#147notjustanumber: As a Kenyan Somali, somehow I blame myself for the #GarissaAttack

I was born in Garissa, the epicentre of the deadly terrorist attack on Moi University, Garissa campus. 

This is where 147 young, beautiful ambitious college kids were slaughtered. They were seekers of knowledge, full of dreams & hope and majority of them were the only hope their families had to get out of a vicious cycle of poverty. The ruthless barbaric Al-Shabaab terrorists suddenly snuffed out their lives.

And my hometown became the scene of a massacre. 

When the news broke, I remember muttering under my breath, "oh no not again". Then I was transfixed on TV channels, twitter handles and anywhere and everywhere I could find an update. Each update that came with a rising death toll sank me lower. As the hostage situation was unfolding, a glimmer of hope lit inside me whenever I heard the government saying, "We have cornered the terrorists". The hope would suddenly fade, when the realization hit me that terrorists do not give up easily. They come to die and they make sure they die having taken as many lives as they possibly can.

I have no words to describe how sad I have been feeling for the past six days. I am all cried out; my tears have stopped flowing. I have stopped asking why my government's security apparatus failed the hostages. Why it took 17 hours to end the siege. I have stopped asking how many more lives could have been saved had the government acted in time to bring in the Recce Company - a specialist unit trained for counter terrorism.

I have stopped being a security expert.

Instead, now I am asking myself, how could this have happened in the first place? What could I have done as an individual, as a Kenyan Somali to stop it all? Somewhere deep in my heart, I blame myself. I blame myself for being angry when Somalis from Somalia were rounded up at Kasarani. I blame myself for defending people who would hurt my countrymen. I blame myself for not choosing sides, for not sticking to the Kenyan side.

Why do I blame myself? 

There is no two ways about it; I can choose to be a real Kenyan and not sympathize with terrorists & their uncles. Or I can be unknowingly, silently aiding them. If I am silent, I am an accomplice in the atrocities of Al-Shabaab, who by the way, have mastered how to hide behind me. They have easily acquired the Kenyans IDs that I, as a Kenyan, have to jump loops to attain. And they speak better Swahili than me. Thy have also learnt to recruit my brightest son. When I am silent about my son’s radicalization, I have played a part in their killing spree. That’s why I blame myself. Because of my silence, people of my lineage, people of my religion, keep killing Kenyans like flies.

It is heart-breaking living with the fact that the terrorists stayed at a hotel in Garissa town - probably with their Armour - before they began their slaughter. Whether directly or indirectly, I must have seen something somewhere; if I just dig on my memory a little deeper, I am sure I saw something. But I did not say anything. If I was just a little bit more patriotic, if I cared just a little more, I would have seen the movements of those terrorists, I would have smelled their intention and I would have said something. But I did not, so I blame myself.

The blood of 147 lives is now in my hands.

My message @ #147notjustanumber Night vigil at Uhuru Park

Kenya is my only country; my great grand parents were born in Kenya. My grandmother used to tell us a story that happened in their village way before British colonialists arrived in North Eastern Kenya. She used to tell us of a particular incident when her mother - my great grandmother - fought Italian settlers who raided their village. She described of a battle between her mother, and an Italian man who tried to rape her. She said my great grandmother leaned against thorny shrubs to cover her back, as she kept the Italian at bay. I was very young when she used to tell us this story.

The significance of this simple story is to remind my fellow Kenyan Somalis that Somalia is not our country; Kenya is. We may speak the same language as Somalis from Somalia but we are not they. We are we - Kenyan Somalis who are Kenyan first, then Somali by ethnicity second.

I am Kenyan first, Somali Second.

Of the Dan Eldon legacy and why Dan innocently chose my career path.

"Wait a minute! It was Dan Eldon, he had something to do with why I chose to be a journalist!"

It was June of 1996. I was in my second year of high school. I had just come to Nairobi for my short mid term break and was at a house belonging to a friend of my family. You see my school was in Thika, few minutes from Nairobi but my home was in a far away place called Garissa. Travelling to Garissa for a short break was both costly and my mum would not hear of it. So my elder sister always had an army of friends who would host me for the midterm breaks.

