November 6th  2003

Tujenge Kenya Mpya: We Can Turn Things Around in Kenya

Building the New Kenya National Democratic Movement (NKNDM)

A Contribution from Onyango Oloo
Montreal, Thursday, November 06, 2003

This document is a rough draft meant for the widest circulation and discussion.

Please send your feedback directly to the author at  oloo_wa_canada@yahoo.com. Or if you are accessing it at a public discussion forum, please do not hesitate to post your brutal, frank, scathing and hopefully, serious comments.

A: Some Preliminary Thoughts:

At the close of the preceding part of this four part essay on the Kenyan political transition, I had urged my readers to look beyond 2007- the date of the next Kenyan elections and start thinking seriously about building a strong social movement to work for fundamental changes in our country. I had kicked off the discussion by observation the fissures and realignments within and across the current political elite, noting the reemergence of ethnic and regional elites and pointing out that the current regime has entered into a period of political  uncertainty with the questionable health status of the incumbent head of state. I
appealed to my readers to look elsewhere.

I outlined what I felt Kenyans should be struggling for:

“….I am talking of a new Kenya with a new democratic constitution; a new Kenya which recognizes its  responsibilities in Africa; a new Kenya that stands up to imperialism; a new Kenya that carries out far reaching agrarian, economic, social, cultural and political reforms geared towards bringing the humble Mwananchi to the foreground of our national development process; a new  Kenya that recognizes and works for the equality of  women and men; a new Kenya that stresses the importance of the country’s youth; a new Kenya that redresses the decades old injustices, including bringing to book the notorious political assassins, land grabbers and  looters of state coffers; a new Kenya that works boldly with other southern countries to fight against  the IMF, the World Bank and the imperialist domination of  structures like the WTO; a new Kenya that elevates the working people of this  country to control state power; in short,  a new Kenya that makes a radical,
decisive break with the trajectory we have been pursuing so far…. “

I gave a simple overview of the social forces that would be fighting for this new Kenyan society placing the working people, women and youth at the core with the petit bourgeoisie and what can pass for the patriotic national bourgeoisie as unstable allies.

I closed with a promise to come back and offer my ideas on how we could build this new movement to fight for a new Kenya. That is my task in this particular essay.

B: What is “Class Suicide”?

However before I do that, I want to go back and talk about a concept I had introduced, and that was the idea that members of the Kenyan middle class, if they wanted to participate in this social movement for a new Kenya must abdicate their class backgrounds.

That idea met with some predictable attempt at withering criticism from one particular Kenyan online forum. The writer, an individual whom I consider a friend wrote, and I quote:

“Nd Oloo,

By what method would you propose Kenyan politicians go about 'abdicating their class backgrounds' ... how possible and
practical is this, like, to expect a cow to shed its skin for another? Herein then lies the clear dichotomy between theory and practice,  rhetoric and reality, what can happen and mere wishful thinking!

In a nutshell, Ndugu Oloo, here in the real world, 'vested interests have a perpetual propensity to perpetuate themselves'(yes, you can quote me on that!) ... and will NOT, of their own (volition), submit to self-denigrating change!

Class structures remain the way they are because the upper classes thrive on the very structures, and have a clear vested interest in perpetuating the advantages so derived from those structures. In other words, Nd Oloo, 'class structures' are a requisite 'tool of trade' for those who benefit from their flaws. The beneficiaries of class structures, and by implication, the flawed society that results from them, are people in power, the ruling class, the power elite, people at the top levels of the class structures (by inheritance or otherwise) who will do whatever it takes to maintain their (exploitative) hold on the rest of the society. How do you want them to change this, of their own accord, to their own detriment?”

The first thing to be pointed out that the concept is not a novel one, nor was it invented by one Kenyan essayist named Onyango Oloo. In effect when I spoke of people abdicating their class backgrounds I was just paraphrasing a very old and familiar concept in African and contemporary revolutionary theory: the idea of “class suicide”.

The concept of “class suicide” has uniquely African origins. It is a very interesting concept first mooted and developed by the late great African revolutionary thinker and national liberation leader, Dr. Amilcar Cabral, who like his contemporaries Agostinho Neto and Eduardo Mondlane was the main force behind one of the most brilliantly organized anti-colonial liberation movements: PAIGC which was like the FRELIMO or ANC of the Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde.

