In June a mass protest movement began in Kenya in response to the proposed Finance Bill 2024 that would raise taxes on a range of basic goods. The face of the protests reflected the largely young population and one of the movement’s slogans was “leaderless, partyless and tribeless”. As I joined street protests, civic education on Twitter Spaces, signed and sent submissions to oppose policies and cabinet secretaries, and offered nervous system support sessions I kept reflecting on the centrality of the constitution to the movement. Over and over again the call was for the constitution to be upheld. I want to suggest the possibility that upholding the current constitution is the lowest hanging fruit we could be reaching for even as I recognise that as a country we are still far off from reaching even that. I began writing these reflections during the street protests, when State tactics were to prevent gathering of any sort by whatever means necessary. I share them months later all the same as I think they are still helpful for thinking and framing possibilities of what is to come and some of how we may get there.
What’s not quite there
The nation-state is a source of violence
What’s being named within the movement as what we are reaching for is for a Kenya whose systems and structures work for all with upholding the constitution as the path towards attaining this. Let’s face it however, the state has never worked for all, not for one day since the Kenya experiment began as the Kenya colony.
Putting such faith in the nation-state when the nation-state was a colonial invention that retained the majority of its colonial features is misguided in my opinion. Kenya was never designed to work for all and though we may tinker with it through various reforms, including the constitutional reform we had in 2010, what we are doing is largely trying to get it to hurt less for a little while (which is no small matter either). However, the fundamentals of the design were flawed from the beginning. Even if the State were to work, it has as its basis extraction, separation, individualism, and taking people’s agency (humans and more than humans alike). These are all violences.
“The system isn’t broken. The system is functioning exactly as it was designed to.” I first heard this phrase from a food activist in Oakland, California describing the realities of living in an unjust food system and the struggle for food justice and food sovereignty. What the phrase points out is that in our justice work we need to be clear that we are not fighting because we imagine that the system is broken, that an error in certain persons, certain decisions, certain actions is causing the plethora of pain, oppression, all lived in the daily breathe, or not, of individuals and families and communities. In reality, there is no brokenness in the system. Rather, the design functions exactly as it was meant to.
What we might see as symptoms of brokenness, are actually outcomes and products of intentional design. A different way of saying this was offered to me by a friend coming from Stafford Beer: “the function of the system is what it does, there is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” If a system is producing joy, happiness, thrival, that is its function and it was designed to do this. If a system is producing harm, violence, prison, poverty, femicides, that is its function and it was designed to do this.
Current representative democracy comes out of the French revolution where local people in their regions would send someone to transmit their voice at an assembly of other voices. They did this through cahiers, notebooks in which the people’s will was written. In that time there were no political parties, there were simply people chosen to take the will and voice of the people to a common place where other communities’ wills and voices were also present. This was quickly preceded through representatives overtaking the will of the people, and choosing to no longer be bound by the cahiers.
This kind of representative democracy shapes much of the world’s governance today. In European colonies, governance models followed their home countries, but only catered for the colonisers’ needs. These governance continued post-independence with little structural change. Peter Ekeh identifies this kind of governance that we continue to live in as amoral, not bound to any sense of belonging, kinship, relationship, duty or honour; as colonial, since having been created out of colonialism it needs coloniality to continue to function; and as illegitimate, since it is divorced from the people’s mandate and voice. The nation state is also a recent invention. The Kenyan nation-state was born of and continues unrestricted violence liberally applied to land and people for the service of capital and wealth accumulation of a few. Focusing only on the terms of the nation-state in our movement constrains us to play on a field designed by systems that do not inherently support life – human or otherwise.
To be clear, we may employ working within the bounds of the nation-state as a tactic, for example for the reason that reforms may impact a large number of people with immediacy, but it is imperative that we see it for what it is, one part of a bigger strategy that does not end with the attempt to reform what was always flawed to begin with.
Anthropocentrism
The framing of the movement is anthropocentric, thinking only with the human.
We must remember that the first violence enacted on the territories that now make up the Kenyan nation-state was a violence on the land. This violence remade land, a living entity, into property, an inert source of capital to be realised through exploitation by colonising settlers. In this violence, ecologies were split by arbitrary borders and functioning ecosystems hampered through enclosures and conversion into timber and plantation agriculture. The beneficiaries of this violence were settler colonists and their mother country.
