This piece is dedicated to our dear comrade Wanjau Wanja who transitioned on 22/08/2025. He knew loss, the kind of loss brought about by poverty, the kind that haunts ghetto youths through police violence, the kind that robs your dignity. Njau chose to struggle for social justice. His life reminds us that our struggle is not only against the undignified loss of life, but also against the countless undignified losses that the poor are forced to endure while alive.
It was a few days after the Saba Saba (July 7th) protests. The nation was still trembling from the horror of what had transpired. Forty-five more mothers across the country had lost their children to police violence. These young Kenyans had been killed for simply participating in peaceful demonstrations.
I was in a matatu that morning, earphones plugged-in, listening to Sam Mangwana on repeat. I was trying to distract myself from everything that was going on. But not even the beautiful rhythm of the drums, the lyrical guitar melodies, or Mangwana’s soft tenor could offer relief. The matatu radio was on, and I could hear the news in the background: another abduction, death, demolitions and evictions somewhere, more loss! Behind me, a few men were talking angrily about how the government had failed them, and I couldn’t help but hear every word. There was no escaping the mood.
From my window, in the slow traffic near Muthaiga, I could see people emerging from the vast Mathare slums, quickly walking toward their plantation sites in the affluent neighbourhoods nearby. Their faces were marked by fatigue, worry, and hopelessness. They looked weighed down by more than just the cold weather.
That moment, in that matatu, got me reflecting on the logic of loss in this country. That was when I began to write this, because loss is never just loss. In a society structured by inequality like ours, our daily tragedies reflect and reinforce the classed structure of state violence that governs everyday life.
The role you play in how wealth is created shapes the kind of losses you’re likely to face. If your survival depends on selling your labour time, and not on owning the means to produce wealth, you’re more likely to lose your job without notice, land without compensation or loved ones without justice.
These losses are produced by what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics. He describes it as the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not. Necropolitics is not just about death, but about governing through the threat of it. The state has the power to bring about the social and literal deaths of individuals and populations through direct action or neglect.
And this is not unique to Kenya. The pain of loss felt in Mathare echoes that of thousands of people in Gaza, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela and many other places devastated by imperialist greed. The well-oiled machinery of exploitation and violence knows no borders.
Loss, however, is not only global but also multi-faced. It is not just about the death of the physical body, it is about being erased while still breathing. It is the slow erosion of dignity, the silencing of memory, loss of culture and language, the suffocation of dreams, being driven off ancestral lands, being excluded from schoolbooks and national history, being denied a voice and made to feel like you don’t belong or matter while still living.
We lose friends to extrajudicial executions, neighbours and relatives to a crumbling healthcare system, dreams destroyed by underfunded public education, homes washed away in floods or flattened by bulldozers in state-sanctioned demolitions.
The working poor lose even time itself. They wait hours at clinics without medicine, work long hours for almost nothing, endure long court processes without justice, and waste hours in long matatu queues. Even the time to love, rest, grieve or heal is interrupted by the constant pressure to survive. Their time is not just exploited, it is wasted and stolen.
Still, the violence doesn’t end there. The poor also lose ecological justice. They breathe the smoke from factories that exploit them, drown in flash floods caused by climate change and unregulated urban planning, live next to dump sites and open sewers,and lose ancestral lands to carbon trading deals signed through deception or without their consent.
But one of the most ruthless tools in this architecture of loss is austerity. Its consequences are empty pharmacies in public hospitals, defunded education, tax breaks and tax holidays for the minority. The 2024 and 2025 Kenya Finance Bills are instruments of economic violence through austerity. These bills increased taxes on essential goods and slashed budgetary allocations for healthcare and education. They were, and still are, acts of class warfare.
For the poor, austerity means skipping meals and trekking to work so as to afford school fees and settle medical bills. It results in our women dying during childbirth or giving birth on hospital floors, students sent home because of unpaid school levies, going without electricity, queuing for hours for a jerrican of water and essentially burying dreams long before burying bodies. And if history has taught us anything, it is that austerity is a deliberate mechanism to crush and control the hardworking poor majority.
Yet, beyond the nature of loss itself, what is even more revealing is how the state responds to our grief.
When the wealthy die, they are mourned in obituaries printed on national newspapers, buried in expensive funerals, and their estates secured by law. Sometimes, swift investigations are launched to give their families closure. The masses are sometimes even summoned for national mourning and flags flown at half mast.
When they face the risk of losing profits or their big businesses sink into distress, the state rushes to bail them out with taxpayer money. Neoliberal economics preaches small government and free markets, yet when losses touch the rich, the state swells to shield them while the police are unleashed to guard their property from the anger of the poor.
The poor, in contrast, lose even the right to mourn. They are every-other-day criminalised for organising vigils or protesting indignity meted on them.
On June 25, 2025, as I marched with fellow patriots in memory of over 70 protestors murdered during the June 2024 anti-Finance Bill demonstrations and in outrage over the brutal killing of Albert Ojwang – a young teacher and son of a quarry worker – killed for exposing the rot in the police force, we were again met with more loss. On that day 25 patriots were martyred by the rogue regime. Among them, Boniface Mwangi Kariuki, a 22-year-old mask vendor who was shot in the head by police in an unprovoked attack.
A few days later, on Saba Saba day, more mothers again lost their children as we peacefully marched to commemorate a day symbolic of the struggle against the Moi-KANU dictatorship and to demand an end to extrajudicial killings.
When we mourned the brutal loss of Julie Njoki who was arrested in Nanyuki during the Saba Saba protests, detained and murdered in police custody, they again deployed riot police to suppress and silence our grief. Julie, the daughter of a chief, did not fit the stereotypical profile of the “disposable poor,” and yet her life was snatched away by the regime. Her brutal demise is a reminder that state violence does not discriminate against dissent.
The weight of these losses is felt across families, communities and generations – for a child raised experiencing evictions, landlessness, hunger or death carries that trauma into adulthood.
Women, especially poor and single mothers, carry the heaviest burdens of loss. As public healthcare collapses, schools defunded, children disappeared or killed extra-judicially – violence enters the home as poverty, and broken women are left to hold together their broke families.
Still, even under such devastation, we must find ways of grief that don’t surrender to unjust power, because under such a system, becoming a victim is not a matter of if, but when.
Cristina Rivera Garza, in Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (2020), reminds us that wherever there is suffering, grief rises not only as sorrow, but as the radical force that binds us into communities determined to reimagine the world.
In Kenya, we’ve seen this with the Mothers of Victims and Survivors Network, an organisation born out of decades of extrajudicial killings in the impoverished settlements of Nairobi. Their relentless pursuit for justice, rooted in the pain of losing their children to police violence, reminds us that grief, when organised, can shake the foundations of impunity.
To mourn loudly in a country that demands silence is an act of defiance and a spark for change. It is a refusal to accept loss as destiny, a cry for justice for the killed, the tortured and the disappeared. It is a struggle to reclaim futures stolen by poverty and lands grabbed by the powerful, a remembrance of our history and a resistance against every form of violence inflicted on the poor majority.
Kinuthia Ndung’u is a Lawyer and Social Justice Advocate in Kenya.