It is one of the tragedies of the Moi-KANU dictatorship that the official hostility to independent political thought stifled the
dissemination of the ideas of African intellectuals and political leaders like Amilcar Cabral, Abdul Rahman Mohammed Babu, Joseph Garang, and Harry Gwala from reaching and influencing the minds of Kenyan youth and students. Instead, our institutions of higher learning (especially after the anti-communist witch hunts and detentions of the early eighties) force fed future scholars with liberal pap and standard western conservative standbys when it came to political science and what
have you. Those Kenyans who embraced progressive ideas did so despite the best efforts of the educational system.

But I digress. What did Amilcar Cabral have to say about “class suicide”? I do not want anyone to take my word for it. A graduate student of history at the City College of New York took the time to not only research and write but also post online a paper he did on the subject:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/theafricanobserver/message/2239?source=1

From his contribution we can share the following:

“…The concept of class suicide is original to Amilcar Cabral. The concept crops up in many of Cabral's writings and speeches. It is part of his more general attentiveness to the role of the petty bourgeoisie in the revolutionary process (which itself flows from his careful analysis of the role of various classes in Guinea Bissau and= Cape Verdean society)…”

And further down the text we read:

”..For those made anxious by Cabral's stark choice of words, by 'class suicide' Cabral does not the mean literal killing off of the petty bourgeoisie. He does not have in mind the drastic measures later taken in Phnom Pen by the Khmer Rouge upon their seizure of power in 1975.

Instead, Cabral means a self-imposed suicide of the class interests of the petty bourgeoisie. Cabral's formulation essentially calls for political suicide, by having the petty bourgeoisie enact policies and guidelines that will so effectively serve the interests of the working classes as to obliterate the distinctions between the privileges and skills of the petty bourgeoisie and the exploitation,  illiteracy and lack of training of the workers and peasants. Cabral says:

In order not to betray these objectives [of national liberation], the petty bourgeoisie has only one road: to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness, to repudiate the temptations to become 'bourgeois' and the natural pretensions of its class mentality; to identify with the classes of workers, not to oppose the normal development of the process of revolution. This means that in order to play completely the part that falls to it in the national liberation struggle, the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class, to be restored to life in the condition of a revolutionary worker completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which he belongs. The alternative-to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class-constitutes the dilemma of the petty bourgeoisie in the general framework of the
national liberation struggle. The positive solution, in favor of the revolution, depends on development of revolutionary consciousness.

Because of historically unequal access to resources and education, the petty bourgeoisie is uniquely positioned to provide leadership to revolutionary movements. Cabral believes this to be particularly true in colonial countries where the imperialists have suppressed the native bourgeoisie in the colony in order to directly extract labor and resources out of the colony without a "middle-man". In any case, members of the petty bourgeoisie have played leadership roles in the revolutionary process, and have inherited control of the new society upon victory. The task, then, is not to curse this reality like a farmer might curse a season of drought, but to figure out how to best prepare both the petty bourgeois leaders and the masses of people for the dangers inherent in this situation. Cabral is almost alone among revolutionary leaders in taking this question on directly. It is notable that Cabral's conception of class suicide is one of the only attempts to deepen and put into concrete terms the theory of the 'withering away of the state' put forward by Marx in the Communist Manifesto and by Lenin in State and Revolution.

The idea of “class suicide” has been put in practice by generations of revolutionaries and patriots in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. To cite just a handful of examples: Amilcar Cabral himself, Dr. Agostinho Neto, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Ruth First, Maurice Bishop, Abdul Rahman Mohammed Babu, Jacqueline Croft, Baleka Kgosistile, Graca Machel, Frantz Fanon, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Jeremy Cronin and Thomas Sankara. The above are all individuals who could have chosen the comforts and certainties of middle class privilege supporting the status quo but instead to dedicate their lives agitating and organizing for revolutionary change. I will leave out the contemporary Kenyan examples because many of them are still very much active on the alternative political scene.

C: What Are We Fighting Against?

In order to win a war, one must clearly identify and define their enemy. Some Kenyans think that they are still fighting the remnants of the old KANU regime. Others think they are locked in battle against the presumed tribal gangsters called the “Mount Kenya Mafia”. Others are more vague, citing issues like “corruption”  “bad governance”  “lack of transparency
and accountability”. Others baldly declare that they are “fighting for democracy.”

