In the recent past, Kenyans have been bombarded with a string of proposed, seemingly petty, laws and regulations targeted at the agricultural sector. Kenyans are bewildered and asking the right questions; what purpose do these bills serve? Whose interests are they securing? Surely not those of small-scale farmers? And how are they connected to the trade deals Kenya recently signed with the US and the UK?

Kenyans first heard of a proposed Livestock Act (2021) that would provide a framework for the regulation and development of the livestock sector at the beginning of June 2021. The provisions relating to beekeeping gathered unusual attention because of the frivolous and punitive regulations they would have imposed on farmers. The bill sought to register beekeepers, and required farmers to, among other things, keep their bees in registered and branded hives prescribed by county authorities. Only an uproar by Amos Kimunya—the Majority Leader in the National Assembly—caused the plans to table the bill before parliament to be shelved.

Several provisions of the bill would have locked out many Kenyans, especially small-scale farmers, from beekeeping. FarmBiz Africa reports that Kenya produces approximately 7,300 tonnes of honey every year against an estimated potential of 100,000 tonnes. A litre of honey is five times more expensive than a litre of oil in Kenya. We need to nurture this sector, not stifle it.

But this was not the first time seemingly frivolous laws relating to the agricultural sector were being proposed or made into law. The Irish Potatoes Regulations were quietly passed into law and gazetted toward the end of 2019, barely attracting public attention that was at the time firmly fixated on BBI shenanigans. The Irish potato regulations that, for instance, sought to register growers, transporters, traders, collection centres and warehouses, only came to the attention of most Kenyans when the Nyandarua County Government issued notice of a sensitization exercise on the new regulations.

Earlier in March 2019, the Kenya Dairy Board was forced to suspend the Draft Dairy Regulations (2019) following massive pressure from the public and farmers. The regressive and repressive dairy regulations were rejected by farmers on grounds such as their attempt to prohibit farmers from selling raw milk to neighbours. This was a clear attempt by those who control the dairy industry to show who is boss; ‘’If you don’t sell to us, your produce is illegal’’. The exploitative milk processors were at the time buying a litre of milk from the farmers at 26 shillings, way lower than the 40 shillings the farmers got from selling that same quantity of milk to neighbours at farm gate prices. The Dairy Industry regulations were finally re-introduced and passed in 2021 without some of the controversial sections that had caused that initial uproar, especially those forbidding small-scale farmers from selling milk to their neighbours and other consumers. The new regulations now set a minimum price for a litre of milk, to be reviewed every six months based on small-scale farmers’ demands.

What mischief is the political elite up to through this endless string of frivolous laws?

Kenya is often portrayed in the news as a developing African nation that has its affairs in order. In the eyes of many, it is a vibrant middle-income country with a young and educated population, with agriculture as its mainstay, and blessed with that African beauty that draws tourists year in year out. The reality, however, is that Kenya is the quintessential neo-colonial state, firmly within the orbit of global finance capital. It is debt-ridden after eight years of the UhuRuto administration that has been characterised by ineptitude and is anchored in an economic philosophy of beg, borrow and steal. With its economy doing poorly and unemployment already high, the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the situation by disrupting livelihoods while adding to the numbers of those unable to find work. Salaries have been delayed in several government departments this year, and the country is basically floating on economic guesswork. Retired civil servants, military officers and politicians cannot get their pensions. Existence for many has been reduced to a daily struggle for survival.

The facade is held together by a calculatingly ruthless state machinery that is very adept at shaping and controlling narratives through sleek public relations campaigns, paid hashtags on social media and intimidation of legacy media. Its security organs—the conveyor belts of its monopoly of violence—have no qualms scuttling peoples’ organising through dispersing protests, arresting activists, or dispatching citizens to impromptu extrajudicial meetings with their maker.

Kenya is the quintessential neo-colonial state, firmly within the orbit of global finance capital.

But what is Kenya? Kenya started off as an economic venture. The Imperial British East African Company was set up and granted a charter in 1888 to run this venture with a view to making profit. The profit turned out to be so good that the British crown wanted full control of the cake. Actually, the whole cake—plus the box. Britain duly declared Kenya a protectorate in 1895, and a colony on July 23rd 1920.