Anyway, that day as I entered the living room of my would be hosts for the next three days, I stumbled upon some sort of a magazine. I cannot truly recall whether it was a magazine, a booklet or a photo catalogue but it was something I innocently picked and started perusing through. Maybe out of boredom or the fact that I did want to intrude on my hosts by making myself at home and turning on the television. I do not recall the reason nor the title. I picked it up and started reading. It had numerous photographs, photos about a war in Somalia I had little knowledge of, I was only 15 years old, I had no interest in the news and was hardly aware of what went on around the world beyond what went on in my teenage head.

This booklet/magazine was the first glimpse I had of a world outside TV sitcoms and VCR movies which I was fond of at the time. It told a story through photos, I remember reading some of the captions below the photos; something in the lines of "...the Somalia war started as 'my tribe against your tribe', then turned to 'me and my clan against your clan' to 'me and my brother against your clan' then 'me against my brother'...." or something similar. I am not absolutely certain of the exact text as I am writing this from pure memory of 18 years ago. I tried researching the booklet/magazine but without recollecting a name, author or something to help the search engines throw familiar words in my face, I am relying on this dim memory of mine.

The memory takes me back to one particular name I do recall though. Dan Eldon. I remember reading at the time that he died in Somalia, killed by an angry mob. I recall the pictures he took, they were vivid, sort of stuck in my mind to date. There were pictures of very malnourished grown men, of a 4 or 5 year old boy with a gun. There was a picture of someone with a begging bowl. I wish I could find this booklet/magazine again.

Why does the title of this post say "Of the Dan Eldon legacy and why Dan innocently chose my career path"? Simple. From the moment I picked up that booklet/magazine, I wanted to be in his shoes, not wanting to die or anything, but to take risks, to be in the middle of the action. But that must have soon faded as I went back to school three days later, and my head was again swamped with homework, passing tests and the good old teenage girl's boy-dramas.

However, the day we were filling out our career prospective forms, I remember jotting down "broadcaster" to the question 'what career path would you like to pursue'. At the time I had no idea 'broadcaster' actually meant the guys who own the TV stations!

So apart from that simple jotting down, I really never gave it too much thought until the year 2000, when my elder sister (she was sort of the head of the family after dad died in 1995) came home one day armed with application forms to the local Medical Training College, fondly referred to as MTC. She wanted me to be a nurse or some clinical officer. I told her I was not interested and that I had already applied to join Kenya Institute of Mass Communication, which was considered the place where all successful journalists in Kenya passed through.

I may not have actively obsessed over Dan Eldon or the author of that strange booklet/magazine but I did become a journalist: a TV journalist, then a radio journalist then freelance producer which I am doing at present. I am now 34 years old and as I was doing some soul searching on new year's day, I stumbled upon that little memory and I thought to myself "wait a minute, it was Dan Eldon, he had something to do with why I chose to be a journalist!" So I just but began obsessively searching for his work, I still haven't found that booklet/magazine, whatever it was called.

In reflection I remember I did travel to Mogadishu in 2006 while working as a TV reporter with Kenya Broadcasting Corporation. It was more than a decade after he did. I remember sensing the danger, the smell of gun powder and the general unsafeness of the place. Even at that time, for some reason the memory of the booklet/magazine did not trigger at all. I don't recall, reflecting on it at the time, maybe because the surrounding was too intense to go back in time into childhood memory.

It is strange why it only came back to me now. On new year's day, when the rest of the world was nursing a hungover. But since then, I have watched a bunch of documentaries about his life, about his family's honouring his work and about his journals. I rang the family's foundation called "The DEPOT"(The Dan Eldon Place Of Tomorrow) in Nairobi and tried to see if I could volunteer. I also managed to write this post. I don't know why, but I feel like he or the information my subconscious absorbed from that booklet/magazine had a lot to do with why I chose to be in this field. I do not know if I will go through with volunteering for his legacy, but I do know that until I find that little piece of collection again, I may never be able to pin-point exactly how he inspired me.

All the same I will say "thank you Dan, may the soul with which you did your work, inspire many more who never knew you!"

Disclaimer: I could not put any image of the guy who pulled me to journalism, you know copyright issues but I am sure whoever wants to find out who he was, can easily bury themselves in his work, photos and art which are allover the internet. For me I feel like that is not going to be enough. But that is another story for another day.