There is an element of the truth in all these assertions. The KANU regime was a by word for repression, sleaze and cronyism. The so called Mount Kenya Mafia (a phrase I am told that was coined by veteran Kenyan journalist Joe Kadhi in February 2003) has distinguished itself with naked ethnic agenda. It is true that corruption is still endemic in Kenya and that our people strive for a society marked by the word mantra of “good governance” “transparency” and “accountability”.

In my opinion however, all of this represents but a slice, an aspect of the larger problem that bedevils Kenyan society. KANU and its misrule did not exist in a historical and political vacuum. There are clear social and economic underpinnings to the elite driven attempt to use tribal difference to maintain a stranglehold on the wananchi. Corruption is a symptom, NOT A CAUSE of a system malfunctioning very badly.  “Good governance, transparency and accountability” do not mean jack outside the summaries of civil society forums if they are not contexualized in a larger global picture.

How was it possible, for example for KANU to misrule Kenya for  close to forty years even though it was one of the most unpopular and disliked parties in the whole of Africa? What are the historical roots of tribalism? Did it start with Moi or even Kenyatta or does it go back much further? Who introduced corruption into Kenya and who are the godfathers of corrupt individuals in Kenya? What do corrupt individuals do with what they have looted from the country? To what extent is liberal democracy and its superficial notions implicated in the ongoing crisis of political reform processes in Kenya?

D: The Complicity of Imperialism

An honest examination of the questions posed in the preceded paragraph will quickly reveal the need to look beyond the borders of Kenya and before 1963 to see the root of our problems.

A historical retracing of the steps will quickly indict colonialism as a precursor and grandparent of our contemporary social, economic, cultural and political problems in Kenya. A geo-political gaze outside the confines the internal contestations will expose threads and intertwining links to the global system of international monopoly capitalism. In brief, once we recognize Kenya’s status as an oppressed neo-colonial society beholden to the diktats of US-led imperialist forces we quickly understand the intransigence of some of our problems and the inability of the mainstream politicians to deal with these problems.

To take a simple example, if we truly understand the role that institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and even the  UN play, we will  be more skeptical about the kind of  alleged “solutions” they offer to the problems we face in this country. We then realize that every time these institutions step forward to “assist” us with something, they are more often worsening the conditions rather than improving them. We can now all testify that the drastic “economic reforms” of the eighties and nineties only made social and economic conditions in Kenya worse, rather than better. Surely, who benefited
from the mass retrenchment of this country’s workers? Who benefited from the introduction of user fees in the hospitals?  Who benefited from the privatization of large sections of the former public sector? How much has the IMF emergency assistance helped us? To what extent did the foreign aid agreements contribute directly to our spiraling national debt? Did SAPS increase or reduce access to primary and tertiary education, especially for girl children? How have Kenya's coffee, tea and sugar farmers benefited within the changed international trade climate? How free have our leaders been to reject or accept invitations
to participate in joint military exercises with the US and NATO forces? How has cultural imperialism impeded the growth of a vibrant, indigenous national culture in Kenya? Has globalization made Kenya prosper or wallow at the margins of the world economy?

I will leave my readers to examine these questions slowly and HONESTLY.

Basically, to be blunt, imperialism has been behind most of our political, economic, social, cultural and other problems.

It is therefore naïve in the extreme to look at problems of governance; issues to do with corruption, tribalism and what not in isolation from the ties that bind the Kenyan elite to the world capitalist system.

Having said that, we can not use a vague notion of “imperialism” as a catchall phrase to explain our problems, or get off the hook the wrong policies pursued and implemented by political leaders we ourselves have elected into office. Moi, Mobutu, Mugabe, Eyadema and every other African tin pot dictator will on occasion invoke “imperialism” when they are trying to abdicate political responsibility for the messes they have created.

What I am saying however, is that there is an organic and dialectical link between the venal and slothful misrule of local despots and the well-known agendas of global capitalism. The world capitalist economy has undergone tremendous structural and technological changes over the past couple of decades. Its modern manifestation with its globalizing tendencies and tentacles certainly calls for closer scrutiny.

Fortunately there are a number of thinkers and scholars who are readily accessible (especially via the courtesy of one of the innovations associated with globalization, the internet).

