Ghosts never sleep easy

We were talking - I mean I was talking and She was praying I would shut up in thirty seconds or less - about how we collectively remember or forget events, traumatic or not. We use the expression "national narrative" sometimes. We describe events in ways that require collective acquiescence that the recollected event can only be recollected one way. It is why it is easy to claim that "Kenyans have short memories".

My people are not pigeons. Just because they haven't strung so-and-so up by his shins and caned his buttocks until they ran red with blood doesn't mean that they have ten-second memories that are erased as soon as another "scandal" is, with Herculean effort as the scribes of the Fourth Estate would have you believe, heaved onto the public square to be stared at, talked about, poked and prodded, discarded and forgotten for the next fix.

We remember, always. The assassinated. The tortured. The disappeared. The "enemies of the state". We remember them all. We remember the ones that said that assassination, torture and disappearance were all part of the messy thing we call democracy in Kenya or words of similar effect. We remember the ones that denied assassination, torture and disappearance were never used against their fellowman. We remember the ones that "washed away the sins" of the assassins, torturers and disappearers. We remember it all and just because our memory is not expressed at the ballot or in a revolution does not mean that it isn't there, that it isn't consequential. Just because the heirs of Wangari Maathai and the Free the Detainees' activists haven't stripped naked and visited curses on the assassins, torturers and disappearers does not mean that we have forgotten. We remember. We remember the curses. And we know that despite all evidence to the contrary, we shall prevail.

But don't for a minute think that we shall prevail by Animal Farm-ing ourselves into a vicious cycle. No. No. When the edifice has been brought down. When the dust has covered them all. Choked them. Suffocated them. When their whitening desiccated bones have been picked clean by the buzzards of the Chalbi. When their heirs are ashamed to use the family name. When their heirs' shame leads to ostentation acts of expiation - libraries, wings of hospitals, chairs of university departments. We shall prevail Maybe not in our lifetimes. But then again, as we all know, ghosts never sleep easy when the blood of the innocent covers their dark souls.