The masked gunmen who stormed Nairobi’s Westgate Mall on Saturday did one thing right. In targeting a site at the epicenter of elite consumerism in the upscale neighborhood of Westlands, they galvanized worldwide attention. As the mainstream media offers us a play by play of the unfolding hostage crisis, and as my Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds are flooded with declarations of anger and sorrow–sentiments I of course share–two things are apparent.

First, the extent to which the more privileged and educated segments of our world community find certain forms of violence in certain locales to be horrifying and objectionable. Second, the classed and racialized framings that shape our understandings of the issue at hand. Together, these notions work to differentiate between human lives that are worthy of grief, and those that are not.

What is it about the targeting of innocents on islands of privatized leisure like Westgate that strikes such a strong emotional chord across the world? Is it not that the majority of us who (have the ability to) log in every hour for updates see ourselves in the victims, knowing that we regularly occupy these very spaces?

Perhaps it is in this vein that we can make sense of the deafening silence in the context of the transnational plundering of neighboring Somalia—a country that readers of the New York Times and Kenya’s Daily Nation have been conditioned to see as representing the antithesis of liberal cosmopolitanism, as requiring external tutelage in the name of ‘peace and stability’, and whose ongoing destruction is more commonly understood as the work of Somalis themselves rather than the product of a complex assemblage of internal and external actors with competing political and economic interests.

How is it that the presence and violence of certain actors in the region–whether the Kenya Defense Forces (KDF) and its African Union ‘peacekeeping’ (AMISOM) partners in Somalia, or US and Israeli forces ‘advising’ the KDF in Nairobi–is normalized in our collective imaginaries as legitimate, while exceptional violence by non-state actors against upper-class Kenyans and expatriates triggers such immediate outcry?

Just three months after its invasion of Somalia in October 2011, the Kenyan military reportedly claimed the lives of at least 700 Somali ‘militants’. UN reports have documented black market sales by peacekeeping troops of arms intended for the Somali government to oppositional groups including Al-Shabaab, and Human Rights Watch reports of indiscriminate mortar and rocket attacks by AMISOM in civilian areas, leading not only to loss of life but also repeated displacement.

If up to 3,000 AMISOM forces have died since the peacekeeping operation was launched in 2007, one can only imagine what the number of Somali casualties might be. Our implicit acceptance of the ostensible humanitarian logic underlying such destruction amounts to what Talal Asad has referred to as the ‘etiquette of death dealing’, characterized by nods of regret for such ‘unfortunate’ loss of life.

Witnesses to yesterday’s attack in Nairobi reported that the suspects ‘looked like Somalis’ and ‘chanted Allahu Akbar as they entered the building.’ The spectral and racialized image of the terrifying Muslim (and explicitly non-Kenyan) Somali is here conjured once again to capture liberal anxieties, while the security apparatuses of Kenya, Israel and the United States are visually and rhetorically incorporated into cosmopolitan imaginaries of peace-keeping and secular diplomacy.

If we are to believe that the Westgate attack was the work of Al-Shabaab as the organization itself claims, does this not demand consideration that this weekend’s tragedy might be a political response to a transnational project of state-sanctioned violence in neighboring Somalia? Is it not Somalia that has been the epicenter of a ‘war zone’ and not Westgate mall, as the New York Times claims?

Given the amplified surveillance and suspicion of Kenya’s Muslim minorities since 9/11, one can’t help but dread how widely the tentacles of this war zone will extend, whether onto the streets of Mombasa or into the homes of Eastleigh. The targets of ‘just’ violence deemed so integral to secular modernity will be lucky to garner an ounce of the empathy we have all expressed in response to the tragedy at Westgate.

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is a doctoral student in anthropology at Yale.

The largest point to make about the Nairobi attack is one that is so obvious, it’s almost impossible to appreciate. Clearly the media wouldn’t be on fire if this massacre had taken place in outdoor market stalls frequented by the poor and the middle class, or some ramshackle mall somewhere in the developing world. Instead however, it’s the upscale mall, that similar to the one you’d see in Beverly Hills or Scarsdale. And if it’s hard for us to appreciate how brilliant this was — just like the school shooting in Newtown trumps dozens on Chicago’s South Side, I’m sure al-Shabab understands and appreciates the connection.

