Don’t mess with those people because they are not peaceful; they are damaged goods.
That was my reality growing up in the aftermath of the African-American Civil Rights Movement which begin in 1954 to advocate for better wages, better housing, better schools and a life without the terrorism of anti-Black sentiment of the 1950s that exploited and sowed divisions between the weak and poor. The Negro movement made famous by figures like Malcolm X, Dr Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks is said to have ended in 1965 – the year I was born, the year Malcolm X was murdered, the year of the groundbreaking Civil Rights Act that promised Blacks across America equal protection and opportunities under the law. But in 1968, at the age of 39, our most famous Black leader, the eloquent and charismatic Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, would be assassinated by a man named James Earl Ray; he would be convicted of King’s murder a year later in 1969. James Ray died on 23 April 1998 – just days after the 30th anniversary of Dr King’s assassination – at the age of 70, at a hospital in Madison, Tennessee.
All my life I was told to stay in my lane, mind my business, to leave what was on the ground, on the ground. ‘But, they were abused, damaged, denied a proper road to true self-realisation, and true freedom,’ I could hear my own voice plead. But it always ended, a losing battle. Everyone seemed to be asleep, or dazed from previous fights. It felt like everyone had just given up the fight for justice; we Blacks in America have always been outnumbered by the majority White population, which made freedom from slavery a seemingly impossible, unbreakable chain. But hope wasn’t lost, not all had given up.
Voices around us called for us to move on, to be about the business at hand, but those voices produced a two-pronged effect in me that made me doubt my existence. One that cried out for compassion and empathy, and the other that allowed for thoughts like, ‘Everyone is going to have to stand on their own two feet.’
But what if the next guy has only one foot? I needed to know, believing I had a clear understanding of Christian principles: ‘Do unto others that which you would have done unto you’ was the mantra for walking out of the darkness I was in. But, in hindsight, what I’ve come to know is that being a true Christian is not easy because so much truth has been hidden or erased. We stumble through fear, searching for meaning outside ourselves when the truth lives deep within the hearts of all men whether they be in agreement or not. I was taught to trust in the power of the unknown god but as a small boy, I could only trust the pain.
Our predicament as a minority ethnic group in America during the 1950s and 1960s was a tipping point for the offspring of former slaves which signalled a shift in cultural values, much like what is happening in Kenya now.
I started writing this piece in April 2024, although I had not anticipated what would happen in Kenya just a few months later. Celebrations were underway across Europe, and particularly in Germany, to commemorate the 300th anniversary since the birth of Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher said to be the founder of Western philosophy, and whose seminal work, Critique of Pure Reason, would usher in the Age of Reason.
Yet for more than three centuries, Blacks in America had been excluded from scientific knowledge, serving as footstools to White men whose words would be received as divine pronouncements. It was even against the law for Whites to teach Blacks to read. Dangerous for the White, and deadly for the Black able to read. To say I was confused by this proud history would be an enormous understatement; I was outraged to learn of the systems that allowed the early White settlers to live out their fantasies as kings while exhibiting the traits ascribed to barbarians, pirates, and savages. I was stumped – until I learned that America’s founding fathers were European traders, paid soldiers and men with no honour.
I couldn’t understand why America would hide the fact that we are all damaged by our contradictory history. To stand as one, we needed new laws that included our African-American experience. We needed healing but we did not heal. And so we became victims of the success of partial freedom; off the plantation we never answered the question of who we were, and what we desired for the future of Black Americans.
One only needs to reflect upon the ‘history of the world’ to know that the spirit and values of the pirates, the barbarians, the former enslavers still live on in our policies and a little in all of us because many of us refuse to examine ourselves, and so hinder our own elevation. We bicker, we backstab, we conspire one against the other, with impunity.
We refuse to examine our intentions, and ‘our help’. We use excessive force when dealing with our own because of how we’ve been conditioned. How could we all not be damaged by the sheer evidence of our shared history? We all are damaged, impaired by the legacy of oppression and subjugation that distorts and blurs the Black image, and consequently, the Black experience worldwide.
Now more than ever we need to remember we are one people across all continents. Far right groups have taken prominent seats in many of Europe’s parliaments amid the ongoing war in Ukraine. The world watched as Black faces attached to Black bodies were pushed off evacuation buses. This should have made us all stop and think; we needed a new moral authority.
