The state of civil society in the post-2022 election period is a critical topic of discussion. This is because the civil society has increasingly become the alter ego of the Kenyan public and republic. Whenever the civil society takes a position on an issue or comments on a matter of public interest, a lot of whataboutism ensues. Demonstrations and other civic actions are questioned by the public and the government alike: “They want donor support”, we say, “They have been paid to do this”, we argue; “Why did they not speak when this and that happened”, we pontificate. Yet the work done by these organisations is critical. I will start with a short anecdote.

Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC), the Greek historian and geographer is aassociated with the myth of the phoenix – a mythological bird associated with the sun that dies in a “show of flames and combustion” and from the ashes rises again. In my creative writings, I conceive the sun as the “child of an idiotic mother” because no matter how much people curse it, the mother allows it to rise again in the morning of the following day. Have you ever imagined the mother of the sun saying “My child, these beings are not happy with you… stay here some”? We would not know day and night! So the sun rises every day. A bird associated with the sun burns to ashes and from its ashes, it rises and flies away – new and renewed.  Just like the phoenix, the sun that rises the following day is not the one of yesterday. But it is the sun.

And so it is with civil society.

In Kenya, the emergence and proliferation of civil society organisations and formations in the 1990s was predicated on the repeal of Section 2 (A) of the constitution that ushered in political plurality and the age of freedom to associate. Although some organisations like Kituo Cha Sheria, ICJ-Kenya, Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA-Kenya), etc. already existed, they had little impact in the political sphere because of the draconian state that ran affairs in Kenya. The neoliberal culture to which Prof. Issa Shivji attributes the emergence of civil society has run its course. In his book, Silences in NGO Discourses, Shivji argues that the emergence of civil society is to blame for the death of revolutionary fervour that could have overthrown colonial and postcolonial demagoguery. True, the Hehe Rebellion in Tanganyika, the Mau Mau war, the Arab spring and other truly revolutionary movements were not organised as programmes of development partners.

This does not mean that the civil society has not achieved a lot. It has. But it only did this when it was catalytic as opposed to programmatic. The work done by the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD) in the late 1980s and early 1990s could not have been achieved by civil society. The work done by the National Convention Executive Council (NCEC) and the National Convention Assembly (NCA) was only possible because the NCA negated the principles of civil society programming and instead took the form of socio-cultural dynamism dictated by the situations obtaining at the community level. For both FORD and the NCEC, the organising principle was radical change – not incremental gains. The two used popular political mobilisation and localised change agenda to build a national framework for creating a new Kenya. Civil society came to temper this radicalism with caution, asking for and working towards reform as opposed to revolution.

That notwithstanding, the civil society gained gravitas and when the Daraja Initiative of 1998 died, from its ashes rose the National Civic Education Programme (NCEP – later Uraia). The NCEP was very programatised – complete with a South Consulting Ltd. (associated with Carl Wesselink and Prof. Karuti Kanyinga) managing the programme and Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) as the Financial Management Agent (FMA). But the implementers radicalised it; while it was completely non-partisan by design and intent, its implementation nevertheless bore the political dissonance that led to the “Moi Must Go!” mantra.

From this time onward, the civil society moved into the organisational development mode – focussing on the professionalization and strengthening of systems – using the models of the Northern and Western counterparts. CSO coalitions on thematic issues were formed whose professional secretariats and “movements” are run like fully-fledged organisations. Strategic planning, organisational development, corporate governance, capacity-building frameworks, work-plan matrixes based on theory of change and SMART objectives, comprehensive policy frameworks and SWOT analyses became the hallmark of “serious” organisations. They also became a precondition for funding – and the funding is usually programmatic and budgetline-specific. And so the echo-chambers deepened. And creativity, passion, and impromptu action were severely curtailed. Bureaucracy was instituted.

And the sun rose, travelled the sky, and set.

