By Abigail Arunga
I woke up in a cold sweat the other day, from a dream I just had. Usually, my nightmares involve having to go back to high school to ‘rewind’ Form 4, often years after I’ve finished, for a mythical punishment I didn’t complete. In real life, I remember watching past students being denied their leaving certificates because an elderly and clearly bored matron had a petty chip on her shoulder. They would come back to school, in their ‘home clothes,’ and pick up a hoe to dig a trench like they never left. To this day, I shudder at the thought.
That is not what woke me up though, for once, breathing heavily in the middle of the night. In this dream, we were protesting – we being me and my friends. It had that same spirit of June 25, 2024. I’m pretty sure it was set there. In it, we were being rounded up to be carted off to God knows where. My subconscious, all too aware of the danger, reacted as if everything that was happening was actually happening and jerked me out of my sleep – specifically, when I saw four men grabbing one of my closest friends, and then turning to come for me. When I woke up, I couldn’t go back to sleep.
What I dreamt was a harsh reality for many last year – many who are still missing, or recovering from being tortured and traumatized, or dealing with the visible and invisible scars of speaking truth to power. As that’s what we were doing, that was the point of the protests – to make our displeasure known. To have it on record that we spoke out against the travesties of our government. To make sure they could never say ‘but the people were fine with it!’ You know how dictatorships and abusive relationships work. Zora Neale Hurston said it best: If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
They’ve been saying many things about us, the protestors. The treasonous criminals. The miscreant elements of society who don’t understand how economies and governments work, and therefore we can’t possibly understand what’s going on. We’re too young to understand, of course – we don’t possess the depth of mental capacity to grasp politics at such a high level. Or, we’re being paid to protest, because people would not come out on the streets of their own volition in such numbers, unless they’re being paid.
Obviously, this is madness. Anyone who would imply that protestors do these things for fun – the real protestors, the ones who are actually on the streets for a cause – is either an ignorant sycophant or, well, an ignorant sycophant, parroting what their boss has told them to.
There is no fun, no joy, in protesting. Not for me, anyway. Every time I have to do it, my stomach is churning for at least 72 hours before. I have been to a few protests in my time, and my stomach has churned a lot, every time – except for my very first one, the My Dress My Choice protest in 2014, where I didn’t yet know to be scared. They hired goons, by the way, (sound familiar?) for that march, to try and scare the women there into abandoning their cause. That was my first insight into the lengths that these aforementioned ignorant sycophants would go to to quell uprisings. Perhaps ignorant is not the term, as it is something more malicious – malignant, if you will. All this to say – I would not do this if I were paid to do it. I don’t know that there is an amount of money that would make sense for putting your life in mortal danger.
Because that’s what it is – or rather, that’s what it was, last year. Going on the streets in 2024 became a death wish that no one was really wishing. I promise you, I would rather have been at home, writing, napping, being a baddie (how do you teargas a baddie? Said the man who then went ahead to vote in parliament’s favour to allow politicians to bid for conflict of interest tenders), but no. I was reading avidly about how toothpaste reduces the sting of teargas, and saving the numbers for Defenders Ke and Law Society of Kenya.
I remember before June 25, we had already started hearing them use live bullets. In the news, they claimed rubber bullets, but the slew of dead bodies piled up next to their claims. On June 25, when there were rumours of the army coming for us, I remember being on Kenyatta Avenue, near the expressway, and watching two black marias full of cops with AK47s, driving over the heaving sea of people, then stopping at the mid point to jump out and point their loaded guns at us.
Please pause here to think about how deeply frightened a government must be of its people, and the will of its people, to deploy live bullets against young people armed with water and Instagram. Think, for a moment, what it feels like, to look at the barrel of a gun and see your end there – to watch those guns, and know that it is for you whom the bell tolls. They were sent for and are coming for you. And nothing will protect you if they so choose. No one will hold you accountable, because your president doesn’t care (in fact, he’ll be seen later asking if the young boy riddled with bullets from his administration is dead). Reflect, if you will, the impact on a generation that these incredibly unintelligent actions will have, the ripple effects of a country wrought from blood and war, and what this means for our future. And then ask who would take money, for this.
One of the reasons that those in power think that there is no way the streets would be this full unless money was involved, is that these are their methods. They not only pay Kenyans to show up and vote for them, but persist in maintaining inefficient systems and illogical grandstanding (oh, I have opened a wooden boda boda stand! Oh, this guy is not from our tribe! Oh, you slapped me! Oh, be a bad girl!). This is on purpose, all of it. The poverty that compels people to take money for a vote, is on purpose. The terribly wrought education system, even the one that was free and this one that also is changed at the whim of every minister, to further corrupt and soften our younger minds, is on purpose. The distraction and the exhaustion from constantly having to keep up, or ignore, the multitudes of draft bills and scandals that are certain to break our backs and weary us into apathy, is on purpose. Unfortunately, we can see that the playbook is the same as it’s always been, but more often than not, many Kenyans are powerless, or too deep in the grime created by said government, to care.
And yet, caring even more is what we must continue to do, if any of this is to stop. The only way we knew who was being taken was because we were documenting it, and their names, online and offline, constantly. The only way we were writing against these bills, whether or not they were enforced and implemented, was caring enough to write templates and become our mothers and aunties, sending it to any whatsapp group that would listen. It is this care, this ubuntu, this utu, if you will, on which our country is founded, and on which the new version of whatever we are to become – after we knock these despots off their pedestals – will rise from.
The question has consistently been, from June 25, where we go from here. I do not know. I do know that whatever we accomplished was from doing what we had been doing in the days, weeks, months, years before that: speaking truth, and only truth, to power, on whatever platform, in whatever way we possibly could. I say this all the time: you can’t protest? Talk about it. You can’t talk about it? Sign a petition. You can’t sign a petition? Share an article. You can’t share an article? Donate to the cause. You can’t donate to the cause? Boycott something. You can’t boycott something? Do something – anything – else. We don’t need 100 perfect activists, as Clover Hogan says often; we need millions of imperfect ones. Don’t let not knowing where we’re going, and being castigated for it, stop you from actually moving. There were 11 years between Kenya’s 1952 State of Emergency and Independence in 1963. If you look at it like that, we’ve only just begun.