Dedicated to the patriots and martyrs who came out to challenge unjust power during the historic Gen-Z uprising in Kenya.
Kinuthia Ndung’u
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting “ Milan Kundera.
The rain poured heavily over Mathare slums. Each drop an addition to the despair, as if the sky shared the sadness of the people below. Nyarari stood at the heart of the Wangari Maathai Community Park with clenched fists. Each tree here represents a soul, for they were planted as living memorials of voices lost in the 2024 youth-led protests. The park, with its flourishing trees, stands in contrast to the despair felt in this slum. It is a place of reflection and healing for the community. At just 23, Nyarari bears the heavy burden of her community’s pain—she is a flame of unwavering resilience, rooted in the very heart of Mathare, raised on tales of struggle and aspirations for change. She is today active in the struggle for a better Kenya, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with oppressed compatriots across the country.
In a poorly-lit mud-thatched house in this slum, the wazee (old men and women ) gather, their once-strong hands now weathered by time and despair. Every Saturday evening, they congregate at this dimly lit house along Mau Mau Road to reminisce and sing about the past ––and they are songs so nostalgic you can’t help being moved as if in a trance sometimes. These elders, once heroic guerrillas fighting against the ‘mighty’ British empire so as to regain their Land and Freedom, are today humiliated and forgotten by unjust power. They narrate tales of blood and pain to anyone who cares to listen, and Nyarari cherishes the time she spends among them, listening and learning from their painful yet hopeful narrations. Wounded yet proud, their voices speak of defiance, of battles fought and lost, of dreams torn apart by oppression. It is in these tales of resistance that Nyarari finds a reflection of her own world.
Almost every street in the country today whispers danger to the youth. Similar to the days of the Moi-KANU dictatorship, people are again whispering about young men and women vanishing, pulled from their homes, or abducted in the streets, never to return. There is talk of the almost proverbial tinted Subaru, the all-too-familiar Toyota Probox, or the double-cabin pick-up trucks. These are no longer just police cars, but machines that ferry deadly predators who seek to crush the spirit of the people. The monsters that these vehicles ferry steal more than just bodies; they steal the hopes of many families and turn the streets into a web of fear, just as the dark blue Mariamus, Peugeot 504’s, and police trucks once did during previous dictatorships.
The abductions under Ruto’s administration echo a dark legacy dating back to the regime of Kenya’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta, and Daniel Arap Moi’s oppressive reign that followed. During Kenyatta’s era, abductions were swift and merciless, often carried out by the infamous Special Branch. Anyone deemed a threat to the regime, whether through their ideas or activism, was a target. This situation worsened under Moi, when dissenters – particularly radical students and pro-democracy opposition groups – were detained at the infamous Nyayo and Nyati House torture chambers. The pattern was clear: abduction, torture, fear and forced silence as tools of control.
Wa Hinya: They tried to silence us, but they could never take away our memory
Wa Hinya, who now lives in the same slum where Nyarari grew up, is a great inspiration and teacher to Nyarari. She has lived through the darkest chapters of Kenya’s history. Though her body has today grown frail with age, her spirit remains unbroken. She is a living archive, a testament to the resilience of the oppressed. She often shares her story with Nyarari and the other wazee at their local hangout along Mau Mau road. Here, she told them about how her family land was stolen. She told them how she had watched as the powerful and mighty crushed those who dared to question. “They tried to silence us, but they could never erase our memory,” she would say.
Her voice would tremble with indignation as she recounted the chilling night of 30th December 1977 when Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s house in Bibirioni, Limuru was raided by officers from the Special Branch. She would recall the terror in the air as the heavily armed police officers stormed-in and picked-up (read abducted) her then-neighbour, Ngugi. Wa Hinya had been part of the audience captivated by his powerful play, Ngahika Ndeeda, during its inaugural performance at Kamiriithu in October 1977. She attended every show for six consecutive weeks before it was banned, igniting a fire within many hearts, including her own—a fire that would later on inspire Nyarari and others for years to come. To her, Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o was a prophetic figure amidst them.