Because of its favourable weather, large swathes of fertile land and strategic location, the British colonial empire made Kenya a settler state. Land was forcefully alienated from the indigenous owners and given to white settlers through a series of punitive measures and laws such as the Crown Land Act. The White Highlands were the jewel of the Kenya colony, and the (in)famous Lunatic Express was soon under construction to ease extraction from the hinterland and on to the ports of Britain—and Europe. The railway project was completed despite fierce resistance by numerous Africans—most notably the Nandi resistance led by Koitalel Arap Samoei.

Thereafter, the Kipande tax, hut or pole tax and the breast tax were introduced to force the African into the cash economy through work, and a system of forced labour was imposed on those unable to pay tax. Yes, African men were taxed for having more than one wife. And for every other female in their household. The colonial enterprise could now concentrate on its main objective, economic extraction.

Kenya’s war of independence was waged for land and freedom, not for bourgeois ideas. The Kenya Land and Freedom Army, popularly known as Mau Mau, went into the forests to fight for freedom and to get back their land. As independence loomed, the land issue remained thorny, emotive and close to the hearts of the people. Most African people are tied to the land, their umbilical cords buried in it at birth.

Independence in 1963 failed to address the land question. And it remains a thorny issue to date. No one actually fought for the independence project, though the collaborators wanted “independence” in order to replace the colonialists in the various spaces they occupied— ownership of prime property, lucrative jobs, club memberships, living in leafy neighbourhoods with servants, et cetera. Land redistribution schemes were hijacked and vast swathes of land shared out among Jomo Kenyatta and his coterie, while the petty bourgeois were allowed to acquire some relatively smaller parcels to not only create a semblance of equality but also fabricate a belief among the struggling masses that it was somehow possible to climb up the social and economic ladder, that hard work paid.

Kenya’s war of independence was waged for land and freedom, not for bourgeois ideas.

Many of the Mau Mau and their children were never compensated or resettled by the independence government. They were never allowed to access or control the land they had fought for in such brave fashion. Most of the fertile and highly productive land remained in the hands of this tiny clique of Africans, mostly former colonial collaborators, and those settlers who chose to stay on after “independence”. These are the people who still own the big tracts of land in Kenya, together with an ensemble of crooks and tenderpreneurs.

Control over the land and its abundant resources gives them the economic power that most of them use to purchase political power that they then use to consolidate their economic power in unscrupulous fashion. Others prefer to remain anonymous, but wield considerable power behind the scenes, flexing their economic muscles every once in a while to keep the political landscape in tune with their interests and those of their masters across the ocean—those same masters of misery who just a few decades ago perpetrated the exploitation and subjugation that Mau Mau and other liberation heroes sought to confine to the dustbin of history.

Enter the Kenya-US Free Trade Agreement

In February 2020, President Uhuru Kenyatta met US President Donald Trump in Washington DC to push forward a free trade agreement (FTA) between the two nations. In July 2020, the two countries began negotiations on the FTA, with Kenya especially going against the regional protocols and collective trade deals it had ratified via the East African Community (EAC), the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Despite the uproar from the region, Kenya went full steam ahead with its plans. (Upon conclusion, Kenya will become the second African country to sign an FTA with the United States, after Morocco in 2006.) The voices of Kenyans who could see that the deal only served to entrench extractive and exclusionary colonial patterns of economics were either ignored or drowned out by the public relations campaign that followed. The ruling class had again smothered voices from below.

Similarly, in early 2021 Kenya and the UK, Kenya’s former colonial masters, signed a trade deal that gives British companies that have been extracting since the colonial epoch a 25-year tax holiday despite opposition from small-scale farmers and Kenyans in general. The people had no say about it.

According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, Kenya and the United States traded US$1.1 billion worth of goods in total (two-way) trade during 2019, with the US importing goods worth US$667 million from Kenya. In the same year, the US imported edible fruits and nuts worth US$55 million (KSh5.5 billion) from Kenya.

A joint statement released on July 8 2020 to signify the start of negotiations partly states that ‘’Increasing and sustaining export performance to the United States requires a trade arrangement that is predictable and guarantees preferential market access for Kenyan products’’.

But whose products? Who has the capital and technological know-how to meet the stringent standards set out in such deals and reinforced by ridiculous legislation like those highlighted at the beginning of this article? Certainly not the small-scale farmers who account for over 70 per cent of Kenya’s agricultural production. It is the class that ensures political power is subservient to its economic power. The Kenya-US Free Trade Agreement is an economic partnership of the bourgeoisie. It prostrates our collective existence as an untapped market, and is aimed at extracting resources for the insatiable consumerism of America. Locally, it only serves to entrench the hegemony of the elite.