I understand that when/where the (female, poorer, rural, young, disabled, nonheterosexual) human has often been overlooked and an afterthought, such as is the case in the colonially inherited state of Kenya, it might seem like a luxury to open a conversation about the more than human. Here I remind us that it is not an either/or but a both/and situation, and that the idea that humans are separate from the rest of the Earth: soil, water, plants, animals, light, etc. is an inherited logic of coloniality. Our indigenous ways of being have always acknowledged that we humans are not the only ones that matter. Deluding ourselves that we are the only ones that matter is a sure way of cutting ourselves out of belonging from the larger community of Beings and enabling dishonour.
If a system is producing joy, happiness, thrival, that is its function and it was designed to do this. If a system is producing harm, violence, prison, poverty, femicides, that is its function and it was designed to do this.
The dishonouring of the Earth over the last centuries has created a cascade of consequences we are currently calling the polycrisis, many crises. These include accelerating changes in climatic patterns, species collapses, loss of the topsoil on which food growing depends, loss of indigenous and localised food varieties, incredible amounts of waste generated through increasing consumption, and increasing conditions for conflict and war, etc. Ultimately dishonouring the Earth ends up dishonouring ourselves as well.
Governance that is colonial, amoral and lacks legitimacy is a violent governance.
Much work to articulate alternatives continues to be in the idioms of the State, seeking to reform the State. Moreover, the alternatives are often anthropocentric, failing to acknowledge the violence of rendering a living earth, dead property available for extraction, and the exclusion of spirits as active members of African communities.
Without undoing and transforming the State and anthropocentrism, alternatives merely become new beneficiaries of the colonial system of exploitation of societies and ecologies. Decades of State-centric alternatives to governance, and anthropocentrism have not and could not recreate regenerative communities. They prompt us to look elsewhere, to reach for new-ancient designs.
Sensing possibilities
One of the things this movement created was an opening such as we have not experienced in decades. We also landed in that in between, middle place. The middles are often the hardest place to be in, the places after what was but before what is to come. It feels like being suspended in air thick with uncertainty. It is easy when we are in the middles to be wooed by fear back into the certainty of what we know we can no longer tolerate to live with.
But we must find our agency in the middles and we must learn how to dance suspended in the air, to rest suspended in air, to fashion new worlds and create the what is to come while “holding seeds in your hand and wanting a whole forest”. This is part of the discomfort of the middles. We want the “what is to come” to be here already, tayari, ready made. It has never been that way.
“We have to make what comes and take the best of it” as Amina tells Paulina in ‘Coming to Birth’, that novel about a nation’s constant miscarriages amidst continuing hope of becoming.
We also often want the “what is to come” to be big – go big or go home right? The idea that only big is worthwhile is another lie of coloniality inviting us to despise the small, yet the smallest seeds grow mighty trees. Indigenous wisdom and feminist clarity will remind us we make life daily through our many practices accumulating. We practise ourselves into the worlds to come and through doing so those worlds get built around us.
And what are some seeds that we are holding that emerged from this movement?
Those moments of joy and felt togetherness amidst protests when someone brought a football and a game happened, those moments of care for and by strangers in the face of water cannons, teargas, and bullets, the party at the end of Thursday’s protest, the food and coffee delivered to doctors sitting in the ministry of health, lawyers offering pro bono services, the restaurant throwing water to protestors being teargassed, pausing to behold the beauty of the forest in the middle of protest with a comrade, can we forget the epic memes?
All of these are seeds of a different way, of different worlds. Worlds of care, of laughter, of drawing closer to each other, of communing with people who were strangers but on the way to becoming kinfolk. Each of these micro moments of a different world were 100% worth it, undismissable. They were a taste of what is possible. And they were embodied. No one can take away what you felt, what you experienced, no one can take away what we now know in our bones is possible.
In the middles we must also learn to grieve. The fear of facing the pain of reality and grieving is often what has us jump back into the arms of the devil we know, or rush forward with only a slightly tinkered version of what was there before, little changed. I’ve often thought that this created the predicament we are in to begin with. I’ve often wondered how it might have been had all the newly independent nations invited massive grief ceremonies at the moment of independence. How it might have been different if we had stopped to acknowledge that something had happened here. But coloniality’s teleology lied to us that life is a straight line and YOU MUST MAKE HASTE forward otherwise you will be left behind.
A truth older than the state tells us that time has never been linear, that there is no behind to be left in, and that when you move in community no one leaves you. And so in a new time of middles, may we grieve, may we normalise crying together in public.
