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The call came in at around 4 p.m. “Kobuthi, it’s Brian from primo.” “Oh, sema Brayo, long time, man.” “I’m good, bro.” After the usual pleasantries, there was a long pause. A deep sigh in Brian’s voice, then he cut to the chase. “Kobz, I’m in a fix. Please send me 275 Kenyan shillings; I’ll refund you when I can.”
I was taken aback. First, Brian and I had lost touch and not connected in years. Then, there is an unspoken bro code: you need to know someone a certain way to have certain conversations, let alone borrow money. Second, the specificity of the amount. Was it a marketing ploy? Was it shame? I thought to myself. Unable to reconcile my position quickly, and still hearing the angst in his voice, I ended the call by saying I’d send something. I wired him 2,000 shillings, followed by a text: “Don’t pay back, handle your stuff. Take it easy, bro.”
Brian was one of those lads who even from a young age showed so much promise. An all-rounder at school, national school alumni, STEM graduate, emotionally intelligent with the ladies in our adolescent days, handsome, with natural leadership qualities. Months later, I bumped into him in Thindigua – a sprawling middle-class neighbourhood, once a vast coffee farm. Our brief tête-à-tête in the Quickmart shopping mall car park centred on him lamenting that his girlfriend’s daughter didn’t respect him. I had no advice. I brushed it off with “We should link up,” but we both knew I had no intention of doing so.
For months afterwards, I mulled over those two encounters. This guy could have been me – same elite schooling, same shadowed Nairobi streets, same fevered dreams whispered in adolescent brotherhood. It struck too close, a mirror’s cruel fracture: why him and not me? What phantom wind snuffed Brian’s flame while mine flickered on? We had all sworn by our choices, our relentless climb, that triumph awaited us together – yet here he was, adrift in the wreckage, and I, trembling on the edge, wondered at the fragile thread of fate that spared one dreamer (with too many scars) while devouring another.
I decided to reach out to old contacts, colleagues, and friends to understand what being a middle-aged millennial means. Story after story revealed the same death of dreams, hopes, and aspirations. Brian wasn’t an outlier but a recurring archetype. Millennials (born 1981–1996) were poised to be Kenya’s generation of change. Entering public life as the first internet generation under President Kibaki, we were educated, digitally connected, socially aware and politically curious – labelled audacious radicals. Yet, now, in our 30s and 40s, many have grown cynical and disillusioned. Relationships falter, visions of societal change fade, and youthful bravado wanes. What happened? A generation once brimming with hope drifts into failed marriages, strained ties, underemployment, financial distress, addictions, incel echo chambers, cynicism towards organised religion, and fixation on state power. How did it come to this?
*****
On 3 February 1960, Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, delivered the famous “Wind of Change” speech to the South African parliament in Cape Town. He stated: “The wind of change is blowing through this [African] continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.” He acknowledged Africa’s rising nationalism, signalling to the West to shift towards decolonisation amid anti-apartheid pressures. This marked not only a pivotal moment in ending colonial rule across the continent, but also a shift towards a more democratic global society. Youth-led social movements in North America and around the world found inspiration from the continent and pursued their own pathways to freedom and justice: from the Vietnam protests to the civil rights movement, from the hippie movement to the Black Panther resurgence, and to the 1968 student riots in Paris – the 1960s and early 1970s were a hotbed of civic agitation.
This “democratic overload” strained Western systems, culminating in the 1970s oil crisis, which knocked the wind out of the global economy and helped trigger a stock market crash, soaring inflation, and high unemployment – ultimately leading to the formation of the Trilateral Commission. Established in 1973 by private citizens from Western Europe, Japan, and North America to “foster closer cooperation among these three regions on common problems, it seeks to improve public understanding of such problems, to support proposals for handling them jointly, and to nurture habits and practices of working together among these regions”.
The Commission published a report in 1975 entitled The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies, authored by Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki. This 114-page document opined that excessive democratisation – rising participation, demands, and expectations – overwhelms governability, leading to ungovernable states with weakened authority and policy paralysis, and that too much democracy erodes effective governance without strong institutions. The report concludes by advocating balancing participation with elite-led stability to prevent collapse into authoritarianism or chaos. The overarching recommendation, which all the authors seemed to reach, was to create a world order where mass democracy is limited for the sake of market efficiency.