This is not to say that important work was not done, no. A lot was achieved in this period. A civil society initiative, The Yellow Movement (a coalition including Citizens’ Coalition for Constitutional Change – 4Cs; Kenya Human Rights Commission – KHRC; Legal Resources Foundation – LRF; Education Centre for Women in Democracy – ECWD; NCEC; and many others) led the onslaught against the dismembering of the Bomas draft constitution by parliament. It was these efforts that defeated what is famously called the Wako draft constitution that was being forced on Kenyans in 2005. In the post-election chaos of 2007, the Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice (KPTJ) coalition can be credited with the inclusion of Agenda 4 in the negotiations for the restoration of democracy. This civil society coalition also led the push to punish those most culpable of fuelling the chaos (who later became known as the Ocampo Six). The members of the coalition – International Centre For Policy And Conflict (ICPC), Charles Ndung’u Mwangi, Public Corruption, Ethics And Governance Watch, Henry Nyakundi Nyang’aya, KHRC, and ICJ-Kenya Chapter – were  to further pursue the International Criminal Court (ICC) indictees Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto in a petition that sought to have the duo struck from the presidential ballot. In 2009 and 2010, the National Civil Society Congress (NCSC) initiated the Katiba Sasa! campaign that became the clarion call for the birthing of the new constitution. The civil society ensured that progressive articles on human rights, public participation, integrity in leadership, devolution of power and public finance management were retained in the constitution. That most of these remain unimplemented is the challenge going forward.

In my opinion, the greatest singular story of achievement for the civil society is the socialisation of the women’s agenda in a deeply patriarchal society and especially the inclusion of the principle of “not more than 2/3rds of either gender in elective and appointive offices” as a constitutional requirement. Although this is still facing resistance (despite a supreme court advisory to the president to prologue parliament), the solidification of the women’s movement owes its success to gender activists within FIDA-Kenya, the Centre for Rights Education and Awareness (CREAW), the Coalition on Violence Against Women (COVAW), ECWD and the defunct Gender Consortium, among other spaces. Significantly also, the civil society movement is credited with the birthing of the youth movement (The Youth Agenda and the National Youth Movement) and a plethora of other organisations and youth initiatives across the country.

The National Civil Society Congress (NCSC) initiated the Katiba Sasa! Campaign which became the clarion call for the birthing of the new constitution.

Over the years, organisations have been involved in community organising, budget tracking, social accountability research and education. These include the CSO-Network in Nyanza, the Centre for Enhancing Democracy and Good Governance (CEDGG) in the Rift Valley, the Mobilisation Agency for Community Paralegals in Africa (MAPACA) in Eastern Kenya, Inuka Ni Sisi! Ltd. and Umande Trust in Nairobi, Ujamaa Centre Kenya and Haki Africa in the coastal region, to mention but a few. They have kept the fire of good governance and democracy burning in community discourses across the country. This is monumental work.

And again the sun rose, travelled across the sky, and set.

The overarching purpose of the civil society, especially the governance CSOs, has been the guillotining of the KANU oligarchy, the stream forming at Jomo Kenyatta’s feet, who, by amending the independence constitution to create a constitutional dictator and outlawing the Kenya People’s Union that was formed in 1965, visited unfreedom upon our land. This trajectory of righting the wrongs of the state and its operatives has been maintained – even when there have been significant democratic reversals: the IPPG betrayal in 1997, the Kibaki betrayal of the Bomas constitutional process in 2004, the stolen elections debacle in 2007/8, the failure of the leadership and integrity principle in the clearing of the ICC duo to run in the 2013 elections, and the failure by the government to implement the Constitution of Kenya since its promulgation in 2010 to date. The civil society has trudged on, making consistent efforts to customise the democracy project.

The sun rose, travelled the sky, and set.

The post-2022 elections period offers perhaps the greatest challenge for the sector, and this is attested by the loud silence ensuing, the stagnation of civic responsiveness and the tongue-tying anger and bewilderment that abounds. The problem is that even if you are an Azimio apologist and you hold the opinion that the Kenya Kwanza/UDA team did not win the elections fair and square, what do you say about the many people (about half of the voters) who supported them? Granted, the hustler narrative – a promise to alleviate the economic suffering of the poor and slay those who enriched themselves from the public coffers, the dynasties – was a strong narrative. And many people believed it – aided of course by the obvious isolation of William Ruto, the perception of persecution of Kenya Kwanza/UDA leaders and the near-fanatical call for citizens to defeat the “deep state” which “threatened to subvert” the people’s will in the elections. This narrative was populist, and the problem with populism is that it takes the wind out of the sails of the conscientious. Thus the civil society was left high and dry.

