Emmett Till and the Samburu
In 1955, 14 year-old Emmett Till, a young African-American boy visiting relatives in the Delta area of Mississippi, was lynched and brutally murdered for whistling appreciatively at a white woman. But what does this have to do with the Samburu? Two blogs ago (July 22nd) I posted a stomach-turning e-mail about those in the Samburu District of Northern Kenya. Some local Samburu told what actually happened to the two young children kidnapped by Somali bandits during the first, small cattle raid which brought in the Kenyan police with their shooting people from helicopters, raping of women and wholesale looting of the remaining cattle. Samburu trackers found the children far from home, hanging from a tree, throats slit and bodies skinned! Even as I type this, it makes my eyes prick with tears and my mind incredulous. Then several weeks ago, two young Turkana children were also kidnapped, killed, skinned and hung from a tree, just as the Turkana tribe were beginning to express sympathy with their Samburu neighbors.
Why did the Samburu, who have worked and lived with Tina for years, not tell her until she pressed and pressed? Because they “feared you would stay far from us.” The message the lynchers of Emmett Till and the kidnappers of the Samburu and Turkana children deliberately fostered was “you who are related to this child: know your place. Keep quiet; stay small. Your child’s body is shameful and you are nothing to us. If others learn of your child, you will be nothing to them too.”
Emmett Till’s mother, upon seeing his battered body – broken bones, bullet hole to his head and eye gouged out – refused that message. She insisted on an open casket at his funeral. She showed her dead son to the world, laid out in all the ugliness of his dying. She did not hide him. In a outcome his lynchers could not have imagined, Emmett Till’s deliberate murder inspired Rosa Parks to sit at the front of the bus. It catalysed the American Civil Rights Movement.
An American living in Northern Kenya, whose insight led to this blog, said:
“Any one who can skin kids as part of their game plan are asking us to imagine the worst. That is what this old teacher has done. Because I’ve seen it before. When they had a funeral in Chicago in 1955 for Emmett Till in an open casket to show what racists in Mississippi had done to a 14 year old boy only a year older than me [at the time] for just looking at a white woman. Those kids killed in Samburu last Feb and in Isiolo in July demand justice. And that means we must fight to protect the rule of law in Kenya. There are not any easier alternatives that will work.
Blessings to you who care.”
