With evil lurking all around us, be thy neighbour’s keeper

Gerry Loughran’s column in last week’s Sunday Nation inspired this article. If you missed it, part of what he wrote was on what he described as “unthinkable cruelty” that recently led to the deaths of three children in Britain. (READ: Unimaginable violence on the six o’clock news)

The first, Hamzah Khan, four, was starved to death by his mother. Keanu Williams, two, was beaten to death by the woman who brought him into the world, while Daniel Pelka, four, was constantly beaten and denied food by the woman he called “mum”, eventually succumbing to mistreatment. Relevant authorities blamed such deaths on, among other factors, “too few or inexperienced social workers.”

Forget Britain for a minute, we have our own horror stories involving children to tell, but unlike more advanced nations like where Gerry comes from, we lack the luxury of social workers who we can rely on to ensure that parents and other guardians respect the rights of children.

Our version of social workers are our next door neighbours, a tragedy, if there ever was one. I say this because few would speak out if they suspect, or worse, knew with certainty, that their next door neighbour mistreats her child. However, when the long overdue tragedy occurs, these same neighbours will be the first to give a detailed witness account of how the neighbour used to cane the poor child mercilessly, or lock him out in the cold. What good, pray, does this do?

When it counted, they said nothing, why speak when it’s too late to do anything?

If you have been paying attention, you will have noticed that cases of spousal killings as well as parents hacking their children to death have gone up.

Each time one of these disquieting stories come up in the news, there will always be that know-all neighbour who will say how the couple used to frequently fight, or how the father-turned-murderer once chased his children and their mother down the road brandishing a panga. The question no one asks these bad neighbours is what they did about it.

FIGHTING COUPLE

I won’t claim to be better than these see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil Kenyans, because in my adult life, I too have been guilty of being a bad neighbour on several occasions.

One particular case comes to mind. Sometime last year, a woman’s screams woke me up. It was on a weekday, a few minutes past 12pm. Alarmed, I switched on the lights outside and rushed to the window. I didn’t see anything, but I could tell that the screams were coming from one of the houses across the road.

I was new in the neighbourhood, so I did not know the fighting couple. In between screams, the woman would shout that her husband was about to kill her. There was a lot of banging, which went on for some time. Suddenly, all went quiet, and I remember hoping that that the poor woman was not lying in a pool of blood, dead.

And then I went back to bed and slept fitfully until morning. I would later learn that the woman gets ‘killed’ by her husband at least thrice a year – but that’s beside the point. The point is that I did nothing.

It’s true that we don’t live in a country where police will come running, guns blazing, when you call the emergency line (does it go through by the way?) to say that your next door neighbour is about to clobber his wife to death, but surely there’s something we can do in such cases?

I dare say that there is something very wrong with a society where no one comes to your aid when you get mugged by two unarmed thugs in broad day light – yet this happens daily in the streets of Nairobi.

Perhaps it is time you and I did some soul-searching.