In my opinion, the greatest singular story of achievement for the civil society is the socialisation of the women’s agenda in a deeply patriarchal society.

The questions being asked are: How do you hold to account a regime that is clearly antithetical to the democratic principles that civil society espouses? How do you interface with a regime that represents populism but lacks realism? How do you support (whether positively or through constructive criticism) a regime that fails the basic test of good governance – that of fighting corruption so as to protect the public purse? What do you say to the brazenness of its members and its high-ranking officials? If you say I am pessimistic or I judge too quickly, be my guest and help me understand why the prices of basic commodities like fuel and flour have continued to soar and why taxation is growing. Hustlers are in tears. It will be a long five years indeed.

How do you hold to account a regime that is clearly antithetical to the democratic principles that civil society espouses?

On the petition filed by Azimio et al., the Supreme Court ruling (its badass language and poise) meant that very few progressives will expect fairness from the courts on issues of social justice. The judiciary is gone – either in fact or in perception. The fact that the president has been able to have his way with parliament on all counts – the leadership of the houses, the supplementary budget, the passing of his nominees for CSs and PSs, etc. – means that the august house is gone. So, what do we have? An oligarchy. And what does an oligarchy mean? That anything the president (and his men and women) says will be implemented. Welcome to the mid-1960s.

And so, before the sun sets to herald a new country, the civil society must quickly realise that the journey it took – from KPU in 1965, to the Karl Marx times at the University of Nairobi, to the Mwakenya and February 18th Movements of the early 1980s, to the Mageuzi movement of the late 1980s, to the Release Political Prisoners’ advocacy in the early 90s, to the constitutional reform efforts of 4Cs and NCEC, to the betrayed “No Reforms No Elections” campaign of 1997, to the uncertainties and convolutions of the last two decades – that this journey, has brought us to the edge of a precipice, and that it is imperative that the civil society become a phoenix, burning to ashes and from its own ashes emerging renewed and new to meet the challenges of starting a new journey in a new sunrise.

In recent fights to re-constitute Black studies in the context of Eurocentric curricula and institutions, scholars must recognize the radical role African thinkers have played in this struggle in order to avoid past divisions. This became pronounced recently when Professor Anani Dzidzienyo, a Ghanaian scholar of Brazil and the African diaspora, died in October 2020, and students, artists, and scholars from across the globe mourned. The diverse and dispersed networks Dzidzienyo built over 50 years of scholarship reveal the crucial yet underacknowledged role that African scholars played in founding Black studies methodologically and institutionally from the late 1960s through the 1980s. He pioneered the establishment of study of the African diaspora at Brown University and researched south-south relations and Afro-Brazil in ways that forged new modes for understanding globalization and retracted often unrecognized channels of Black radical connection. While the importance of prominent African American and Caribbean thinkers, artists, and activists travelling to Africa has been well documented, there is still little recognition of the vital route played by young thinkers coming from Africa to the US, and the particular role of Ghanaian intellectuals in shaping a lesser-known and often neglected global aspect of Black radicalism and Black internationalism.

Dzidzienyo is part of a generation of intellectuals who came of age as Ghana fought for independence under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. His stepmother, Grace Ayensu, was one of the first women in parliament and a prominent member of Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party who forged diasporic linkages and solidarity with other Black people. In 1960, Dzidzienyo left Ghana to represent the country at the New York Herald Tribune World Youth Forum. He graduated from Williams College in 1965 with a BA in Political Science and completed his graduate studies at the University of Essex in Latin American Politics and Government in 1968. He then spent three years as a research fellow at the Institute of Race Relations in London, during which time he first visited Brazil.

