Until Everyone Is Free

Yesterday, we hosted the final installment of our teach-in series "Beyond the Bill." After the June 25 uprisings last year, many Kenyans were radicalized, they began seeing the state for what it is, they started seeing the contradictions. We wanted to capture that momentum and, through political education, help people make sense of the shape of power that guides what has been happening in the country—from "how countries should think about debt" to the history of Mwakenya, to Pan-Africanism in the DRC, and much more. Every month for the last year, we invited people to help us understand these connected struggles, and we're grateful to everyone who took part and, of course, everyone who listened and shared!

In two of our sessions, we spoke to Sudanese comrades Rabab Elnaiem, Husam Mahjoub, and Gussai Sheikheldin. The edited transcripts of these conversations, we put together and published in a booklet called "Revolution Neither Starts Nor Ends." Our ultimate goal is to distribute these as free pamphlets for reading in social justice centres and other political organizing spaces throughout Nairobi (and maybe throughout the country)! However, in order to fund a big print run, we are selling bound copies of this book at 800 KES. Please buy some copies and help us raise money to print hundreds more to give away! You can find them at Cheche Bookshop. Some of you who have already sent money can pick up your copies there anytime.

Police violence is one of the oldest stories of Nairobi. Although many are shocked by the open violence unleashed by the Ruto and Sakaja administrations on the streets of Nairobi — goons given permission to wreak havoc and uniformed officers executing people in broad daylight — brutality is always how informal settlements have been governed. For this reason, people's movements in the ghetto have long been the front-line fighters of the war against police violence, documenting and following up on cases long after media fanfare fades. What are the lessons that can be drawn from their work? How can others stand in solidarity with these movements? How is the fight against police violence actually a fight for a bigger kind of freedom?

There's a season for everything, and the time has come for April Zhu, our producer, to sign off. Until Everyone Is Free will continue with our team Stoneface Bombaa, Felix Omondi, and Wairimu Gathimba—bringing history into the living archive of our listeners' minds, hosting discussions on political shifts in the airwaves and, of course, radicalizing people. A luta continua.

A lot of the talk about AI focuses on how human AI is. Can it write like me, draw like me, sing like me? What we need to be concerned about, however, is how AI makes us less human. Kenya has become a hub for companies that recruit African workers to do the content moderation and data labeling microwork that AI depends on — and yet workers and their often inhumane conditions are hidden.

Commissioned by Project Ether, Until Everyone Is Free produced a special podcast episode highlighting how AI technology is just the latest stage of a long story of capitalism. But, as with all other stages, there is worker resistance too.

We've said before on the podcast that "Uhuru wa Palestina ni uhuru wetu"—that when Palestine is free, we are all free—because the occupation of Palestine is the "heart of the beast," it is imperialism at its baldest, it is a colony that in 2025 has yet to exercise its right to self-determination.

In this episode, we want to not only explain the history of the long war in the DRC but, more importantly, how this is true of Congo too. There is a reason Pan-Africanists have called DRC the "heart of Africa," why—as some sources claim—Kwame Nkrumah proposed the capital of the United States of Africa to be located in Kinshasa. It is not simply because Congo is in the geographical center of the continent. It is because, from the First Industrial Revolution to the Fourth, Congo—which contains half of Africa's water resources, half of Africa's forest cover, and enough arable land to feed half of Africa—reveals the darkest face of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. And a free Congo reveals a horizon for African self-determination and self-sufficiency that we’ve yet to reach.

Today, we are speaking to Nteranya Ginga. Nteranya Ginga has a research background in rehabilitation, reconciliation, and reintegration of former child soldiers in post-conflict communities using creative participatory mediums such as dance and film. As Content Director for #CongoExcellence, he worked on educational content for Congolese youth to nurture their potential to contribute to the development of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nteranya has been the implementation support lead for the SOS Children’s Villages (CV) Ombuds implementation project for West, Central, East, and Southern Africa regions.  He has also worked with the research centre Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, Kenya Scholar’s Access Programme (KenSAP), Tuition Aid Data Services (TADS), and immigration law company, Rivero Law LLC. 

