It was one of those hot, busy Friday evenings in Nairobi. There was the kind of heat that makes your shirt cling to your back because of the profuse sweat, making every movement feel like a chore. The people stood in endless queues outside the bus station, packed shoulder to shoulder, tired and silent, waiting for matatus. Rush hour had started early, the matatus blaring horns, the boda bodas weaving through the crazy Nairobi traffic, hawkers and conductors shouting over each other, as preachers blasted sermons on the sidewalks. Everyone was in a rush trying to escape the city or survive it.

 The matatus were a spectacle, their exteriors splashed with vibrant graffiti and flashing lights. From the sidewalk, you could hear the loud music blaring from their speakers. The drivers navigated through the urban chaos like mad men, squeezing through impossibly tight spaces and making sharp turns with inches to spare. The long queues at various bus stops and reckless driving were a representation of the disorganized public transport system in most African cities.

 People poured out of office towers, construction sites, and warehouses like they had just been released from a shift at the plantation. Because that is what most of these jobs are, urban slave plantations. Long working hours, poor pay, and bosses who only remember your name when you’re in trouble at work.

 My friend and I were walking down Tom Mboya Street, headed home, when we saw a crippled woman dragging herself across the pavement on her elbows, clutching a cup that contained a few coins. Beside her was a little girl without shoes, maybe five years old at most, one hand holding tightly to her mother’s dress. She held a doll in the other hand, and smiled as she walked – asking her mother questions like any curious child, like everything was okay.

People walked past them without a second look. No one stopped. Everyone was in a hurry to get somewhere, to get away from it all. My friend and I didn’t speak. We dropped a coin into her cup and just kept walking.

A shared agony: weight on our shoulders.

By the time we finally settled down somewhere to share a meal, the mood had changed. It was like someone had placed a weight on our shoulders. The image of that woman and her child lingered between us as we sat. We had gone through a rough day, full of stress and running around. But even that didn’t seem to matter at that particular moment.

Each bite of the food tasted of privilege; each chew a reminder of the disparity. We felt guilty – guilty for having a plate of food in front of us while the woman crawled through the unforgiving heat and dust, begging to survive. The silence was heavy, no usual jokes or complaints. Just that quiet stillness that sits in when your spirit is disturbed.

To break the heavy silence, I asked my friend whether he was okay. He looked up and said that he could not stop thinking about that woman and her daughter. He said it reminded him of the wretched of his land, a small African country on the shores of the Atlantic – dot republic. “It’s miles away from here, you know”. He paused, taking a deep breath, his voice thick with emotion. “But it’s the same agony, the same hopelessness.”

He wasn’t talking about some far-off place. He was talking about all of us. About our shared agony, which we carry every day, mostly in silence.

Here we are decades after independence… but what have we really achieved? Nkrumah’s dream of a united Africa, of self-determination, of a liberated people all seem shattered today. And some call this freedom? How long do we keep pretending we’re free while we carry these heavy chains around our necks every day? What kind of liberation is this?

That is what has become of African liberation! A word, a date on the calendar, an annual event where we gather on every 25th day of May to recite the names of martyrs long betrayed and sing revolutionary hymns. Meanwhile, the people that our martyrs died for remain forgotten and humiliated by unjust power in the neo-colonies.

Can we Call this Freedom?

What does African liberation mean to the poverty-stricken miner in Marikana, South Africa, as he drags himself out of a deep shaft, coughing blood and dust, while the platinum he mines enriches the foreign shareholders and local elites? What does it mean to the street vendor in Cairo’s Khan el‑Khalili, stripped of her livelihood because she can’t afford a bribe? What does it mean to farmers in the DRC, watching helplessly as multinationals and the militias they arm/control turn their lands into killing fields? What does it mean to the sugarcane cutters in Mauritius, whose sweat sweetens profits for others while they rot in poverty? What does African liberation mean to the people of Western Sahara, still held hostage under Moroccan occupation? What does it mean to the people of Sudan, caught between the bullets of a brutal, counter-revolutionary war waged by rival generals drawn from the Sudanese National Army (SNA) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). What does it mean to the people of Somalia longing to rebuild their nation? What of the woman I saw crawling through Nairobi’s heat, her barefoot daughter gripping tightly on her dress? Or my late friend, mzee Ngugi, a retired watchman in Ngara who died cold, hungry, sick, and alone next to the Indian owned shops and buildings that he once guarded?

Independence and sovereignty are words used by the elite to mask the truth. The tree of independence was watered by the blood of patriots, but the culture of dispossession and humiliation of our people continues. Year after year, the political elite siphon billions to their offshore accounts and toast ‘independence’ in air-conditioned homes and luxurious cars while financially starving rural clinics and forcing children to study by candlelight. Can we call this freedom?

The Mediterranean Sea has today become a mass grave for the youth of North and West Africa escaping the continent. They escape not because they love Europe, but because they’ve given up on Africa. Their countries have nothing for them except betrayal by internal and external forces, and a guaranteed promise of more misery. They’d rather perish in the sea trying to escape poverty than to slowly die at home.