Dzidzienyo’s story reveals how Nkrumah’s ideas about pan-Africanism and African liberation inspired young scholars to seek out global linkages around race and power, to uncover historical connections and forge new ones. These exiled Ghanaian intellectuals insisted that mutual emancipation required that Black Americans viewed Africa as a place of ongoing political struggle and sociocultural transformation, instead of seeing the continent merely as an abstract symbol or distant heritage. At the same time, they argued that it was necessary for Africans to understand the African American and Afro-Latin Americans “reality.” These Ghanaian scholars followed a long history of Gold Coast internationalists, including Chief Sam, who inspired many African Americans to return to Africa.

Dzidzienyo started at Brown at a time when Cold War politics and Black nationalism had turned Africa into an abstract symbol for many African American activists rather than as a place of ongoing political struggle and sociocultural transformation. The work and lived experiences of Dzidzienyo and his Ghanaian cohort of exile intellectuals offer us the opportunity to rethink the Civil Rights era as a collaborative effort between Black Americans and Africans in the struggle for Black liberation in the US. Combining the study of Africa with a practical blueprint for emancipation, these Ghanaian intellectuals were also open to the particular radical and activist nature of the US Black Student movement, which enabled them to connect political education with mobilization. In his scholarship and activism, Dzidzienyo focused on what Africa meant for Afro-Latin Americans and worked to mobilize Afro-descendants in Latin America in the fight against worldwide white supremacy in his analysis.

Dzidzienyo asserted that connecting with Africa would enable peoples of African descent to generate a racial political consciousness attuned to global issues including the plight of Afro-Brazilians. His 1971 groundbreaking book, The Position of Blacks in Brazilian Society, challenged scholars to center the lived experiences of Afro-descendants within Brazilian studies and Latin American studies more broadly at a time when the lusotropicalist ideas of the right-wing thinker Gilberto Freyre still dominated intellectual discussion of race in Brazil. Pioneering the field of African diaspora studies at Brown University, Dzidzienyo helped move Black studies beyond simple Africa-US and Africa-Europe conversations toward a scholarly analysis rooted in Africa-Latin America connections.

The first tenure-track professor that Rhett Jones, an African American scholar, hired to help establish and develop an Afro-American studies department at Brown in 1973, Dzidzienyo, was according to Jones, the reason “Brown’s Black Studies unit was among the pioneers in what now is called the study of the African diaspora.” Fluent in English, Ewe, Fanti, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, Dzidzienyo ensured that Brown’s approach to the diaspora was genuinely hemispheric in scope. Working with other faculty members, Dzidzienyo made Brown’s program a prominent center for research and teaching about the Portuguese-speaking world, especially Afro-Portuguese societies.

Dzidzienyo used his classes to move conversations beyond the lived experiences of Blacks in the US. In the late 1970s, he developed two year-long courses: “African History and Society” and “Blacks in Latin America History and Society.” With Dzidzienyo’s courses as models, the faculty in the Afro-American Studies Department created two additional year-long courses: “Afro-American History and Society” and “Caribbean History and Society.” These multidisciplinary courses focused on the Black past as well as contemporary issues across various geo-cultural areas of the African diaspora.

For Dzidzienyo, it was important that the study of Africans and peoples of African descent exist outside of the framework of the global North. Thus, he asserted that a study of the contemporary political, social, and economic networks between African and Latin American countries offered an important space to rethink Black radicalism and Black internationalism.

Dzidzienyo became particularly interested in what the public memory of Africa meant for identity and emancipatory political movements throughout Latin America. Dzidzienyo research on Brazil investigated both historical and contemporary linkages to the continent. He urged scholars to shift their focus from a “frozen Africanity,” which simply celebrated specific African historical, cultural, and religious retentions, to a study of the diaspora as a “dynamic variant,” one whose crosscurrents shaped the sociopolitical realities of contemporary Africa and Latin America.

Dzidzienyo’s life and work reminds us of the important moment when a few Black scholars attempted to conceptualize the project of Black liberation beyond the shores of the United States. They followed a long line of people who had done the same, going back a century or more. Dzidzienyo was one of several Ghanaian intellectuals active in the US, Grenada, Suriname, and Senegal from the late 1960s through the 1980s. These scholars were bonded by their admiration of Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism ideas, their nationality, and their forced or self-imposed exile. They all brought portions of Nkrumah’s political and intellectual vision to their new contexts, reshaping his original vision as they went along. Their collective contributions to the global development of Black studies have been largely ignored but their legacies within the institutions where they worked remind us that there were spaces in which radical African intellectuals, through the 1970s at least, ensured that the liberation of Africa was central to Black radical intellectual pursuits worldwide.

