The title of this book by Jacob Mwathi Mati attracts at first glance. It inspires the excitement of providing a lucid and deep analysis of the major waves of political protests in Kenya since independence, a terrain that is often overlooked by scholars of social movements in the region. The half title of the book excites even further scholarship on social movements in the statement on page ii: ‘It engages intersections of social movement and theories of democratisation to probe the production, operations, and outcomes of the disruptive yet creative power of the movements at the centre of the struggle to transform the Kenyan constitution.’
However, reading through the book, it comes out more as an analysis and documentation of a singular political movement, that of the Ufungamano Initiative in the late 1990s. Ufungamano comes from the Kiswahili word fungamana, which means to join together. The Ufungamano Initiative was named after Ufungamano House, also known as the Christian Students’ Leadership Centre, located in the precincts of the University of Nairobi. It was an ecumenical endeavour between the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) and the Kenya Episcopal Conference (KEC), who jointly own the centre. The Ufungamano Initiative subsequently morphed into a broad-based movement for constitutional reforms in Kenya.
The book is divided into nine chapters. The historiography of political protests in post-independence Kenya is mainly located in Chapters 1 and 2 of the book. The rest of the chapters, especially Chapters 3 to 8, are mainly focused on the struggles of the Ufungamano Initiative. The author considers the Ufungamano Initiative as having ‘epitomised a social movement with extraordinary mass appeal and a multiplicity of actors that many social movements, especially predecessors like the National Convention Executive Council (NCEC), had failed to achieve’ (2). He further extols it as a ‘movement of movements’, and as the peak of constitutional reform struggles in the 1990s (2).
Chapter 1, ‘The seeds of contemporary Kenyan constitutional reform struggles: an introduction’, does well in the effort to theorise and locate post-colonial struggles for constitutional reforms in Kenya. The author gives the tempo of the constitutional reform struggles as being reactions to social, political and economic malaise in post-colonial disappointments in the country, as in many countries in Africa. The author, however, seems to contradict this analysis elsewhere in the book where he opines that ‘This struggle is an exemplar of a constant dialectic in the postcolonial African state reform project which has been characterised on the one hand by vicious intra-elite competition and fragmentation, ethnic-based political mobilisation, and mass inter-ethnic conflict’ (2). This latter opinion subsumes the prevalent post-colonial grievances and yearnings of masses of people who are submerged in poverty and hopelessness, even after the country attained independence. These social, political and economic strains experienced by the masses are exacerbated by consensus and fragmentation of the political elite who continue to use and abuse ethnicity to railroad and divide the masses. Ethnic rivalry was itself ingrained in colonialism, whose pillars remained largely unchanged, and was indeed advanced and cemented by the liberal and retrogressive political elite in the post-colony. Ideology was a central pillar in political struggles in the early years of the country’s independence from British colonialism.
Nevertheless, the first chapter provides a fair, albeit sketchy, account of the deep-seated ideological struggles in the early years of Kenya’s independence, with the neutering of the radical-left-leaning politicians, the labour movement and progressive political parties and activists. This analysis stretches from the 1960s up to what the author views as the ‘militancy of the 1980s’ (14).
The author views these struggles as converging in the 1990s in pro-democracy and constitutional reforms struggles. This convergence was against the background of a turn in global politics, especially the thawing of the Cold War and the debilitating structural adjustment programmes. The author considers the struggles for constitutional reforms to have crystallised under the Ufungamano Initiative. However, in the parlance of mass street protests highlighted in the book, Ufungamano does not seem to generate as much attention and gravitas as the protests led by pro-democracy politicians or activists, or even by NCEC. NCEC in itself was able to organise massive and protracted constitutional reform protests on the streets across the country that ‘were met with raw state brutality and various activists died at the hands of the police’ (48). The author admits that of all these mass protests led by NCEC, the one that fundamentally altered the rules of the game was the July 7 (Saba Saba) 1997 demonstration. Twenty-one people were killed. As Mati observes,
The July 7 massacre was a turning point in the struggle for constitutional reforms because the state capitulated after coming under increasing pressure and condemnation from the international media, diplomats, and donor countries that threatened to place further economic sanctions on the Moi regime unless he agreed to open dialogue with the opposition. (48)
The Ufungamano Initiative in itself does not come out clearly in the book as having marshalled equivalents of such massive and protracted streets protests across the country. At best, the Initiative is portrayed as a platform for religious and civil society activists whose struggles were mainly waged in boardrooms, town halls and in the media. Whereas the intransigent Moi/Kenyan African National Union (KANU) regime was driven to the wall by NCEC’s street protests and compromised in the Inter-Parties Parliamentary Group (IPPG) deal, the Ufungamano Initiative protests were compromised and fused into the lukewarm, state-led constitutional reform process under the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission (CKRC).