The youth of East Africa are today being flown to the Arabian Gulf to engage in degrading jobs on contracts negotiated by their governments or by unscrupulous agents licensed by these very governments. Instead of pursuing deliberate, state-led industrialization and implementing radical land reform to dismantle land monopolies and enable the mechanization and modernization of agriculture, the kind that would create dignified, well-paying jobs for millions of young people here at home, our leaders have chosen to become slave merchants. They negotiate these contracts under the guise of creating employment for the continent’s growing youth population and send them off abroad in highly televised events meant to sanitize these betrayals. These workers are thereafter subjected to slave-like conditions by their new bosses – beaten, raped, starved – and either underpaid or denied salaries altogether. And when they return home either broken or in body bags, the government remains silent – complicit in the violence it outsourced.

Political independence without economic transformation is no liberation.

 And the ones who stay? Those who get diplomas and degrees and play by the rules. They’re on antidepressants or drinking themselves numb. Because the system has betrayed them.

 And where is the African Union? Too busy writing useless statements. Too scared to upset the masters that pay their bills. Remember they condemned the people-backed coup in the Sahel. At the same time, billions of dollars looted by African presidents and their cronies sit comfortably in offshore accounts. While local healthcare and education remain underfunded, these sell-outs get medical treatment abroad as their children attend prestigious schools using our looted resources.

Despite all this, sparks of resistance are growing.

In the Sahel, the people are standing tall, refusing to kneel any longer. They are done with puppet regimes, western-imposed notions of democracy, and the imperialist military bases. They are fed up with the west plundering their natural resources. The strength of their resistance lies in their unity, first as an alliance, now as a confederation, and, if the vision holds, soon to be a united federal Pan-African state.

In Kenya, the belly of the beast in Africa, the youth are waking up; they are rejecting western puppets like Ruto who continue to auction not just Kenya but the entire continent to imperialist interests. Despite the torture, abduction, and killing of government critics, the fire is still burning within them. The people today understand the destructive role that the IMF and World Bank are playing in their country. They are rejecting such governance and the colonial economic infrastructure. Like the heroic Mau Mau guerillas, today’s youth are ready to pay the ultimate price – death- to complete the unfinished African liberation struggle.

They are asking the hard questions:

What is liberation without land?

What is freedom without food?

What is sovereignty without dignity?

What is independence without the highest quality free healthcare and education for all?

But the majority of the contemporary African left remains disorganized. The old left still holds tightly to the nostalgic memories of their underground struggle against colonial domination and post colonial dictatorships, or their days in jail and exile. Yes! They fought, and their courage not only advanced our cause but continues to inspire our generation. A few of them continue the fight and inspire the young generation despite all the challenges, but many have given up and now look at today’s realities heartbroken – their energy spent and their vision obscured by the cancer of betrayal. Many of them are languishing in poverty; while some others have joined the oppressors out of despair or for self-preservation.

The new generation of fighters is facing a different kind of war. Many foot soldiers of the movement, young grassroots activists, have been lumpenized by the NGOnisation of the struggle. Many are broke, homeless, hunted by the police, burnt out, or turned into alcoholics. In response to this suffering, the NGO complex offers a shallow remedy called wellness; depoliticized retreats, breathing sessions, and therapy.  This wellness is disconnected from the structural violence that the activists are resisting. It becomes a channel to manage their burnout without confronting the root cause.

The NGO complex has launched an ideological offensive, neutralizing and depoliticizing the struggle in the neo-colonies.  In place of a state weakened by IMF austerity demands, the foreign funded NGOs and the private sector provide the services ideally supposed to be provided by the state. They have turned the struggle into a campaign for ‘democracy,’ ‘human rights’, and ‘good governance’ – all defined by the very powers that underdeveloped our countries. Some of our movements are today fixated on implementing the NGO agenda and delivering services to our communities, thereby losing sight of the greater goal: building strong, politically conscious movements capable of taking power and creating national structures and institutions that serve the masses.

Issa Shivji warned us about this trap a few decades ago in his seminal work Silences in NGO discourse. Shivji asserts that “I have tried to argue that Africa is at the crossroads of the defeat of the national project and the reassertion of the imperial project. The national liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, which put imperialism on the ideological defensive, have been aborted. Imperialism under the name of globalisation is making a comeback while refurbishing its moral and ideological image.” His words ring louder today than ever. A reminder to dedicate ourselves to real political struggle rooted in our people and our history, lest we become part of the system that is keeping us down.

In Not Yet Uhuru , Jaramogi Oginga Odinga noted that political independence without economic transformation was no liberation at all. He foresaw the emergence of a comprador elite class, Africans who would replace colonial rulers but continue to serve foreign interests, maintaining the structures of exploitation. Odinga emphasized that without land reform, control over the economy and genuine power vested in the people, independence would merely be a facade masking continued oppression. His fears today resonate as neoliberal policies, donor dependency, and puppet regimes that perpetuate the betrayal of the masses, mocking the very essence of uhuru(freedom).

When we speak of African liberation, let us be clear. Our people are not interested in remembering the past for nostalgia – they want an end to the continued exploitation of their resources, the land returned to the toilers, food on every table, and the highest quality education and healthcare for all. They want to enjoy a life of dignity and leave a future for their children.

The journey to Uhuru is still incomplete, but together and organised, we can make it attainable.

Onwards with the struggle for African Liberation!