The poem is a mood in a room, it is the possibility for certain types of conversations in the lobby afterward – grown men crying, thinking about their grandmas, or something like that. The crying is the poem. ~ Henrik Karlson
Yuval Harari looks at gods not as supernatural beings, but as powerful ideas that shape human behaviour and societies. In the names of these powerful ideas and the narratives around them, empires rose and fell, and lives were pledged and lost in unimaginable magnitudes. As human society developed, the necessity to sustain connection and communication ballooned from the family level, to tribes, to kingdoms, to empires. To enable these connections, human society shaped itself around “shared fictions” – ideas that exist because many people collectively believe in them. Some of them surely you must know – governments, money, etiquette and corporations. Over time, these ideas we use to orient our connections to each other, themselves become connected, and become something grander and more potent – stories. Seeing just how powerful ideas can be, we can easily conceptualise stories as far more potent catalysts of human potentiality in any one direction.
As a Kenyan child witnessing the 2007 post-election violence, I was instiled with a salient truth: violence itself is horrifying, but even more horrifying is how narratives born from violence can be weaponised to rouse people into rage-driven action. It’s an age-old ploy – create pain, swoop in posing as a “saviour” to attain veneration, worship, and, crucially, votes.
The single greatest instance of mass violence in my country happened when I was 6 years old. I barely have any recollection of it – all I remember was my mother telling me not to leave the house, and that I should avoid some of our neighbours (of another tribe). My dad kept urging us to go back to Maasailand if things got real in the city. To date, my mother is still convinced that everyone with dreadlocks is Mungiki (a tribal militia of young Kikuyu men – linked to criminal extortion and violence – who engaged in violent reprisals in response to violence against the Kikuyu in the 2007 post-election violence).
My father, cultured man that he is, winces if I ever hint to him that I might bring home a Kikuyu girl to meet the family. Keep in mind that the old man himself speaks fluent kikuyu and does business with Kikuyus on an almost daily basis. But bring up any mention of one being tucked onto the family tree? Hahhh! I saw barely any of the violence, but the stories that led to and arose from it still entwine my everyday living. They have a bearing on how I can look, whom I can date, whom I can interact with and what parts of the country I should feel safe in.
Worse still, the stories about that devastating time, more than a decade later, tinge the latent potentiality to violence in all my countrymen with a certain genocidal intent that is easy to miss until you listen closely – a casual remark made by a drunk uncle during a family gathering, an offhand remark by your mother’s friend about girls from a certain ethnicity, a not so funny comment about witches coming from a certain part of the country. In essence, these stories, long forgotten by even those who spun them, are dry leaves in a forest, ready to catch flame should anyone come with a match. This is simply the effect of an instance of violence occurring within one year, and within the confines of the state of Kenya. What then of Palestine? Of the DRC? Of all other longer running, deeper-seated, wider spread instances of violence?
One of my most intelligent and worldly-wise friends was at odds with me a short while before I wrote this. Why? She believes that Israel is evil. I believe that simply stating that one side is evil does not necessarily mean the other is good. I believe that, especially in instances where human lives are lost in such magnitude, one should take as complete an outlook as possible. This is hard to imagine when one side is responding to violence with violence. Every conflict has a story to be understood. One needs to look through time, through motivations, through intent. I think she believes me unfeeling. Honestly, she might be right. I would rather that than be consumed by emotion unabated, which opens one to manipulation. Ironically, in today’s digitally connected world, chains of cause and effect can be more easily obfuscated than at any other time in history.
The recent past has been replete with conflict, some drawing the focus of the world and some unseen. In February 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war escalated significantly, although the conflict had been ongoing since 2014. Similarly, the world is just now waking up to the long-running tragedies in the Eastern DRC, where millions have lost their lives and survivors have endured unimaginable atrocities since the Second Congo War began in 1998. There are conflicts in Ethiopia and Sudan, and the ongoing Palestinian genocide has been exposed by the latest escalation on 7 October (although traceable as far back as the Nakba).
