On the 14th of March 2015, I attended a meeting of activists from Mathare, one of
Nairobi’s largest informal settlements. I had been invited to join by one of my informants,
himself a resident of Mathare and active with a small youth group there, whom I had interviewed on the previous day. With the help of a Kenyan PhD student at York University in Canada, a number of activists from Mathare had been engaging in efforts to set up a community forum to address human rights violations in Mathare86; this meeting was part of those efforts and it sought
to refine a concept note on the forum’s structure and activities. I met Mugambi at the petrol station by the main road leading into Mathare; from there, we moved to a small, local joint serving tea, fries and sodas, where the remaining participants were waiting. We climbed a narrow set of worn-off stairs to the first floor, to a windowless room, made smaller by the short ceiling and the faint, yellow light coming from the only lightbulb in the room. Three narrow benches lined the walls, their colour impossible to tell in the semi-dark (Ichim, personal fieldnotes). This space, with its restrictions, was not unusual among those that grassroots
defenders used for their work. A few weeks earlier, another one of my informants had shown me the office space of a different youth group in Mathare. Located in a tiny structure made of
corrugated iron-sheets, and containing two old, broken armchairs and a few other random objects left in disarray (a broom, a few yellow plastic containers typically used to store water in places like Mathare, and an amputated chair), the office seemed like a shed – a space for storing disposables - more than a meeting space.
85 The “subaltern” has become a key concept in post-colonial literature to investigate phenomena of oppression and
marginalization theoretically (Gramsci and Forgacs, 2000; Spivak et al., 2013). Here, I borrow the term from one of my interviewees, whom I quote later in the text.
86 This later became Mathare Social Justice Centre. See http://www.matharesocialjustice.org (last accessed on 10
The contrast between professional activists and those from the grassroots is not limited to the spaces – formal and informal – from which they work. As is the case with their professional counterparts, grassroots defenders’ outward appearance, methodologies of and possibilities for activism also function as markers of their status as a distinct category within Kenya’s landscapes of activism. When I had met Mugambi for our interview the previous day, he was wearing a pair of worn-out blue jeans, that looked like they had long exceeded their shelf-life. From underneath the orange jumper, threatening to unravel under the weight of holes, a crumpled light-blue shirt looked like it had nowhere to belong. The right hand-side bottom of his small, colour-faded backpack was poked by a hole through which a corner of his notebook peeped out. His long, rasta hair, gathered under a colourful, thick hat, looked dangerously heavy for his small, thin frame. Like other young activists from Nairobi’s informal settlements that I had met throughout my fieldwork, paradoxically, Mugambi’s activism had been spurred on by a past that had begun with his involvement in crime. Coming from a poor family, he left school in form three, and became a criminal – stealing from passers-by. In 2006 he was arrested, but he was acquitted two years later, under a constitutional clause that stipulates that no one shall be arrested for longer than 24 hours without being charged. Mugambi found out in prison about this clause, realized that it applied to his case, requested different counsel, and was able to get out shortly after. This was Mugambi’s first encounter with human rights, and, according to him, the moment when he realized the importance of education. Subsequently he went back to school, and in 2011, started doing art and acrobatics together with other young people from Mathare, which they combined with garbage collection and other environmental activities. A small office space and their activities were funded in the first year through a USAID grant managed by a reputable Kenyan professional activist; during that time, they worked on land reform in Mathare, gender-based violence, and extra-judicial executions. When that money ran out, Mugambi went back to his parents’ place in the slums, divided one of their two small rooms in two, and started using half as an office space. But the local police came not long after, confiscated his documents, and
assaulted him – police harassment was an ongoing issue for Mugambi’s work and livelihood in Mathare; during our interview, he told me that just a day earlier the police had come and shot his dog in the leg. At the time of our interview, in March 2015, Mugambi supported himself through
vibarua. The term translates from Swahili into English as “labourers”, but informally it has come
early in the morning and waiting at the edge of the road for someone to pass by and give them work87; on a good day, Mugambi will earn 500 Kenyan Shillings (KSH) (about £3), but the
average nears more to 300 KSH; on a bad day, it can be as little as 100 KSH. At the end of the month, he saves around 2000 KSH (the equivalent of about £13), a bit over half his rent. Friends will usually help him cover the rest.
Mugambi’s story, and especially his current situation, the struggle to eke out a meagre living and make ends meet from one day to another, is in no way unique. I have come across the same patterns in other of my informants’ stories, both defenders living and working in Nairobi’s socio-economically marginalized spaces, and those from rural or small town centres beyond the boundaries of the capital. Unlike their professional colleagues, these defenders work on issues intensely “close to home” - usually human rights violations very local in nature; something that happened to a family member, or a neighbor, or a member or group that is tightly knit in the same geographical and moral community. Their familiarity with the nature of human rights violations “on the ground” makes them reliable sources of information for their professional counterparts. The latter’s busy work schedules typically allow them little time to travel to “the ground”, unless they have a specific job description that includes an investigative component. Often, professionals rely on defenders on the ground for mobilization for events (Interview with protection professional, 4 May 2014, Nairobi), information for human rights reports (Interview with grassroots defender from outside of Nairobi, 4 March 2014), and liaising between them and victims of human rights violations for cases that they can act on. However, defenders from the grassroots are rarely, if ever paid for this work, and often, they have to cover expenses from their own, meagre resources. For example, to report human rights violations to professional
organisations, citizens and defenders from the other parts of Nairobi must travel long distances, in traffic, and at a cost that, to them, can be prohibitive. Even by matatus – the ubiquitous
minibuses that make up much of Nairobi’s public transport system – for that distance, the cost of a journey can reach 200 KSH both ways – about £1.60, which for people with very little or no income is very high. At the same time, professional organisations receive an overwhelming
87 I have seen this in my own and other middle-class neighbourhoods in Nairobi. Usually women, sitting patiently
for hours by a shopping centre or a roundabout; occasionally, they will be lucky to be offered a small job – like laundry or cleaning – by a resident of these neighbourhoods (Ichim, personal fieldnotes).
