The very ugly face of a hurting population

The late Ivy Wangechi. PHOTO | COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • The medical fraternity is shaken, and nobody knows how to handle the loss of a budding doctor at such a tender age.
  • Any person who justifies sexual and gender-based violence of any kind is capable of carrying it out himself.

This past week has been a particularly difficult one for us at the University and at our Teaching Hospital.

On Tuesday, Ivy Wangechi, one of our final-year students, was hacked to death right outside the Teaching Hospital in which she had been trained and was helping relieve the suffering of our patients. Her killing has cast a dark cloud over our days, and it will be a while before we are able to walk past the scene of the attack without a shiver.

TENDER AGE

The medical fraternity is shaken, and nobody knows how to handle the loss of a budding doctor at such a tender age.

However, the public discourse on this murder has been a lot more outlandish. Within minutes of her killing, total strangers with access to internet went to town with all sorts of theories trying to explain why she was killed.

Our peculiar obsession with sex and sexual relationships was on display once again, with vile-minded men and women going out of their way to find sexual reasons for the killing.

Disgusting stories were published on social media, and picked up by the more trashy mainstream media houses without any attempt at verification or corroboration.

RELATIONSHIPS

Kenyans were all over the media giving advice to young girls, telling them how they should behave in order not to be killed by the men in relationships with them, or who desire to enter relationships with them.

Girls were being told not to accept gifts or money from men unless they wanted to have sex with them, not to answer phone calls from “potentially dangerous” male strangers, not to smile when complimented by men they don’t want to enter into relationships with, and other similarly ridiculous advice.

To my mind, this kind of reasoning mirrors the purveyors’ state of mind. Anyone who rushes to find an explanation for a murder, any murder, betrays the fact that for that same reason they would murder another human being.

Any person who justifies sexual and gender-based violence of any kind is capable of carrying it out himself. There are absolutely no exceptions to this rule. You are capable of carrying out whatever you excuse.

TWISTED OPINIONS

These past few days have demonstrated to me the depth of the bile Kenyans carry around. Many Kenyans, at least those with access to the means to publicly express their twisted opinions, are hurting in ways even they do not know.

They grew up in depraved environments, and were brought up by parents who exposed them to extreme violence and childhood adversity.

Their dinnertime conversations centred on how people from the neighbouring community are less than human and probably deserving of death.

In many households, violence was an accepted mode of emotional expression, and women and children were meant to be seen and not to be heard. Anyone contravening this universal rule would be violently chastised, and literally cut down to size.

VIOLENT MEN

Our heroes were corrupt and morbidly violent men, and the highest mark of respect for a man was the extent to which he could humiliate all others without repercussions. Our metaphors, which persist to this day, are expressions of extreme violence.

Those are the minds from which justifications for killing girls and women for whatever reason emanate. Those are the minds in which plots for similar acts germinate and thrive, and are eventually actualised.

Lukoye Atwoli is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Dean, Moi University School of Medicine; [email protected]