People like Fidel Castro are still very relevant. So is someone like James Petras from Latin America. You also have the Irish born, South Africa- based academic and activist Patrick Bond. Among the YOUNGER generation of contemporary progressive thinkers and activists, there is one woman’s name which stands out.  She is Canadian and she is barely into her thirties.I am talking about Naomi Klein.

She was recently in Montreal to give a talk. I am proud to say that the organization I work for, the Quebec Public Interest Research Group at McGill University was one of the four organizations together with CKUT 90.3 FM (the station where our show DUNIA is based) and Alternatives, another sister organization,  which sponsored that talk.

Naomi Klein is the author of the multimillion best seller, “No Logo”, which has become some kind of a “bible” for the anti-globalization movement. At her recent talk in Montreal, she recounted what monopoly capitalism is doing in and to Iraq and Argentina in the pursuit of the three of the main objectives of modern monopoly capitalism: downsizing, privatization
and deregulation in order to maximize profits. I think it is better to hear Naomi Klein speak for herself so I have
included this mp3 link to her talk:

http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=8023

For more on Naomi Klein, please visit:

http://www.nologo.org

From the Naomi Klein address it is obvious not only does that capitalism not respect national boundaries. What is even more starkly apparent is that the kinds of problems we have in Kenya are not that unique. More importantly we see that there are other oppressed people, in Latin America, in the Caribbean, in the Middle East and indeed in other
African countries who are fighting back.

To sum up, I think  that the MAJOR OVERARCHING PROBLEMS in Kenya today are  DIRECTLY LINKED to the  pro-imperialist neo-liberal  garden path that our misrulers has misguided us to follow since December 1963. We need to stop going down that garden path to political dead ends, economic disaster, social implosion and cultural and environmental
denudation. As I write this I can hear the loud chuckles of Kenyan middle class hecklers who are themselves wedded to neo-liberal delusions. I can hear their death rattle as they formulate the anti-communist spittle with which they are preparing to shower this essay.

Luckily, they are at best a secondary audience who I go through to get to my primary audience- those patriotic and democratic minded Kenyans who are seriously looking for a permanent way out from the neocolonial mess we have been wallowing in four bad decades. Some of the Kenyan hecklers, chortlers and mudslinging bystanders are residents of certain Kenya digital forums and they will definitely have a field day dredging up weird National Review neo-fascist rejoinders and ancient moth-eaten cookie cutter liberal bourgeois retorts and general festival of uninformed cat calls to our anti-imperialist contributions.

What gives me courage though, are the dozens of Kenyans I met recently in Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru, Kisumu and other parts of the country. These are the Kenyans who still remain committed to the idea of a truly independent and democratic Kenya; they are compatriots who see the dastardly role the United States  is playing in formulating INTERNAL Kenyan policies like  security legislation, trade agreements, international human rights conventions, economic reforms,  etc; they are Kenyans who are working in small formal and informal groups to educate, to entertain and to mobilize Kenyans in the quest for an alternative perspective and trajectory; they are the Kenyans who have looked beyond the internal wrangling among  the mainstream Kenyan neocolonial politicians; they  are the Kenyans who are busy organizing women, youth, artists, activists and workers to  build more focused mass democratic formations all over the country. These are the Kenyans who will form the nucleus of the New Kenya National Democratic Movement that we shall now discuss in more detail.

E: What Are We Fighting For?

I am a Marxist-Leninist. My readers may therefore automatically assume that I am rooting for
socialism as the immediate goal on the Kenyan political calendar. But if they thought so, they would be completely wide off the mark. Yes, it is indeed true that Kenya’s problems will EVENTUALLY be solved
by adopting socialist policies.

On the cards right now, however, are some uncompleted historical tasks that must be followed to conclusion before we can start talking of building socialism in Kenya.

What are these tasks?

• Number one, we have not completed our task around national independence.

• Number two, we have not completed our task around national democracy.

Both of these tasks are inter-related.

What do I mean?

Simply this: that we, as Kenyan people fought for decades for national independence, but like Jaramogi Oginga Odinga said, we are Not Yet Huru. Related to that, we have been struggling to deepen democratic reforms in this country only to be thwarted by the opportunism and spinelessness of the wanasiasa we elected and entrusted with these responsibilities. One example which clearly shows that we are not yet an independent nation has to do with the so called war on terrorism. The pending bill to fight terrorism is a bill made in Washington to meet and protect American, NOT Kenyan interests. It is largely unpopular among Kenyans but will probably be passed in some forms because our neocolonial leaders are lapdogs who jump whenever George Bush says jump.

