In the European spring of 1845, Karl Marx wrote the now well-known line, “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. Here, Kenyan journalist and writer Mohamed Amin Abdishukri first interpets recent events in Kenya, arguing protests have been more reformist than revolutionary. He then details how, through sites of struggle such as Kenya’s first socialist library, Ukombozi Library, progressive social justice activists are working to bring revolutionary consciousness directly to the masses and encouraging them to imagine alternative realities that go beyond capitalism.
By Mohamed Amin Abdishukri
Towards the end of her lecture at the 2012 Mwalimu Nyerere Intellectual Festival in the University of Dar es Salaam, the late Professor Micere Githae Mugo posed the following question: “Are our minds liberated zones or occupied territories?”
Over a decade later, when Kenyans protested against the punitive IMF-backed Finance Bill 2024, when they stormed parliament, when they were gunned down in the streets, when they were abducted and tortured, when President Ruto dropped the Finance Bill, when the protests eventually diminished and the energy seemed to dissipate, when the discourse went to other fora away from the streets, I found Professor Mugo’s question haunting us with renewed urgency.
Without undermining the magnificent courage Kenyans displayed, the collective action, the resolve, and camaraderie that sent fear into the hearts of the political class some of whom had to escape like rats through underground tunnels when parliament was stormed, the #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests (and the subsequent #RutoMustGo movement) and the discourse that followed brought out the limits of action without consciousness.
In mid-August 2024, lawyer Morara Kebaso initiated the “Vampire Diaries” campaign where he went on a nationwide “de-launching” tour, dressed in Kaunda suits and mimicking the speech and mannerisms of President Ruto, inspecting and exposing stalled government projects and highlighting cases of corruption and mismanagement of taxpayers’ money. Kebaso gained meteoric prominence and amassed a large following across different social media platforms. His exposés not only increased the anger of Kenyans but they also sparked public debate and demands for accountability.
Within a month, Kebaso began positioning himself not as an activist but as an “emerging leader” with political ambitions. In addition to his exposés, he began conducting what he called civic education rallies, addressing crowds and “helping them understand how elective choices affect their life, how corruption affects the quality of their life and expose lies told to them”. Using funds and resources raised by generous Kenyans, Kebaso went from fueling his vehicle, to acquiring Public Address (PA) systems for his tours to eventually securing an office and forming a political party with the purpose to “replace corrupt leaders with leaders of integrity”.
Since then, Kebaso has come under much scrutiny with some of his critics going as far as calling him the younger version of President Ruto. Kebaso has not done much to help his case and beat this allegation. He has shown glimpses of the kind of religious zealotry practiced by the evangelical Ruto, even repeating the same “God has chosen me” sentiment that Ruto used. Kebaso has also refused to account for some of the donations Kenyans raised for him citing security reasons and suggested that anyone who doesn’t support him is okay with the corrupt system. During the #EndFemicide march in December 2024, Kebaso made a mockery of a crisis that had torn through the country and stolen countless women’s lives, turning it into some men’s issue. “If they kill our women, who will we marry?” he asked, completely missing how most women are killed by their intimate partners.
Perhaps the worst of his many blunders is a remark he made on solving a defilement case through mediation between the parents of the victim and the perpetrator, a remark he made so casually while surrounded by his supporters in his office. When confronted about this on X (formerly Twitter), he dismissed this grave (and very political) issue as a trivial matter that is causing distractions away from the goal which is civic education and exposing the government’s corruption.
Kebaso is a representation of many Kenyan activists who have the same line of thinking and suffer from a “it’s not the system, it’s the people in the system” mentality. Most of them abundantly push for good governance, anti-corruption and civic education. Teaching people how the system works (or how it should work), how bills become laws, how taxes are collected and used, how to participate in the electoral process. Basically, showing people how to navigate existing institutions without questioning why these institutions exist as they are and who they generally serve. The result is a form of activism that may produce engaged citizens who know their rights but remain disconnected from radical community organizing and transformative political action.
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Around the same time the #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests were going on, ride-hailing app drivers in Kenya rose up and protested against the low prices set by the multinational companies who owned these apps and the large percentage they took from the driver’s earnings. The drivers, in an attempt to reclaim control over the value of their labour, took things in their own hands and developed their own price list. Some went too far and turned to threats and violence against their customers – a problematic but predictable eruption of rage.
Here was a perfect moment for Kenyans to understand the drivers’ actions, to recognize how different forms of exploitation connect – how the same global capital that demands increased punitive taxes through the Finance Bill also demands that drivers accept low wages through app-based exploitation. Instead, most Kenyans responded with different Marie Antoinette-esque versions of “let them create their own apps.”