Busia Senator and activist lawyer Okiya Omtatah recently declared his intent to run for president in 2027. Over his career, Omtatah has sued multinationals, government, politicians, and many others on behalf of the public interest and promises to focus on "anti-corruption measures" and executing the Constitution.

We've spent many hours helping people understand the structural nature of what ails Kenya. Omtatah has certainly played an important role as an individual, but is this at odds with what would actually be necessary, structurally, to liberate Kenya from the root causes of its problems?

How then should we think about electoral politics? They objectively matter, but how should we organize within a context where its importance is overstated? How should we think about the issue of solidarity within coalitional politics — throwing women and queer people under the bus — for a "lesser evil" and "non-corrupt" candidate?

Firoze Manji, PhD, is a Kenyan, but now resides in Québec, Canada. He has more than 40 years of experience in international development, health and politics. He is the publisher of Daraja Press (www.darajapress.com) and an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He is the recipient of the 2021 Nicolás Batista Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is the founder and former editor-in-chief of the pan-African social justice website, Pambazuka News. He has published widely on health, human rights, and politics.

It is important for many who were recently radicalized by the #RejectFinanceBill protests to understand that we are not the first to take on the powers that have shaped Kenya into a country subservient to foreign interests. Under Moi, neoliberalism and authoritarianism stripped Kenyans of self-determination, but many movements—including the December Twelfth Movement/Mwakenya and the Release Political Prisoners Movement—fought back. In this teach-in, we are joined by organizers of these movements, plus Women Solidarity Network, to discuss movement-building, linking past and present struggles, and the role of feminist ideology and leadership in making movements resilient and successful.

We need to think beyond just graft and theft. For all of the wastage and graft of MPs, for example, Parliament still only makes up less than 1% of Kenya's national budget. We need to think beyond individual vice—concepts like greed and corruption and dishonesty—and think towards larger structures, particularly production. Agricultural production, industrial production, infrastructure...

We were lucky to have Gussai Hamror Sheikheldin join us for the last teach-in. Towards the end of that discussion, Gussai looked at what's happening now in Kenya from a pan-African lens and helped us see what parallels were to be drawn between Kenya's experience and those of many other countries in Africa and elsewhere in the global south. We didn't have much time to go into the details of that in the last teach-in, which really focused on Sudan's revolutionary story, but Gussai was kind enough to come back for a solo feature, to talk about debt, taxation, developmental states—from a pan-African perspective.

Gussai H. Sheikheldin is a researcher and consultant whose work seeks to illuminate synergies between techno-science and institutions, to advance policies and solutions in sustainable design for socioeconomic systems and development governance. Based in East Africa and Sudan, most of his projects focus on African topics, from a pan-African perspective.

Staggering visions of unity from Kenya’s historic #RejectFinanceBill protests demonstrated a solidarity that many thought was impossible. However, now that the clear threat of a single bill has diffused, many feel we are in unprecedented, uncharted waters. Nothing could be further from the truth. In 2012-13, our Sudanese comrades realised that street demonstrations were the manifestation of people power, but only through mass organising could that power actually be wielded. From neighborhood resistance committees to informal unions, Sudanese have drawn upon African revolutionary traditions of popular democracy to innovate powerful forms of grassroots organisation—tactics we hope can expand the political imagination of those who have been invigorated and radicalised by the protests here in Kenya but ask, “What’s next?”

On 31 August 2024, we invited Rabab Elnaiem, Husam Mahjoub, and Gussai H. Sheikheldin to share insights from Sudan's grassroots organising.

Rabab Elnaiem is a Sudanese activist, labor organizer, and former spokesperson for the Sudanese Workers Alliance for the Restoration of Trade Unions (SWARTU) currently based in the United States. She is a co-founder of the Ta Marbuta podcast, a feminist, anti-capitalist podcast.