According to the Congolese Action Youth Platform, nearly three decades of Ugandan and Rwandan military presence in the DRC have led to over 12 million deaths and more than 500,000 rapes, primarily caused by the Allied Democratic Forces and M23. Many Congolese blame Rwanda for these atrocities. Conversely, Rwanda accuses FARDC (Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) of collaborating with the FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda), which is linked to the 1994 Tutsi genocide. On May 4, bomb attacks on refugee camps near Goma killed 12 and injured 20, with the Congolese administration and the US blaming Rwanda and M23, which Rwanda denies. Some months back, I had the pleasure of sitting in on an online debate between two individuals I think highly of, one Rwandan and the other of Congolese descent; coincidentally, both schooled in Kenya and one is a close friend of mine. They are astute lawyers but even they were unable to come to an agreement on something as seemingly simple (to me at least) as who was actually fighting who in North Kivu. What then of the people on the ground? The people whose blood is the ink in which the very stories of these conflicts are written? In late 2023, a viral video showed a Congolese man self-immolating in Kinshasa while holding a sign reading, “Stop the genocide in Congo”, highlighting the extreme despair of simply being a statistic, a name in a story, a node in a narrative.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is another tragic clash of narratives, each rooted in profound historical and religious claims. Palestinians see themselves as victims of unjust dispossession by invaders, questioning the legitimacy of Zionism, especially when embraced by secular Jews. Conversely, Israelis view their presence as a justified return to ancestral lands. This fundamental disconnect extends to the contentious issue of the Right of Return – Israelis often perceive it as an existential threat, while Palestinians see it as a fundamental right to reclaim their homeland. The human cost of this ideological impasse has been staggering, particularly in Gaza, where recent Israeli military actions have resulted in the deaths of over 36,000 Palestinians, including thousands of women and children. These competing narratives, each deeply ingrained in their respective communities, form the foundation upon which decades of conflict have been built, making reconciliation a daunting challenge. In an instance of tragic mirroring, on 25 February, 25-year-old Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., in a horrific protest against the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, shouting “Free Palestine” before succumbing to his injuries.
A story tweaked just right can rouse such fiery reserves of violence that often enough they can even burn the people who spun the yarn themselves. There is violence in response to stories, or violence in response to violence born of stories, originally told by people long dead, for purposes long forgotten. A sober analysis often reveals a stark disconnect between the realities of global conflicts (and any other kind really) and the narratives arising from them. The conflicts themselves are immensely complex, with causal chains built up over decades. The narratives arising from these conflicts, on the other hand, depict clear-cut sides of “good” and “bad”, with easily understandable motivations ripe for assigning blame. Meanwhile, the systemic, long-ignored foundations underpinning these conflicts are banished from our collective consciousness. The result? Fissuring. Even of families, simply because they believe different narratives about a conflict.
I find myself convinced that an incredibly heightened awareness is the only way to prevent manipulation. Otherwise, we are little more than anthropomorphised sheep set to war against each other. What if people went out of their way to learn as much as possible about a situation which could rouse violent intent in them? What if people took time to deeply analyse violent intent in them and, instead of acting on it, ask themselves the paramount question – who stands to benefit from me acting out this violent intent? What if people maintained a healthy scepticism of cut-and-dried narratives with clear good and bad people?
Contrived narratives and control
Binyavanga Wainaina recounts a story that was going around in Kenya at the turn of the century, that robot dogs from Tanzania were attacking people out late at night, with some turning up mangled and dead. This was around the time when Kenya’s second president, Daniel Arap Moi, was about to leave office after 24 years in power, and everybody was afraid he just… would not. The easiest way to describe the reality at the time – the murders, the disappearances, the depressing reality – was crazy robodogs from Tanzania. People perceived a threat they could not name, and so they spun a story around it, and oriented themselves around that story such that, to date, decades later, you might still find places where people are afraid of attacks by robodogs if they’re out too late at night.
The spoken reason for the violence is seldom the actual reason the violence is happening. I call this the Franz Ferdinand phenomenon. Most often, it’s just a well-placed match that has ignited bottled grievances and caused an eruption. In fact, violence that appears justified and righteous is simply sustained by old stories, something grand and inspiring that a people is owed, something that was lost and must now be regained. To justify its World War II trajectory, Germany used Sonderweig (loosely translated as “the special path”), the idea that, compared to other Western states, the country had a unique historical and cultural development. Russia has something similar, the Osobby Put. Kenya itself has multiple ethnic Sonderwegs that have come to a head in multiple tribal clashes over the years and culminated most devastatingly in the 2007 post-election violence.
Now imagine when stories and the narratives they build are used as catalysts for violence. The potentiality for violence is innate, I think, to all living beings, anchored in the will to survival and, in humans, the will to power as Nietzsche calls it. Humans, being social animals, naturally exist in concert with each other, interconnected, enmeshed. On a primal level, there is a latent animal potentiality to violence that can be tapped into given the right triggers, and for humans specifically, the right stories.
More often than not politicians use people’s capacity for violence as a bargaining tool. It seems to me that, whenever there is a clear good/bad guy in an instance of mass violence, someone is trying to manipulate you. Violence is a gory, nasty, hard-to-control business that is sustained only when people buy into one single story – and there can never possibly be only one story. The people on the ground/in the streets/in the trenches, committing and enduring the actual acts of violence are never the people orchestrating it behind the scenes. Those in control of these narratives tend to be those who only want power for themselves, and the harness-able latent potentiality for violence in even the most peaceful citizen allows them to use it as a weapon to their own ends every single time.
