Inside the silent corridors of the Kenya National Archives, on the first-floor gallery wall, hangs a series of portraits, framed faces of Kenya’s police commissioners, stretching from colonial rule to the present day. The first is Sir Donald William Stewart, the first British Commissioner of the East Africa Protectorate, who served from 1904 to 1905. He stares out with cold authority, like a ghost that refuses to leave. Next to him, another portrait. Then another. Slowly, the faces begin to darken. Then comes Bernard Hinga, the first African Commissioner of Police after independence in 1964, followed by a succession of other black faces decorated in medals earned through the enforcement of state violence.
In colonial Kenya, the police force was not built to protect but to keep the “native” in line. Ask the scorched earth of Hola detention camp, where in 1959, detainees were clubbed to death by colonial police. Ask the ghosts of forests where the Mau Mau fought, only to be betrayed by the same Home Guards, black men in khaki shorts who killed for the Queen. It was a colonial tribal police officer named Ndirangu who shot Dedan Kimathi. It was also a colonial-trained Black officer who tied the rope.
From Stewart to the current police boss Douglas Kanja, the institution holds steady. The legacy of violence, rooted in colonial repression, persists. The same boots that marched for the empire now march for the new elite. Jomo Kenyatta replaced the Queen, and the instruments of violence remained at his whims. Every regime since has used the police as its personal weapon.
In the 80s, they killed and broke bones in Nyayo and Nyati House torture chambers. In the 90s, they dragged students from lecture halls and brutally crushed protests. And today? They abduct, torture, and kill those that dare to speak truth to power. They intimidate and lob teargas at school children bold enough to see through their paper-thin deception.
The Kenyan police, under the current system, are trained to protect private property and the illusory peace of the rich minority.
From Kimathi to Rex Masai, the chain of state brutality remains intact. Rex didn’t die by mistake. He was executed for the crime of marching with others who dared to demand dignity. The state called it a “stray bullet.” We know better. There are no strays in a system trained to silence dissent on sight. But here’s the tragedy: The man who pulls the trigger is just as trapped as the one in his line of fire.
The Kenyan police officers are not free. They are psychologically brutalized long before they brutalize others. They wear uniforms soaked in the sweat of humiliation. They are trained like animals in camps that resemble torture chambers. Screamed at, beaten, and broken. Then handed a gun and told: “Now you are the law.”
So they walk the street with rage in theirs chests, armed with their power—the handcuffs and rifle. They see the citizen as a threat. They are owed by the same system that owes us. But instead of turning their weapons on the slave masters, they are taught to shoot the fellow slaves.
They earn a salary that disappears in loans. They live in undignified dwellings and die in public hospitals with neither facilities nor doctors. They are not just enforcers; they are trapped in the same web of exploitation. They are both the jailer and the jailed, trapped inside an institution built to crush humanity , their own included.
When the political class is rejected and called out in the streets, they send the police—our parents, siblings and neighbours—to brutalize us into silence. When the people match in the streets for dignity and accountability, they meet baton-wielding, blood thirsty officers. But behind the gun is a woman who skips meals to afford school fees. Behind the shield is a man who hasn’t paid rent. Behind the tear gas mask is a father with no insurance for his sick child.
And when the political class is overpowered, as they were by Kenya’s Gen-Z, they unleash their final weapon: the military. This regime came face to face with its biggest fear when youth protests broke through police lines and occupied parliament. For the first time in decades, power trembled. The state responded by not just using the police to brutalize and kill the protestors but by invoking an executive order to deploy the army, turning our streets into militarized zones. That order is still in force today. It is a silent threat. A reminder that the system is ready to use their instruments of violence to kill again.
This pattern of state violence is not new. In 1969, during President Jomo Kenyatta’s visit to Kisumu, security forces opened fire on civilians. The government attempted to cover up the extent of the massacre, and virtually all documentary evidence from the day was destroyed.
In 1984, the Wagalla massacre occurred when the Kenyan military killed ethnic Somali men in Wajir County. Government troops detained some 5,000 Degodia men at an airstrip, denying them food and water for a week, and then massacred them.
And when one of their own dares to speak, to question orders, to serve the people, they are hunted from within and made an example to the rest. When Cop Shakur, a former prison officer, dared to stand with the youthful patriots during the historic Gen-Z protests in Kenya, he was suspended from the force and later arrested and charged maliciously for his solidarity. His courage reminds us that even within the system, there are those who recognize its rot.
Throughout my childhood in Mathare and Kariobangi in Nairobi, violence was the air we breathed. We grew up watching police raids tear through our streets, their boots kicking down doors and extrajudicial killing of petty criminals. We saw mothers wailing over their beloved sons who never made it back. We learned early that to be poor in Kenya was to live under the constant threat of a rogue force.
Today, as an organiser, those memories are no longer distant. I have stood on the frontlines and watched history repeat itself. Last year, during the height of the anti-government protests, I was brutally assaulted by a group of General Service Unit (GSU) officers along Kimathi Street. My only ‘crime’ was questioning the arbitrary arrest of my comrade, Kiritu Chege. That day, they beat me to the ground, their rage echoing the brutality I first glimpsed as a child. The assault was captured on video and quickly went viral, becoming a stark testament to the unchecked violence meted out by the state.
During the 2024 Nane Nane (8th August) protests, I sustained a cracked rib from police batons in downtown Nairobi. But I was lucky. Some have not been. Many families mourned children stolen by bullets and buttons. Many mothers are still grieving.
This cycle of violence is not theoretical; it has left scars in our communities riddled with grief, on our broken bodies and in our memories. We carry the weight of this brutality every day.
But the system is not broken, it was built this way. The colonial gun cannot be reformed overnight. The police and military, as instruments of state violence, have repeatedly shown their unflinching allegiance to unjust power and not the people. Their actions are a testament to this.
We must continue to organize, to build movements rooted in social justice and accountability. When we capture power, we must dismantle this oppressive system and rebuild it into one that serves its people. A system where no child will have to breathe violence. A system where no mother will have to bury a child lost through police violence. A system where police uniforms will no longer be soaked in the blood of the people.
Until we break the colonial gun, it will never be our hands that hold it.
*Kinuthia Ndung’u is a social Justice Advocate with Kasarani Social Justice Centre (KSJC)
