On a March afternoon, as gray clouds gathered overhead, Boniface Mwangi
procrastinated outside the walled Kariokor Market, in Nairobi, scrolling
through text messages on his iPhone. Mwangi is thirty-four years old
and a well-known political activist whose tactics frequently put him at
the center of attention. On that day, however, he was entering the
narrow, crowded alleys of the market not to protest government
corruption—his signature issue—but to campaign for a seat in parliament,
and he was nervous.
“When you protest, you want the government to do something, but now they
expect me to do something for them,” Mwangi said, of the potential voters
inside the market. “It’s no longer the government to blame but you who
will be responsible for the mess. It’s a very different feeling.”
Mwangi finally silenced his phone and tucked it into the pocket of his
jeans. Then, clutching a sheaf of yellow flyers with his picture on
them, he plunged through a rusty metal doorway and into the market.
Mwangi started out as a photojournalist for a Kenyan newspaper, where he
earned a reputation for fearlessness and simple, unpretentious frames.
His career was changed, as so much in Kenya was, by the 2007 national
election, in which the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, a member of the Kikuyu
tribe, was pitted against Raila Odinga, a Luo. On December 30th, Kibaki
was declared the victor—it was a surprise, and Odinga rejected the
result, claiming fraud. What followed was two months of violence that
left almost fourteen hundred people dead, as politically motivated tribal
violence tore through the Great Rift Valley and the capital.
During the violence, Mwangi took his camera into Nairobi’s slums, where
the intercommunal fighting and the police crackdown were most brutal.
Day after day, he captured images of the beatings, lynchings, and
murderous rage incited by politicians.
International pressure eventually forced the candidates into a
power-sharing government, and the killings ceased. Mwangi’s editors
ordered him to get back to work taking regular news photographs of the
very leaders whom Mwangi blamed for the maimings and killings. It was as
if they bore no responsibility. In June, 2009, during Madaraka Day, a
celebration of the anniversary of Kenya’s self-rule, he heckled
President Kibaki from the stadium stand; he was swiftly and roughly
arrested. In that moment, Mwangi switched from observer to activist.
Independently at first, and then with the support of politically engaged
artists, musicians, and activists, Mwangi built his second career as a
protester and organizer. He used social media to rally supporters and
publicize protests. In 2011, he founded PAWA 254, an artists’ and
activists’ collective and workspace where he would conceive and plan his
protests.
Broad-shouldered and restless, Mwangi speaks quickly and has a deep,
explosive laugh and a flair for witty stunts. He once filled the streets
of Nairobi with giant polystyrene babies, to ridicule Kenya’s political
immaturity, and another time with donkeys, to symbolize the Kenyan
people’s exhaustion with the corruption in their country. While the
focus of his activism is corruption and greed, he also once worked to
prevent a primary-school playground from being turned into a parking lot
for a hotel owned by a politician, and once joined a march supporting a
woman’s right to wear whatever she chooses, wearing a dress himself. His
confrontational approach has earned him death threats but it has also
brought him fans, often young, social-media-using urbanites. “The things
I said outside parliament,” Mwangi told me. “I want to say them inside.”
Mwangi grew up in Starehe, a constituency in central Nairobi that
encompasses both the downtown business district and slums. That day in
March, as he entered the Kariokor market, just north of the city center,
he shook hands with three men who were watching as a fourth plucked a
chicken over a plastic basin, and gave them flyers. He then approached a
market stall and workshop where leather shoes were sold,
plastic-wrapped, for fifteen dollars a pair.
“Eh, Mwangi! Selfie?” one of the shoemakers shouted, brandishing a
smartphone. His name was Austin Wandera and he wore greasy jeans
patched with squares of rubber from an inner tube. “I need selfie with
mheshimiwa,” he said, using the Swahili honorific for parliamentarians.
Mwangi gamely posed, bumped fists with Wandera, and moved on. Mwangi’s
assistant, Patrick Karanja, stuck around and collected Wandera’s name
and phone number, which was added to the thousands of others on the
ever-growing WhatsApp and SMS distribution lists that Mwangi uses to
rally support. “Social media, for me, is like my radio station,” he
said.
