We must protest, but who will teach us to do it peacefully?

A majority of Kenyans are feeling wronged. They are feeling wasted, abused and denied their democratic right.

Many people are feeling wasted because they spent lots of hours queuing to cast their votes, and yet, apparently to them, it was not a transparent process. They felt all their efforts came to nothing and now, they are angry.

That anger can clearly be seen in the outburst of violence that broke immediately after the announcement of the presidential results. The burning of homes and the Eldoret church massacre are just some of these instances. These are clearly things which are not ‘Kenyan.’

I felt the outburst of anger from the comfort of my office chair on the same day the president was re-elected and sworn in.

I received a distress call from a brother. He said his neighbourhood was on fire. Marauding gangs from the neighbouring Kibera had moved into Olympic estate and were stealing and setting houses on fire. His house was spared, at least for some time, because he could speak the same ethnic language as the attackers and pleaded with them not to loot.

Later on, he called to tell me the looters were stealing everything from the houses in his estate, including the doors and gates! Apparently, they were ripping houses apart, removing the plumbing fittings and destroying anything they could.

Many days later, one could see the protesters’ anger by looking at the remnants of that estate. And the anger is visible when one looks at Kisumu, now a shadow of its former self. Eldoret and Kericho, with their overhelming numbers of displaced people and looted shops in Mombasa and of course, several grieving families.

I also felt that anger when I sat at a café in town, sipping coffee. When it was news time, a big TV was switched on and everyone milled around to catch the latest happenings. As new ministers were being sworn in, two men moved to my table to catch a better glimpse of the goings-on. And then I heard shattering remarks. The men claimed Kambas were going to be the next in line to be killed, because their leaders had apparently moved to the “wrong” political divide.

The problem with most Kenyans, o is that they don’t know how to protest. That is why we have seen a scenario of people burnt up in a church, because their aggressors saw no better way to express their anger than kill, maim and loot from people who share something they consider to be in common with their enemy – ethnic origin.


And peace makers have been preaching on televisions urging people to be peaceful. They are saying, do not kill your neighbour, do not burn your neighbours’ house and lots of other things. And yet they are not telling people who are feeling deeply aggrieved how to release their anger.

From the International non-violence protest movement, we have seen many examples of peaceful protest. Demonstrations, Sit-ins and sit-downs – where the aggrieved parties move to certain areas for a period of time to express their anger, “haunting” the powers that be, by using volunteers to follow and haunt particular officials until they get tired and listen to one’s cause are just but few of these methods. And from our own traditions, we saw how Uhuru Park was safeguarded in the early 1990s as women striped naked in protest.

If only Mahatma Gandhi was here to preach non-violence methods of protest to Kenyans!

Unfortunately for our society, we seem to be unkind to such types of protests. It was only last year that a group of disabled hawkers kept vigil while on a hunger strike outside the building where I work for almost a month and nobody seemed to care.

It is heart wrenching for me to see my fellow women-folk, peacefully demonstrating, being dispersed by police and tear gas. I suppose if the police just left protesters to march and march until they got tired, their anger would be a little bit soothed.

As long as the root causes of people’s anger is not satisfied, or at least seen to be satisfied, then our people might continue resorting to unorthodox means of protest, with devastating consequences.