When William Ruto won the 2022 general elections to become Kenya’s fifth president, local and international media were awash with discussions of Ruto as an “evangelical president.” The excitement, however, was informed less by Kenyan religion or politics and more by right-wing evangelicals in the US and their war on homosexuality and abortion. Kenyan intellectuals, largely educated in Western liberal values and human rights discourse, also focused on concerns about secularism and for the rights of women and sexual minorities in Kenya.

Much of this analysis misses major nuances of religion and politics in Kenya, and comes from rigid adherence to the Eurocentric framework in which religion represents the conflict between traditional monarchical fascist conservatism on the one hand and liberal secularism and  anti-religion left politics on the other.

For people of African descent, expressions of faith are not tied to monarchies and republics but to liberation. For the last four centuries, freedom has been the fundamental spiritual and religious preoccupation of Africans on the continent and in its diaspora. The spark of the Haitian revolution was the Boukman prayer, where the proclamation of freedom appealed to the God “who orders us to revenge our wrongs,” and against “the white man’s god who is so pitiless.” In Africa, Kimpa Vita, Simon Kibangu, Elijah Masinde and Lucas Pkech are some of the Africans who used contrapuntal readings of scripture in resisting colonialism.

The civil rights movement in the US followed the same tradition, for both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X grounded their struggles in faith. If anything, the modern articulation of right-wing, white evangelicalism is a reaction to the impact of the liberation theologies of the 1960s and 1970s in the US. Led by figures like Paul Weyrich, the right wing actively sought the collaboration of American evangelicals to fight against the gains of the civil rights movement without mentioning politics or race. To counter desegregation of schools, the new alliance offered homeschooling and faith schools. In the place of diversity and social welfare, it offered family values. Against the political gains of women, it turned abortion into a rallying cause.

But rather than confront the capture of theology, the acolytes of Enlightenment (i.e. liberals), offer reason, human rights and landmark court cases, hinting that religion automatically makes one a conservative, and implying that peoples of the Global South who want to harness religion have failed to decolonize their minds. The silence that they impose on emancipatory readings of religion has allowed space for right-wing, anti-political and hateful theology to gain momentum, which has culminated in the capture of the US Supreme Court. Instead of learning their lesson and removing the Eurocentric walls around religion, these intellectuals now try to force African politics and religion into restrictive Eurocentric boxes of constitutionalism and human rights activism.

This hubris is oblivious to the fact that any interpretation of religion is fundamentally political, because interpretation informs and is informed by decisions we make in society. And this reality is not affected by secularism, for as the Kenyan historian Ali Mazrui once wrote, the separation between the church and the state does not necessarily translate into a separation between religion and politics. Blocking discussions of religion is political as well, but its effect is to depoliticize people by imposing moral conversations (the goodness of individuals) where there should be political ones (what people should do about power).

A large part of this oversimplification of religion emanates from the Euro-American liberal discomfort with knowledge outside of the rational. Religion and spirituality allow more space for ambiguity, fluidity, contradiction, and intersection, which is inconvenient for forms of power and knowledge that rely on the letter of the law, precision, and empirical proof. Add to that racism, which is notoriously impatient with appreciating Africans as complex human beings, and you have a potent mix that misreads African political theology.

Ruto’s Christianity

Ruto’s faith and political career illustrate the fluidities of Christianity in Kenya. In the run-up to the 2010 constitutional referendum, Ruto was the most prominent politician in the “No” camp against the constitution, but his interest was largely driven by what appears to be his concerns about his own political future. Ruto campaigned on a platform that the constitution did not respect the capitalist principle of limitless land ownership, and that the proposed devolved governance did not assign enough resources to the counties. The evangelical churches were opposed to the recognition of Kadhi courts and the clause on abortion allowing doctors to determine the threat to life. The Kenyan pastors who waged war against the constitution voiced their concerns as moral, but in reality, they were daring the state to a supremacy contest, hoping to wield their supposed Christian majority as a power bloc to vote against the government.

During the referendum campaign, therefore, Ruto and the clergy were largely partners of convenience. Mark Kariuki, who would pray fifteen years later at Ruto’s swearing-in as president, even clarified, “No yao si no yetu” (Their “no” is not our “no”), meaning that Ruto and the clergy may have been on the same side though not for the same reasons.

