Kenya’s Season of Protests

(1) All sovereign power belongs to the people of Kenya and shall be exercised only in accordance with this Constitution.

(2) The people may exercise their sovereign power either directly or through their democratically elected representatives.

—The Constitution of Kenya

On my first protest on 25 June 2024, some of the protesters who were streets ahead of me stormed through the barricades the police had set up and managed to occupy Parliament, setting fire to a section of the buildings. The report reached us through a wave of disinformation, ambulance sirens, running bursts to evade the armoured water cannon truck, live rounds fired by the police, and clouds of tear gas. My mother called me in the middle of the chaos as she’d been following the protests from the news as protesters occupied Parliament. ‘Please, please, don’t go to Parliament,’ she pleaded as she had my live location. ‘They are shooting people!’ We couldn’t speak for long, but I promised her I wouldn’t. I almost immediately reneged on this promise as my friends and I walked from Kenyatta Avenue to Cardinal Otunga Street near Parliament Road, where we stopped because of sounds of gunfire.