What the book does best is to detail the behind-the-scenes canvassing of the Ufungamano Initiative and the public postures of this constitutional reform movement. The book thus works best as a chronicle of the constitutional reform struggles and of the Ufungamano Initiative. An impressive array of the clergy, activists and scholars were interviewed in the process, making this book a fitting archive in the documentation of constitutional reform struggles. However, the author’s contention that the Ufungamano Initiative was a movement of movements is unconvincing, as it is contradicted, later in the book, where he states that the initiative ‘remained mainly urban-based and middle class-led. As such, it is probably most accurately defined as an intra-elite struggle rather than a mass movement’ (73). What comes out more is the author’s singular admiration of the Ufungamano Initiative without casting it properly in the milieu of radical mass protests in the country. How, for example, can the Ufungamano Initiative be argued to have succeeded where other similar attempts failed in the past? It ended in the grips of betrayals and compromises, finally fizzling out altogether.
The author considers the 2007/08 post-election violence in Kenya as providing ‘the necessary pressure from below to force elite fragmentations and the realignment of social forces, which in turn delivered a new constitution in 2010’ (148). The post-election violence forced the political elite to negotiate and make concessions. The violence and its resolution, the author argues, created the constitutional moment: the ‘disruptive power of the post-election violence ultimately made reform possible’ (148).
Chapter 8 of the book, titled ‘A turning point when history failed to turn?’, is more forward-looking, focused more on the processes towards the new constitution that was promulgated in August 2010. The chapter also deals with the aftermath of the 2013 and 2017 elections that were conducted against the backdrop of the new constitution. The new constitution was then not only about enabling a ‘wider range of elite actors to benefit from rent-seeking and -distribution activities’, as the author alludes to on page 170 in the book; it also restructured the exercise of political powers and attempted to heal uneven development in the country through devolution and the establishment of various institutions. There are also various progressive provisions in the 2010 constitution.
The concluding chapter of the book, Chapter 9, looks at the different waves of the constitutional reform struggles as being influenced by two core factors. The first one is agency, attributed in the form of leadership that mobilised conscious actions by citizens to change the material conditions of their lives. The second element is the wider societal structure, in the form of the underlying socio-economic and political conditions in the country that fuelled these protests. However, these two factors mask ideological differences that have been simmering since the country was mortgaged to neo-colonial interests by the comprador political elite in what is generally viewed as flag independence, in Kiswahili as uhuru wa bendera.
The book is a commendable account of the Ufungamano Initiative and related constitutional reform struggles, but not deep enough in its accounts of waves of contention and social movements in post-independence Kenya. Inasmuch as the book is a detailed chronicle of the constitutional reform struggles, it misses several critical trajectories. For example, the patriotic exploits of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), popularly known as Mau Mau, which scholars such as Professor Maina wa Kinyatti refer to as the peak of African nationalism and anti-colonial resistance in Kenya, are not adequately analysed in the book as seeds of contemporary struggles in the country. Other crucial leftist activists, progressive parties, and movements such as the Kenya People’s Union, the December Twelve Movement and Mwakenya are also not addressed in the book. These leftist movements have undergirded the struggles for fundamental reforms of the country’s constitution based on social justice and a more equitable socio-economic order, but are not credited well in the book. The author also fails to clearly set out a theoretical framework or concepts relating to mass mobilisations and social movements that could help to explain the changes and discontinuities referred to in the book’s title and thereby illuminate related studies and practices of social movements in the country and elsewhere in Africa.
Such oversights suggest that the title of the book, Political protest in contemporary Kenya: change and continuities, promises more than it delivers, as it is more of a detailed account of a singular political protest in contemporary Kenya. It would also have been useful to include the period when the political protest that is detailed in the book took place. On the whole, however, the book is an insightful read for those interested in accounts and analysis of constitutional reform struggles and movements in Kenya and in Africa at large.