Then we must build, even suspended in air as we are. We must prepare ourselves just as much in the material as in the relational, emotional and spiritual aspects of our lives. The fact that many people are impoverished (not poor) is a political strategy. When folks are in a precarious state, constantly worried about their livelihoods, how to feed families, pay rent, school children and pay hospital bills, they have less time to show up on the streets, to show up at public participation exercises, to call their MPs, make submissions, etc. It is a political strategy to keep us unable to say no, as we constantly weigh uneven options. And so we must accompany our decrying of what is not working and could be working better with building communal economic alternatives that do not depend on the state. We must source our power elsewhere.
We practise ourselves into the worlds to come and through doing so those worlds get built around us.
Reaching for more
If we see constitutional democracy, great as it may be since even that has never existed, as only the lowest hanging fruit – there is so much more we could be reaching for. Let’s look for the better, raara to buri, as Fulani pastoralists practise. Knowing there is a better and not settling.
What could be better?
A governance that is interwoven with the more than human, doesn’t only treat the more than human as property, and that recognises that humans are not a more special kind of person than any other being. A governance that is humane, that is humble to recognise there are many beings besides us who also need to have a say in how things run on Earth. In several places around the world, folks are rethinking governance to reflect our kinship with all Life. Here are some examples:
Within the rights of nature framework, Ecuador has legally enshrined the rights of nature “to have its existence respected holistically, and to the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes”. Articles included in the country’s constitution recognise the inalienable rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish, give people the ability to petition on behalf of nature, and require the government to remedy violations of these rights. Bolivia has also acknowledged rights of nature among other cities and local councils.
On the shores of Lake Mwitanzige (colonially Lk Albert), in Uganda, the Bagungu communities have revived and documented their customary laws and have secured legal recognition of their customary governance system to protect sacred natural sites and ancestral lands. This work was done in the spirit and philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence.
Legal personhood is another form of governance with the more than human. Examples of this include recognising particular ecosystems such as rivers, forests, etc. as legal persons. Aotearoa (New Zealand) recognises the Whanganui river as a legal person in this way for example. The Ganga and Yamuna rivers in India have also been recognised in this way. There are more examples of legal rights of nature as a practice of governance with the more than human here.
Beyond these legal mechanisms however, which still often function within and depend on the nation-state structure of laws and rights, indigenous communities also practise making decisions with the Earth, receiving instruction and direction for how to lead a life that supports life to thrive. For full ecological democracies we will need to go beyond state borders and the securitisation and violence that states perform. Thinking at the scale of the bioregion and place based communities at the same time, while bringing to bear the fullness of our beings and our spirit communities.
The town of Cherán in Michoacan, Mexico governs itself without police in their town after a community uprising in 2011 that expelled police, political parties and companies logging the forests of the city. Of course after years of living within violent extractive governance systems, the community did not automatically create a new system, this new system arose out of intergenerational dialogues at communal food points called fogatas that were established in the immediate time following the expulsions. In the years since, communal direct governance councils have been established, the forests are being replanted and restoring a local food culture of mushroom harvesting and cooking.
Kurdistan is an autonomous territory spanning parts of recognised Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Rojava in particular which is in north Syria is autonomously administered through the practice and theory of democratic modernity and jineoloji (Kurdish womanism) as an alternative to a State model of governance. There is a particular concern for retaining ecology as a commons, non exploitation of more than human nature, collective economies, and community models of resolving issues rather than punishment which is a feature of the nation-state.
Bioregional governance that relocates power and decisionmaking from a centralised state far away in favour of a governance that is in conversation with the particularities of a territory and its ecology is another form of governance with the more than human. In Colombia, indigenous communities reject State led Plans for Development (and assimilation) and create their own Plans of Life. Plans of Life recognise Earth as a living being and centre the community’s spiritual and cultural values and practices as a path to autonomous thriving according to the community’s own terms.
Across the continent there are indigenous traditions of leadership that are also seeds of the more we could be reaching for. For example the practice of heterarchical leadership,where power is held in a distributed rather than hierarchical way. There are practices of consulting Earth through divination or dreams in order to take decisions that include and respect all members of community (human, more than human, spirit). There is also a preoccupation with legacy and taking into consideration past and future generations in the decisions that we make.
– Bevalyne Kwamboka protesting in Nairobi CBD, Image by nairobileo.co.ke
In what ways are these examples of community based governance with the more than human related to where we began with rejecting the Finance Bill 2024? As we reject a governance that is violent, we can hold current examples and also turn towards the governance traditions older than the nation-state as examples of possibility with which to imagine and redesign governance that can truly be responsive to and work for all Beings. Decisionmaking that recognises that humans are in relationship with and not dominant over the world inevitably supports communities’ sovereignty over their food, cultural, spiritual and economic practices because it is an orientation that supports Life to thrive.
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