Later adopted by the Bretton Woods institutions and enforced globally through aid, military juntas, or economic sanctions, in Africa, this recommendation manifested as the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs). Kenya boarded this bandwagon in 1980 with Sessional Paper No. 10 on the acceptance and implementation of the recommendations of the Civil Service Review Committee (1979/80). However, President Moi – dubbed the “Professor of Politics” – adroitly balanced Western and domestic interests until 1985, when Sessional Paper No. 3 on the Civil Salaries Review Committee paved the way for full SAP implementation. The implementation of SAPs ravaged African economies, distorted social arrangements and restructured Africa’s public sphere. But this was deliberate.
In his book The Darker Side of Modernity: Global Future, Decolonial Options, Walter Mignolo argues that Euro-modernity has followed a particular logic to sustain power since the Age of Discovery. First, it imposes violence and destruction upon a specific people, then it recreates that society in the image Euro-modernity desires – a diabolic salvific script that casts the instigator of the initial violence as its eventual saviour. In this way, Mignolo notes, “the rhetoric of modernity is the constant updating of the rhetoric of salvation, hiding the logic of coloniality – war, destruction, racism, and plunder”. Thus, per Mignolo’s framework, if SAPs embodied modernity’s destructive side that wrecked Africa’s economy, reshaping society to impose it – especially in Kenya – relied on twin pillars: Christian theology and secular science/philosophy.
The secular argument was best propounded by Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. There, he posited that the global spread of liberal democracies, Western free-market capitalism, and the accompanying lifestyle, represented the endpoint of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and political struggle – the final form of human government. Henceforth, he suggested, civic work would adopt a technical character, with social, political, and economic challenges addressed through expert fixes. Thus was born civil society, a cadre of experts – local and foreign – wielding technical arsenals to mend society’s fractures.
Kenya’s landscape teemed with experts overnight: four-wheel-drive saviours roaring through the hinterlands pledged to banish poverty, slash child mortality, and uplift the natives. A deluge of development jargon followed: log frames, poverty reduction, burn rates, grassroots empowerment – all suspiciously evocative of Binyavanga Wainaina’s How to Write about Africa satirical edict: “In your article, mention aid workers with rugged good looks who save the day, always with a Land Cruiser and a noble heart for the suffering African.” The beneficiaries of this industry echoed new liberal edicts to the natives: human rights were good, tribalism and nepotism bad; an independent judiciary was good, corruption was bad; free media with its young fresh acolytes postured as the new meaning makers were good; failed institutions and dictators bad. Meanwhile, the rule of law was the divine pursuit for citizens and state alike. I am simplifying, of course, but living within this hegemony of power made it impossible to imagine that this new world was itself an experiment.
The fall of the Iron Curtain, the collapse of communism, the end of colonialism and the apartheid era – marked by Nelson Mandela’s release from prison on 10 February 1990 – necessitated a theological response suited to the new times. At the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) General Committee meeting on 30 March 1990, Professor Jesse K. Mugambi categorically stated: “Reconstruction theology [and not liberation theology] is the new priority for African nations in the 1990s. The churches and their theologians need to respond to these new priorities in relevant fashion, to facilitate this process of reconstruction.” Secondly, he observed the sheer frustration in Africa over its intractable problems, and the desire for a more pragmatic theology – one that seeks solutions rather than perpetuating the vicious circle of the blame game was necessary. Thirdly, as Professor Mugambi elaborated in an interview with Julius Gathogo – quoted in the article, “Storytelling as a Methodology in Developing a Theology of Reconstruction”– “Liberation tends to be focused on the past while reconstruction is focused on the future.”
The argument that liberation theology served its purpose during colonialism, slavery, and apartheid, that, with those eras ended, liberation theology is obsolete, is a falsification, particularly in light of the current global political order. This, as proponents of reconstruction theology suggest, misreads history profoundly, conflating decolonisation (a completed historical phase) with decoloniality (ongoing epistemic and structural forces perpetuating non-white subjugation). The result is a flawed theology: one proclaiming a “free, flat and fair” world where the task is simply reconstruction from ruins. Moreover, recent events like George Floyd’s globally televised murder and contemporary Black slave markets in the Middle East expose this claim’s falsehood. Second, the push to reorient theology towards pragmatism and “practical solutions” mirrors the neoliberal zeitgeist of the time, offering theological legitimacy to market-driven ideologies. Third, by framing liberation theology as past-obsessed and reconstruction as future-focused, Professor Mugambi constructs – in theological guise – an anti-secessionist logic. This parallels the assertion that Jesus, post-resurrection, severed ties with Hebrew culture, severing theology from its historical roots. This move delinks reconstruction theology from African histories, and struggles, rendering adherents of reconstruction theology effectively ahistorical – or, at best, frozen within a nativist, seldom idealistic and historic frame of Africa – a colonial trope no less. Yet, a far more insidious theological operation lurks beneath this shift. In liberation discourse, the site of struggle encompasses both external and internal forces that shape the material conditions of the oppressed, which in turn underpin their cultural, social, political, religious, and intellectual lives.
