How might catastrophic event change our lives?

LAST weekend the Sunday Times carried a photo of a little white girl running across the floor of the Westgate mall in Nairobi. She is four-year-old Portia Walton.

On the other side of the floor, in the direction she was running, stood a black man, Abdul Haji, who beckoned her. In the opposite picture little Portia was in the arms of a black policeman outside the mall.

For some reason the black policeman had no name, but he carried little Portia to safety, away from the mall which was under siege reportedly by al-Shabaab.

I am not sure whether Portia understood fully what was happening around her. Her mother, Katherine, says she was screaming when there was shooting, but that somehow amid all of that she managed a nap every once in a while.

Phillip, her father, says he could see fear written all over little Portia’s face when he looked at her picture.

I would like to think that her parents will preserve the pictures for her. When she looks at them, 12 years from now, she will hopefully understand the world and its workings much better than she does now.

I don’t think she will remember everything which happened there, but I would like to think her parents will recount the events for her.

Looking at her pictures, I have tried to put myself in her shoes now and 12 years henceforth. In doing so, I have recast quite a few things.

I have transfigured the attackers and made them all white, bar a single woman, whom I have made black. Haji and the policeman without a name are both white.

Needless to say, I am a black toddler of Portia’s age.

I imagine that I would quickly forget what happened and wallow in the business of growing up, which every child should do, in the intervening period. I hoped that my parents might allow me that space.

I harboured the hope that when I was older, they might reintroduce the pictures to me and recount what happened on September 21 and the next three days in every gruesome detail.

How would I react? I thought I would be grateful for the luck to be alive and probably appreciate human life better than I might, if I were never exposed to such danger.

I also thought I would be angry, very angry at the people who exposed me to mortal danger at so young an age.

Would “race” come into it? That was very difficult to tell.

Much would depend on how my parents would have raised me in the intervening period, how the society in which I grew up would have encouraged me to think about humanity and how my parents would knit the narrative back together for me.

Howsoever these intricate influences might work together to mould my inner self, I hoped I might still be able to think independently, for the essence of being human consists in being able to rise above forces propelling us to behave in particular ways and take charge of our lives. And accept individual responsibility for our decisions and actions.

I thought I would probably be aware of the fact of my blackness and that the attackers were white. Watching myself running to a white man and being whisked to safety in the arms of another white man (even if he had no name!), I hoped these would mediate the ways in which I might think about “race”.

This is not to say I might not appreciate, if things were so configured still, that a majority of white people might not be like my two rescuers.

I said I would be very angry about being exposed to mortal danger at so young an age. Hopefully my anger might be sublimated, so that it was channelled to efforts to create a better world.

I would hopefully resist any notion which requires of me to be part of the faithful flock which imbibes everything from the stool of authority. So, I would in my anger hopefully still try to understand the things that drive people to embark on the course of action which would almost have nipped my tender life in the bud, 12 years ago.

Merely calling them terrorists would hopefully not do it for me.

I hope I would see that as an easy cop-out in the face of difficult political questions. I would want to ask penetrating questions about decisions made by the British government in June 1960 when declaring Somaliland’s independence and in August 1963 when Kenya got its independence.

I would take this disposition, not because I would be soft on terrorism, but because merely labelling your opponents as terrorists has never removed the basis of conflict.

If four-year-olds are to be exposed to the dangers I was 12 years earlier, I would want to play my bit in ensuring that it is not in the service of a cause which has not been clarified in honest discussion.

But of course my hopes are in some ways an intimate product of the person I already am. The course of history is, however, determined by people as they already are and so I offer no apology.