Social media enabled Mwangi’s protests, which he would brand and
advertise on Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp—all of which are hugely
popular in Kenya. His Facebook
page has two hundred and
fifty-four thousand likes; his Twitter
feed has six hundred and sixty-four
thousand followers. He solicits donations from supporters to fund his
campaign. One day, he received both a ten-cent donation and a
six-hundred-and-eighty dollar donation, sent via M-Pesa, Kenya’s
mobile-money service. Social media is also practical. Mwangi says that
he doesn’t have the money to plaster Starehe with posters or to pay
people to come to a rally. Tweeting is cheap.
But hundreds of thousands of online supporters often translate into
merely hundreds of street protesters, and he is certain to face the same
challenge on election day, on August 8th. Kenya’s politics are often
transactional, in a literal sense. Voters expect cash payments of a
couple of dollars from campaigning politicians, knowing that it may well
be the only thing they will ever get from their representatives;
candidates hope the handouts will be an investment in their future
ability to enrich themselves once in office. (Kenya’s M.P.s are among
the best paid in the world, with some taking home around $12,700 a
month,
while the average urban Kenyan earns closer to ninety dollars monthly.
Scandals involving the disappearance of government money are so common
that no one pays much attention to them.) Kwamchetsi Makokha, a
newspaper columnist, says that this tradition is not really vote buying,
because handouts don’t guarantee votes, but is a symptom of Kenya’s
cynical politics. “We are swimming in a cesspool of dishonesty: the
electorate is dishonest, the candidates are dishonest, and we all figure
out a way of getting round each other,” he said. In other words,
candidates lie about what they will do for voters, and voters lie about
whom they will vote for.
As the afternoon downpour began in earnest at the market, I talked to a
woman named Jassy Muli, over the hammering of raindrops on tin rooves.
Muli is twenty-eight years old, with thick braids and rectangular
spectacles, and runs an M-Pesa kiosk in the market. She also sells fizzy
drinks from a stall with a wire cage for a window. One night last year,
a driver lost control of his car and smashed through the brick wall at
the back of her stall. Muli was furious that the local M.P. at the time,
a career politician in his mid-sixties, didn’t do anything. “The shop
was down. No one help us. We struggled. No one come,” she said. The only
time she recalled seeing her M.P. was just before the last elections,
four years ago, when he came looking for votes. Politicians? “They do
for themselves,” she told me.
At this inauspicious moment, Mwangi appeared. “I’m here to ask for your
vote,” he said, leaning in solicitously. They spoke about her concerns,
including the car-crash incident, and he promised a metal barrier on the
roadside to protect her shop.
“Ever since the current M.P. was elected, he has done nothing,” Muli
complained.
“Then elect me so I can go and be your voice,” Mwangi said. “I am
Boniface,” he added, holding out a hand to say goodbye.
“Yes, I know you,” Muli replied, looking just a little starstruck.
The odds are against Mwangi, as he challenges established political
machines. Mwangi launched his political party, Ukweli (meaning “truth”),
in mid-March, and he intends to run thirteen candidates for national and
county assemblies. The party headquarters, in downtown Nairobi, still
smelled of fresh paint when I visited. A transcript of Martin Luther
King, Jr.,’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech hung by a window, and there was a
framed photograph of Muhammad Ali, standing triumphant over Sonny
Liston, above Mwangi’s desk.
Win or lose, Makokha, the columnist, told me, Mwangi’s candidacy is
important. “He is brave in the sense that he tries things even if they
are not going to work,” Makokha said. “What Boniface is trying to do is
part of a continuing struggle for social change, and whether he succeeds
this time or not I don’t think he is going to stop.”
Experience has taught Kenyans to see politics as a crooked business, and
they are justifiably skeptical of politicians and those aspiring to
become politicians. “When he’s inside parliament, he’s done,” Francis
Ngugi, an Uber driver in his forties, told me. “As an activist, he’s a
good guy. But as an M.P., he will be as greedy as the others. Just you
wait. He should have stayed shouting from the outside.”
Mwangi has heard this before. “People who have integrity are afraid of
going into politics. Most of my ardent supporters pray that I fail. They
worry the system is so corrupt that I’ll be changed,” he said. “But I
say, what if I succeed?”