Kenya’s social media moral police always want us to hide photos of those killed from one injustice or the other. A lifeless photo of a guard knocked by a CMC Motors big vegetable yesterday generated a heated exchange between myself and one of the PSCU directors on Twitter (serious issues are first canvassed on Twitter). The fellow, standing on a higher moral pedestal than myself, castigated me for not being ‘sensitive’ to the family of the dead. I didn’t share the photo; I only asked what’s wrong with sharing it.
I will post two photos (below) and ask: Was the world insensitive for sharing these two images, each which led to massive soul-searching by moral people?
Back to the issue: The photo of the lifeless man was first posted by my friend Robert Alai Onyango (who, perhaps due to social media bullying, has since pulled it down). Alai’s brother was recently killed by a hit-and-run driver (God Rest his Soul in Eternal Peace). Because there was no photo, no video, it took him months tying together the bits and pieces till he luckily found the person. However, there are hundreds of people knocked down daily and their cases run cold.
Where powerful people are involved, like happened to that hapless guard knocked by a CMC Motors executive (who would rush out of his range rover and bemoan the damage to the vehicle, leaving the helpless man lying in a pool of blood), it takes such photos to motion the justice system to act. In such times, the victim’s family is not just the small helpless family that will bury him, but every hater of injustice. In such times, the immediate family becomes the whole moral universe.
I am not mindless of people who cross roads anyhow. I am not mindless of the ‘damage’ such people cause to people’s vehicles when they are knocked dead. Anyway, my point is; certain injustices are so insensitive that being ‘sensitive’ to them is being insensitive. The photos below were captured by people who refused to be ‘sensitive’.
