A Tribute to Pheroze Nowrojee

I was not expecting much when a Kenyan friend told me about a video interview he wanted me to watch featuring Pheroze Nowrojee, who had just passed away. My initial thought was that the request sounded a bit odd; what was I to gain from a posthumous interview? Until I remembered the article I had written about the Gen Z political uprising in 2024, after two previous visits to Nairobi and other parts of Kenya, the first in 2022 and the second in 2023.

Since the courageous revolt of the Kenyan Gen Z, many of us who had accepted that we were united in the struggle were asking the same questions about the widespread corruption, rapid inflation and lack of jobs in many lands, and wondering out loud when better times would ever come for the children of Africa. I was grappling with these issues as the Republican Party took over the US White House in January 2025. However, it wasn’t until I saw the interview with the Senior Constitutional lawyer Pheroze Nowrojee on The Elephant’s YouTube channel hosted by Darius Okolla that I began to see a definitive way forward, not only for the Gen Zs in Kenya but for us all across the globe.   

I was excited to watch the interview with Pheroze Nowrojee for two reasons. The first was because it was one of the last interviews he would give before his death on 5 April 2025. Secondly, because of Okolla’s creative mind and his dedication to keeping a record of our experiences. Okolla’s intergenerational series of conversations seeks to provide a space for knowledge-sharing born out of the June 2024 uprising and the government’s response.

When Pheroze Nowrojee referenced the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the South, from which I hail and of which I am a living benefactor, I knew I was in for a real treat. I listened to the interview with the intention of learning something I didn’t know, to catch what valuable information might slip from the lips of this man of authority because, to borrow from the young human rights activist and rapper Yassin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, in response to the events in Gaza: “We’re first timers with this. We’ve never had floor seats to this.”  And, it is true, in so many ways. We’ve never been in a position to witness an intergenerational exchange in real time. We didn’t have the high-speed internet now available to the Gen Z to construct and coordinate a battle plan. This is a first for us all.  

I was born in 1965, a member of Generation X and among the first of my kind to be bestowed the full rights enjoyed by White Americans to live as a complete human. For what is Civil Rights if not the protection of one’s right to live without persecution? 

In March 2025, I celebrated my 60th birthday and would never have imagined we would be facing the same opposition to our freedoms in America today as my parents faced in their youth. In the interview, I was delighted encouraged by the senior counsel’s response when asked what tools Gen Z could use going forward: “History is society’s early warning system.” No one has to reinvent the wheel. We can all access the archives of history, both written and oral – our main source of record keeping and information-sharing since the beginning of mankind. I became further charmed into a certain form of submission when he began to reference past cross-nation legal collaborations with colleagues from Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, Tanzania and elsewhere. Nowrojee’s belief in the power of his profession to defend and protect the truths of the marginalised and the overlooked was palpable. I appreciated how he praised Kenya’s Gen Z’s strategy to remain leaderless and act peacefully which he observed changed the spirit of the movement and took it to a whole new space. The Gen Z had the right to demonstrate but that right would never have been honoured had they come out as thugs.  

Nowrojee notes the protesters’ use of the constitution and their courage faced with the threat of physical harm. Change has never been easy but Nowrojee insisted that we all must find ways to break through. Now, what he didn’t say but what I imagined – in between the pauses and the moments of silence – where there was no emptiness but only the absence of noise – was a world of possibilities to imagine for all generations. When he made mention of the reason for the 1963 March on Washington during which Civil Rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the famous “I Have a Dream Speech” making it known that Blacks in America were not there to take from White America, but had come together to demand jobs, the same reason why the Gen Zs had come together to demonstrate, as he was stating these facts, I saw something then I had only heard mentioned in the writings of the famously misunderstood 19^th-century philosopher and social critic, Frederich Nietzsche, the author of such titles as Beyond Good and Evil in which he makes a scathing critique of the science of psychology and demands that the established definitions of what is good behaviour and bad behaviour be re-examined by those on the ground rather than by the ruling class.  

