Kenya: An Unusual Way of Showing Your Anger
blurb:isstoday:05122008kenya
5 December 2008: Kenya: An Unusual Way of Showing Your Anger
In the last week of November, prisoners in Kenya protesting over bad living conditions and abuse by prison officials used human excrement as their main weapon against armed officials. The prison warders too used the prisoners’ toilet buckets and hurled the contents at the resisting prisoners. Could the use of human excrement by those in conflict with the law in Kenya be an indication of what the criminal justice system is like?
This is not the first time that accused in Kenya have used human excrement to show their discontent and anger. On three different occasions this year, three different men disrupted court proceedings when they unwrapped neatly packed packages and hurled the stinking contents at the magistrates or judges. Judges in other countries fear physical punishment when they mete out harsh sentences, but in Kenya they are more likely to fear excrement missiles. The question is: what makes anyone pack human excrement neatly and stash it in his pocket until it is needed? And why is this mostly happening in the criminal justice system?
Street urchins were known in the past to threaten the public with human excrement carried in a can if they did not handover their valuables. And perhaps this is where the idea came from. Or could it be the same generation that still believes in the power of feces as a tool? In one way, it simply sends the message that I can also humiliate you in the same way the system treats me. Or it shows that when people are dehumanized by the lack of appropriate sanitation facilities their whole life, and when they live next to open sewers permanently, excreta becomes a part of life just like any tool or item they use every day. Slum residents sell food next to open flowing and sometimes stagnant sewer drains. This is humiliating for anyone trying to provide for a family or even for themselves. The constant lack of dignity becomes something they perhaps want those in power to experience. The relatively wealthier groups benefit from the engineering marvel that is the flush toilet to remove waste out of sight and out of mind, hence for them the deplorable conditions in slums can be ignored comfortably.
Unfortunately, human excrement is in health terms a weapon of mass destruction. A gram of human feces can contain up to 10 million viruses and at least 50 communicable diseases — including cholera, meningitis and typhoid. All those diseases travel from host to host through human excrement. It doesn’t take much: even a small child innocently playing in soil where people have been defecating can trigger an epidemic when he dips his fingers in the family food pot. Heavy rains and a constantly mobile people, moving between the rural and urban communities, make the country a communicable disease paradise.
According to the Lacanian theory “we pass from animals to humans the moment an animal has problems with what to do with its excrements, the moment they turn into an excess that annoys it". And this has been demonstrated time and again by a few individuals contesting the law in Kenya. We do turn into animals if we act this way because all the things humanity prides itself of are the results of man's attempt to impose some image of dignity or transcendence on his physical reality. When we fail to do this, we are failing humanity.
With regard to the Kenyan prison skirmishes, the prisoners are already used to the permanent smell of the bucket contents they have to use. At Kamiti prison where trouble broke out, prisoners reported that 70 prisoners would often share a cell and obviously a bucket or buckets. For them, it would appear normal to use that against marauding warders who are known to run syndicates and confiscate valuables from the prisoners. But for warders to equally pick up buckets of waste and hurl them at the prisoners is even more disturbing. A strike earlier this year by prison officers revealed that most of them live in terrible conditions. They are tortured just like the prisoners hence their minds can easily work in the same way.
Dr Annie Barbara Chikwanha, Senior Research Fellow, ISS Nairobi