Consider the Mau Mau – Kenya Land and Freedom Army – who grasped intuitively that reclaiming their stolen land would unlock broader spaces of freedom. Reconstruction discourse, by contrast, executes a profound pivot: it redirects progressive struggles away from the material conditions (land, resources, tangible power) towards cultural recognition, confining justice to the realm of identity and mindset. This sleight of hand ignores enduring material inequities, leaving the oppressed to seek liberation in their minds alone while structures of dispossession remain intact. This theological shift would provide the necessary conditions for what has come to be termed as identity politics in Kenya’s public sphere.
****
When I entered the job market in the 2010s as a philosophy graduate steeped in African thinkers such as Sophie Oluwole, D. A. Masolo, Kwasi Wiredu, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, I was surprised by how obsessively my colleagues and friends – whether religiously inclined or liberal-leaning – clung to their sense of identity. I spent the first half of the decade in faith-based ecosystems and the second in liberal circles. In both, identity was no essentialist quest as my philosophical training suggested. Instead, identity was a performative politics of social sanction; virtue-signalling to affirm in-group belonging. The absurdity lay in the doctrinal certitudes wielded like a literal “sword of truth” to sustain the tribe and fend off outsiders. These worlds coexist side by side in Kenya’s public sphere – a false binary fuelling absurd gladiatorial clashes over norms, beliefs, and values. Yet away from this performative divide, a theological truth binds them: material prosperity signals fulfilment of one’s raison d’être and true discipleship within the ecosystem. It is within this framework that one can understand my friend Brian’s tragedy. Miseducated amid illusions and vacuous political vernaculars, Brian – like many of my peers – has become trapped in a senseless, absurd pursuit of existential meaning within Kenya’s public sphere, akin to the Sisyphean tragedy.
Carter Godwin Woodson astutely captured this miseducation in his book, The Mis-Education of the Negro: “The so-called education of Negro college graduates leads them to throw away opportunities which they have and to go in quest of those which they do not find.” The Kenyan millennial, force-fed the adage “someni vijana, mtapata kazi nzuri” – study hard, youths, and you’ll land a good job – became the new doctrine echoed in the public sphere. Channel your energies into NGOs or the private sector, they said, and prosperity awaits. Instead, we now confront exhaustion: stagnant careers, donor whims, corporate drudgery, and a hollow chase for validation in systems that promised much but delivered disillusionment instead.
****
In early Egyptian civilisation, elites completed their education at forty after being tutored from the age of eight years. The Hebrew-born, Egyptian-raised prince, Moses followed the same pathway. This explains why, at forty, he killed the Egyptian – launching his mission to redeem Israel. Yet, as W. E. B. Du Bois observes in “Of the Souls of Black Folk”, the dual education now offered to Africans breeds psychic turbulence. Similarly, for Moses, his mother’s informal lessons echoed freedom and truth, while palace training basked in empire’s raison d’être of war, victory, dominance, and power instilled a sense of omniscience and omnipotence in the mind of Egyptians elites.
This dualism mirrors the crisis afflicting the collective millennial soul. For Moses, another forty years in the wilderness re-educated him, reframing freedom not through imperial echoes but as a simple shepherd in the vulnerability of the natural world. I find myself asking: should we not embark on a parallel journey – not literal herding, but reckoning with freedom beyond the West’s curated “truths”? How do we rid ourselves of this dualistic logic that has hollowed our humanity, eroding our capacity for “teleological suspension”?
“Teleological suspension”, explains African American philosopher Lewis Gordon, is when a discipline suspends its own centring because of a commitment to questions greater than the discipline itself. We implement this suspension because it is more important to answer real-life questions using knowledge from various disciplines, than it is to be a stickler for rules, for doctrinal beliefs, for disciplinary boundaries or some performative identity. Just like we suspend reality when we read fiction or watch a play, we should be able to suspend our attachment to our “performed identities” and be able to talk to each other over the common issues confronting all of us. We should be able to ask ourselves how we can be religious and intellectually curious in concert. How we can reclaim the art of disagreement and move towards what Ifeanyi Menkiti called communal personhood. We must do this and start the conversations – our wilderness awaits.
