True African History

Maybe you should stop reading and first watch this "Bangladesh Protests: politics is a negotiation, not a zero-sum game", then come back.

Basically, Shahid Bolsen (the person in the video above) is saying that protesters in Bangladesh or Kenya should stop protesting because there is a great danger that their protests will be hijacked by outsiders (basically the USA / the West) and the final outcome has the potential to completely go out of control and end up in a very bad outcome (think of Sudan or Egypt).

To paraphrase, he suggests that we need definite political goals and once those goals are achieved, we need to stop. For example, in Kenya, the protests of July 2024 achieved their goal of having Kenya's 2024 finance bill revoked. Even though the people have legitimate grievances against the government, Shahid suggests that protesting should stop right now to avoid their infiltration by the West. In my view this is fair enough but it is defeatist.

Kenya is essentially a satrapy and has never been free. The current Kenyan president (Mr. Ruto) is an absolute darling of the global american empire (GAE). The entire Kenyan political class and ruling elite is corrupt through and through. The average man on the street in Kenya therefore has no hope that things will ever get better. He/she has seen their lives progressively get worse and worse with no end in sight. There is a lot of resentment which undoubtedly provided a lot of the energy behind these recent protests to the extent that the protesters in Kenya are now calling for the removal of Mr. Ruto and his entire government. They feel that at last they get to exercise real political power and get immediate feedback from the system. And yet we are asking these people to stop.

On the other hand, I do agree with Shahid Bolsen that the way things have played out in Kenya is suspicious and appears to be textbook GAE interventionism: you have a legitimate popular uprising that is brutally put down, which only fuels the uprising, and then agents of the GAE infiltrate it and use it as they please. I do get a feeling that this is or may be happening although to be honest with you things are very foggy from my point of view. I feel the people's energy and I know their grievances are legitimate. However, I also know that Kenya is 100% unfree and there is no way it could be allowed to become free. Therefore, the longer that these protests go on, the more certain I am that they will be subverted.

There is no question that a great evil is in control of Kenya and Africa at large. This evil must be fought. Personally, I am not yet sure how this evil can be effectively fought. However, I do think that we must know what we are fighting. For instance, we are not fighting for the restoration of democracy, whatever that means, and it is disturbing that so many of the protesters in Kenya think in and believe in "democracy", which is an idea that originated with and is championed by the enemy. So we have a strange and complicated situation where the people are oppressed and want to fight for change, the government is tyrannical and those within it want to hold on at any cost, and the ultimate puppet master is absolutely unwilling to give any concessions. What can be done? How do you get out of this?

Since I am already writing about this, I must bring up this twitter thread written by Richard Poe that explores the idea that the 2007/2008 post election violence in Kenya was actually a "color revolution". I was shocked at how everything in that thread was new to me. This speaks to the fogginess I mentioned a few paragraphs ago in that I am quite unsure about the nature of Kenya's true rulers. I know the government is a puppet but the exact identity of the puppet master eludes me. Anyway, so Richard Poe in that thread basically says that the puppet master is the British government, who are the immediate former colonial masters of Kenya. Basically, if the story is to be believed, the British through their agent Julian Assange sought to manipulate the Kenyan presidential elections in 2007 so that their preferred candidate, Raila Odinga, would emerge victorious. When that did not happen, the British then instigated and/or took over the post election violence that followed to force issues, which resulted in their man Raila being part of the grand coalition government that was then formed.

As a Kenyan this is fascinating (and sad!). I can believe that foreign powers were involved in 2007/2008 in Kenya. Indeed at that time Kenyans would be heard boasting of how Kenya is so important that it cannot be let to slide into mass violence and general anarchy so some form of international intervention did happen. The part that is not easily believable is that Richard Poe says the British did all that to ensure that Mwai Kibaki was not re-elected in 2007 because he was the preferred candidate of... the Americans. The reason why this part is hard to believe for me is that I believe the Americans and British are one and the same and it is unlikely that they would publicly fight over control in Kenya like Mr. Poe suggests. In fact, in his (Richard Poe's) latest book - which is titled "How the British Invented Communism (And Blamed It on the Jews)" - he makes the case that British actually control everything and at the very least have significant power and influence in the USA. I don't fully buy the claims made in this book, though I must say it is very interesting and you should read it. I brought up the book to make two points. The first point is to show that the British and the USA are literally the same entity and so it would be weird if they fought over Kenya in a colour revolution. Secondly, I wonder if Mr. Poe's thread was just a tool to help sell the book some more.

Whatever the case may be, it is clear to me that something sinister backed by the GAE did happen in Kenya in 2007/2008. Could something similarly sinister be happening in Kenya in 2024? I mean, in WhatsApp and Telegram groups there were reports of an American special forces aeroplane circling Nairobi during the protests. So surely something is happening, and surely the ultimate losers will be the people of Kenya. Like it or not, "leaderless" popular revolutions always fail. For real change you'd need a new or different elite to back the people in throwing out the current elite. This is not happening in Kenya right now and so the final outcome will certainly not be anything that the average Kenyan hoped for.

Again, I ask: how do we get out of this? What can be done?