Born in Prussia in 22 April 1724, Immanuel Kant built a bridge between the rationalists who claim that knowledge can only be based on experience, and the empiricists, who argue that knowledge can only come from reason. According to Kant, ‘Intellectual knowledge considered to be true without being based on previous experience or observation and empirical knowledge gained solely on personal experience or personal observation cannot exist without the other’.
A cultural movement emerged in the 18th century that aimed to promote the use of reason and experience as central doctrines related to individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to absolute monarchies and the power of religious authorities. Published in 1787, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason examined the foundations and limits of pure human knowledge: ‘There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. For how could the faculty of cognition be awakened to activity if this were not done by objects touching our senses and thus partly automatically producing representations, partly stimulating the activities of our understanding to compare, connect or separate those representations, in order to thus process the raw material of sense impressions into the knowledge of objects called experience?’
Now, I don’t claim to have the expertise or the authority to talk about what must come next for Kenyans or Black people in general; but the politicians don’t either. We are at a tipping point, at a crossroads where we must dare to think for ourselves with clarity as complete beings. If we do not dare to do something, it means we do not have the courage to do it, or we do not want to do it because we fear the consequences.
Having seen little done to bring equity to the poor, the brave are forced to go out to meet it. What we saw in the demonstrations in Kenya was an attack against humanity itself and against Blacks globally – labelling the protesters criminals and agitators when really they are victims of an outdated system. All the wars being fought today are old landowners’ wars, previously hidden from public scrutiny for centuries. This has to stop, for what impacts one, impacts us all.
We are one body, one people, let there be no mistake. And we need each other. The greatest challenge to our progress in the past has been ourselves, but the most sinister way in which to lose would be to tell the Gen Z that it is their fight alone; don’t believe it, it’s a trick to sow divisions within the ranks.
The road ahead is not going to be easy for any of us alive today but what we must not do is give up the fight for freedom or exhaust the youth. Every generation has a right to want better and work towards it – understanding that natural laws apply.
Simply stated, representation matters and it was a proud moment for me to see my Kenyan brothers and sisters organised and demanding better of their politicians. I was proud of everyone because they were peacefully demonstrating for change; they could see when the heavy-handed policing began. It was then that I realised we are all being called to act. This isn’t Gen Zs’ fight alone; in a world where perception is reality, now more than ever this is a wake-up call to us all.
What I saw and understood – that those without reference might miss – is that the handling of the protesters in Nairobi was a byproduct of the programming of the former colonisers. Peace through negotiations and an even exchange have never been the way of those attached to a system of dominance.
But according to Kant, ‘There is nothing higher than reason. Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is merely intellectual play.’ When asked to explain or refute the existence of God, he responded, ‘The existence of God cannot be proven, but neither can the opposite. So we may assume, or believe, that God exists. Knowing had to be abolished to make way for believing.’ A breakthrough for the emerging sciences, Kant’s findings would, however, remain taboo for the general Black collective.
Today I’m outraged; I was outraged as a child growing up in the 1970s and ’80s before leaving America in the 1990s, and I am outraged now as an African-American living in the Netherlands who has had the privilege of visiting Nairobi on two separate occasions. I am compelled to say that we must not lose hope. Ultimately, hope is not dead, and your demonstrated power matters, don’t lose that. One must never give into a tyrannical regime. Laws have to be rooted in knowledge, understanding, cooperation, transparency and a willingness to be held accountable.
We must examine the fact that we are the victims of a shared history and are, in some form or fashion, damaged goods, acting as puppets and behaving in ways detrimental to our own good, not accepting that we are one people, in Kenya and the world over, Black people one and the same, none better than the other. Until we carry this in our hearts, I fear history for us will always be someone else’s story.
No one should have to think that their life is in jeopardy when taking part in protests against the government. The protesters were peaceful protesters, young people who thought that their president had their backs, that they had a right to speak out. They were not unlike the Black youths in America who sought opportunity in the 1950s and ’60s but were told: “Go slow.”
It’s a feeling I know all too well; it’s exactly how the young Kenyan girl explained it when asked her reasons for risking her life by taking to the streets to protest the Finance Bill: ‘Tired, I’m just tired.’ I get it.
Asante sana, Gen Z. This is your movement and your moment; make it your finest hour and, in one unified voice, proclaim freedom now. Peace and blessings to Mother Africa and to all God’s children.