number of reports of human rights violations. The long-term nature of investigating these violations to assess cause, responsibility and means of redress, coupled with the bureaucratic nature of human rights work in professional organisations and insufficient numbers of staff, means that they are able to take on a very small number of cases from those reported to them. In turn, this creates the perception among grassroots defenders that professional organisations are unresponsive. This perception is further strengthened by their knowledge (and corresponding expectations) that the staff of professional organisations are paid for their work, in addition to receiving other benefits, such as health insurance and pension schemes.
Social markers such as poverty, lack of access to resources, an inadequate educational background, unsystematic, ad-hoc human rights work that is geared towards the immediate rather than long-term projects in the halls of Geneva and Brussels, define grassroots defenders not only as a distinct group within the human rights community in Kenya, but also, importantly, as one that is subordinated to that of the professionals. Within Kenya’s class-based human rights community, defenders from the grassroots have become what one of my interviewees, a high- ranking staff in a top Kenyan human rights organisation, has called a “subaltern” category. In both outlook and methodologies for work, today’s grassroots defenders mirror those activists who, back in the 90s and 2000s, fell through the cracks of the new system for lacking the
professional credentials of their middle-class, better educated, colleagues. Concepts such as “the struggle” and “comrades”, which defined the left-leaning underground movements of the 80s, and which have long disappeared from the lexicon of the majority of professional human rights activists, pervade the grassroots’ human rights vocabulary. This is at once an oblique critique of the present – a rejection of the NGO model as the embodiment of a neo-liberal world that has eluded them and that history from the present, and it reflects an intentional affiliation with that history as a critical factor in their subjectivity as human rights defenders.
The hierarchy between professional defenders and grassroots defenders is especially apparent in the subtle changes in the meanings attached to the term “activist” in Kenya in recent years. Within closed circles, many professionals find that the term “activist”, discredited post- Kibaki, defines grassroots defenders better than the term “defender”. This categorisation and its subtle meanings in the present only make sense within the history of activism in Kenya. On the
one hand, the term activist, once a badge of honour, was discredited in the public eye as a result of Kibaki’s credibility with the public post-2002 and the ensuing traction that his hostile remarks towards activists achieved with the public (Interview with human rights professional, 20 August 2014)88. There was also a more insidious development, however, which took place within civil
society. When, after Kibaki’s ascension to power in 2002, the state formally opened up spaces for engagement with civil society, and those who were still proponents of earlier, more radical, methodologies of activism became excluded from the new structures, the latter became relegated to the category of “activists”. Meanwhile, the former better defined themselves through the titles of their positions within professional organisations, and, later, through the term “defender”, because of its professional connotations, when it became known in Kenya. Often, these two categories overlap with “the grassroots” and “the professionals” as distinct categories of activism, on opposite sides of the hierarchical class divide in Kenya:
“It [the term activist] has been turned into a word associated with a subaltern culture. Those who struggle to eke out a living and make noise, they come to you, you give them 10 shillings, they go to someone else they give them 10 shillings, etc.”(…) "The activist element has become the subaltern. It is associated with the so-called rowdy, noisy, less educated human rights workers, that you will find coalescing around, for example, Bunge La Mwananchi, people doing things from the stomach most of the time, the other ones [who] combine a little bit of the gut feeling with thinking about it a little bit. Activism has then come to be something associated with those ones who do not have access to the boardrooms" (Interview with human rights professional, 8 January 2015).
Although, theoretically, the term defender covers both categories, and nowadays it is employed as such in public and often private spaces, nevertheless, internally, both terms continue to be used, with nuances and meanings attached that are informed by the changes in human rights
88 In the immediate post-2002 years, Kibaki enjoyed a high degree of public confidence, at least in part due to the
fact that his administration co-opted former activists. As a result, when activists who did not join politics criticized the excesses of Kibaki’s administration, his critical remarks had credibility with the public (Murunga and Nasong’o, 2006).
activism in Kenya in the past couple of decades. As such, their usage also expresses the kinds of inclusions and exclusions that the professionalization of the movement has engendered.
Within this framework, much as the markers that define the grassroots as a distinct group of activists, and I have mentioned some of them above, are all too real, the meanings of the category itself as they emerge through the practice of protection must also be interrogated. Here, I wish to do so through analysing the launch of a report on human rights defenders in one of Nairobi’s informal settlements. Specifically, I investigate how, in the practice of protection (broadly defined), grassroots defenders transition from a marginalized group that needs attention, to a group that ends up counting more as a referent for the relationship between professionals and the donors, without, at the same time, being part of that relationship.