The moral posturing of the clergy still did not persuade Kenyan Christians to abandon the legal and political agendas that had brought Kenya to this new constitutional moment. Contrary to the clergy’s expectations, Kenyans ratified the constitution. Many elite adherents of evangelical Christianity, including professionals, carry that rejection as a trauma to date.

The greater manifestation of Ruto’s faith is not in his view of sexual identities but in his economic thinking. Four years ago, Kenyan journalist Christine Mungai wrote a brilliant analysis of Ruto’s “gangster theology,” arguing that Ruto’s camaraderie with evangelical churches was a tactical strategy in propping himself up as a “hustler.” To distinguish himself from his former boss, Uhuru Kenyatta, as a dynasty, Ruto had to portray himself as a person who had pulled himself up by the bootstraps to become a politician of national prominence. (Kenyatta, like Ruto’s main rival for the presidency, Raila Odinga, is a member of Kenya’s political dynasties, which has ruled for much of the post-independence period or controlled access to wealth.)  Ruto’s religion, therefore, needed to reflect the image of “Kenyan ordinariness.” He had to align himself with pastors who had begun their churches in abandoned buildings with a few congregants before they became wealthy heads of mega-churches.

Despite rooting for hustlers, Ruto supports the neoliberal ideology of individualism. He hates the arts and believes that science, technology and finance, not social change, are the solution to Kenya’s economic challenges. As such, his answer to crippling economic inequality has been to avail cheap micro-credit to the poor, otherwise dubbed as the “Hustler fund,” and to promise very little in terms of social support. If the evangelical God blesses individuals for the work of their hands, then that theology perfectly aligns itself with micro-credit as a route out of poverty. It is up to the poor to “work hard” using the loans they receive, albeit at high-interest rates, in the same way that Ruto rose from a chicken seller to become president, and in the same way pastors became owners of mega-churches.

To focus on Ruto’s stereotypical answers on women and sexual minorities is therefore to miss the gist of Ruto’s politics. That is not to say that the human rights of these groups are not important, or to minimize the spectacular violence that they suffer. It is to point to the socio-economic and political dimensions of this violence, which are the crippling inequality, the narrow public sphere and the cruelty of daily life under neoliberal policies. These dynamics are often obscured by critics who engage in moralistic, human rights-centric discourses and who, even worse, lock out the possibility of alliances with other groups who may or not be religious.

Ruto’s politics chose evangelical religion more than evangelical religion chose his politics. Ruto’s evangelicalism is an integral part of his neoliberal economic policy, which he believes will address the plight of the people at the bottom.

For the same reason, he and his deputy president, Rigathi Gachagua, have appealed to African spirituality as the spirituality of the non-elite, in addition to evangelical faith. Ruto sought the blessings of the Talai clan, who suffered brutality during the early years of colonial rule, because the colonial administration considered them to be the kernel of the impermeable Kalenjin anti-colonial resistance. Meanwhile, Kikuyu politicians led by Rigathi prayed facing Mount Kenya, to emulate the Mau Mau who fought for land justice.

The question is therefore not the relationship of religion to the Kenyan state, rather which theology we will use to interpret Ruto’s faith, assuming that theology is necessarily political. We can interpret Ruto’s religious expression based on the tradition of African spiritualities of liberation, or based on the European theology that pitted of the constitutional monarchy and the capitalist republic. If we choose the former tradition, we will find that Ruto’s evangelicalism falls in the latter one.

In my view, the new prominence of religion in the public sphere is a good development because, as the African experience shows, religion is a knowledge resource that can bring together people of diverse backgrounds, especially the oppressed who are denied access to institutions. Since 2010, political discourse from the public sphere has been dominated by constitutionalism, which generally hands over politics to lawyers. Religion, on the other hand, allows ordinary people access to political conversations. Rather than close that door because Ruto has taken advantage of that space, we need to open the door even wider for ordinary Kenyans to bring the riches of their knowledge to politics. Religion is one space where humanity can accommodate diverse knowledge. At least that’s what Africans have used it for.

Therefore, critics need to be patient, learn to deal with the ambiguity of the current political moment, and let Kenyans figure out what Ruto’s religion means politically and theologically. This situation is new for us and we need to figure it out as well. Forcing Ruto’s neoliberal wine into old liberal wineskins depoliticizes, rather than empowers us.

The matter of whether Uganda should have a national language, and if so, whether that language should be Kiswahili, is one that comes up for some level of public scrutiny every few years.

