The Wings
They speak of an identity made for freedom. Even restrained, they remain evidence of what captivity cannot redefine.
The story behind the painting
I once clipped the wings of something that was born to fly.
When I was about fourteen years old, growing up in Kenya, I came across two wild geese moving through the bushes of our large compound.
They weren't alone.
With them was a brood of young birds.
To the adventurous fourteen-year-old that I was, this was an extraordinary discovery. I called my brother and siblings and, despite the desperate attempts of the adult birds to protect their young, we managed to capture every one of them.
I remember returning home feeling like a hero.
I was now the proud owner of these beautiful, mysterious wild birds.
We built an enclosure for them alongside our chickens. The young geese grew there—eating with the chickens, walking with them and becoming part of the familiar landscape of our home.
But their parents knew where they were.
They would fly over our compound, calling to them.
And as the young birds grew older, something began to happen.
They started trying to fly.
Their wings were telling them something that their captivity could not erase:
they were not born to remain on the ground.
My brother saw the problem before I did.
If we wanted to keep them, we would have to prevent them from flying away.
So we cut their flight feathers.
I remember holding those beautiful birds, one by one, while their feathers were trimmed with scissors.
And it worked.
They remained with us.
Their feathers eventually grew back, of course, so we clipped them again.
And again.
They were still beautiful.
Still graceful.
Still recognisably wild geese.
But they could no longer go where their own wings were designed to take them.
That childhood memory stayed with me.
Eventually we stopped clipping their feathers. Their wings grew back and, one after another, the birds flew away.
Years later, as I began learning more about human trafficking, that memory returned to me differently.
I began thinking about what it means to take something that was born with freedom and deliberately create conditions that prevent it from exercising that freedom.
Human trafficking does something far more devastating to human beings.
People can be controlled, exploited and stripped of dignity, identity and choice. And unlike the birds from my childhood, freedom does not simply return because a captor grows tired of keeping them.
That is where this painting began.