Another example which clearly demonstrates the frustrations with deepening democracy in our country today has to do with stalling and foot-dragging around the constitution. We have just seen Bomas of Kenya III postponed and there are indications that the constitutional conference could be a marathon saga rivaling the decade’s long run of the Phantom of the Opera before it is completed.  Yet, the popularly elected (and thoroughly unreliable and flip flopping) NARC government promised a new democratic constitution within its first 100 days in office).

So what then are we fighting for? Regime change? Constitutional reforms? Democratic transformations? Economic and agrarian reforms? The short answer is: All That and Much, Much More.

We are fighting for a National Democratic Revolution. Now don’t get scared now, even if you are liberal parliamentary
advocate. Each word is chosen for a purpose.

The “National” obviously refers to the fact that we can not fight for the liberation of Turkanaland, Masaailand, Luoland, Gikuyuland and Gusiiland separately in isolation and to the exclusion of other parts of Kenya. Neither can we fight for the tribal or regional hegemony of one part of Kenyan society to the exclusion of other parts. We are fighting
for the whole of Kenya.

The “Democratic” aspect defines the main content of our struggles. We are deepening the spaces to be occupied by the popular social actors and here I mean, not Mzee Tamaa and Mama Kayai and Redyculass, but rather, the social forces: the workers, the small farmers, the poor, the women, the youth and all the wananchi who have been so far marginalized from the political mainstream. We describe some of the key democratic demands later on in this essay.

The “Revolution” aspect underscores the need to go beyond PIECEMEAL REFORMS. We need a fundamental shift and reorganization of Kenyan society. And by the way, not ALL revolutions are VIOLENT. A revolution is simply a moment or process in time and space where one group of rulers( not individuals but social groups and/or classes) are replaced in terms of political power by another, previously marginalized social group/ class/alliances of  various classes who then proceed to undertake a fundamental restructuring of that society. It flows from this definition that a revolution is not an elitist conspiracy but a moment when millions and millions of ordinary wananchi are galvanized by a well-organized political and social  movement with a strong leadership achieve ownership and immediate agency in enacting new pathways to the future.

So, yes, we are talking about a National Democratic Revolution in Kenya. By its very nature, given the fact that we have defined the main obstacle as the neo-liberal universe of international finance capital, our national democratic revolution will have both a patriotic and anti-imperialist character. It will be in this context, a “Left oriented” National Democratic Revolution.

F: Who Leads Our Struggle for National Democratic Renewal? First of all, cross out ANY NAMES of ANY INDIVIDUALS if that is what you have been tallying. The main thing about serious political struggle is to focus on the SOCIAL FORCES that will be at the core of the movement.

Hitherto all of our democratic struggles have been DOMINATED by the Kenyan comprador, national and petit-bourgeois forces. And no wonder we have gone exactly nowhere. When we allow forces that have been in bed with capitalism to spearhead our so called “second liberation” why are we then later dejected when they sell us out to their masters?

The Kenyan middle class is notorious for its political prostitution. One infamous example that springs to mind is some time during the life of the 1992/1997 parliament when a certain opposition MP threatened his constituents that he would defect to the ruling party KANU if they did not PAY OFF his debts! And we do know how many eventually took more than a few morsels of ugali from Moi… and even Pattni.

As recently as last December, the Kenyan people again came out in massive number to hand power to another gang of petit-bourgeois opportunist and tribal minded politicians. And we are harvesting the bitter fruits of that shameless betrayal of our democratic and patriotic aspirations even as we speak. The Kenyan middle-class as a collective social force, can therefore NOT BE TRUSTED with providing leadership to the national democratic revolutionary project.

Neither, with all due respects to Frantz Fanon, can that leadership be entrusted to  lumpen proletariat and other  elements déclassé in our slums and  other impoverished areas. This is not the place to go into a detailed ideological segue as to why not. But the reasons are fairly familiar to all seasoned progressive political activists.

And the Maoist concept of a peasant led revolution is not just on the cards in our country,  given the reality that the Kenyan peasantry has been disintegrating into various social fissures contributing new elements into the modern Kenyan working class, the  rural and urban middle classes and of course the  lumpen proletariat and other declassed elements.

