If you are testifying against a sitting President and Deputy President of your own country there’s no amount of persuasion that can erase the fear. Its palpable and tangible. It towers over your will to do what is right. It strangles you. It blocks evidence from coming from your lips. If you are given money by people who claim to represent the accused or called by your community to opt for reconciliation, you can’t help but notice the veiled command of take it or take it. These are suppositions, that may be true.
To the victims of the 2007 Post Election Violence, brace yourself, it won’t be long before Kenyans tell you to accept and move on. Don’t be surprised when they do. Our short memories are our biggest national treasure. Forget the pain and indignity of rape, forget the scenes of neighbours and strangers decapitating your husband, forget the hopeless screams from children trapped in a burning house, forget the people of God who became ashes despite their pleas to the Almighty while men waited outside with bows, arrows, and machetes to slice off any life that dared escape from the burning church, forget the dispossession. Forget the years in makeshift camps. Don’t mourn your dead. Don’t worry about the living. It has all been a lie. There was no Post Election Violence. Everything was calm and peaceful. We were all happy.
Now as a friendly advice, take the money they have given you. Take it and go a way. If you happen to be a witness, withdraw your evidence, take the money and go away and build a new life. Never, never shed a tear – unless they are tears of joy. The world is what it is and you are who you are. Never look back. Not for excuses, not for justifications, not for a life stolen from your very grasp. Learn the simple truth that the past is dead. We are dead. Banish the thought that we care. Truth is, we fuckin don’t. We just pretend we do.
Remember:
(1) Criminal trials are not searches of truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They have never been. Rarely do justice and truth eat from the same plate.
(2) Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
(3) Nothing is ever settled till its settled right.
Truth is, and I quote (William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605), Act I, scene 7):
“But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice
To our own lips.”