‘It Is Not Feminism If It Is Not Political’
The co-founder and executive director of feminist movement, Feminists in Kenya, discusses convening Kenya’s anti-femicide protests of January 2024 and what needs to happen next.
‘We are tired of being unsafe in our own country,’ Nancy Houston, the co-founder and executive director of Feminists in Kenya, told me on an erratic zoom call a few weeks ago. She was in Nairobi, where Feminists in Kenya is headquartered, and I was in Lagos. Feminists in Kenya is a feminist movement and one of the conveners of the anti-femicide protests that took place across Kenya earlier this year in January. I had followed the protests and had reached out to Houston, wanting to know more about the situation on the ground. We had been trying to have this conversation for some time and had needed to reschedule our call at least once. Finally, we were speaking: it was late March, only a few days since Kenya, Nigeria and several other African countries reported severe internet downtime following damages to undersea telecoms cables that serve our countries. Incidentally, the internet, specifically the impact of social media on African feminist movements, was among what I planned to discuss with Houston. From Nigeria’s 2018 #MarketMarch protests to Namibia’s #ShutItAllDown of 2020, social media had, in recent years, come across as a unique boon to feminist protests. Platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and the unique ability to coordinate discussions and thus communities around hashtags, had transformed the internet for activists generally. Such advantages meant that through the internet, Houston explained, ‘we’ve gotten so many opportunities…and we’ve been able to create alliances with multiple feminists.’ But with social media platforms increasingly prioritizing monetization and promoting algorithmic over organic curation, was social media becoming dangerous for activists? ‘I think the internet for us has been a double-edged sword,’ Houston said. Additionally, ‘there is a form of right-wing digital content that is actually spreading so fast. And this content is also radicalizing a lot of men who exist online. So, it’s like the patriarchal violence that exists offline, has moved online as well.’
Together with Kenyan human rights lawyer, Vivian Ouya, Houston founded Feminists in Kenya in 2019 following the protest, #TotalShutdownKenya. That protest was also anti-femicide, which left me with several questions: did #TotalShutdownKenya not achieve its goals? What had happened since then? Did the need for the January 2024 protests suggest that femicide was on the rise or that social media-enabled activism was ineffective? In discussing these questions, I wanted to understand more about feminist organizing in Kenya: the conditions in with feminists organized; how organizations like Feminists in Kenya were staying afloat; what funding and collaborations looked like. The result was a conversation in which Houston not only shared how Kenya’s feminist landscape has evolved since #TotakShutdownKenya, but also highlighted the unique challenges confronting Kenya’s feminist movements: ‘the more we grew,’ she explained, ‘the more we felt like we were being pushed to organize in a certain NGO-ized way.’ Likewise, she outlined the emergent opportunities such feminists are seizing. ‘[T]he resilience of Black feminist activists who are on the front line is highly valuable,’ she said. ‘They are waking up, and they are imagining alternative realities for African women. And they're saying that this can't be it for us, what else is there for us as African women?’
Our conversation continues below and has been edited for brevity and clarity...
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