A letter to the youth we lost in June, 2024

This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.

To Rex, to Eric, to Kennedy, to Shaquille, to Bernard, to Boniface, to Credo, to Austin, to Brian, to Caroline, and to every name we mentioned this past Thursday; to every ‘unidentified young male adult’.

We are writing to you on the anniversary of the day everything changed. You should know what they did with it.

They blocked the roads. On a day the government announced would be a normal working day, they mounted razor wire around Parliament, they sealed Thika Road, Waiyaki Way, Jogoo Road, Mombasa Road.

They blocked Kenyans from moving through their own city on the day they were supposed to come and remember you.

And when some of them still came, still found a way through, still showed up to light a candle at the intersections where some of you fell, police lobbed tear gas at them.

People came to lay flowers. They were met with canisters. People came to say your names aloud in the streets where you once walked, and the state decided even that was too much. That the memory of you was too dangerous for their peace of mind.

Drawing salaries

You died because you believed that better was possible. You died because you went out and said so. Rex, you were twenty-two. Brian, you were nineteen. Austin, you lived with autism and six bullets found you anyway, near a hospital meant to heal people. Caroline, Kennedy, Eric, you went into the streets because the maths of your daily lives had become unbearable, and someone in authority decided that the appropriate response to that was to take your lives from you.

None of you were armed. None of you threatened anything that deserved to stand.

What you threatened was the comfort of people who had grown used to the understanding that there would be no cost for what they took from you.

We have not won the fight yet. We need you to know that. The Finance Bill was withdrawn, and then, quietly, a new Finance Act was signed two days before we came to remember you this year.

The burden did not shift. The state learned from what you started. It learned to be smaller in its cruelties, to distribute them more carefully, to make them harder to march against. The officers who fired at you, who ordered the firing, who watched the footage and decided there was nothing to answer for: they are still in uniform. Still drawing salaries. Not one has been convicted. Not one.

Albert, you came after. Arrested from your home in Homa Bay last June, for words you typed on a screen, dead in a cell within hours. They said you harmed yourself. They said you tortured yourself in a cell to death.

The pathologist disagreed. You are one of many who came after, quietly, in the spaces between the anniversaries, each death absorbed into the official record with language designed to close the question before it is properly opened.

The state discovered it does not need to shoot crowds to silence people. It has learned to work in smaller rooms. It has learned to be patient, and to rely on the rest of us forgetting.

We have not accepted any of this. We have not traded your names for the peace of looking away. Gillian Munyao still says Rex's name everywhere she goes, in every room that will have her, until the rooms grow uncomfortable and someone in authority is forced to acknowledge that the name belongs to a person who is not coming back.

The families of Boniface and Bridget and Benson still show up. They showed up this week. They tried to lay flowers at Parliament and were turned back with the same tools that were turned on you a year ago. Tear gas at people carrying flowers for the dead. We have looked directly at that, and we have not looked away.

We are going to try to fix this next year. Through every legitimate instrument we have. We do not have everything we need yet, but we are not stopping. Your deaths should never have been the price of asking for accountability.

That is not a political statement. It is the only honest thing left to say. You were owed a country that did not kill you for wanting it to work.

That country does not yet fully exist, but it is what we are building, and the reason we are building it has your faces on it.

Holiday dinners

But, comrades, if it is not too much to ask of you, we have one more request. Do not let them rest.

The people who gave the order, the people who pulled the trigger, the people who saw the footage and filed it away. The ones who show up to their children's school events and their holiday dinners, comfortable, untroubled, unsanctioned. Trouble them. Appear at the edges of their good moments. Surface in the quiet between their laughter. Let them feel, in whatever way the dead make the living feel things, that something is unresolved. That what was done in those streets and those cells did not dissolve into the bureaucratic language it was buried in. That you are not a closed file. That you will not become one.

You should not have died for this. The right to assemble, to speak, to demand that public money be accounted for: these are not extraordinary requests. They are the minimum a country owes its people.

You asked for the minimum. They gave you bullets and silence and, on the anniversary, razor wire and tear gas for the people who came to grieve you.

We are still here. We are still angry. We are still learning your names, and we will not stop until the people who took you from us are made to account for it.

Reporting originally appeared via Nation Africa. Read the full source for additional context.