Gender activists say: Let the Women Show The Way Because the Men Have
Failed! Youth activists say: Let the Uhuru Generation Lead Because the Old Guard Has Become Deadwood! Unfortunately they are both wrong. Why?

Well women and youth are not monolithic. They belong to various layers and classes and do not have identical interests across these class cleavages.   A very wealthy Kenyan businesswoman living in Runda or Mountain View has very little in common with her live-in housemaid apart from the fact that they are both women and sharing the same roof, to
give an obvious example.

A rich brat living in Loresho is a world apart from a ghetto youth from Mukuru, to give another obvious example. The one grouping in Kenyan society that can lead the national democratic movement is the Kenyan working class. Does it exist, I hear some anti-communist ask. And I respond: should I even bother answering such a silly question? Why should Kenyan workers be at the centre of this new movement?

Because historically, this is the class in Kenyan society that has always been at the backbone of things, even when they do not lead the movement. We know for instance that Kibaki, Raila, Ngilu, Wamalwa, Musyoka, Moody and others addressed the mass rallies in the run up to the NARC landslide last year. But who attended the rallies? Who came to welcome Kibaki when he came back from abroad? More significantly, who voted?

Simply: by and large Kenyan workers in the towns and the countryside. For it must be remembered that not everyone who lives mashambani is a farmer.  A big chunk consists of agricultural workers and other workers who live in the rural areas. Kenyan workers, unlike their peasant counterparts, are collectively, likely to be more conscious of the reality of imperialist exploitation through their lived experience even though we do know that small farmers experience  monopoly capitalism  in the process of dealing with cash crop production,  trade and consuming products  supplied and  marketed by local subsidiaries of multinational and transnational companies. The Mitumbanization of the Kenyan economy has made all working people, not just workers realize the reality in which economically we are pushed to the furthest margins of the global economy while the setting up of EPZs exemplifies both the integration and marginalization of Third World workers abused in this reconfigured imperialist economy where more and more workers are “contingency workers” without full time employment, benefits or any form of long term job security.  And surely, is there a section of Kenyan society that feels retrenchment more acutely than the very workers who are periodically downsized and dumped outside the gates of the factories, plantations and offices where they once toiled?

Kenyan workers of course contain women and youth and it is these two social forces within the ranks of the workers that have to be drawn EVEN MORE INTO THE LEADERSHIP CORE of the New Kenyan National Democratic Movement. What I am saying therefore about who should lead? The Kenyan workers should be the social force that is MOST DOMINANT in this movement.

The individual leadership of this movement must in ideal circumstances be composed predominantly, but NOT EXCLUSIVELY from workers who are the MOST POLITICALLY CONSCIOUS, with a deliberate effort being made to identify and recruit militant women and youth into this leadership core.

The other segments of Kenyan society, will of course be part of this movement, but again the leadership group should comprise the most political conscious, most rooted among the wananchi and definitely, when we are talking about the middle class we will be hoping to attract those progressive, patriotic and revolutionary petit-bourgeois elements who have committed class suicide in Cabral’s understanding of the term.

One must stress that in this discussion one must firmly include Kenya’s progressive and patriotic  musicians, writers, film makers, journalists, actors, and  other cultural workers. The Kenyan artistic community, especially its younger component is  leading the way in terms of eschewing tribalism and working for  the emergence of a new national progressive culture. I have in mind folks like the people around the Kwani literary journal, the Mulika Media Collective, militant and underground hip hop groups like Kalamashaka, Sinpare and Do Klan Revolution  and the progressive theatre associated with  people like the late Wahome Mutahi and veterans like Wakanyote and so on.

And we must not forget that Kenyans of South Asian heritage are often an invisible component in ALL THE SECTORS cited above.

G: How Do We Build This National Democratic Movement?

By applying a principle I alluded to in my last essay: Sustainable Coalition and Alliance Building From BELOW. What am I talking about? The new home some of us have been talking about CAN NOT be built by one person or by a circle of A FEW POLITICAL FRIENDS who consider themselves “leftists” and “revolutionaries”. We must build this home from the raw material of the actual Kenyan society that we are living in right now. It is a collective project that will take the ideological, practical and material contribution of a lot of people who share broad progressive and anti-imperialist values and beliefs.

More than that it will an organizational coming together of social forces represented the various components I have cited above. In other words, it will be a coalition of progressive working people, of women, of youth, of patriotic and anti-imperialist middle class elements and other affiliated forces.

