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Westgate: A photographer’s story

Photographer Kabir Dhanji revisits the people he met inside Westgate Mall during the attack on September 21, 2013.

On September 25, 2013, Ambi Ghataure and his father, Gurdial Ghataure, adhere to the traditional Sikh customs and cremate Pablo Ghataure and Davinder Ghataure, at the Sikh crematorium in Nairobi, Kenya. Pablo was Ambi(***)s son and Gurdial(***)s grandson, and Davinder was Ambi(***)s mother and Gurdial(***)s wife. Pablo and his grandmother(***)s cremations are among the first funeral rites of the 67 dead to be laid to rest as the siege at Westgate officially enters its fifth day. The KDF claim that they had all but defeated the terrorists, but sporadic bursts of gunfire could still be heard echoing through Westgate and across the by then expanded scene.Pablo and his grandmother had been at the cooking competition on the rooftop when the attack happened. It was believed that they were among the first fatalities. The family are still not entirely sure how everything happened.The cremations were one of the most difficult parts of the story to photograph at that time. They are personal, and intimate, an ancient passage of rite in devastating circumstances. This was the fist time since the first day inside Westgate that I felt connected to the story again. All that had happened in the interim was a dictated course of action by the authorities in charge to mediate and stifle the flow of information and access to the truth and what was happening. The security cordon was moved further and further away from the building over the course of the three days. Some of the other photographers used long lenses to try to capture what little they could of what was happening outside. The focus then, during the siege, was on what had transpired inside Westgate, and how, and by whom - but none of those questions were ever fully answered, and it remains that way. The cremations defied everything the authorities had set about to do like withholding identities and information of people who were killed, and laid bare the horrific and harrowing tragedy that had unfolded. I will never forget words that my dad once said to me: (***)No father should ever have to bury his son.(***) I could not imagine anyone having to do that, and there was Ambi, cremating his son and his mother.

By Kabir Dhanji

Published On 22 Sep 2014

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As part of Al Jazeera’s coverage marking the first anniversary of the deadly siege on the Westgate shopping mall in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, we have obtained exclusive images and stories from photographer Kabir Dhanji who was inside the mall at the time of the attack. He visits people he photographed on that day to find out how the incident has affected their lives.

“I was on my way to have my camera serviced, as is the norm in-between assignments, and had to go past Westgate to get to the camera shop. Normally, I’d never carry a camera: This is home, where I grew up, and not an assignment.”

On Saturday September 21, 2013, Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, came under attack and was held under siege for five days before the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) were able to take back the building.

“The attack had already begun by the time I got there. We had no idea what was happening. Early reports from the outside said that it was a bank robbery gone wrong. These things happen often enough, so there was no reason to think otherwise. It was the first in a long chain of bad information that never got better as the truth slipped further and further away. Eventually, the truth got lost and there was little more that was known other than what was seen through the pictures and footage.

“I spent almost 12 hours inside Westgate Mall on that day, helping as many people as I could and simultaneously documenting what had taken place as we reported what was unfolding. It was a complicated scene to understand, and challenging to work inside, only because of what wasn’t known: We didn’t know who the bad guys were, we didn’t know how many they were, we didn’t know where they were, we didn’t know why they were doing this, and nobody knew what their end game was.

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“The people below were all present on that fateful day. In an event so harrowing, with such brutal scenes, reality got suspended somewhere that morning and this acid nightmare took over; everybody got trapped and was … is looking for a way out.

“With the truth becoming so largely unavailable, the questions continue to mount and the theories grow thicker with the days. This is an attempt to understand the people who were affected by what happened as they try to come to terms with it and understand the same. These are pictures of what happened during that siege and what happened afterwards: What the world looks like in the aftermath.”

