Balancing Act: Operating Between Privilege & Responsibility

from Aileen Waitaaga Kimuhu

Originally published on The Nurubian · Original Publication Date: Aug 5, 2024

I have complicated feelings. After all, I am a human being.

These feelings stem from a simple question: How should I use my voice? or perhaps more accurately, how should I use my resources?

You see, I don't know if I'm the one who should be telling this story - or that my voice is the one that needs to be platformed right now. This is because I am privileged in Kenya. And while my privilege does not spare me from the corruption and greed of our government, I can't deny that my privilege has been enabled by that same government time and time again. Literally, because my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were, and have been civil servants; moving from administrators to bureaucrats. Literally, because when the government retaliates against protestors, they always stop just shy of my neighbourhood (which is, at least, middle class). And figuratively, because the way the Kenyan state has been set up - to benefit citizens from specific ethnic communities structurally - has protected the resources these opportunities allowed our family to amass. Enough for both my parents to have university degrees, and enough for me and my brother to earn ours. So while I may not occupy the political class who bear the brunt of Kenyans' frustrations, I do feel guilty - tainted almost. Because, as, arguably, a beneficiary of the Kenyan state, I don't know if I should be speaking up right now. After all, in this zero-sum game that passes for Kenya, my privileges are at someone else's expense.

This hasn't stopped me from advocating, organising and mobilising. My anxieties have not stopped me from seeing through the government's attempts to break these protests along class lines - with their emphasis on property destruction and their willingness to equate a broken building to a dead body and their attempt to delegitimise our concerns by pointing out that we have "iPhones, arrive and leave in Ubers and leave to eat KFC." If anything, it has fuelled these activities even more. As the very education and resources that allow me to critique the state, and see through my privilege; will be the very resources I will put towards sharing these privileges with others so that they may become the rights we are owed. These resources go beyond the financial or political but to the temporal. For example, when the President hosted his Twitter (X) space town hall, in the middle of a workday; only those with the time and money (to buy data) could attend. As a result 156,000 people watched it live, out of a nation of 56 million. And though the media would have reported on the sad performance as, and after, it happened, there's a difference between, for example, reporting on his failures to respond to the accusations levelled against his feat, and praising him for coming to the table. Indeed, in the recent protests, time has become yet, another, privilege withheld by the Kenyan state.

So again, we return to what role can we with resources play? Given that Kenya is a nation of 10 millionaires and 10 million beggars (JM Kariuki, 1975), what can those of us in between do? How do we manage these anxieties as we work towards transforming privilege into right? How do we balance our ability to access resources, against the hierarchy this reproduces in our social organisation? And how do we stop these hierarchies from being reproduced in our movement that is leaderless and tribeless? Thinking a little big picture, how do we ensure that we move beyond the Masters' tools - knowing that they can never dismantle the master's house?

Yeah, I have nothing but questions, anxieties, and actions - my constant companions in recent years.