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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 recent days, there have been a lot of discussions about the advent of ‘artificial intelligence’ and its potential as a game changer in the way we go about our business. This discussion has come to the fore since the OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT signed a long-term collaboration agreement with Microsoft worth several billion dollars. In Kenya, the mainstream ‘Sunday Nation’ newspaper on 29th January was equally excited about the development, running a feature on it with a tag line; “ChatGPT: Tool that helps even the lazy write magnificently”.  But despite all the hype generated, the hullabaloo about ChatGPT or machine learning is at least as much an indication of our intellectual decline as it is of any technological advance on our part, and here is why.

I have personally been hesitant to explore what AI actually does, steering clear of what seems to be a rabbit hole that doesn’t have any logical destination. Recently though, I had an in-depth discussion about developing a project proposal with a colleague better versed in this application, and he was kind enough to take me on a ‘tour’. So, I ‘asked’ the app several questions relevant to African wildlife studies (my area of expertise). In my line of questioning, I ‘posed’ as a student seeking to develop a conservation research proposal focusing on human-wildlife conflict. The app dutifully typed out problem statements, research questions, methods, and even a table of contents. The result, however, had nothing that looked even remotely new or original. They were just clichéd excerpts extracted from a myriad of conservation literature available online, which was baffling, because intelligence is defined as “The ability to apply knowledge, to manipulate one’s environment, or to think abstractly”. This definition of intelligence did not appear anywhere in the (limited) experiment that I conducted. What I perceived was just a search engine seeking specified information online and ‘typing’ out results rather than presenting a ready manuscript and creating the impression of some kind of ‘thought process’ at play.

The other cosmetic illustration of intelligence of course is the absence of attribution to any source – an attractive feature which extends itself to the user through the allure of presenting this ‘work’ elsewhere as his or her own. To the casual observer, the document looks like a complete research proposal, but a closer observation from someone familiar with the topic reveals the lack of a logical framework that can be followed from the problem statement, through the hypothesis and methods that would give a result if it were all implemented on the ground in a ‘real world’ situation. There is something scary about this.

Our society shouldn’t be frightened of apparent threats posed by the capabilities of AI, which after all are only as powerful as those of its human programmers. What should scare us is the manner in which people we rely upon as ‘experts’ perceive it as some kind of breakthrough in human development perceptions. The fact that a newspaper, whose editors are supposed to be purveyors of writing excellence, can call the thoughtless regurgitations of ChatGPT “magnificent” is what should worry us because it implies that they wouldn’t be averse to using it as an editing tool. This strange fascination isn’t limited to Kenyan media, and major US publications have also spoken about it in similar tones, with the ‘New York Times’ seemingly enthralled with the bot’s ability to write essays. We live in an age when individual opinions are routinely suppressed by states, mobs, propaganda, religion, formal education systems, and a myriad of powerful forces. This suppression has led to the mass acceptance of ideas like carbon trading and cryptocurrencies that suffer and falter under any logical examination. Consequently, when highly-educated, highly-regarded, or capable humans start offering homage to an idea, we court the threat of an indolent majority treating those opinions as paradigms.

An example of this is the excitement elicited by a January 2023 paper published by Prof. Jonathan Choi of Minnesota University Law School and others entitled “ChatGPT goes to law school”. It reported that the now famous bot passed a law school exam consisting of multiple choice and essay questions, attaining a grade of C+. This was met with the customary excitement amongst the public, despite the consternation amongst teachers who felt that this was a plagiarism threat. What was invisible to the public is that this “pass” result just illustrates a well-known fact that the study of law necessarily contains a large component of reference to existing laws and precedents, all of which are archived on the internet. The pretty average grade attained indicates that the bot hit the skids when faced with interpretation questions. The fact that a “passing’ grade in a specialized field can be achieved out of empty ‘competence’ without any logical thought should be a sobering thought for scholars and philosophers in all fields of study around the world. If this continues, where will we find a philosophical and ethical direction that will guide the progress of human societies? Philosophy, logic, and ethics are necessarily experiential and human attributes that cannot be engineered, but rote learning has reduced our thinking to a level where engineering can be mistaken for intelligence.

