not to drop it until I can do something about it. And I hope in my discomfort, I bother somebody else. And perhaps that somebody would bother somebody who can do something about it too.
I would be the first to admit that I would prefer to see funny, lighthearted posts on my social media feed much more than disturbing ones. A student discovering that her math teacher at university is actually a professional model? Sure, sign me up.
But the fact that there's another student across the globe who had to hide for two days in a closet, under a pile of clothes, drinking lotion to survive and hide from the men who killed all of her classmates - it doesn't stop being real just because it's not on my social media feed.
So I hope that as much as we spend time watching and sharing videos of cats jumping into small boxes, we also spend time finding out what's happening around us, sharing our own awareness with others. Let these things come to us, affect us, and shake us. Hopefully, we will then find a way to turn our discomfort into action so these things would not be allowed to happen again.
And then we can peacefully return, uninterrupted, to our regularly scheduled cat-video programming.
Photo credit: Alesa Dam / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA
