|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
“Why are you killing us? Why are you throwing tear gas when we’re helping the wounded?”
The words – choked by tears and laced with the sting of gas – came from a young doctor in a white coat, her voice cracking above the shriek of sirens in Nairobi’s CBD. Around her, in a makeshift clinic outside Holy Family Basilica, next to Parliament, volunteers were tending to the injured—the same people who’d just been scattered by bullets and tear gas.
This wasn’t a rhetorical question. It was a raw, desperate plea. A cry that captured the true nature of the horror unfolding: a government not only attacking protesters, but targeting the very people trying to save lives. And in that moment, it also revealed the deeper truth about this movement. The Maandamano wasn’t just a fight in the streets—it was a resistance that healed, protected, and built.
This is the story of those who built a movement, not with violence, but with purpose.
When the streets erupted in chaos, they didn’t pick up stones. They packed gauze, gloves, and adrenaline. While the police readied their tear gas launchers and rubber bullets, a quiet brigade of medics was laying out gloves and trauma kits in the shadow of Parliament.
These young Kenyans formed a coalition of doctors, nurses, clinical officers, and medical students. Most were in their twenties, some still in school, but they moved with urgency and purpose. Within hours of the first major crackdown, they had set up makeshift clinics outside Holy Family Basilica, inside Jamia Mosque, and beside All Saints Cathedral. These were not fortified hospitals—just chairs, first aid supplies, and their own bodies.
They were there to help anyone who needed it—protester, bystander, even the police.
And yet, they became targets.
What these medics did went beyond bandages. In the very act of showing up—again and again—they redefined what it meant to resist.
They were the emotional and literal backbone of the maandamano. Their presence told protesters, “You are not alone.” Their tents became sanctuaries. In a city choked with fear, they gave people the courage to keep showing up—not to fight, but to demand dignity. With every injured body they treated, they reminded the nation that human life still mattered, even when the state acted like it didn’t.
Their power wasn’t in protests or placards. It was in standing between life and death and choosing life—again and again. Even when the police came for them. Even when the air turned toxic. Even when no cameras were rolling.
In a country where public healthcare often feels distant, corrupt, or unaffordable, these young volunteers offered a radical alternative: a health system built on solidarity, not profit. They showed what Kenya could be when care becomes collective.
And perhaps that’s what made their presence so threatening. Because to heal in public, in the middle of state violence, is to expose a broken system. To volunteer care when the government offers none is a quiet indictment. And to treat the wounded in a protest zone is to say, without a single slogan, “This country deserves better.”
These weren’t just medics. They were the moral centre of the Maandamano. Their gloves were their protest. Their refusal to leave was their resistance. And their legacy – like the lives they saved – still pulses beneath the skin of this country.
Then, when night fell and protesters were rounded up across Nairobi and beyond, a different kind of frontline emerged: courtrooms, police stations, WhatsApp groups. These were the spaces where legal minds stood between the state and the silenced.
Within a week of the June 2024 protests, these volunteer lawyers had helped secure the release of over 300 individuals detained without charge. They worked around the clock—raising bail, preparing petitions, and launching “Know Your Rights” campaigns on digital platforms.
Legal observers insisted on their right to presence at arrests and in police stations—rights repeatedly ignored. Human Rights Watch documented hundreds of pre-emptive arrests, many including children, often before protests even began. Some were abducted by plainclothes officers and held without legal access, others disappeared for days.
Despite being threatened, monitored, or obstructed, these legal voices held firm. They pursued petition after petition, calling out constitutional violations and pushing for judicial scrutiny of police conduct.
Their work was resistance by other means. While some demanded visibility by storming Parliament, these protectors wielded court papers. They didn’t just defend individuals—they defended democracy itself. Every bail posted, every petition filed, was a public rebuttal to authoritarian impulse: the streets might roar, but justice was being fought in public records and under oath.
One young paralegal summarised it best:
“We are not just freeing bodies from cells—we are preserving the right to speak, to gather, to say no to injustice.”
When the state tried to silence dissent by jailing its loudest voices, it was these legal warriors who kept the flame alive. They camped outside police stations for hours, sometimes overnight, demanding the release of illegally detained citizens. At Central Police Station, some were even tear-gassed and shoved while peacefully seeking access to their clients—proof that in Kenya, even the law’s defenders are not immune from state violence.
But they stood their ground. Their resilience reminded the nation that constitutional rights are not abstract ideals, that they are worth fighting for. And sometimes, that fight looks like sleeping on a police station curb with nothing but a briefcase and a cause.