There is nothing new under the sun

The neo-colonial state is full of wonders and oxymorons. It has adapted and perfected colonial tools of political and economic domination for continued extraction. It has equally been moulded in the punitive nature of empire, crushing those who stand in the path of primitive accumulation of wealth, and especially land.

The capitalist system behind it continues to thrive using slave labour as it has done for the last four centuries, this time through wages that leave workers struggling to put a single meal on the table, let alone pay a myriad of bills.

The Kenyan elite have perfected use of the state and its organs to meet their personal interests, negating the common wants and demands of the motherland. They have further perfected the art of moulding law, culture, ideology, religion, et cetera to serve and defend their economic interests.

Kenya and the UK, Kenya’s former colonial masters, signed a trade deal that gives British companies that have been extracting since the colonial epoch a 25-year tax holiday.

What is the difference between last year’s eviction of Korogocho residents who possessed valid land ownership documents and the land alienation perpetrated by the British colonial empire of the early 20th Century? What is the difference between the colonial laws that limited what crops black African farmers could grow, and these new laws that today aim to criminalise our people, their daily work, their produce and means of sustenance?

The difference is the same.

Although the basic structure of the exploitative system remains the same, today’s agents of neo-colonialism do not blatantly criminalise production. They only restrict access to the large and lucrative international trade in select goods for small-scale farmers and peasant producers. That is why the state has put minimal effort into enabling the millions of existing small-scale producers to increase production, carry out local value addition through their cooperatives, or meet the standards demanded by external markets. It is instead focussed on criminalising their toil, sweat and produce. With an abundance of young jobless Kenyans, labour remains cheap. The seemingly frivolous laws serve this purpose.

There is nothing new under the sun.

On June 22,  Israel achieved a diplomatic goal it has been working towards for nearly two decades and became an “observer” state at the African Union (AU). “This is a day of celebration for Israel-Africa relations,” Israel’s new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yair Lapid, stated, adding that the achievement “corrects the anomaly that has existed for almost two decades.” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs explained that Israel’s observer status will enable greater cooperation, “among other things, in the fight against Corona and the prevention of the spread of extremist terrorism throughout the continent.”

The latter is a somewhat disingenuous claim, given that Israel’s international cooperation strategy is virtually non-existent, and that its global “counterterrorism” agenda is largely focused on selling technologies of oppression to autocrats. In reality, the key objective behind Israel’s longstanding effort to gain access to the AU has been undermining Palestinian efforts to influence the continental stance on the situation in Israel/Palestine, and by implication, the stance of independent African states on the matter. Palestine has long had an observer status in the AU. President Mahmoud Abbas is regularly given the opportunity to address the organization’s summits. But if African states are expected to follow the position set by the AU when casting their votes in other international fora, Israeli officials believe, then an Israeli ability to influence decisions at the AU could have significant political implications.

There are more than 70 states and NGOs that are accredited to the AU. For most, this is not a particularly big deal. But for Israel this has long been a major diplomatic objective with considerable symbolic weight. Israel used to be an observer state at the Organization of African Unity in the 1990s but was denied this status when the AU was founded in 2002. Muammar al-Gaddafi, who donated to the new institution in an effort to project his own influence in Africa, opposed any Israeli presence. Since his ousting in 2011, and as part of Israel’s “return” to Africa over the past decade, Israeli leaders and diplomats have been trying to mobilize their allies in the continent to advocate for Israel’s admission to the AU.

The main obstacle, however, was the objection of several states—“mostly Arab states but also other African states,” an Israeli diplomat previously explained—among them South Africa and Egypt. Ambiguity with regard to the exact procedure required in order to approve the granting of an observer status to a non-African state and the number of AU member states that need to support such a decision, made it easy to rebuff Israel’s appeals in the past. An application submitted by Jerusalem to the previous Chairperson of the AU Commission, South Africa’s Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, was not approved. The argument has commonly been that there are not enough African states supporting the bid.