The usual outcome when this happens is the same predictable commentary, and then the matter disappears from public view for a few more years.

There is a difference this time, whose significance is yet to be revealed.

Since the last such lurch in that direction, the East African Community trading bloc has more than doubled its population and trebled its size and, at its 21st summit in February 2021, the bloc issued a directive making Kiswahili an official language of the Community. The African Union has also announced the adoption of Kiswahili as a working language.

At its 41st Session in Paris in November 2021, the UNESCO General Conference declared July 7th “World Kiswahili Language Day” (Resolution 41 C/61), citing “the critical role played by Kiswahili in promoting cultural diversity, creating awareness, and fostering dialogue among civilizations.”

On the 5th of July last year, Uganda’s government followed suit with a cabinet announcement that Kiswahili was to now finally be the country’s national language.

Even Julius Malema, leader of South Africa’s loudest left-wing party, has spoken volubly on the urgent need for Africa to adopt one language and that the language should be Kiswahili. This could have been in response to the African Union as a whole adopting Kiswahili as its Official Working Language in February 2022.

I doubt if a thing that is not a nation can create a national thing. And if languages create nations, then clearly we already have quite a few nations in existence inside the three, or seven, East African community member states.

In Uganda, the usual and easily invoked objections are around the history of the language as a tool of state repression. And this is the area of objection that critics of Ugandans expressing opposition to Kiswahili usually focus on. They do so because it allows for three politically correct points to be made.

The first is that English, Uganda’s official language, is also colonial, and so those opposed to Kiswahili should be opposed to English as well, which they don’t seem to be.

This enables a follow-on argument that language is a tool and therefore its use for good or bad depends on the motive of the user. And when the objection has specifically come from a native of Buganda, it is pointed out that their language Luganda was also a language of regional domination both before and during colonialism.

And finally it is argued that such objectors are simply locking ordinary Ugandans out of a wider free trade regional market.

Occasionally the point is made about the mythical benefits of accessing Kiswahili’s alleged high culture.

And so it goes, back and forth, in an unedifying spiral of oppression Olympics and republican self-righteousness.

In this back and forth, two important questions are ignored: effect and context. The second is the simpler one, and has already been discussed above—Kiswahili has not meant the same thing to all Africans everywhere at all times and will therefore have varying receptions.

But “effect” is the more fundamental issue. As mentioned, this proposal, or drive, has always remained unclear as to what the ultimate desired goal is. Several explanations exist.

If Africa wishes to build a united common cultural identity, we must first settle the question whether this is an act of rebuilding something that was destroyed, repairing something that exists but is broken, or departing from scratch. Which of the three will the future of African development be based on?

At the economic level, when we talk about integrating regional markets, have we also asked ourselves who owns these markets even in their current, less integrated form? Does Kiswahili create independent, African-owned economics, or simply a smoother path for the current foreign-owned ones to reach deeper into the continent?

The issue of cultural identity brought to mind an incident many years ago during an evening stroll in downtown Nairobi in the company of a Tanzanian colleague while attending a workshop in the city. During an encounter with one of the many Nairobi street kids, we had an interesting time observing how he alternated between understanding my crude Kiswahili — which was forcing me to “step up” — and my friend’s sophisticated version — which he was having to “dumb down” — as we asked him a little about his life’s journey thus far.

Does Kiswahili create independent, African-owned economics, or simply a smoother path for the current foreign-owned ones to reach deeper into the continent?

After the boy went on his way, we reverted to the English we had been using and ended up in a discussion about homes and homelessness. The point, I think, was about traditional African family structures. At some point, as I was expounding on the concept of the paternal aunt and maternal uncle in Kiganda (and other Bantu) cultures in their once actual role as potential resources for troubled children, my colleague became animated and recalled such relations from his childhood growing up in rural Tanzania, and then a little agitated at the sudden realization that he could no longer recall the specific title used, in the language of his childhood, to name these people.

The point here is whether this was just a loss of a word once spoken, or if it also meant the eventual loss of the role and meaning of the persons and relationships carried by that name. And if it was indeed an erasure, has that been the intended effect of the one-language policy?

What is gained and what is lost in such a process?

Native language includes native consciousness for as long as it remains the property of its owners. A change of language can therefore be shorthand for the suppression of native identity in an approach to African “nation-building” that the historian of Africa, Basil Davidson, described as being based on “the complete flattening of the ethnic landscape”.

