Dear Gen Z,

Please allow us to start off this epistle by referring to you by your proper epithet at this monumental juncture in our country’s history: our leaders. Yes, you are our leaders, and we write to you this love letter to express our love ❤️, solidarity ✊🏿 and pure admiration 🤗.

We know we are writing to you at a difficult time when your hearts are heavy, when the mortal remains of two of your comrades, the courageous martyrs of your struggle Rex Kanyike Maasai and Evans Kiratu lie lifeless in a morgue after Rex was shot by a murderous agent of the state and Evans succumbed to fatal injuries sustained after being shot at using a teargas canister by yet another marauding policeman, their only crime being that they loved Kenya so much. Kenya, unfortunately, did not love Rex Kanyike Maasai and Evans Kiratu back with the same intensity. We pray for their souls and comfort their loved ones. We mustn’t forget Rex Kanyike Maasai and Evans Kiratu. They join a long list of those Kenya has devoured.

We also know our timing couldn’t be worse because you must be battled-tired, having spent the better part (if not the whole) of Saturday 22 June 2024 agitating (via a virtual rally attended by tens of thousands of Kenyans and friends of Kenya) for the release of your compadre Billy Simani alias Crazy Nairobian, who was being held incommunicado by the state. Billy, like tens of other cadres within your ranks who took the risk to deploy their social media capital to mobilise for the #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests (like Dr. Austin Omondi of @MedicsforKenya who was abducted on Sunday then released after you applied pressure, and Shadrack Kiprono who was kidnapped on Sunday and is still missing), was paying the price for loving Kenya. Unfortunately, as you may all have known by now, loving Kenya can be a spectacularly troublesome affair. 

In fact, we could have simply shut our big mouths and allowed you to focus on the task(s) ahead, the planning of an action-packed week where you seek to up the ante in your clamour to #RejectFinanceBill2024. We know that because some of you love Kenya so much and have chosen to put their very lives on the line, that some of you and your older comrades have since gone underground, either fearing for their lives or attempting to avert the growing number of abductions by the state and its agents, a sign of creeping repression akin to the Daniel arap Moi dictatorship. 

But please indulge us, if you may, our dear leaders ✊🏿.

First off, please allow us to restate the obvious: that no matter what anyone says or does, never forget that you are and will remain on the right side of history. You, our leaders, are following in the long tradition of youth movements across the breadth of history, since antiquity, which upset the thieving, oppressive and complacent status quo and took back their countries and societies.

The killing of your comrades Rex Kanyile Maasai and Evans Kiratu are reminiscent of the killing of Hector Pieterson (12) in Soweto in 1976, in what became The June 16 Soweto Youth Uprising. 

Protesting against the South African Apartheid government’s Bantu Education Act (the trigger is always a law, it seems) which sought to make English and Afrikaans (the oppressor’s language) compulsory in schools – among other anti-Black and anti-African legislation – the protest was sparked when pupils at the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto boycotted class on 30 April 1976. A month and a half later, the rest of Soweto joined in, culminating in a march on June 16, in which the police opened fire. The official death toll was 23, but after the protests spread across South Africa for weeks, the death toll was estimated to be over 500 school children. South Africa changed forever. 

It is those protests that gave the anti-apartheid movement new impetus, with those school children and their comrades joining various liberation movements at home and in exile.

Closer home, a year earlier in 1975, University of Nairobi students stood up to the state as they mourned JM Kariuki, a Jomo Kenyatta ally-turned-critic who was gruesomely murdered by suspected state security agents, his body dumped on the fringes of Ngong Forest. It is out of those JM-related protests that a new breed of youthful patriots was born (two second liberation stalwarts, Wanyiri Kihoro and his future wife Wanjiru Kihoro, actually met during those protests).  

Let us not even start with the history of Kenya’s infamous Second Liberation, which was literally powered by the Young Turks (some of whom have since become old and now form part of the political establishment you are rising against, so we will spare you the agony of reading their names in print) – a group of young professionals, politicos and members of the intelligentsia who were a bit older than your generation at the time, but who risked everything – a lot of them were detained without trial in dictator Daniel arap Moi’s Nyayo House Torture Chambers; a bunch fled Kenya and either made something of themselves or were depressed to death; while most lost jobs, ended up with broken families and soured marriages, among other devastations. But in the end, it is these young men and women who faced Moi and reclaimed the motherland.

All of this to say that with #RejectFinanceBill2024, you and your generation have essentially crossed the rubicon, and are in fact heeding the timeless and universal clarion call by Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquan psychiatrist, philosopher and Marxist who insisted, and is now beseeching you, that ‘‘Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.’’ 

Just like the generation of South Africans which was born post-1994 (when Nelson Mandela became president and there was a temptation to imagine the liberation struggle was over) was perceived to be apolitical and ignorant of the liberation struggle shocked its critics by leading the #FeesMustFall uprising, seeking to curtail tuition fee increment in South African universities; or just like the tens of thousands of young Nigerians better known as the ‘‘Soro Soke’’ (speak up) generation led the #EndSARS protests against police brutality when hope was hard to come by in their country; by leading the #RejectFinanceBill2024 movement, you and your generation are rising from what Fanon termed ‘‘relative obscurity’’, where you were deemed agnostic to politics, and are now, in Fanon’s thinking, ‘‘discovering your mission’’ (at least we hope so), which mission you must then either fulfil or betray (we hope you don’t betray it, but no pressure 😅).

We say all of this to reiterate that this is not a fleeting moment, to affirm to you that you are not hallucinating or being delusional by picturing how big this moment is, this moment of yours, this moment you have and are creating for yourselves and for our country. That indeed, as we imagine you would say, nyinyi ndio hao wasee, because indeed you are the ones you have been waiting for. 

All said and done, we’ve got only one thing for you: ❤️.

Till next time ✌🏿 (aka tomorrow ✊🏿).