Temples of Western commerce aside, the challenge for American visual media to find a baggage-free way to put its eyes on this dizzying real-time cataclysm only gets more complicated. Given the amount of violence in American movies, one school of thought would be to steer clear of anything that confuses the dramatization of war, soldiers and violence with the real thing. The photo above, on the other hand, appeared in-column in the breaking NYT Lens post beneath a very intense slideshow by Times photographer and Nairobi-resident, Tyler Hicks.  If the caption had made some reference to the poster, if just to acknowledge its enormous weight in the image,  that would be one thing, but here’s how it reads:

Gunshots continued to ring out after nightfall, though the Kenyan authorities did not provide much information about what was happening inside the mall.

It’s the fact we’re forced to silently account for this outsized celluloid (or video game) mashup somewhere and somehow in our brains, while also parsing it out from the real horror, is what’s actually more jarring.

Still another variation of the drama theme involves the depiction of those civilian security personnel. The warning light here involves the risk of blurring the line between editorial photography with powerful associations to violent blockbusters and blaxplotation films.

With the alternately hot and cool lighting, the dramatic profile, the escalator with the bad guys up there somewhere, and, again, the cinematic posters packing the frame, this photo — which also ran on the front page of yesterday’s NYT print edition — might do justice to Tarantino.

And there are at a least a few more themes to be watchful about.

Be it Kenya or Haiti, there is always the danger of fostering an image of ineptitude on the part of local authorities, especially in contrast to the capacities of the white Westerner.

This gives us the tremulousness of the local forces and balloons on the set of Fright Night.

These image are insidious, I should emphasize, because they’re not ubiquitous but mostly, rather, embedded in a larger mix. As a result, they will subtly undermine photos like this one, a shot which is exemplary for the officer’s poise.

Another point. It’s important to make sure there’s no ambiguity between who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy when it comes to black men with guns. The problem with this Reuters image appearing in this Telegraph slideshow has to do with the caption.  It reads:

Kenya’s presidential office said that one of the attackers was arrested on Saturday and died after suffering from bullet wounds.
Picture: Goran Tomasevic /Reuters

You would hope that the readers saw enough of the pictures or read the stories enough to understand that the attackers remained completely invisible  – to the press at least. Otherwise, it’s entirely possible to confuse which side this guy’s on.

Back to the Hollywood theme, another way to understand the danger here has to do with infusing horrific news images with irony.

The mall might be generic but what can’t be underestimated — considering we’re still talking about “the dark continent” — is the domestic readership’s capacity for cultural incomprehension.  I’m sure upscale Africans understand the artifact as an amusement and a throwback — similar to the statue in a mall in San Francisco of a miner panning for gold . Still, I think it’s symbolically tricky in this foreign land, to juxtapose this screaming savagery (and the cammo) with an elephant.

(photo 1-3, 8 : Tyler Hicks/New York Times. photo 4: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters caption: A journalist rescues a woman injured in the shootout. photo 4: Siegfried Modola/Reuters caption: A police officer tries to secure an area inside the Westgate Shopping Centre. The al-Qaida-linked Somali militant group Al Shabaab has claimed responsibility for the deadly attack. photo 5: Goran Tomasevic / Reuters via WAPO caption: A soldier carries a child to safety.)

BY MR DAVEY D

Between the horrific drama playing out in Kenya with the mall shooting, this new Tom Hanks movieCaptain Phillips which is showing commercials every 5 minutes and is about US/European ships being victims of pirates and the US media highlighting the exploits of Al-Shabaab, the new terrorist boogie man is gonna be Somalia in a big way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WT8NYn9Wf8

The fact that there are reports surfacing saying that Somalian-Americans are rolling with or have sympathies with Al Shabaab, means this war on terror will increase and domestic spying will be justified especially if it’s a Black face being spied upon..We have already seen increased surveillance activities in large Somali communities in places like Minneapolis.

It was just the other day we heard Congressman Peter Kingchairman of the House of Representatives committee on counterterrorism and intelligence has already come out and urged the FBI to watching Somali-American communities. He asserts that Al Shabaab has been recruiting amongst Somalian Americans and thus all Americans should be wary of them.. Of course King is not too vocal about us needing to be wary of white Americans who may be recruited by Neo-Nazis, KKK members or other white supremacist organizations which routinely are involved in acts domestic terrorism.

Words like lawlessness and ungovernable are routinely used to describe Somalia and her people. What’s often missing in the analysis are the stories about extreme drought and poverty which were exacerbated by polluted waters caused by world commercial vessels passing through the Horn of Africa, which has depleted fish supplies which has long been a main sources of food and commerce.

Pay attention as all this unfolds… It’s in the mist of chaos that serious, oppressive moves are made..

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2013/09/21/nr-intv-savidge-francona-al-shabaab-mall-shooting.cnn.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D87knFnlSAE

 

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