By TONY MOCHAMA

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Netflix in collaboration with Kathy Eldon and producer Kweku Mandela Amuah will be making the film The Journey is the Destination, based on the journals of Dan Eldon, the son of Kathy, who died in 1993 while covering the civil war in Mogadishu Somalia.

Last Saturday, under a cloudless Nairobi blue sky at the Kuona Artistes’ Collective in the suburb of Kileleshwa, a group of artists, film makers, thespians and writers sat in a circle and listened attentively to a talk by Ms Eldon.

The talk was on the role of film in immortality and how young people around the world can harness the power of media to provide solutions to challenges and improve their lives.

Ms Eldon, who now lives in California, US, is a film maker and many other things but was speaking here as a mother, of Dan, who died ‘’way too early.’’

She told of the tale of her son, and how his work trip to East Africa in the ‘’summer of 1993’’ ended up with her, 23 years later, with Amuah, producing The Journey is the Destination. The film portrays Dan as he lived his life as a photojournalist and his eventual death covering the war in Mogadishu. Thus the title of the film.

Ms Eldon was in Kenya, on a reconnaissance mission with Kenyan local art, culture and film champions – the likes of Kariuki Thige, thespians Gilbert Lukalia and Abuto Eliud, filmmakers Bea Wangondu and Judy Kibinge – as she seeks to launch her foundation, Creative Visions Foundation in Kenya later this year. She was accompanied by her board chair Geralyn Dreyfous,

“We want to focus on empowering youth to use the power of media to share solutions to the challenges around them,” Eldon said, adding that this is based on the work they have been doing with Rock-your-world.org since 2002 – based on the UN’s SDGs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

‘I see a lot of Pan-African collaboration among African youth, and far beyond, North and West,” she said. Youth using power of media to share stories. Cross-continental collaboration.”

Bloody Monday

The story of Dan Eldon is intertwined with that of Somalia’s civil chaos after the fall of Siad Barre and degeneration into civil war that sucked in the Americans and led to the death of thousands of civilians, including Dan.

The Journey is the Destination poster. PHOTO | POOL

On July 12, 1993, what Somalis call Isniintha Dhiigii, or ''bloody Monday’’ the US Marines in Mogadishu, while pursuing to arrest the warlord Farah Aideed on whom Washington had placed a bounty, got caught up in one of the most violent uprisings in Somalia’s early days of the civil war.

The incident is well captured in the Hollywood film Black Hawk Down.

Dan, alongside Reuters photographers Anthony Macharia and Hos Maina were lynched by an enraged mob baying for the blood of infidel invaders, when they got caught up in the violent aftermath of a US Marines attack on the Mogadishu Awales’ villa that killed more than 200 Somalis

It is not for nothing that Ms Eldon produced Extraordinary Mothers alongside Julia Roberts and Oprah Winfrey.

In extraordinary words that moved the artistes at the Kuona Collective near to tears, she said: ‘I long forgave that crowd for taking my (only) son. It wasn’t even racial. They were war’s collateral damage’

Yet she has spent 30 years now in ensuring that Dan, a “creative activist,”” didn’t die in vain, as has her only other child, Amy Eldon Turtletaub, with whom with CNN international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, did a documentary on the dead quartet called Dying to Tell the Story.

In a way, through her work, Ms Eldon, has ensured that her boy, who died way too young, has become an “immortal.”