Kenya is a beautiful country – one of the most beautiful on our continent. It is the tourist destination of choice for many Europeans Americans and other westerners, probably second only to South Africa. I have visited the country more times than I can remember. I have very dear Kenyan friends and two of the most beautiful godchildren in the world, Wachera and her baby brother Githondo. Kenyans and Nigerians have a lot in common. They are both the economic engines of their respective regions. The economies of our two nations are among the most rapidly growing and competitive on the continent.
A terrible tragedy occurred on a university campus in the northern Kenyan town of Garissa, about 200 km from the Somali border on Thursday the 2nd of April. At dawn, precisely around 4.am, the al Shabab Somali terrorists descended on the university campus with heavy ammunitions. Given that it was the eve of Good Friday, one of the holiest days on the Christian calendar, Christian students were gathered at a prayer meeting in the chapel. The terrorists went straight to them and slaughtered everyone. They kicked the bodies to make sure all were dead. They did not stop there. With the aid of a loudspeaker, they announced that all women should come out, “if you do not wish to die; as our religion forbids the killing of women and children, come out immediately if you do not wish to die”. Many of the young women fell for the bait. They were all asked to lie down in rows. They were soon sprayed with bullets, dying with sighs and whimpers.
At the last count 150 people, of which 142 were students, perished in that massacre. Most of the survivors were those who either fled or who played dead amidst the heaps of corpses. One survivor was a 19 year girl who hid in a wardrobe for 48 hours. When the terrorists beckoned for women to come out, she smelt a rat. She felt instinctively that these people could never be trusted. She hid in a wardrobe and survived by drinking body lotion. Most of the victims died of gun wounds. Several had their throats slit. The terrorists would normally ask their victim to recite the Holy Qur’an. Those who could were given a safe passage while those who could not had their young lives summarily snuffed off. One young woman was asked by one of the terrorists to call her mother. When she did, the terrorist told the mother, “this is the last time you will hear the voice of your daughter, because I am going to kill her”. The stutter of submachine gunfire followed. And then silence.
Astonishingly, it took 11 hours for the Kenyan authorities to react. By then, the deed had been done. The government reacted by sending its air force to bomb suspected al Shabab strongholds inside Somalia. They have also frozen the accounts of several Somali remittance companies operating in Kenya as well as the assets of suspect al Shabab sympathisers. Somalia is a failed state with no workable monetary system of any kind. The millions of Somalis rely on remittance corridors to transact business and send money to relatives across international borders.
This would not be the first time that Kenya has come under the onslaught of terrorist attacks. In August, the August 1998 al Qaeda inspired attacks on the American embassy in Nairobi led to the death of 224 and over 4,000 wounded. The majority of the victims were Kenyans, not Americans.
There was also the attacks by al Shabab at the busy Westgate shopping in September 2013, which led to the death of more than 80 people. Among the victims was one of my favourite writers, the Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor. He had visited Kenya to speak at a writers’ conference. As his son lived in Nairobi, they both went to have lunch at a restaurant at Westgate. Awoonor was gunned down by the terrorists. His son was also shot. He survived by playing dead along with his father.
Kenya is a thriving multi-religious and multi-ethnic society. The port city of Mombasa is populated by Kenyans of Arab and mixed origin. There is a sizeable community of Somalis who are Kenyan citizens. Some of them have complained of one form of discrimination or the other. The al Shabab terrorists articulated their casus belli as Kenya’s participation in the peacekeeping coalition in Somalia.
Since time immemorial, violence has been an instrument of political struggle by alienated or aggrieved groups. However, I believe that some of the things we are seeing today are insufferably evil even by the questionable standards of terrorists. They operate on the basis of the military doctrine of “savagery”. The idea is to maim and kill in ways that are grim and shocking. They mean to dehumanise everyone, victim and spectator alike.
Consider the hacking to death of an off-duty British soldier, 25 year old Nick Rigby, in May 2013. Two terrorist converts of Nigerian origin, Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebalajo were malingering around the military barrack in Woolwich, south east London. As soon as one lone off-duty soldier emerged, they trailed him across the street, descending on him with guns, axes and meat cleavers. According to an eye-witness, amidst shouts of allahu akbar, “They were hacking at him, chopping him, cutting him.” The broad daylight hacking to death of young private Rigby was an awful spectacle that shocked Britain and the world. I have say it was one of those days in which one felt ashamed to be a Nigerian. My son, who grew up in England, was totally disconsolate for days.
