On a humid July afternoon, I found myself at a stall in Brixton Market in South London buying a Kenyan flag bracelet. The lanky man selling the country bracelets asked me if I was replacing mine. I told him I had never owned one. He stopped flicking through the bracelets and paused, his hand mid-air holding a string of beads in red, green, white and black—the colors of the Kenyan flag.

“Why?” he asked.

“I have a complicated relationship with my country.” I replied. “The politics, the politicians.”

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He concurred. “Bro, I’m Nigerian so I know exactly what you mean.” We laughed about it some more, this shared misery of ours, the state of our countries. I tapped five pounds for the bracelet, wore it around my wrist, and left. This was me finally displaying my Kenyanness, this was me saying, “My country is not perfect but it is mine.”

I sat on the tube from Brixton, scrolled through my Twitter feed, and watched photos and videos of young Kenyans covered in tear-gas smoke and the water cannon spray.

On June 8, Albert Ojwang, a 31-year old teacher and anti-corruption blogger, was killed in police custody after being arrested for allegedly insulting a senior police officer on social media. His death in Nairobi sparked a series of protests by young Kenyans against police brutality and lack of government accountability.

The young protesters were again met with the brute force of the Kenyan police. I shuddered at a video of hawker Boniface Kariuki being shot in the head. I saw images of young people lying dead on the road, their blood spilling and meshing with the tarmac. Mothers crying out loud for their children, and fathers hugging their children close to their chests. In three weeks of protests, 38 people were killed and 29 others injured.

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I couldn’t help but ask myself how did we get here? How did we allow ourselves to sink to this point? That, of course, is the easier question to answer with our own choices in the elections. How do we get away from this becomes a much harder one to deal with.

This is the tug-of-war relationship I’ve had with this place I call home.

The first time I encountered police brutality in the hands of the Kenyan police, I was four years old. It was Saba Saba day, July 7, 1997. On my way home from nursery school I was caught up in the nationwide protests against the government of Daniel arap Moi, the dictator who ruled Kenya between 1978 and 2002 animated by calls for a transition from a one-party state to a multiparty democracy. I choked up on teargas........

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