One approach (and I am saying this conscious that there are many ways to skin a cat as one well known Kenyan politician is fond of saying) is to encourage, for example patriotic and progressive youth to form coalitions/federations of youth, promote the same process among women, and other social groups and then help facilitate a process where these coalitions/ federations in turn form a grand alliance from below of a left democratic Kenyan social movement.

Another approach is to identify, through a process of consultations, individuals who may form some kind of an  interim organizing committee drawn from the sectors cited above who then spend some time within their sectors helping to simultaneously coalesce these forces within their specific sectors while at the same time putting energy in planning ahead for a  national conference maybe a year and a half down the  road that will see these efforts culminate in some kind of a formal structure with a written manifesto/ minimum democratic programme for fundamental social
change.

Yet a third approach is try and explore the possibility of doing all this by involving representatives from the above social forces in a collective political project like say launching and publishing a progressive newspaper/ publication which then becomes a rallying point/ educational forum to thrash out these ideas of forming this left democratic and patriotic coalition one is talking about.

There are other approaches, but the important and crucial thing, to my mind is to grasp the concept that there will not be a single individual/ political circle or tendency that will have the monopoly of prescribing the “one single, correct path” to follow.
 

H: Learning from Other Countries and Other Struggles

The encouraging thing about all this is that we need not despair, banging our heads against the wall in frustration. There are other people faced with similar political and historical imperatives who have forged the kind of formations that we could learn
from.It would be instructive, for example to study the experience of the South African people and how they went about building the United Democratic Front and later the Mass Democratic Movement between say 1980 and 1994.

Another example would be to find out the lessons learned by the Filipino popular democratic struggles in the mid eighties to the present period.

More recently, I would be curious to learn how the people of Brazil went about building the series of  progressive and radical coalitions  that culminated in the victory of Lula  in the last elections in that massive South American country. And needless to say, one must also familiarize themselves intimately with struggles and organizational histories in three other crucial Latin American countries: Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia.

Personally for me one of the most inspiring projects and processes has been that one currently unfolding in South Korea. In the early nineties when I lived in Toronto, Ontario I was part of a Kenyan human rights group that worked very closely with an organization called Young Koreans United, a North American based solidarity group that supported the anti-imperialist struggles in Korea. Through this group I came across literature detailing the history of the Korean National Democratic Alliance (or a variation on that name). It was fascinating to see how the Korean people had build this very strong umbrella organization from coalitions of countrywide federations of  workers, students, women, artists, professionals, progressive religious leaders, business people, intellectuals etc and how they had ensured that  Korean workers were at the core of the movement and the ideological vision remained staunchly anti-capitalist. I consider it one of my most urgent responsibilities to
try and retrace those links with those Korean comrades (many of whom have since relocated to the United States and South Korea) so that at the very least, I can put my hands on the literature that documents this process that I have just outlined because I am convinced that we as Kenyans can benefit immensely from studying the historical struggles of the contemporary Korean anti-imperialist movement.

I: Ni Sisi Kwa Sisi- The Answers Lie Within

At the end of day however, the real solutions must come collectively from us, as progressive and democratic minded Kenyans. I am confident that within our collective memory we have this huge repository of knowledge, experience, ideas that if sifted through collectively can assist us in identifying the necessary building blocks to the kind of the new home some of us have been visioning for quite some time.

On a practical note, I am glad to observe that this process is already underway. The document you are reading is a public document that is being circulated widely across the world via the medium of the internet. By its very public nature, one is naturally constrained from detailing some of the concrete practical steps that are being taken even as we write these lines.

It is to be hoped that this document will be part of  the material critiqued, reshaped and improved upon by the debates, discussions, exchanges, one on one meetings  that some of us know are already taking place within Kenya.

What is happening, is very very modest and tentative and represent the first fumbles towards political and ideological  clarity  going on and across a motley crew of  veteran leftists, militant youth, progressive gender activists, writers, singers, musicians, film makers and other cultural workers, patriotic intellectuals, well-meaning professionals, radical politicians active in mainstream  political  parties, anti-imperialist Kenyans living abroad and other democratic minded compatriots dotted around the globe.

Please take this document and tear it apart and rebuild it as something better than the humble draft you are just finishing to read for the first time.

Onyango Oloo
Montreal
Thursday, November 06, 2003