Dear God,
I thought today I would know who and I would understand why.
I thought today, after seven years of waiting here and my spirit hovering around the life I once had I would at least witness the start of a justice process that would bring my killers to book, vindicate my innocence and start a healing process which my people badly need.
Dear God, today I have immersed my entire hope in the dead bucket of aborted justice, I have washed my face with the blood of my slain villagers and rinsed my hands in the boiling rivulets of victims of an orchestrated violence. I have bowed my head, heaved my shoulders and curled into a resigned ball of death.
I have succumbed here in purgatory where my executioners sent me; I have died with no ounce of justice to my name. Today my looming spirit fades for eternity to the place where I belong – the place where those who do not matter reside.
Dear God, when they came for me, they never told me that my sin was engraved in the community of my birth; that my heritage vexed them; that my people supported a party they detested. They never told me that my second name was my bane that because of the power struggle in a State House I would never ever see my blood was to be spilled. God, I had never even met them in person save for snippets in the news but I was killed in their name. I was slain and delivered to my doomsday in the name of people I have never known!
Today with the other 1200 victims, we are hurdled here at the final gates of purgatory lost in the depths of blinding deflation. Actually, it is I and the scattered pieces of the others who were killed with me. They do not want the country to remember us. We are fragments of a memory of a bad a past – a past haphazardly being pushed into the grave of forgetfulness but a past whose conscious is screaming for immortality.
It is difficult to rest in Peace God. How can we when we were delivered here in pieces? My neighbor, a guy from my village came here the same way I did – killed by several machete cuts from head to toe. He says he can never rest because some of his body parts are still missing since he died. “How can I ever be at peace when I do not have all the pieces that should allow me to die a wholesome death?” He poses. It is a question we have asked ourselves repeatedly, all the 1,200 of us who were brutally torn apart by rape, hacked, bludgeoned, set ablaze, shot and beaten to a pulp to our deaths. God where are the pieces that can make us whole again so we can rest in Peace?
Today, they said the case had no weight. They blamed a bungled prosecution, political interference and a raid onto the witness stand that heavily jumbled the process. They gave warnings which I did not understand and they said something about inviting us witnesses to express views and concerns in relation to reparations or assistance in lieu of reparations. They confuse me God. I am a victim but I am dead. My spirit looms over a fake normalcy but I am dead. I surely cannot appeal for reparations. Who will speak for me? Who will champion my justice?
I think of my mother whose tears have fallen every single day for the last seven years. From my spirit world I witness her torturous life after myself, my father; two brothers and one sister were dispatched here during the violence. For seven years, she has never spoken a word. For seven years, she has never taken a bath. For seven years they say her mind stopped and refused to re-start. She has joined the movement of the walking dead, for seven years since the violence. She lost herself. She lost everything. What then would she tell that reparations team? Will they replace her mind give her back her family?
Dear God, there is celebrations in the country today. It is a happy day. Yes, I can feel the singing and the dancing right on top of my grave. It is loud and unsettling just like the last seven years when politicking ensured that our names and faces are never recalled. The singing and dancing over my grave today is much more painful than the slash of the pangas that killed me God. The jubilation pierces my heart and signals the end of justice for the down-trodden; Kweli maskini hana haki!
They walk free today because the process has declared them blameless. How can I blame them when the highest court has exonerated them? The list had been longer but one by one they dropped off the list in the same way we were felled from the earth one by one as pangas slit our throats. Today the list has zero names. No one stands accused of our deaths. No one has been convicted. I am baffled God. How did I get here? Who brought me here? Please absolve my desperation to know. History tells me that this may never be over, because God? 2017 is here again and this place is too small for anymore guests to come in. Please tell me before it is too late.
Yours,
The Dead of the PEV
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