For example, the Luganda version of the word that was lost to my erstwhile Tanzanian colleague is Senga (sometimes spelled Ssenga). Its meaning is very specific: the female sibling of one’s father by the same father, or set of fathers. In other words, being first and foremost of the same totem as your father. It is a clan institution operating at the family level and responsible for various things, such as overseeing her brother’s daughters’ personal lives, (including marriage, as extemporized in the book Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi), as well as installations of family heirs.

Native language includes native consciousness for as long as it remains the property of its owners.

A more revealing variation of the same institution exists in the culture, and therefore language, of Banyankole of Uganda. In one case it is call Shwenkazi, which is a verbal conflation of the term sho-enkazi (“sho” being “your father”, and “kazi”, being “female”). Quite literally, “your father the woman”, or more directly, “your woman-father”.

It is not reducible to the word “aunt”; it means paternally-descended paternal aunt, but not merely as a label but as a title that carries a specific cultural function.

In the ordinary Kiswahili being promoted, the word Shangazi means aunt.

One can clearly see a similarity with Senga and Shwenkazi. However, Shangazi functions only as a family label in the same way that aunt, uncle or brother do in English, such that the paternal aunt is “Shangazi wa baba”, and the maternal one “Shangazi wa mama”. I am unclear if any cultural function existed or still exists attached to the name (although I suspect it might, at least in some perfunctory form).

A series of critical questions emerge from this. Clearly, the three words Senga, Shwenkazi and Shangazi bear a common root. But did they at some point also carry the same function? How come the function-name seems to be clearer (and also similar) in Luganda and Runyankore, and not in Kiswahili, where it is a flat label indiscriminately applicable to any female sibling of any parent?

Was there a time when Shangazi also meant Senga in both name and function? If so, by what process was this lost?

Therefore, the main point is this: if one is to substitute Luganda, or Runyankore with Kiswahili, or even just make it primary to them, then the meaning of this institution — quite central to how the extended family system operates here — will be lost. And so will the practice, and therefore eventually, the culture.

This feeds into the question of what kind of future the advocates of Kiswahili-for-all envisage. A lot of cultural activism in Africa is hemmed in by either a preservation mentality, or a profusion one.

Kiswahili advocacy suffers from both. On the one hand, Swahili culture is seen as a culture worth preserving in the memory of its “highest” forms (which are really just a celebration of the Arab-informed city-states of the coast, built as assimilationist fixtures of a spreading Arabist culture headquartered somewhere in Arabia to the north-north-east). This means leaving it with the erasures and distortions fully embedded. This is because the dominant version of modern Pan-Africanism conceptualizes its task as one of building from scratch. The past does not matter at all, and the present matters only as the place where the future is being planned.

On the other hand, the language has been allowed to grow variously, based on needs and circumstances. In the case of Tanzania, for example, it was part of the inheritance of the German colonial erasure that became useful in the Basil Davidson description.

This is a problem of legitimacy. Cultures, and the languages they produce, have owners. It is these owners that should hold the ultimate right to curate the direction in which their language goes, because they have the original, and greatest stake in it. Between the governments of Tanzania, Zanzibar and Kenya, on top of the respective language institutes in those countries, it is unclear who has the ultimate say over matters of vocabulary, syntax and general linguistic development. What is clear is that any or all of those centres carry a bigger voice than the indigenous Bantu people of the East African coast who birthed the language.

The problem is larger than one might think. State-owned Kiswahili (which is the Kiswahili formally taught in schools) tends to be quite relaxed on the question of organic growth. It is common for English and other language words to be simply dropped, as if through a trapdoor, into the language. For example, doctor is rendered “daktari”, clinic “kliniki”, and picture “picha”. This happens in many languages to some extent. But with Kiswahili, it seems to be almost a matter of policy, because this is done even in cases were a native word already exists, or could be organically created from the existing vocabulary. And this is only complicated by the reality of the differences in dialect among the various coastal peoples anyway. In short, it is not one authentic Kiswahili that is being ignored and distorted, but several of them.

State-owned Kiswahili tends to be quite relaxed on the question of organic growth.

The immediate effect is to place a larger than usual memory burden on the learner or speaker, as there is no organic source within the language for those nouns. In Luganda, for example, the word for clinic or hospital is taken from the verb to be ill. This is the rule for a large number of words and it makes it much easier to recognize or recall the word, or even to develop other words, especially adjectives, around it.