Wa Hinya also saw the same fire in the eyes of her son Hinya Munene, an intellectual and patriot who was abducted from a bus on his way back home from the university, tortured and jailed during the brutal government crackdown that followed the 1982 coup attempt. Her son, who had once shown immense potential, was later expelled from the university for his political activism. The weight of his pain sank him deep into depression, and he turned to alcohol for escape. In the end, her son, lost to his struggles, passed away—leaving behind deferred dreams, and a mother’s heart broken.
Standing at Wangari Maathai Community Park, Nyarari’s mind flashed back to the faces of those she had lost—her friend Jamba, who was gunned down extra-judicially in the streets of Dandora, and her fellow youth who had either been disappeared or killed in the recent youth-led protests across the country. She stood there frozen, her breath heavy, the rainfall blurring her vision like the tears that once filled her eyes. Her mind went back to the streets where the fire of resistance still burned.
From Mau-Mau to Gen-Z: The Streets Are Calling
Nyarari had marched with fellow youth in the streets to demand that Parliament drops the new IMF-imposed taxes which put forward a raft of tax increases, fuelling frustration and anger amongst the poor and middle-class forces. The cost of living was already unbearable at the beginning of 2024, unemployment and corruption were soaring, and families were crumbling. The promises of change made by the President during the 2022 elections seemed increasingly unachievable. It had been two years since those elections, and the initial optimism had long evaporated, it had turned to anger and mistrust of the government.
First came the floods that killed and displaced thousands, especially in the slums. Then came the subsequent demolition spree in which countless homes and businesses were crushed under the weight of bulldozers. Nyarari’s family was no exception. Their small house had been reduced to rubble, the ground around it now littered with broken dreams. Then the government introduced a new university funding model that isolated children from poor backgrounds, and Nyarari had to drop out of university.
On 18th June 2024, Nyarari led a group of veteran Mau Mau women (Nyakinyua group) from Mathare to the streets of Nairobi. They who had resisted colonial domination decades before were here, inspired by a new generation that was resisting neo-colonial tyranny. It was time for compatriots to burn away the illusions of ‘peace’ that had kept them shackled for so long. Their voices would no longer be drowned out.
Sirens wailed in the distance, signalling the approach of the deadly dogs of the regime. The bold, angry, disillusioned voices continued chanting loudly, calling for the President’s resignation. Placards, flags and fists raised high felt like the dawn of something new: an unstoppable wave of freedom. Nyarari raised her flag in the air, her voice joining the chorus of the masses. The chants grew louder as they surged forward, determined.
The government’s response to the protestors was swift and brutal. The peaceful march was soon turned into a battleground when the state unleashed its conveyor belts of violence – the police. The air was thick with the scent of tear gas and the screams of brutalized protesters. The old women of the Nyakinyua group were not spared either, they were violently struck with batons and dragged away by the police. The elderly Wa Hinya was among those rushed to a makeshift hospital with severe head injuries.
Then the blow came on the 2nd day of the protests at around 7:00 p.m. when Rex Masai, the first martyr of the protests, fell to the ground. He had been murdered by a police bullet. The 29-year-old, a martyr before his time, became a symbol of the new generation’s struggle for justice and dignity. His blood stained Tom Mboya Street, and with it, the fury of the young swelled.
The criminal regime had now crossed the rubicon.
Parliament Buildings.
The youth were enraged, and no longer afraid.
The 25th of June would be the culmination of all their rage, and of their dreams of a better country. Nationwide, the streets were lined with armed officers, water cannons, and armed vehicles – their eyes void of empathy, and their guns thirsty for blood. But the people did not cower to power. In the centre of Nairobi, the number of protestors had swelled to over a million, and their voices filled the air. Nyarari and other youth marched forward in defiance. They were not alone, other cities erupted in a symphony of protests, with people rising in Wajir, Nyeri, Kisumu, Mombasa and even Eldoret – the president’s stronghold. The people’s conscience had been ignited in every corner of the country.
At around 5:00p.m , parliament voted to pass the controversial Finance Bill that had sparked the fury of the people. Upon learning this, the protestors, fuelled by the spirit of Rex Masai, Kimathi, Kaggia, Karimi, Mekatilili and others who came before them, charged towards parliament in fury. Their chants drowned out the bullets and sirens of the approaching police, the people’s collective energy shattering the fear that had once bound them.