Several things have changed over the past year. One was Israel’s normalization of diplomatic ties with Sudan and Morocco, as part of the US-backed Abraham Accords, which followed Israel’s normalization of ties with Chad in 2019. Another was the replacement of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa with DRC president Felix Tshisekedi (who has been making efforts to strengthen ties with Israel) as the Chairperson of the AU. Israel’s increasingly constructive ties with Egypt—with Cairo apparently hoping to improve its relationship with Washington as well via Jerusalem—also seem to have helped. All of this has made it easier for Israel to embark on another campaign in recent months to gain access to the AU, led by the new head of the Africa section in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Aliza Bin-Noun.

To the extent that the move was supposed to attract attention from Washington, it seems that it worked. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was quick to congratulate the AU “for its leadership in building bridges and creating new avenues for exchange,” adding that the US welcomes “Israel’s return to the African Union as an observer as part of our support for broader normalization.” But while Israel made sure to publish this latest victory as widely as possible, the AU’s own statement on the matter, has been less celebratory. A press release from Faki’s office merely stated that the Chairperson “received credentials” from Israel’s ambassador to Addis Ababa and that he used the opportunity to “reiterate” the African Union’s longstanding support of the two-state solution.

This reiteration of support of “peaceful co-existence” notwithstanding, the timing of this development—weeks after the Unity Intifada across Palestine/Israel and a wave of global protests in support of Palestinian liberation—tells another, bleaker story. It testifies not only to the irrelevance of the Palestinian Authority in countering in any meaningful way Israel’s ongoing international efforts to mobilize support for its apartheid policies, but also to the growing lack of interest among African leaders in the Palestinian issue altogether. With no concrete policies upon which members have any intention to act, it seems, the AU’s rhetoric of solidarity with Palestine is becoming increasingly hollow—an old ritual that is no longer meant to achieve anything in particular apart from appeasing a few disgruntled critics.

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

In early 2020, just before the pandemic became the word and the life, young Ugandan women took to Twitter to expose men they alleged had sexually harassed and, in some cases sexually assaulted them. These Twitter threads sent ripples beyond the online world, breaking through the national silence about the pervasive sexual abuse in the country.

For the first time, young women were speaking out in unison, although for some only momentarily. They shared their lived experiences as survivors of sexual violence, and there was no doubt that many who they outed as rapists had targeted several young women. This was Uganda’s own #MeToo moment, although the push for accountability has been a long and difficult struggle. These young women were  building on the bravery of women who had earlier told their stories despite the public wrath they faced.

Sheena Bageine took on the mantle for those who still couldn’t speak publicly about their experience. She received their stories and posted them anonymously. Sheena was arrested, spent a night in a police cell, and was later charged with offensive communication and cyberstalking.  This is how patriarchal power operates, from online silencing to state systems ready to “teach a lesson” to women who refuse to shut up.

Young Ugandan women responded, from lawyers to mental health specialists to social media warriors, and the #FreeSheena hashtag trended. Within a few hours, she had become a liability for compromised police who released her on bail.  Sheena’s case is still ongoing. But the actions of her peers and the solidarity she evoked shows how agile young women’s mobilization in the digital age is, despite the entrenched hegemonies that still prevail in daily life.

This courage has been inspired by the boldness of a long line of women organizers and resisters. In recent years, Dr Stella Nyanzi, a poet and academic, has set the tone for how radical young women can be if they want to.  She has tapped into old forms of refusing to accord civility when dealing with those abusing power. In a poem on Facebook, she defiantly described the president of Uganda as a pair of buttocks for failing to provide sanitary pads to adolescent girls who drop out of school. She was arrested, tried and imprisoned for more than a year.

Millions of young women across the African continent have found a common voice for community building, organizing, and mobilization, taking advantage of the steady increase of internet penetration and the proliferation of cheaper smartphones.

Despite being fewer than their male counterparts online, you can’t miss young African women’s bold outrage and organising. Access to information has always been key to any consciousness awakening. For this generation, despite economic and digital disparities that still remain, information access is much quicker than for their own parents.

By seeing other young women dare cross the lines defining the civility expected of women, they too find their courage to join in small but growing communities. Online spaces have thus enabled pan-African organizing. A protest in Namibia or Sudan can quickly become known  in other countries within a matter of hours or days, where others can find ways of showing solidarity.

