Wangui Kimari on the Nairobi Protests

On June 25, Nairobi will be in the streets. 

One year ago, when I interviewed Wangui Kimari for our special issue about confronting fascism around the world, we discussed 2024’s mass protests against William Ruto, president of Kenya, and his austerity tax bill. In response to the protests, police fired live rounds at protesters, killing about sixty people over a period of days. The biggest day of protest was June 25. 

Many Kenyans have continued to criticize Ruto, a Trump-ish figure who skews theatrically authoritarian. Critics included a little-known rural teacher named Albert Ojwang who had blogged about a deputy police chief’s corruption scandal. The police arrested him. The next day, still behind bars, he was dead. The police blamed suicide, but a postmortem showed that he’d been beaten. Kenyans took to the streets again. 

I called Wangui to ask what this new phase of protest might look like. “Kenyans are just tired of Ruto, but since this postmortem, there’ve been spontaneous protests.” She blamed the abduction on the government’s disarray as young protesters continue to mobilize. The officials, she said, “are still in their vanity. They’re trying to pin this on everyone, saying people are being paid to protest, but it’s a common outrage. Everyone hates Ruto’s guts.”

“Albert Ojwang is symbolic not of the famous activist, but of the extent to which they’re trying to stamp out dissent — that they will take a nice but unknown teacher-blogger from a rural area and torture him because he insulted the deputy inspector general.” She pointed to a soft-spoken activist, Rose Njeri, who built a website that let people send emails to their government representatives. In May, police “abducted her — this lovely young 4’9” woman who made a website.”

In the latest round of protests, the police have come out in force and ended up shooting Boniface Mwangi, a hawker. Protesters fought the government’s hired goons and burned their motorbikes. On June 25, “we need to memorialize the 67 people who were massacred on the streets and the many others who have disappeared.” There is plenty of fragmentation, including some prominent faces from the protests who’ve been coopted by the government, but far from being cowed, Wangui said that everyone is organizing where possible. “People are raising money for Albert Ojwang’s funeral” and to support the hawker who was shot. “These actions are definitely a ‘fuck you’ to Ruto.”

Given all this, protests seem primed to explode one week from today. “We are not going back to the status quo. Being on the streets led to new imaginaries even if there isn’t a cohesive political block that’s organized to take power.” In the U.S., where protesters are being shot with rubber bullets and even liberal politicians being tackled by masked goons, we’ll be watching. —Sarah Leonard