This response revealed two things. Firstly, many Kenyans are stuck in a bubble of individualism and selective solidarity. Secondly, and more importantly, many Kenyans suffer from a lack of an all-round political consciousness. The same Kenyans who could articulate detailed critiques of government taxation and state-imposed exploitation couldn’t – or wouldn’t – analyse private exploitation and economic colonisation by multinational corporations. The same Kenyans who recognised state power remained blind to corporate power.
This also explains why the #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests were more reformist (and reactionary) than revolutionary. The demands that Kenyans made largely remained within the framework of neoliberal capitalism. Kenyans rightly fought against a specific punitive bill and specific taxes but not as much against the logic and the system that makes such exploitation possible. The protests were rightly framed as a response to increased cost of living and economic hardship. But was there an adequate critique and analysis of the entire system of economic apartheid that has shaped Kenya’s history? Was there a theoretical framework to push beyond immediate demands into systemic change?
War of Position
The protests quickly morphed into the #RutoMustGo movement which had – and still has – the potential to be a truly revolutionary movement if we can agree on two things. First, the noun “Ruto” does not refer to William Samoei Ruto the individual, but rather the system that he represents, the system that produces Rutos. The second and more important thing we need to agree on is that ideological struggle must precede power struggle.
When writing about revolutions in his Prison Notebooks, the Marxist scholar Antonio Gramsci brings forth the distinction between a war of manoeuvre and a war of position. The former referring to the forceful deconstruction of the state’s power through direct clashes between revolutionaries and the state while the latter is more of a slow, long, counter-hegemonic social transformation; a pre-revolutionary phase that involves ideological and political education to awaken the consciousness of the masses and shift their thinking to what is possible outside the status quo.
According to Gramsci, the state (and by large the ruling class) maintains its dominance in society not just through political and economic power (which is usually coercive) but fundamentally through ideological and cultural control (which is usually consensual). This is what is known as hegemony and it maintains itself primarily through a network of institutions including schools, religious institutions, the media and even civil society.
Hegemony is at play when you see Kenyan media publish pieces that indirectly generate consent for state sanctioned violence, or when they produce documentaries covering constitutionally protected protests and instead of focusing on the victims of state violence during said protests, they portray politicians as victims. When you see Kenyans mass consuming self-help books, podcasts, and films that glorify hustle culture, hyperindividualism and capitalism, that is hegemony at play. When you see Kenyan students selecting university courses based solely on employability and the demands of the corporate world, that is hegemony at play. When you see schools and institutions of higher learning produce workers and not nurture thinkers, that is hegemony at play. When you see Kenyans support the Zionist apartheid settler colonialist state of Israel and repeat western imperial tropes of referring to Palestinians as terrorists, that is hegemony at play. When you see churches being funded by politicians and Imams having state Iftars with the president, that is hegemony at play.
Most intellectuals, in as much as they would love to be perceived differently, are also nothing more than tools of hegemony. They are mercenaries who have no desire to change the status quo, no revolutionary motivations for liberating themselves or the masses because they are beneficiaries of hegemony and therefore use their intellect to secure the dominance and authority of the ruling class. They do this either from within the establishment serving in different government roles as bureaucrats or from the outside as either members of civil society or the professional class. They are hegemony’s puppets, parrots and walking lies. They mediate between the masses and the established ruling class to dissuade any challenge against the regime. They are morally bankrupt individuals who should never be trusted.
So how and where do we counter hegemony?
Sites of Struggle
In August 2017, a group of veteran progressive social justice activists established Ukombozi Library in Nairobi – Kenya’s first socialist library. Starting with 1,000 rare and revolutionary books and publications from the secret library of the December Twelfth Movement (later Mwakenya), the underground movement that had kept the flame of resistance burning during the darkest days of Daniel arap Moi’s dictatorship throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the library was established on the first floor of an old building across the road from the main campus of the University of Nairobi.
Since then, Ukombozi Library has added more resources, initiatives and programs that serve as an arsenal against amnesia and more importantly, as a model of what Gramscian counter-hegemonic struggle looks like in practice.
At least once a week (usually on Mondays), for two hours, university students, young activists, artists, veteran activists, members of different social movements and social justice centres gather at Ukombozi and under the gaze of the portraits of revolutionaries hanging from the walls – Dedan Kimathi, Pio Gama Pinto, Thomas Sankara, Mao Zedong, Assata Shakur, Karimi Nduthu, Zarina Patel and others – form study cells reminiscent of the revolutionary formations of the ‘80s and ‘90s in order to share ideas, read, think, reflect, learn and unlearn. “The first lesson in any study session is the true history of Kenya, not the history taught by colonialists and post-independence ruling elite, but the real history,” Kimani Waweru, one of the library’s founders and coordinator says.