According to a 2019 Afrobarometer report, the proportion of women who regularly use the Internet had more than doubled over the past five years in 34 African countries, from 11% to 26%. But the report also showed a continuing gender gap of 8% to 11%. Women are less likely than men to “own a mobile phone, use it every day, have a mobile phone with access to the Internet, own a computer, access the Internet regularly, and to get their news from the Internet or social media.”

Women on these platforms face enormous challenges. They are often not considered as  expert sources, including by their colleagues within progressive movement campaigns and even when the issues are about lived experiences of women. Or the voices of  young women are  pigeonholed and only allowed to be audible on “women’s issues.”  The marginalization within public discourse extends into the online world, where hierarchies of who is heard are recreated and extended from offline. Many retreat from public platforms into smaller groups of trusted friends. This denies a public voice. And, like men, they must also navigate the growing trend of internet shutdowns and surveillance  by governments.

Despite these obstacles, African feminist voices are making an impact both on and offline. As with men, those with greatest access to the internet are disproportionately well-educated and affluent enough to pay the costs of internet access. But the growing number of feminist collectives, with commitment to collaboration and inclusiveness, is a witness to the potential for inclusive politics.

In some cases, issues that have been historically treated as simply “women’s issues” are slowly making it to the center of political contestation. Younger people on the continent are pushing for changes which even their elders, including those who reject the status quo, aren’t providing. Feminist voices are gaining prominence as a crucial part of this resistance.

For example, the Feminist Coalition in Nigeria mobilized to respond to the needs of protesters in the #EndSARS protests that rocked Nigeria in response to police brutality in October 2020. Around the same time in Namibia, youth-led  #ShutitAllDown protesters demanded action to address femicide, rape, and sexual abuse.

Formed in 2019 during the popular uprising against the Omar al Bashir regime, the #SudanWomenProtest initiative brought together thousands of women to protest against “militarization, pervasive injustice against women and girls, gendered killings, and the normalization of sexual violence as the result of severe discriminatory laws that are still in effect in Sudan.”  Sudanese women had been resisting for decades, but their visibility in the 2019 revolution that overthrew Bashir came as a “shock” to the world, as a video of a woman on top of a car leading protest chants went viral. In March 2021, the initiative continued the pressure on Sudan’s transitional government to remove all sexist and discriminatory policy.

Keenly aware of global internet campaigns such as #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #IBelieveHer, young women around the continent have taken their own initiatives. And like their counterparts elsewhere, they have infused intersectional feminist perspectives in their organising.  In South Africa they have formed movements for gender justice, such as the #AmINext protests in response to the 2019 rape and murder of  university student Uyinene Mrwetyana. But young women have also been key leaders in the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements.

Offline, however, young feminist movements and collectives remain marginalized even in young people’s movements pushing for political changes. Young people in Africa are increasingly organizing in search of radical change in the way African nations are governed, to deliver dignity and respect for citizens’ voices. Without the equal participation and leadership of young feminists, however, such a social transformation will remain elusive.

Young African women are learning and teaching that struggles must be linked rather than posed by mutually exclusive alternatives. In Nigeria, for example, young activists in the middle of the #EndSars anti-police-brutality campaign also insist that #NigerianQueerLivesMatter.

Asking young women and queer Africans to put their own struggles aside, in deference to the argument that “national” liberation  must come first, as our foremothers did again and again, is not acceptable.

Women were central to the movements for independence and everyday resistance to colonial rule. But  often the movements themselves morphed into ruling political class hegemonies. And while we have increased the number of women in parliaments in Africa to match the global average of 25%, actual power in both government and society falls far short of even that achievement. True liberation for women and minorities from shackles introduced by colonial subversion of gender remains elusive.  From homes to bars to streets and workplaces, for all the strides made in “empowering women,” we are yet to truly see the liberation of women, in the sense that they can walk this world free in their own skin and their own bodies – free from violence.

And often there’s an expectation from oppressed people, in this case, African young women and gender-diverse people to be civil in demanding for their full humanity to be recognized, with condescending phrases such as “you are asking for too much.”

But who defines what is too much for anyone’s freedom and existence? For Sheena Bageine and Stella Nyanzi here in Uganda,  and young women and queer Africans resisting dehumanization around the continent, then the response is to be “too much.” It is only by being “too much” that new cracks in the wall of patriarchal dictatorships can emerge.

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This article was originally published by the US-Africa Bridge Building Project under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.