As the protestors pushed towards parliament, Kenyatta Avenue was renamed Rex Masai Avenue, flames licked the sky as the Governor’s office was set ablaze, with the office of the Chief Justice at the Supreme Court not spared either. The police were soon overwhelmed and quickly running out of bullets and teargas, while the water cannons had run out of water by this point.
But the way to parliament was not without sacrifice. The police fired live ammunition towards the protestors killing and injuring many. The injured were rushed to waiting ambulances as the dead were picked up by their compatriots, becoming part of the surge towards parliament.
By the time that the people finally reached Parliament, several bodies littered Parliament road, and blood had been spilt on the streets of most towns in Kenya. Part of the building was set ablaze and people occupied the senate chambers. The storming of Parliament had been their statement, an ultimate act of resistance and an assertion that the government could no longer rule with impunity. The flames were symbolic — a beacon to show the government that all sovereign power belonged to the people, that the people would challenge any attempts to enslave them in their own country.
The Members of Parliament, terrified, scrambled for safety, scattering towards Bunge Towers and Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC) where they were whisked away in helicopters or disguised as injured protesters and driven off in ambulances. These sellouts who had once considered themselves untouchable were now running away from the masses they had long ignored. The regime, which had long prided itself on its ability to control the people, was left shaken to its core.
That evening, the nation was in shock, for the youth had done the ‘impossible’. From a distance, the sound of military trucks and helicopters could be heard – the Cabinet Secretary for Defence had earlier announced the deployment of the military to save the crumbling regime. In a late-night address to the nation, the President labeled the protestors as criminals and promised a crackdown on what he labeled as “treasonous events,”
The next day, the President again stood before the media flanked by his loyal parliamentarians, their faces marked by fear and unease. In the charged atmosphere, he reversed his stance on the controversial Finance Bill. The people had forced the unpopular regime to surrender to the winds of dissent that had blown too fiercely to ignore. But it came at a price – a lot of youths were either injured, missing or dead.
As promised by the President, the state was not going to forgive the protestors for this humiliation. In the aftermath of the protests, the government struck back with a vengeance, cracking down on the demonstrators. Many of Nyarari’s friends—those who had dared to speak louder than the rest—were either abducted and killed or tortured. Her friend Ramogi was not lucky, he was picked up at home in Majengo by state agents in a black Subaru never to return. This cruelty has recently extended into the very sanctity of hospitals where an elderly critic of the regime who was seeking medical care, was ripped from her bed and thrown into the police cells to face malicious charges. The regime has no mercy on those like Nyarari, the ones who dared to challenge the suffocating grip of their rule.
Difficult beginnings
As she stood at the park, her thoughts, now blurred by the rain and the haunting memories, turned dark. Her heart ached for her lost friends. Tears soaked her eyes as she imagined the pain of the mothers crying for their children who now lay lifeless in the morgues.
She could not believe it! The people had been close to toppling the regime—so close—but there was no organization, no clear leadership. The streets had been filled with rage, but there was no unified movement to offer leadership and build something better from the ashes of the old order.
‘How could we fight without a plan?’, she asked herself. She realised that if the uprisings had successfully toppled the regime, the military or political opposition, which are other reactionary formations, would have at that moment wielded political power and perpetuated the same injustice.
She clenched her fists, her resolve firm like the earth beneath her feet. The rain fell harder, but it could not extinguish the fire within her. At that moment, she realized the truth—the fight was not over, that the majority of disenfranchised citizens needed to dedicate themselves to building an organisation through which they could direct their anger to the enemies of the people. The government could fall, but the people had to be ready to build a new reality with their organisation at the helm. She knew that the enforced silence in the streets did not mean peace and that the people would not remain silent forever – they would rise again. But this time, they would rise with purpose, with unity, and with a vision for something greater. The journey was just beginning and it would go through time and clime to see the new world built from the ashes of the old.
15th Jan, 2025.
Mwimuto, Kabete.
Kinuthia Ndung’u is an organizer with the Communist Party Marxist – Kenya and Kasarani Social Justice Center.