As I watched the Senior Counsel speak, I began to see the image of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the warrior, form in the movement and gestures of Pheroze Nowrojee. The Übermensch was the type of man Nietzsche stated the world would always need to save itself from itself because the Übermensch does not compromise. He does not conform to the world. He shapes the world in his image because he has somehow managed to escape the trap of needing the approval of others. He has killed the ego and the need to be accepted by anyone. He does not shout and he does not argue because he understands to argue is only intellectual theatre. He uses silence as a weapon because he knows his words are powerful. He understands to react is what the manipulator desires because once you do you have already lost the battle. But the Übermensch understands the psychology of silence, he knows silence disconcerts, it changes the narrative and, coupled with his gaze, it becomes a mirror held up to one’s opponent forcing them to face themselves, to question themselves and their motives. And when the Übermensch speaks, if he speaks at all, it is surgical. He listens not to respond, but as a hunter listens in a forest, for the cracks, for the contradictions, for what is being exposed, and at the appropriate moment he engages because he understands he has nothing to prove, he owes no one nothing, not even a rebuttal.   

However, let there be no mistake, Nietzsche knew there is a dark side to using silence as a weapon, and the Übermensch must know this too. Nietzsche knew empires have been built on the silence of others. Not only did Nietzsche write of the herd mentality, he wrote of the slave mentality as well, and here is where I believe his being misunderstood came to the forefront. Nietzsche proposed: What if the decision to remain silent isn’t wisdom but a screaming silent surrender? Nietzsche warned about this and the slave mentality versus the master mentality that allows one to suffer the abuse of others and still feel virtuous for it. What that meant to Nietzsche was that you were still working in your ego state, still seeking the approval of others, and that, in Nietzsche’s eyes, was no existence at all. 

One must realise Nietzsche didn’t write for the faint of heart. He didn’t write to free the slave, he wrote for the slave who dared to free himself. That Nietzsche was brilliant is undeniable, but I believe that to put those ideas on paper at a time when empires were being built and colonial settlers’ strategies were being carried out in different hemispheres, his scathing critiques of the moral authority of the elites to lord it over the common man during the period the Europeans termed the age of enlightenment, must have been too much for the thinking, reasoning publics to bear. Nietzsche published most of his work, including The Dawn, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy (History) of Morals, during the 1880s and it is for this reason I believe Nietzsche became misunderstood. 

Silence as a weapon. I knew I was on to something as Nowrojee continued his interview, his presence animated, amplified as he began to analyse the early thoughts of many lawyers, particularly Nelson Mandela. “Nelson Mandela said, ’It is my profession [and it’s an honourable profession – he was a lawyer, Nowrojee pointed out – before he went into politics] that will not allow me to do dishonest things.” There, in that statement, was the treasure I knew I was to find: Mandela knew that greatness comes not from being good but in doing what is right. 

After the interview concluded, I decided to do a few random web searches to learn more about the man whose deep passion for law would be used to shape Kenya’s constitution and I was not disappointed. There were many tributes, testimonies, and outpourings of love but one in particular stuck with me, an opinion piece written by Gina Din in the New African magazine. Gina Din is the founder of the Gina Din Group, and author of the autobiography Daughter of Africa. In her piece, Dina wrote: “Pheroze was more than a lawyer. He was a custodian of the law’s highest purpose: justice. At a time when the law was being weaponized against the people, he chose to wield it in their defence. When the price of dissent was exile, imprisonment, or worse, Pheroze stayed. He took on the cases others wouldn’t touch. He stood beside those who had no one.”

Nietzsche wrote about the will to power, and Pheroze Nowrojee pointed to this in his interview with Okolla; those in active roles of struggle must understand the roles of power, they must come to know what power is in the government as well as in the individuals and what role that power gives to the struggle. I particularly loved it when he pointed out that not all people in high places were bad; Nietzsche stated the same in his work the Genealogy of Morals. Pheroze Nowrojee, I discovered that day, was the epitome of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the Overman, a man I would come to know through the work he left behind and the lives he touched. He was a man who did what was right not because it was good, but because he couldn’t be any other way. Pheroze Nowrojee died on 5 April 2025 in the United States at the age of 84.