The January attacks on the Hebdo Charlie political comedy publication in Paris took the lives of 12 people. Again, it was another act of savagery. I totally disagreed with the editors in pocking fun at the Holy Prophet of the Muslims. As His Holiness Pope Francis himself remarked, you cannot make fun of somebody’s mother and expect him to smile at you. But I wonder whether taking a submachine gun and disturbing the tranquillity of the City of Lights was the best way to respond to this insult on Muslims.
In February this year, the world had another rude shock as 21 immigrant Egyptian workers in Libya were rounded up by agents of the Islamic State and beheaded in cold blood. Their crime was that they were Egyptian Christian Copts. The ranting of the spokesman for the Islamic State celebrating the beheadings was as incoherent as it was hate-filled: “chopping off the heads that had been carrying the cross delusion for a long time, filled with spite against Islam and Muslims, and today we… are sending another message: Oh crusaders, safety for you will be only wishes especially when you’re fighting us all together, therefore we will fight you all together until the war lays down its burdens and Jesus peace be upon him will descend, breaking the cross, killing the swine”.
In Nigeria with our Boko Haram, In Kenya, in Europe and throughout the civilised world, tension is rising between our various religious communities because of the savagery and fear imposed by a few extremists. Their aim is to sow the seeds of bitterness, anger and hatred that would eventually result in a cataclysmic denouement.
I have been a student of the Islamic sciences, having lived in North Africa and travelled through the Middle East. Islam has been one of the greatest contributors to world civilisation. During the dark ages, Europe had lost Aristotle and Plato and were re-educated on the works of these immortal philosophers through the labours of the great Arab-Islamic thinkers. In metaphysics, mathematics, medicine and prosody, the impact of these thinkers has been without parallel in the history of human culture: Al-Kindi, Muhammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sinna, A-Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Jallaludin Rumi, Ibn Khaldun (my favourite), and up to moderns such as Muhammad Iqbal of Pakistan and the wonderful Ali Shariati of Iran. In Cordoba, in Al-Andalus, the great Muslim Caliphs who ruled Spain in medieval times created a great flowering of culture that has enriched Europe and the world. From Samarkand to Fez, Qom and Baghdad, Muslim sages carried the light of civilisation when the world was in darkness. Nobody who considers himself enlightened can denigrate Islam or Muslims.
Today we face a different challenge and a different world. A new breed of savages have emerged who know neither Islam nor Humanity and civilisation. Possessed by the spirit of the Anti-Christ, they aim to plunge the whole of Humanity into the rule of fear, darkness and savagery. There was a time I was tempted to be very angry about the Chibok girls’ abduction by the Boko Haram insurgents. I placed myself in the shoes of the parents and I felt extreme anger. It took me back to my days as a teenager in boarding school. Imagine your last month in school, when you were revising for your WAEC finals. And then some madmen arrive at the cold of dawn, kidnap you at gunpoint and set your school ablaze. At one single stroke, those girls were robbed of an entire future, leaving their parents in inconsolable grief and anguish.
With the passing of time, I have since realised that anger solves nothing. Yes, we can be angry and we can feel outrage, but our primary duty is to act as the conscience of Humanity in a spirit of love and the fraternity of peoples. The savages who are maiming and killing aim to maximize fear and hatred. We must reply them with courage and firmness. True love can never die. It is the duty of Muslims and Christians who believe in Humanity and civilisation to come together to stop the New Barbarism in our midst. Our future as a country and the destiny of civilisation itself may well depend on it.
The poem, “On the Gallows Once”, by the late Kofi Awoonor, was prophetic of the times in which we live:
“I crossed quite a few/of your river, my gods,/into this plain where thirst reigns/ I heard the cry of mourners/the long cooing of the African wren at dusk/ the laughter of the children at dawn/ had long ceased/ night comes fast in our land/ where indeed are the promised vistas/ the open fields, blue skies, the singing birds/ and abiding love?/ History records acts/ of heroism, barbarism/ of some who had power/ and abused it massively/ of some whose progenitors/ planned for the secure state of madness/ from which no storm can shake them/ of some who took the last ships/ disembarked on some far-off shores and forgot/ of some who simply laid down the load/ and went home to the ancestors”.
OBADIAH MAILAFIA
