Ekho is a popular Kenyan social media company based in Dallas hosted by One Monicah Kariuki. Ms. Kariuki covers all manner of topics that are relevant to the Kenyans in the Diaspora. That I was invited to speak on Ekho was not a big surprise. The company is a Kenyan company, meaning that the topics covered are relevant to me as well. But I could have expected to be covering the topic of food than issues of domestic violence.
I graciously accepted the invitation and promised myself to think about what my position would be much later. Then something interesting happened. The closer we got to the onse of the event, the more I realized that there are very interesting connections between food justice and domestic violence.
When you think about it, the most basic source of our socialization is the family. It's the place where we get our most enduring values.
If that environment happens to be violent, then it is logical to assume that violence could be part of that family's value moving forward. Save for serious interventions, the violent tendencies can metastasize over time to create a whole industry of violence. This is largely what seems to have happened. You see any change or development brings its own opportunity. Another way of looking at it is that certain changes or developments are brought about to create opportunities for certain people. Violence is no different and while it might not appear that way, it is quite plausible that violence is an industry in its own right.
There are historical, political and economic dimensions to violence.
If we look at the foundation of America as a country, from the bloody revolution and the violence against the native people, the first blue chip industry besides slavery and cotton, was the gun industry. It become the first powerful lobby group in the U.S. that it became the envy and model for future corporations bid to subvert the power of the government for the purpose of using public resources for private gain. The use of lobbyists and buying political influence started with the gun lobby. While many view Edward Barney as the father of public relations, the gun industry was a forerunner of such relations.
Put differently violence is a cradle of this country. But how does that ultimately affect the kind of country we ultimately become? What turns out to be the most likely result, at least going by the case of America, is that we normalize violence. America became a gun culture and that culture is not only social but also political. I don’t know which presidential candidate would even win the Republican primaries without pandering to the gun culture of the party members.
It is therefore ironical that the same national culture that espouses the right to have weapons around the house that are fit for the battle ground. Weapons do not necessarily make people violent, what they do is create a culture that glorifies weapon and by extension a culture that can be easily manipulated by corporations keen on selling more weapons. In the end, a country becomes addicted to weapons for no apparent gain. In the end, violence becomes something that we find hard to separate ourselves from. It becomes part of us and something we either cause or just come to be oblivious of. It is no surprise then that people of African descent can suffer historical violence and the country still view them as both a threat as well as an obstacle to progress and peace in this country. It must take a special people to be so deluded and still consider themselves normal. The violence then spreads outside our borders with our complicity and sometimes tacit approval.
In such a case, the world domestic violence actually describes who we are as a county. All violence is domestic, it starts from home, upbringing, culture, socialization or training. It’s effects are felt at a domestic level as it is someone’s father, mother, son or daughter who gets violated and that has direct or indirect consequences on the domestic lives of all those related to the victim of violence. So yes, domestic violence is us and we are it.