Through these history lessons, experiences of old struggles inform new ones and knowledge comes with an instalment of revolutionary consciousness. The fundamental questions of class struggle – land ownership, wealth inequality and capitalist exploitation – are examined through studying history and analyzing the material conditions faced by Kenya’s working masses.
Ukombozi Library is actively breeding what Gramsci referred to as “organic intellectuals”, individuals who emerge naturally from within a social class and help shape how that class thinks and understands itself through organising, linking theory and practice, connecting different struggles and thinking beyond the boundaries and limitations of hegemonic thought. And because of the emergence of these intellectuals who have gone on to organise their own study circles, the study sessions at Ukombozi are now carried out more on a need basis rather than the initial weekly sessions. “However, this is about to change again,” Kimani tells me. “We want to bring back the weekly sessions exclusively for new members.”
In pursuit of bringing revolutionary consciousness directly to the masses and encouraging them to imagine alternative realities that go beyond capitalism, Ukombozi Library conducts community outreach through film screenings in different informal settlements and rural areas across the country. The artists who are members of the library have also played their part in making complex ideas enjoyable and relatable through music, plays and poetry. “We want socialism to be sexy and attractive to people. Ukombozi Library is a place to deepen and advance socialist knowledge and practices in Kenya but we want to do that in a way that attracts people,” Dr. Njuki Githethwa, Managing Editor of Ukombozi Review, tells me.
Ukombozi Library has also served as an incubator for progressive movements. In 2018, the Young Socialist League—a student organization with study groups across multiple university campuses—began using the library as a study hub. They held political education sessions there, borrowed books and pamphlets, and used it as a space for organizing.
As members graduated from their different universities in 2019, the Young Socialist League evolved into the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), a political party with a comprehensive manifesto and a membership that goes beyond students to include working-class citizens, the urban poor, peasants, and other Kenyans who shared their vision of liberation.
RSL operates through cells—small groups of 10-12 members who meet regularly for political education and organizing activities. These cells have now spread beyond Nairobi to establish a national presence in various counties. And while RSL has since established its own space and operates as an independent political entity, its members continue to gather at Ukombozi Library for selected meetings, maintaining their connection to their organizational and educational roots. Other organisations such as the Kenya Leftist Alliance (formerly the Kenya Leftist Forum) also use Ukombozi’s space to conduct some of their meetings.
To maintain its ideological purity without interference, Ukombozi Library has gone to great lengths to avoid co-optation and receiving funding from the many (neo)liberal NGOs and foundations saturated in Nairobi. Despite the material and financial challenges this poses, it allows Ukombozi Library to steadfastly maintain its anti-imperialist position and continue with the war of position and ideological struggle without compromise.
Other sites of struggle include the many social justice centres, such as Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) located in one of Nairobi’s oldest informal settlements and one with an illustrious history of resistance going from its emergence as an urban stronghold against British colonialism to its present-day resistance against neoliberal violence. Among its many activities, MSJC has produced reports on land grabbing and forced evictions, reproductive rights, ecological justice, commodification of education and rising food costs. And in everything it does and produces, the centre consciously exposes capitalism’s logic, its mechanisms, its deliberate creation of precariousness as a weapon used by the ruling class to control the masses. While mainstream NGOs and CBOs slice human rights into convenient funding categories, MSJC insists on seeing and fighting the whole beast.
The Mathare Green Movement (MGM), an initiative of MSJC, exemplifies this comprehensive approach to liberation. In a community where environmental justice might seem like a luxury compared to immediate survival needs, MGM demonstrates how ecological destruction is inseparable from economic exploitation. When they plant trees in spaces threatened by land grabbers, they are marking territory, claiming space, and asserting community sovereignty in concrete terms. This is how consciousness develops. Not through abstract theory alone, but through the recognition of how different forms of oppression entangle in daily life. This is the kind of thinking that results in what Professor Micere Githae Mugo would refer to as liberated minds.
What we saw once Kenyans retreated from the streets, is how easily a movement’s energy can be contained when it lacks consciousness. With the way the government is moving right now, reintroducing the finance bill that began all this in bits and pieces, with politicians going back to their arrogant speeches and display of opulence, with Kenyans being abducted and tortured on a frequency that has not been seen since the Moi era, the next uprising isn’t just coming – it is inevitable. The question is whether it will be another almost-revolution, another footnote in Kenya’s history of incomplete revolutions, another moment of rage contained and conquered by the ruling class, or whether it will be the beginning of total liberation brought by radical political education and consciousness.
Mohamed Amin Abdishukri is a journalist, writer and a digital creator whose content focuses on literature and political education.
This post was originally published here, on Ukombozi Review.
Featured Photograph: Young women protesting the Reject Finance Bill in Nairobi, Kenya, 2024 (Wikimedia Commons).
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