Ambi Ghataure and his father, Gurdial Ghataure, at their home in Nairobi. Before we made the portrait we talked about Westgate. They wanted to know how many gunmen there were? It was like they did not know anything about how their loved ones had died. They had so few details. There are still so many questions that remain unanswered for them. 
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Ambi Ghataure shows me his son’s room at their house in Nairobi. He knows everything there is to know about his son, Pablo, and no details are spared. You begin to get a sense of how close father and son were by the way in which Ambi is able to describe in detail, and at length, the intimacies and intricacies of everything that’s in that room, and what they mean, and how they expressed something about his son Pablo. Ambi explained that the calendar above Pablo’s work desk was made by his sister to help him get through school tasks, which he had been falling behind on. On the day that he was killed, she crossed off the day on the calender with the words: (***)Pablo is dead.(***) He did not talk to me so much as he seemed to be talking to himself, looking into some distant space at what was not there.
Daniel Ciuga is an Administration Police (AP) officer in plain clothes who rarely smiles. He had responded to the emergency call made early in the afternoon of what was described to him as a bank robbery gone bad, as often tends to be the case. Only later did he discover how much more complicated things were. Once Daniel arrived at Westgate, he immediately took charge of the scene outside the service entrance. A large number of casualties who were on the lower floors of the mall were evacuated in the early hours of the afternoon. He made sure that the civilians and the wounded exiting the building had safe passage, and that those in need of medical attention received it immediately. Daniel is in a lot of the images. Each time, he was helping to carry someone different. He did not seem to stop. He said, on more than one occasion: (***)Wewe chunga, uta chapwa,(***) meaning, (***)You be careful, you(***)ll get hit(***) - referring to the gunfire. Nobody knew what was happening. I remember people wailing: (***)Oh Jesus... Oh Lord... They(***)re dead... They(***)re killing everyone... Oh Jesus, oh Jesus!(***)
The pretence of not smiling disappears almost as soon as you get to know Daniel. Shooting his portrait for this photo-essay, the same thought struck me as when I first encountered Daniel outside Westgate: He(***)s in charge. His significantly large and heavy-set frame demands nothing less as he towers above most of the rest of the general population. Dressed in his uniform, Daniel is nothing short of precise and practiced in what is expected of him.
This particular scene was late in the day and the sun was dancing happily through the clouds, meandering its way to the horizon, while chaos reigned supreme inside the mall. One of Kenya(***)s elite Reece Squad members had just been shot, as had one police officer, and one member of the KDF, all inside Nakumatt, a supermarket on the first floor, all within moments of each other - only moments after I had been there. In the subsequent gun battle that ensued, fighting an enemy that could not be seen, mattresses inside the supermarket were set on fire, turning an already tangled scene into a labyrinth of smoke, and exponentially increasing everyone(***)s vulnerability, armed or unarmed, against an enemy that seemed invisible.It(***)s strange and obscure what you think and remember, but all I could think about then was how inappropriate it was that the sun was shining.Red Cross volunteers ran frantically across the parking lot amid the haze of smoke that had now begun to grow thick and heavy and settled like a cloud on its throne. The dashes of red streaking from here to there did not cease.
Issa Premji is in charge of the one of the Red Cross Disaster Response teams for Nairobi, and was one of the early responders to the scene of carnage on the roof of Westgate where the terrorists had entered the building. Small in stature but grand in heart, Issa was instrumental in coordinating the early part of the day when the scene was a constant flurry of chaos, lacking help and resources. Issa worked through the day and long into the night, and then did the same again every day of the siege.
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Anthony Kamindo is an inspector in the Administration Police in Nairobi. Anthony and I went into Westgate together in an effort to help rescue as many people as possible. Calm and cautious, he checked the quiet spaces, waited, and then checked them again, before exposing himself to danger. (***)Try to move them quickly and quietly,(***) he said.As Anthony was escorting the last of a group to safety, he was blindsided and shot in the head. After he fell to the ground, he was kicked in the head just to make sure he was dead. Like so many others that day, Anthony played dead while he bled out in an effort to save himself.This frame was made after Anthony picked himself up and crawled his way to safety. That day, it was hard to know what was going to happen. As the day got longer, there were targeted assaults against the security forces, and the casualties continued to mount. There was no way of knowing if someone who was there, who(***)d helped or was helping, had made it out alive.
I tried to replicate the moment when Anthony Kamindo received the news that there was a robbery, possibly a bank heist, taking place at Westgate. The reports were that there was heavy gunfire and loud explosions from inside the building. Anthony was drinking a cup of tea, as he often does, in this same canteen, in the same seat. 
Ramah Hawkins is a freelance cameraman and cinematographer, and a friend who ended up inside Westgate the same way I did. Like most other people who were inside the shopping mall on that day, everything else came second, and helping people was the immediate priority, and that did not change at any point during, or in any of the subsequent days.There are a lot of images of him that could have been made, and probably should have been made, and most of them would have been of him helping people. Every time I turned to see where he was, to check that he was still there, and that he was ok, he was helping someone.At some point in the afternoon, his camera died and we got separated. All of the other photographers had left the building by then and I was on my own. It(***)s a lonely feeling being on your own, and everything changes all over again: You start to operate differently and think in a different way. I was alone, I was not operating in a pack of photographers. The insecurity of not knowing what the danger was or where it was coming from was overwhelming.When I eventually made it out of the building, to the rooftop triage area late in the evening, Ramah was there. He could have left, but he did not.
Ramah is a private person from humble beginnings. He has not put down his camera and continues to make telling pieces that document life. He is working on various projects including one documenting boxing in Nairobi. (***)Nothing soft comes out of the bronx,(***) is how I think of him.