Last week I was speaking to someone who works for an international organisation with headquarters in the United States. She recalled how her colleagues at HQ were oscillating between various stages of fear, angst and utter despondency at the ongoing George Floyd anti-racism protests that had resulted in looting and curfews in multiple American cities. Her American colleagues were shaken to the core and struggling to find answers to how the country’s society was seemingly unravelling fast.
The lady chuckled, recalling how during the Kenyan post-election tensions in 2017, her American colleagues were fairly reticent in their direction, guiding the Kenyan office to just work from home, but continue working. The social tensions in a far off remote corner of the globe were distant and incomprehensible. But now the same kind of tensions, laying to bare existential questions on the equality of citizenry and police brutality, pulled at the tenuous strings of the peaceful American societal fabric.
