Boniface Kariuki, the man who was shot in the head by a cop in Nairobi’s CBD is in critical condition at Kenyatta National Hospital. We’re all hoping he pulls through, but even within that, the knowledge that his life has been altered irrevocably. I don’t know that anything qualifies as justice in a situation like this. The best we can do, is the upending of the political systems that sustain this kind of violence and even then, still, a bleeding emptiness in the place where a life untouched by this violence should be.

My reflexive response to seeing that video was a sense of smallness. My very first thought was, what am I against a cop with an assault rifle, the full power of the state behind him?

In the hours after he’d been shot, when he was in surgery, trying to find some hope, I thought, I’ve survived multiple head surgeries. The particulars are different, of course, but I know a thing or two about death in your face and a surgeon’s scalpel in your head. It is, make no mistake, a gross violation. But still, I know, in its aftermath, a liveable kind of life. Of survival, Toni Morrison says, “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.” Too many of us have been murdered and all we have, as a collective, is our beautiful, fearless attempts at survival.

So my second thought was, you cannot accept this sense of smallness. You, we all, have a political imperative to refuse despair.

Years of surgeries, and other treatments for a rare form of cancer broke me so thoroughly, I felt like a wraith. You know how Annie describes vampirism in Sinners? Like yes, they’re corporeal entities but they don’t have access to a life, a culture, a soul. It’s an existence without meaning. Whatever it is that makes a person a person—spirit, a soul, the part of your brain that tells you a joke is funny; that you enjoy silly puns, the ability to sustain presence, executive function, I don’t know. Whatever it is, I didn’t have access to it for years. In its stead, was an oppressive absence, a formless, yet caustic knowledge that I was at best, a bag of skin, stuffed with deracinated dreams and ideas, masquerading as person. I have no experience of corporeal death, but if the dead could speak, I’m sure they’d describe that all-consuming nothingness.

I was hopeless proper.

And then in 2023, I don’t remember where exactly, I came across the concept of refusing despair. It changed my life. I was severely emotionally dysregulated and here was the realisation that I had some control, if not over how I felt, but over what I did with myself. I didn’t have to take my brokenness an irrefutable fact. I didn’t have to wait for enough time to pass until I felt alive again. I could just live as if I were alive. I could masquerade as a person! Yes, you feel like wraith, but there’s air in your lungs and blood in your veins and if nothing else, you can take a walk.

Mariame Kaba, a Black American abolitionist says hope is a discipline. “I always tell people, for me, hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism….Because in the world we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that nothing is going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. It feels sometimes that it’s being proven in various different ways, so I really get that. I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. I choose to think a different way, and I choose to act in a different way….I believe ultimately that we’re going to win, because I believe there are more people who want justice, real justice, than there are those who are working against that.”

In the end, it’s not about how we feel, it’s about what we do. Yes, there’s an impossible grief, a cavernous grave, but there’s also the people standing around it, holding each other, planting flowers, swearing to fight another day.

We will win!

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Read, Hope Is a Discipline, here.

Photo by Faris Mohammed on Unsplash