Our (mis)education through this method has trained us to believe that our own thinking and experiences count for nothing. My lasting memory of this came from a writing class I took as a first-year undergraduate student. On an elective assignment, I chose to do an essay on livestock keeping, something I was very familiar with, and I wrote extensively about sheep, which are probably my favourite livestock species. Amongst the details I included was the average weights of the sheep at different ages and the lecturer gave me a demerit on that point with the comment “what’s your source?” Apparently, it was unacceptable to state such information in my essay about sheep I had reared and weighed myself without a “source” or reference. If I were to quote a source, it would not likely be about red Maasai sheep (which ours were) which are ‘unimproved’ livestock, generally frowned upon by animal production experts at the time. Even if this was available, my essay was about OUR sheep, not sheep in general. The key lesson I learned from this class is how vehemently contemporary ‘education’ is opposed to the thoughts and indeed the very existence of the individual.

Nearly three decades later, this violence has gotten far worse. If a student today chose to generate an essay for such a class using AI, it would certainly score very high marks because all of the ideas offered therein would have external sources, complete with references to existing literature and data. Nothing would be original. In the years since then, I have taught classes of supervised students at a number of universities around the world at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. My tests and assignments never sought to have students find and regurgitate material because I would seek the material myself and present it to them seeking their philosophies and justifications for the same. The work I expected from them would never be created by AI, so educators worried about AI use amongst students today should re-examine their methods rather than seek to impose ‘bans’ on its use that are impossible to enforce.

The concerns that we should address urgently remain. Universities are supposed to be centers of education and innovation, so if merit can be scored merely by reference without innovation, where will societal progress emerge from? Advanced-level studies are increasingly defined not by the quality of outputs, but by how small the silo is into which they can compartmentalize a subject. This increases the quantitative rather than qualitative output of education. In practice, we have numerous publications whose findings cannot stand on their own or find relevance outside a certain circle of authors and reviewers. This isn’t regarded as a problem, because publication has become an objective in itself and academic prowess has for the last few decades been measured by quantity rather than content of publications. In the same vein, contemporary human progress has seemed to be ‘rapid’ because we now perceive it quantitatively through technological advances, even as other spheres remain stagnant or even regress. History tells us that boundaries didn’t really exist between the arts, science, communication, etc. In the ancient world, famous scholars like Leonardo Da Vinci were outstanding artists and scientists. In contemporary times, we have examples like Chiekh Anta Diop the Senegalese polymath, and Jonathan Kingdon, the naturalist whose artistic skills made him an authority amongst mammologists and many others.

The most recent peak of the ‘noise’ around ChatGPT was probably a stunt by Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a member of the US congress who recently gave an AI-generated speech to the house on 26th January 2023 and members didn’t realise until he said so. The fact that Rep. Auchincloss’s speech didn’t elicit much attention for its content is because it was empty. AI doesn’t generate logic that can be supported or opposed on its own merit; it closely mirrors the majority of speeches typically given in legislatures around the world. It is more a reflection of the decline in quality of our socio-political discourse around the world than the quality of the artificially-compiled (not generated) content.  Many members probably detected words and phrases that they’d heard before. ‘The Verge’ (an online publication) described it as “dull and anodyne as you might expect for a political speech filtered through an AI system based on probabilistic averages”. This is not the sort of material that can engender genuine human progress.

The jury is still out on AI and the excitement is still at a fever pitch, with global tech giants Baidu and Google rushing to develop apps to rival the apparent success of ChatGPT. However, in the long run, artificial intelligence may help us in ways we never envisioned. It may turn out to be the best tool at our disposal to identify AI (actual indolence). Our youth are typically adept at using digital tools in ways that aren’t even envisioned by the developers. If we do that with AI and let our natural intelligence guide us accordingly, then Africa will be just fine.

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This article was first published by The Pan African Review.