What word, then, will be used in Uganda? And will the state setting the Kiswahili exams be willing to make an accommodation, or insist on language orthodoxy, such as it is?

The purpose of any valid Africanist exercise would be to build up the African identity, but this can only work if understood as a task of recovery, as opposed to reinvention.

To restore an original building, one needs the original bricks. And then to repair them individually before rebuilding.

As one remnant of a wider family of remnant languages coming out of one wider language, Kiswahili is just one such brick. The problem is that the modern pan-Africanist Kiswahili advocates believe it, or just intend to make it, to be a whole wall.

Which also leads to the economic question: Beyond the 50 or so Kenyan cents my Tanzanian friend and I gave to street kid, how did our common ability to speak in Kiswahili help him? And to what extent had the idea of new protections from the state helped erode the viability of the family-level cultural institution that failed him? How much Kiswahili spoken by the Maasai Tanzanians of Loliondo will become enough for their right to reclaim the land they have just been evicted from by the Tanzanian state in order to make way for Middle Eastern Big Game-hunting corporations?

What are the risks that may come with making African cultures less internally culturally cohesive and more dependent on citizen protections backed ultimately by a former colonial state? And are they indeed seen as risks?

Kiswahili is not unique in carrying the erasure and distortion that have come to it through the events of time and circumstance. Many languages, especially those at the receiving end of colonial, or genocide-extermination, or genocide-assimilation experiences, have gone through the same.

But the problem is this: Kiswahili is being promoted as a meta-language, rising above other Bantu (and even wider African) languages. In reality, it is just another Bantu language, with its own particular history of external impacts and distortions. It is part of a whole, coming with its own particular missing parts. A convenient means, first for the establishment of the coastal slave plantations and trade, and later for the European explorer missions — the human resource required to mobilize a trade or exploration caravan inland would have recruited from a lot of the people found along the coast.

Kiswahili is not unique in carrying the erasure and distortion that have come to it through the events of time and circumstance.

I think we have seen enough to be able to recognize that Bantu languages are all parts of a missing whole.

This is the central point made by Cheikh Anta Diop, when he speaks of the cultural unity of Black Africa. This is the difference between a word being borrowed, as has happened with Kiswahili Arab and state use, and a word being inherited. And also therefore, the difference between a whole language being borrowed, as the post-colonial states have done and seek to further do, and inherited, as post-Egyptian languages seem to have done.

In summary, instead of seeking to repair and develop all the bricks of their gaps and erasure so as to rebuild the wall of the original African meta-language, the advocates of Kiswahili seek to pick out one of the incomplete bricks and impose it, with its specific defects, on the speakers of all the other languages. It is an act of double-erasure.

Swahili needs to address its own historical identity crisis as part of the process of African cultures everywhere also addressing their own setbacks.

Women are the reason why men have changed because women are hard on men. […] The expectations they come with into a relationship, and generally how they have been brought up, or the life they live, that is what gives some men stress. […] When someone is living with a woman in the house, you find that issues are many because money is little.

Wellington Ochieng, 36-year old labour migrant from western Kenya

During almost three years of ethnographic fieldwork among male migrants in Pipeline, an over-populated high-rise estate in Nairobi’s chronically marginalised east, I heard complaints like Wellington’s almost daily. Migrant men, in my case predominantly Luo men from western Kenya who came to Nairobi with high expectations of a better future, bemoaned a life full of pressure caused by the romantic, sexual, and economic expectations of their girlfriends, wives, and rural kin. The blame often lay on “city girls” who were portrayed as materialistic “slay queens” who “finish” men by leaving them bankrupt only to suck away the next sponsor’s wealth after grabbing him with their “Beelzebub nails”, as Wellington called the colourful nails sported by many Nairobi women. Soon, so a fear repeatedly expressed by my interlocutors, most men would no longer be needed at all and Kenya’s economy would be ruled by economically powerful women who raise chaotic boys brought up without an authoritative father figure. Such fears of male expendability also manifested in imaginations about a future in which more and more men and women would live in homosexual relationships or “contract marriages” that replace trust and love with contractual agreements. Once, on his way back to our shared apartment, my flatmate Samuel—a student of economics who is divorced from the mother of his baby son—passed a neighbour’s house where a group of women were celebrating a birthday. He shook his head and sighed: “We live like animals in the jungle. Women and men separately. We only meet for mating and making babies. Maybe that’s where we’re heading to.”

