Grief in the Digital Age: A Lesson in Change
He was now just a number – a telephone line that could no longer be located. What do you do with the chat history? When someone close to you dies, the first instinct now is to rush to their social media accounts, to catch their last posts, to wonder if there was a final message or tell-tale sign of their impending end. We turn into digital archaeologists, Browse through curated profiles, transforming into investigators of a life lived online. Unlike the physical pages of Anne Frank’s famous diary in the Netherlands, our Kenyan Gen Zs are leaving behind an entire digital universe.
This reality was vividly underscored in the run-up to the June 25th anniversary of last year’s Finance Bill protests. Watching videos of the dramatic moments of June 25th, 2024, I was struck by the reincarnation of fallen comrades like Rex Maasai and Eric Shieni as AI avatars, marching to freedom protests. The names of those lost—Denzel Omondi, Kennedy Onyango, Matthew Njoroge, David Chege, Beasley Kogi—resurfaced, mostly through their personal records, videos of young lives streamed online. In this year’s mobilisation, I came across several accounts of young Kenyans recording their own last testaments, anticipating death by state violence, ensuring their stories remained intact. Some even sent money to a mortician and wrote their own eulogies. Call it the audacity of youth, but self-memorialization is now a digital reality.
This June 25th anniversary reveals a generation manifesting a coordinated digital remembrance. I’ve witnessed a flood of tribute posts, shared photos, and curated video montages set to musical compositions inspired by the Sarafina line, “Freedom is coming tomorrow.” While my generation might perceive this as mere public posturing, I’ve observed the deep empathy and genuine communal memory expressed in this new format.