A Deadly Election Season in Kenya
NAIROBI—Two days after her husband was shot in the head on a soggy October afternoon, Dorothy Achieng sat on a wood-framed sofa cradling their one-year-old daughter Maya. Around her sat a dozen friends and relatives, quietly commiserating. In front of her, two photographs of her handsome husband lay on a knee-high wooden table; in each picture, he’s posing and smiling directly at the camera.
Thirty-year-old Paul Omina was killed in the poor, crowded Nairobi neighborhood of Mathare late last year as an extended, disputed, and sometimes violent election season drew to a close. That witnesses said he was shot by the police came as no surprise to virtually everyone I met in the neighborhood. For them, such brutality is rendered mundane by its ubiquity—there are well over one hundred extra-judicial killings recorded in Kenya each year, and even more in election years. But each statistic is its own tragedy.