Overwhelmed by their wives’ and girlfriends’ expectations, many migrant men who spoke to me in Pipeline had decided to spend as little time as possible in their marital houses. Instead, they evaded pressure by lifting weights in gyms, stockpiling digital loans and informal credits, placing bets in gambling shops, gulping down a cold beer in a Wines & Spirits, playing FIFA videogames, or catcalling “brown-skinned” Kamba women on the roads. Some men who could no longer cope took even more drastic measures involving murder and suicide. One man cut his girlfriend’s throat and tried to kill himself, while another tried to poison himself, later quoting his wife’s actions and character as the reason for his attempted suicide. Anything appeared better than spending time with the “daughters of Jezebel” who were waiting for them in the cramped houses of Pipeline, sometimes demanding that they engage in romantic and sexual practices they were unfamiliar with, as expounded upon by Wellington:

“When you come to Nairobi, our girls want that you hold her hand when you are going to buy chips, you hug her when you are going to the house, I hear there is something called cuddling, she wants that you cuddle, at what time will you cuddle and tomorrow you want to go to work early? […] you don’t go to meet your friends so that you show her you love her, you just sleep on the sofa and caress her hair. To me this is nonsense because that is not romantic love. I think that romantic love, so long as I provide the things I provide, and we sire children, I think that’s enough romance. […] Another girl told me to lick her, and I asked her ‘Why do you want me to lick you?’ She said that she wanted me to lick her private parts. Are those places licked? […] Those things are things that people see on TV, let us leave them to the people on TV.”

The burden of economic and sexual performance was not only felt by poorer migrant men, however. Rather, as shown by articles in Kenyan newspapers (see, for example, here and here), it is a nationwide pandemic affecting men from different classes. On a two-day-long men’s meeting on the slopes of Mt. Kenya in mid-2022 which I attended and which was organized by Chomba Njoka and the self-help book authors and masculinity consultants Silas Nyanchwani and Jacob Aliet, for instance, a male lawyer, a psychologist, and a land surveyor, among others, lamented about similar issues. Sitting around a bonfire drinking cold beer in the damp cold of Mt. Kenya, one man after another told a story about a girlfriend who cheated with a financially better-off man, a wife who emptied the marital home of all valuables and left with the children, or young women who come to Nairobi to be seduced by the city’s material promises and men in suits with “deep pockets” who flock the bars of places like Pipeline looking for teenage girls with dreams of big cars, shiny clothes, and expensive hair pieces. Initially the stories were told hesitantly; one could feel that the men telling them were afraid to be blamed. Was I not man enough to provide for a family? Was I responsible for my wife leaving me? But more and more of the men present told similar stories, cathartic laughter breaking out after yet another man narrated a ridiculous incident in his life. Maybe, we began to think, it was not our fault. But whose fault was it then?

“Nairobian girls, man, acha tu (Kiswahili, “just leave it”)! If some hapless guy with disposable income and sensible behaviour shows some interest, the girl will put her acting mask on, and can easily fool the man proper. Nothing wrong with that, as life is a game. You play. They play. We play each other”, writes Nyanchwani in his book 50 Memos to Men, a collection of his Facebook posts on gender relations in contemporary Nairobi. When I first met Silas in a café in Nairobi’s central business district,  a calm and soft-spoken guy over six feet tall and father of a girl, he told me that men had been left behind in Kenya’s economic and cultural development of the last two decades, perpetuating local discourses about the “neglect of the boychild”. Most development aid interventions were targeting the girlchild, and women were increasingly empowered economically. Who, however, was there to tell men what to do, to give men a voice and guidance? Aliet, an imposing man with an authoritative appearance, shared Nyanchwani’s sentiments. Known as a writer of Sci-Fi novels, Aliet decided to write his book Unplugged: Things our fathers did not tell us after many of his male friends had shared stories with him about the pressure to provide, the burden of performance, women’s ungratefulness, and men’s inability to know how to respond to what women and society demands of them. If the raving reviews by both men and women on the homepage of the Nuria bookstore are anything to go by, the book has helped many male readers to find relief and new hope by receiving guidance on what it means to be a man in contemporary Kenya.

But more and more of the men present told similar stories, cathartic laughter breaking out after yet another man narrated a ridiculous incident in his life.

