By Brendan Sweeney
Maina Kiai, an advocate of the High Court of Kenya and former Chair - and founder member - of the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights, is renowned for his human rights work both at home and abroad. In 2005 he was named Jurist of the Year by the International Commission of Jurists for instance. He was the first Executive Director of the nongovernmental Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) where he led the revitalization of the constitutional reform process in Kenya and has served as Africa Director at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International and Director of Africa Programs at the International Human Rights Law Group in Washington, DC (now called Global Rights).
But now Mr Kiai has turned to making films as a way of promoting social justice in Kenya. In the following interview he explains how filmmaking offers another way of bringing human rights to the fore.
Could you tell us something about your professional background?
I have basically been doing human rights work all my life. Essentially my most recent human rights work was with the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights. I was the founding chairperson. I did that for five years…and since then I have been doing something quite different which is using film and documentary to reach out and to empower people. It’s a fascinating experience to use film to do human rights work. My foray into that has been accidental.
But your background is in law not in film?
Yes. I’ve done work with elections, constitution making, building communities and empowering them, but generally my background is in human rights law.
The decision to move from human rights advocacy to making documentaries; how did that come about?
It was accidental. I was in the US following the Obama campaign to see whether there were any lessons we could learn. Once you analyse most of Africa, the key challenge we face is moving towards democracy and sustainable and equitable development is a lack of leadership. So the question has always been; how do you create good leaders? Obama’s campaign inspired a lot of interest and enthusiasm across the world and I was given the chance to film it. Another thing was that I went to Harvard Law School with Obama so there was a personal element to it. I wanted to see this person whom I had known as a young man galvanizing people and doing things which had never been done before in US politics. What struck me most about the campaign was the level of organization. He built a movement around himself…it was a terrible year for me and for Kenya and Obama’s election gave me hope, and inspired hope.
How did this lead to you making documentaries?
I had some friends in the UK and I told them that I had good access to especially Obama´s Florida State campaign machine. They said; why don’t you make a film about that? They sent a film crew who had also done work for Channel 4 in Kenya, so it became a Kenyan project and was shown on Channel 4 in the UK and we made a slightly longer version for Kenyan television. We got a lot of good feedback in Kenya so we decided to make another film. We have just completed one on justice in Kenya; it’s much longer. It’s called ‘Getting Justice’.
What issues did you tackle in the film?
We looked at issues around the election crisis last year for instance and the elections themselves. We went to the survivors and victims and gave them a voice…and challenged some of the conventional wisdom associated with the violence that took place last year. I was shocked for instance by how much rape was used as a tool in that violence and how intensive it was, and how it was then forgotten. The people who were raped are completely ignored and have received no help whatsoever. Many have subsequently gone into prostitution because there was no other option. We tend to talk about justice in a very abstract manner and then forget about how it affects real people, the victims and survivors. It was a real eye-opener for me. What I also noticed was how well people respond to a camera. It helps too that I am quite well known in Kenya so when people see me they open up. There was for instance a group of about 25 women who had all been raped and I asked them if they wanted their faces to be shown and they all said yes. They said we have to deal with this and confront this and people have to see us as human beings.
Do you feel that these documentaries have a healing quality?
Absolutely. Talking helps. Most of these women or people affected by the violence haven’t had any counseling…Part of the documentary ‘Getting Justice’ deals with Rwanda, its justice system and what has happened 15 years after the genocide. We talked to perpetrators, some in jail, some who had been released, as well as survivors, getting them to open up. Film is a remarkable tool that I feel human rights people don’t use enough…especially in countries that don’t have the Internet. We can use film, and broadcasting to mobilize people but we are still at the stage of trying out and testing the limits of this…We are not making film for its own sake, we think of it as a serious tool for the empowerment process. In places where there are deep divisions, our goal is to go back and show the film to the two warring communities at the same time. This is to show that everyone is a victim.
In Kenya, there was a lot of interethnic violence connected to the elections?
Yes, but there was also state violence against certain communities, and it is a huge benefit to be able to bring together victims and aggressors so that it can hopefully spur debate and discussion and empowerment. It is a grassroots method. One of the things that is characteristic of traditional human rights work in many parts of Africa is that we have carried it out from the top down. We focus on policy changes, on legislation and on lobbying leaders and parliament. I think it is time now to start doing this from the bottom up, getting ordinary people to get involved and push for their rights.
How many of your films have been broadcast?
Two films have been broadcast already, and the third film is due to be broadcast in October.
Have your films created debate within Kenya?
The first two did. The Obama film was extremely well received. I went to out-of-the-way places and people remembered they had seen me hugging Obama. This was good for me at a personal level as I had been under serious threat. The political classes understood that Obama knows me which gave me some protection. The second film was also very well received, and shown three times on national television. But that’s not enough so we’re working on getting an even wider distribution, sending out DVDs.
Can you feel an ‘Obama effect’ in Kenya, that there is a sense of change?
There is, but not quite yet. There is a sense that change can happen but there are things you have to resolve first. Clearly people like Obama don’t come around every day. But among the intellectual class in Kenya there is a feeling that it’s time to start thinking outside the box in terms of leadership and politics. [In Kenya] we are still rotating around the same paradigm, patronage, money politics, and ethnic politics…the biggest obstacle for us has to be the ethnic issue which we have to confront much more. This was an issue which took a long time to resolve in the US. I remember that in law school Obama’s goal was not to be president it was to be senator because that is what he thought was achievable. In the late 1980s the most a black person could attain to was becoming a senator but that changed dramatically by the 1990s.
For further information, please contact Brendan Sweeney at