Effigies:
Rumors Externalized
Before I went among the street children of Kenya, I knew them only through the news. The papers called them a blur of wretched faces.
They said they were kids who sniffed industrial glue and kerosene to kill the hunger, carrying virus and rot in their lungs, fighting with knives in the dust.When they are seven, people pity them. By twelve, the pity turns to fear.
The city begins to see them not as children, but as thieves, killers, and a sickness in the dark.Then comes the violence. It is quick and it is total. A boy steals a handful of sugar or a phone, and the crowd kills him with stones and burns the body on the asphalt. Before big government meetings, the police clean the streets with batons and gas. Children run into the river and drown. The autopsy reports are short. They always read: mob justice and starvation.
The public kills them in the mind first.
Then the street does the rest
If prejudice had a shape,
this is what it would look like.
These paintings do not document the lives of the street children. They are a mirror for the people who look away.
The twisted, ugly figures on these canvases are not the children. They are statues. They are the shapes made by public fear, class hatred, and cold neglect.
By giving a body to these rumors, the work forces us to look at our own cruelty.
It asks a simple question:
Do not listen to the talk.
Open our eyes and look at the boys and girls we refuse to see.
Where does the truth end,
and where does our imagination begin to twist it?
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I went to the streets and gathered the drawings made by the children themselves. They have never had a day of art training, but their simple lines hold a fierce and innocent longing.
In the following pages, I show their drawings, along with their names, ages, and real photographs.
When we look into their eyes and see their years, the cold and blind gaze from above will fade away.
It will become a look with a smile, and the beginning of kindness.
To answer this prejudice,