Husam Mahjoub is co-founder of Sudan Bukra, an independent nonprofit Sudanese TV channel launched in 2019 as a media voice for the revolution. Husam is a communications engineer, journalist, and host of a show in Sudan Bukra that critically examines Sudanese politics through interviews with various political actors, including many resistance committee members, trade union leaders/members, and progressive writers and activists.

Gussai H. Sheikheldin is a researcher and consultant whose work seeks to illuminate synergies between techno-science and institutions, to advance policies and solutions in sustainable design for socioeconomic systems and development governance. Based in East Africa and Sudan, most of his projects focus on African topics, from a pan-African perspective.

Other useful links:

https://hammerandhope.org/article/sudan-revolution

https://newpol.org/issue_post/a-revolutionary-way-of-doing-politics-is-taking-shape-in-sudan/

https://menasolidaritynetwork.com/2021/11/04/powering-the-uprising-sudans-resistance-committees/

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/interviews/magdi-el-gizouli/

https://roape.net/2024/01/10/exposing-the-murderers-the-uae-and-saudi-arabia-in-the-war-in-sudan/

Unmaking as Emancipation

Who really is a Luddite? Contrary to popular usage of the term, Luddites are not anti-technology; they are anti-exploitation.

In E4, we discussed the constant tug-of-war between labor and capital that pushes history forward. Capital, on its side, innovates to strive for more accumulation and profits, primarily by developing new technology to reduce labor costs. This is the situation skilled artisans in 18th century Europe found themselves in; after being forced into the wage economy by capitalism, the system continued reducing its use for them as it innovated technologies to reduce labor costs. The skilled artisans resisted, striking down the machines taking their livelihoods away. Labor organizing at the time was illegal, so workers had few legal means of protest.

Here in Kenya, we find a similar parallel in the unfolding of colonialism. Under it, our elders were forced into the wage economy through laws such as the Crown Land Ordinance that forced them out of the land they relied on to make a living and the imposition of monetary taxes that they had to work to pay for. In Kericho, for example, 90,000 acres were stolen from the Kipsigis and Talai and leased to tea-farming multinationals. Those who the land had been stolen from found themselves forced to work for their thieves.

Upon independence, the new neocolonial overseer class allowed the British multinationals farming tea on the land to continue working there, often at lower than market-rate land lease fees. The Kipsigis and Talai continued to work on the land that had been stolen from them as well; they had no access to the factors of production that they could use to remove themselves from this system. Then, as it happened to the artisans of the 1800s, their labor (& consequently livelihoods were continuously made redundant as these tea companies introduced machines to cut labor costs.

In E4, we discussed how states and corporations have laid out bureaucracies to rein in unions and drag out conciliatory procedures. The tea-pickers, through their union, Kenya Plantation and Agricultural Workers Union, after fighting for a whole 10 years in court with the mechanizing multinationals, lost their case in 2021. So, what did they do in the absence of their ability to undermine capital? They found another way to undo their oppression; by destroying the machines responsible for their lost livelihoods. Framing our discussion around these 2 points in history (the 18th-century Luddite movement and the 21st-century tea-pickers resistance) and making reference to the various ways amorphous groups of workers are fighting back against capital as discussed in E4, we put forth all this work as the work of unmaking. What are the different ways we unmake the oppressive structures governing our lives? Tune in for an exciting discussion.

What is imperialism, and how is the Kenyan state complicit in enabling it? Why, since Independence, has the Kenyan state been a willing imperialist stooge — in terms of military action, global finance, economic partners, trade deals, and more? Why do our rulers value the acceptance of the West more than that of their own people? What lessons can we learn from Palestinians, Sudanese, and others who have resisted imperialism at home?

On 11 July, our team and Qwani/Bunge la Mayut hosted a teach-in on Imperialism. It was called Beyond the Bill: Imperialism, Globalism, and the People's Resistance. Our panelists were Wacera Thande, Maureen Kasuku, and Booker Omole.

Keep learning, keep sharing, keep looking out for one another, and keep fighting. We are just beginning, and it has been beautiful.