In the digital age, resistance often begins at the keyboard—and this was never more apparent than during the Maandamano protests, where tech-savvy Gen Z activists became the invisible backbone of the movement. Within days of the campaign gaining momentum, tech communities banded together to deploy innovative tools such as “Lost in Kenya”, an AI‑powered missing‑person tracking platform developed by 27‑year‑old Joy Mutheu to help locate loved ones amid protests. A custom GPT‑style chatbot explaining the Finance Bill – built using raw legislative text – was launched by Kelvin Ndemo, making complex policy understandable to everyone.
These tech interventions were not afterthoughts—they were foundational. In places where physical marches were met with tear gas or bullets, digital tools kept the movement alive. Where journalists were blocked, streams carried voices. Where arrests – or internet blackouts – threatened visibility, VPN tunnels kept information flowing.
In effect, the coders and connectors built a parallel infrastructure of resistance, one that survived police perimeters, state intimidation, and technical shutdowns. They exemplified what digital-era activism looks like: inclusive, responsive, resilient. Their code mattered as much as their courage. In a technology-driven society, control over data and communication can make or break collective action. These young Kenyans made that an asset, not a vulnerability. They showed that the future of resistance need not be defined by fists or crowds alone, but by apps, algorithms, and access. And in doing so, they demonstrated how digital literacy can protect democracy—and even save a nation.
But while some were building platforms, others were building meaning. One evening at Qwani, during a poetry reading event, the conversation drifted – as it often does in times of crisis – toward the state of the nation. The topic was corruption, but what followed wasn’t just critique. It was a firestorm of ideas, metaphors, and questions. Poets spoke of land stolen and dreams deferred. Visual artists painted futures on makeshift canvases. One performer asked, “If the system is broken, are we brave enough to build something else?”
It was loud. It was brilliant. It was deeply Kenyan.
And it was resistance.
As the old saying goes, “Fasihi ni kioo cha jamii.” Literature is the mirror of society. In Maandamano, that mirror didn’t just reflect—it magnified, interrogated, and reimagined. While others protested with placards or code, Kenya’s creative minds used paint, film, and poetry to keep the nation from forgetting.
Photographers and documentarians risked arrest to visually record police brutality, injured protesters, and community defiance. Accounts like Missing Voices, Kenyans First, and Africa Uncensored became trusted sources when official media went silent or softened their tone. Musicians and poets turned protest into rhythm and rhyme. On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, spoken word pieces racked up tens of thousands of views—some even broadcast during live rallies.
Graphic artists and illustrators transformed pain into symbols. A viral piece showing a bleeding map of Kenya with bandages stitched by Gen Z hands became a digital emblem of resistance.
In movements where momentum fades with fatigue or fear, artists keep the pulse alive. Their role wasn’t ornamental—it was essential. The revolution was not just televised, it was documented. And that documentation shaped public opinion, informed legal action, inspired new waves of protest, and archived truth for future generations.
In every mural, verse, and photograph was a refusal to let the state define the narrative. These artists became Kenya’s unofficial historians. And in a society grappling with silence and erasure, they dared to remember out loud.
One year on, the images still linger.
A young doctor in a gas-filled clinic outside the Basilica, crying out for mercy as she tended to the wounded.
A lawyer curled up on a concrete curb, sleep-deprived but unrelenting, waiting to post bail for yet another illegally detained protester.
A coder hunched over a laptop in a small bedroom, turning raw legislation into a chatbot so ordinary Kenyans could finally understand what was being done in their name.
An artist, raising their voice and using their craft not to entertain, but to awaken.
And among them – perhaps the most powerful of all – the everyday Kenyan. The mama mboga who closed her stall to march. The boda boda rider who gave protesters a lift to safety. The high school student who made their first placard. The mother who held her child tight and said, “We are not afraid anymore.”
Together, they were the backbone of Maandamano. Not because they were the loudest, or the most visible, but because they held up the very structure of what resistance must be: collective, compassionate, intelligent, and deeply human.
Their legacy is not just in what they opposed, but in what they built. A movement not defined by its anger, but by its architecture of healing, defending, informing, and imagining.
If the old Kenya was built on exclusion, impunity, and fear, then these young people – Gen Z and their allies – offered a blueprint for something new. Something better.
A Kenya where knowledge is a weapon, where care is revolutionary, and where speaking up is no longer a risk but a right.
They remind us that resistance is not just what happens in the streets. It is what happens in the clinics, in courtrooms, in code, in verse, and in the quiet conviction of a citizen saying, “This country belongs to us too.”
And maybe that’s the story history will one day tell—not of chaos or crowds, but of a generation that rose with open hands, clear eyes, and an unshakeable belief that Kenya is worth saving.