Yet neither Nyanchwani nor Aliet rule over Nairobi’s booming masculinity consultancy scene where one can find controversial figures such as former radio host Andrew Kibe among more moderate voices such as Pastor Simon Mbevi who counsels men and couples or Onyango Otieno who openly talks about his experience as a male rape victim and advises men to allow themselves to be vulnerable. The most famous personality, however, is Amerix, a medical doctor from western Kenya who gives advice to Kenyan men on Twitter and through other social media channels. Although Aliet, Nyanchwani—the former writer of The Retrosexual column in The Nairobian that is now written by Brian Guserwa—and Amerix align with the global red pill movement, part of a global backlash against feminism or some of feminism’s social consequences, they do so to different degrees. While they all agree that the world has become “femicentric” and that men need to swallow the red pill to be “unplugged” from the false truths of feminism, Amerix has a more radical take on Kenya’s gender relations and not only offers answers that aim to change the totality of his adepts’ daily lives but also openly admires Paul Kagame’s autocratic style of leadership and dreams of a world where strong “Afrikan” men subdue obedient women. In his chat groups, young Kenyans are not allowed to write using “effeminate” emojis or incorrect English while dreaming about a reinstated patriarchal order and implementing Amerix’ advice by practicing semen retention to accumulate testosterone, fasting for days, lifting weights, and avoiding processed food as well as the imperial ideology spread in NGOs and churches by white men and women. Being pressured to perform economically and sexually, young men all over Nairobi beg Amerix to “continue to mislead” them by warning against get-rich-quick schemes and by ridiculing women’s expectations of large penises and pornographic sexual performances.

It would be easy to ridicule the absurdity of some of the advice given by Amerix or to call out Aliet and Nyanchwani as toxic men. Yet, over one million people are following Amerix on Twitter, and both Aliet and Nyanchwani are typical Kenyan men who, despite harbouring patriarchal inclinations, care about their children and their spouses. None of the men I met on the slopes of Mt. Kenya dreamt of enslaving women, and all agreed that a return to their fathers’ world was not desirable. However, after three years of fieldwork, I can count on the fingers of one hand those men who confided to me that they are in happy relationships or marriages. Heterosexual Kenyan men, in other words, are unhappy, and, as attested by Amerix’ fame, they are desperately looking for explanations for their experience of economic, romantic, and sexual pressure and the impasses they find themselves in financially, socially, and with regard to their relationships with women more generally. Many Kenyan men feel side-lined and, despite their willingness and attempts to provide, are unable to meet what they imagine to be—or what sometimes indeed are—the unrealistic expectations of women, which compels them to look for advice from fellow Kenyan men who seem to be the only voices resonating with the problems they face “on the ground”. Mark, an unemployed Luo migrant with a degree in physics who survived by writing essays for Chinese students with substandard English skills, responded to my question about the role of Amerix in his life with excitement:

“Amerix is talking about why shouldn’t we be us? Why do you have to be dictated by a woman? Let the woman decide whatever you have to do? Be away from friends she does not want? Do whatever she wants? You see that? So, we were like, give us this shit. […] From the first day, we were all into Amerix’ thing. […] There are some people who argue that Amerix is misleading the men, but then if you understand what Amerix is talking about, it is the real thing, the real situation on the ground.”

In such an impasse, Western journalists, social scientists, and development aid practitioners should ask themselves what social, economic, and conceptual benefits for both men and women could be generated from working with more moderate masculinity consultants such as Nyanchwani. Although they neither agree to notions of the social construction of gender nor share beliefs in the necessity to dismantle all patriarchal gender roles, they have access to the minds and hearts of Kenyan men such as Wellington, Mark, or Samuel. While I disagree with the red pill movement’s evolutionary naturalization of gender roles and its simplistic use of biological assumptions—such as female hypergamy—to explain human social relations and strongly believe that a more political-economic approach would allow men and women to attack some of the common enemies that deprive them of economic development, I also think that honest debates that include the voices of various masculinity consultants could open a conceptual space beyond, on the one hand, the capitalistic and colonial notion of the male breadwinner and provider that necessarily produces pressured men who desperately want but cannot provide for their loved ones due to the structural conditions of Kenya’s capitalistic economy, and, on the other hand, the largely still unacceptable notions of men as vulnerable and dependent that only resonate with a few middle-class Kenyans. Such progressive, open-minded, and creative debates might help to repair what appears to be a social constellation characterized by mutual misunderstanding and heightened mistrust between men and women.