“At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
One chilly evening, my late father returned from the village – our homeland nestled among the gently rolling beautiful hills and ridges of Iganjo. His face, usually clouded by the anxieties of city life, carried a rare glimmer of joy and calmness , like someone who had just encountered truth.
He had been spending more and more weekends in the village, drawn back to the place he had once fled during the economic upheaval of the ‘80s. Back then, structural adjustment programs had devastated rural livelihoods, forcing many, including him, to abandon their ancestral homes and seek survival in the city.
But now, as age caught up with him and the city grew more hostile, he found peace in the serenity of Iganjo. The land was calling him back, not just as a place of rest, but as a symbol of belonging. A profound connection between place and self.
Curious about his calm joy, I asked him what had brought it on. He leaned back and began to tell a story, one that had unfolded during his recent visit to the village. It was filled with bravery, anger, and a long-awaited sense of justice. It felt deeply rooted in our land’s history and incredibly relevant to the present moment.
It was the story of a retired head teacher in the village. With a few herds, relatively expansive land, a stone house, his treasured Pajero, and stories of his days in public service, he had long made himself lord over village affairs, meddling in land disputes, silencing dissent, and bribing local authorities to have his way. A retired school principal and former civil servant, he returned from the city with a pension, a sense of entitlement, and a hunger for more.
This time, his victim was a poor widow and her two sons, an easy target in a society where land is not just property, but sustenance, dignity, and memory.
The old man, drunk on entitlement, had illegally annexed the widow’s land after her husband’s demise, preventing her from cultivating or even stepping on it. He weaponized his unprincipled connections with the local administration – the corrupt chief and police, relics of a colonial system – to humiliate, harass, and occasionally detain the widow and her sons on fabricated charges. And as always, the community watched, whispered and prayed about the injustice in private, but did nothing.
Until that fateful morning when the widow’s family couldn’t take it anymore.
Desperate with hunger and no land to till, the widow and her sons had to make a decision, to either die from starvation or fight for their land. Their hunger echoed louder than fear; they took their jembes and machetes and went to occupy their shamba (land). The old man, seated on his balcony, saw them from afar, mounted his Pajero in fury, and drove down. He arrived and immediately began hurling insults and threatening the family. But what he didn’t realize was that the family had reached the edge. The point where the old dies and the new is born.
What followed was swift and final. The family, long simmering with resentment, attacked him. The machetes landed hard. The man’s head rolled, severed from the body. His blood mixed with the earth, the same land he had stolen, now reclaiming its dues.
But what made this story unforgettable, as my father told it, wasn’t just the act of violence – it was what came after. The family did not flee the scene. They walked themselves to the authorities and surrendered.
As they walked, the villagers lined the road. No one said a word. Tears mingled with applause. Men lowered their heads in shame and awe. Sadness hung heavy in Iganjo, knowing that this poor hard working family might spend the rest of their days in prison. Yet, there was a newfound courage among the villagers. For once, the rich felt the wrath of the oppressed. It was a moment of rupture, a collective awakening.
In this act of resistance, the widow and her sons embodied Fanon’s assertion that violence can liberate the oppressed from internalized inferiority and despair. Their decisive action shattered the psychological chains that had bound them, transforming them from passive victims into agents of change. This transformation extended beyond their family, igniting a sense of empowerment within the entire community.
And from that moment, everything changed. The silence became questions. “If the poor widow and her sons can fight back, why can’t we?”
This act, this explosion of long suppressed cry for justice and dignity was not isolated. It was part of a global echo of resistance by the wretched of the earth.
On October 7th, 2023 the Palestinians, after decades of brutal occupation, genocide, blockade, and international neglect, rose up in defiance against Israeli Occupation. Just as the widow and her sons reached a point where death was better than submission, so too did a people long suffocated reclaim the right to fight for dignity on their own terms.
Further west, in the Sahel, in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, a people tired of imperialist exploitation and neo- colonial dominance, are rising. Like the widow, they are reclaiming their land and the right to shape their own future.
Even here, in Kenya, the fire is growing.
On 25th June, 2024 when Kenyan youth stormed Parliament, it wasn’t just about a punitive IMF and World bank-imposed Finance Bill, It was a reaction to the decades of humiliation and dispossession by the powerful. It was about a generation saying: Enough is enough.
Frantz Fanon understood this better than anyone. That violence is not just destruction. For the oppressed, it restores their humanity. It silences the internalized voice of submission.
From the breath-taking hills and ridges of Iganjo, to the blood-stained streets of Palestine and the scorched fields of the Sahel, the story of the widow’s family’s act of defiance is a call to challenge the injustices our people have long endured, a reminder of the moral obligation of every oppressed person to resist their oppression through all means. Just like the land eventually swallowed the old tyrant from my village, so too shall all oppressed people reclaim their dignity, with fire and fury!
*Kinuthia Ndung’u is a Social Justice Advocate with Kasarani Social Justice Centre (KSJC)
