© Walter Astrada/AFP Photo
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On New Year's Day, 2008, dozens of people were burned alive in a Kenyan church during ongoing riots in response to President Mwai Kibaki's suspicious reelection the month before. For Argentinean photojournalist Walter Astrada the violence was a call to action. He decided he had to show the world what was happening.
Astrada spent nearly two months taking pictures of the postelection violence that has already claimed 1,000 lives and has displaced more than 300,000 people. On January 17 -- after two days of mass public demonstrations -- a group of policemen raided Kibera, an enormous slum in Nairobi, throwing tear gas into homes and brutalizing suspected supporters of Kibaki's opponent, Raila Odinga. Astrada followed the police, and from amid the chaos, he heard a boy shouting, "Baba," or Father; an officer had kicked the terrified boy's door down while he was home alone.
Astrada chose to focus on the officer's instrument of violence, instead of his whole person, to emphasize the cruelty of the raid. "In this case, the policeman used a baton, but it could have been a machete, or any weapon to hurt or kill," Astrada explains. "That was happening all along Kenya."
Two days later, Astrada visited the boy to see if he was okay. The boy hadn't been physically harmed, but Astrada discovered why he'd been home alone: He'd been visiting his grandmother's house while she'd been at work; this was his vacation.
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