Protesters stand outside Parliament Buildings in Nairobi on June 25, 2026 after laying wreaths during the second anniversary of the 2024 anti-Finance Bill protests.
Yesterday’s memorial protest was not exactly like June 25, 2024, but the fundamentals remain unchanged: The youth are the most powerful and dangerous (to the corrupt elite) force in Kenyan politics today. It is not because the youth are many, or clever or even brave. They are all that, but they have a superpower that the rest of us quite plainly don’t. But let me tell this the right way, like a veteran.
In 1676, something happened in Virginia that shook the foundations of power and wealth in the American South and changed the political shape of America forever. A militia of poor white servants and black slaves, men who shared the same backbreaking labour, the same dirt floors, the same hunger, together rebelled and burnt Jamestown to the ground. They were led by a planter named Nathaniel Bacon, but the fire in their bellies was purely class: fury at a wealthy planter elite that exploited them regardless of colour.
The Virginia planter class was staring at the loss of privilege, power and wealth. Not from the sacking of a capital, but from the terrifying spectacle of the bottom-feeders uniting against the top. Their response was not to address the grievances of the poor. It was something far more cunning—and far more durable. They invented race.
Through a calculated series of laws passed by the Virginia assembly in the decades following Bacon’s Rebellion, the planter elite drew a luminous legal line between black and white that had not existed in the same strict form before. In 1667, the assembly declared that converting to Christianity, previously a route to freedom for some enslaved Africans, would no longer end bondage. In 1680, a new law banned slaves from fighting any white person, effectively making even the most destitute white servant an enforcer of racial hierarchy. In 1691, intermarriage between races became a crime. By 1705, all property owned by slaves was seized, sold and the proceeds given “to the use of the white poor”.
The mechanism of elite power
That last detail is the masterpiece of the scheme. The white poor received a material, if small, dividend from black oppression. As historian Robin D.G. Kelley has observed, poor whites “began to identify themselves, if not directly with the rich whites, certainly with being white”. The word “white” itself barely appeared in colonial documents before this moment. It was, in the most precise sense, a political invention, a psychological bribe given to people who had nothing, so that they would not notice who had everything.
Three centuries later and 5,000 kilometres away, a different set of elites discovered the same lesson. They would not use race. They had something more irrational and therefore more potent—tribe.
Lee Njiru, former President Moi’s long-serving press secretary, who entered State House at only 28 and spent 24 years by Moi’s side, is one of the most savvy and consequential media operatives in Kenya’s post-independence history. He was, in his own words, not there “to say what the President said, but what he meant”: He formulated, shaped and managed perception from the innermost sanctums of power.
His 2022 memoir, President’s Pressman, offers a rare window into those corridors. Njiru was loyal, brilliant, and by his own account devoted to Moi with something approaching filial love. “Moi was like a father to me,” he told the Nation in 2020. It is a sentiment that also illuminates the mechanism of elite power: those closest to the throne are bound not merely by employment, but by identity, devotion, the seductive warmth of proximity to greatness—and a profusion of fat morsels for their hungry mouths.
Moi himself was a master of elite manipulation. His trick was to mobilise the smaller tribes against the big ones and plant in them fear of domination by the big two—the Kikuyu and the Luo.
Most reliable tool of elite survival
A Kikuyu peasant and a Kalenjin peasant alike struggle with the same collapsed public hospitals, the dying universities, the lousy education, merciless taxation, crushing debt, the same impassable roads in the rains, and the same police who extract bribes rather than deliver justice. But the Kikuyu peasant was taught to fear the Kalenjin, and the Kalenjin peasant was taught to fear Kikuyu dominance, and so neither looked upward to where the feasting goes on.
This architecture did not die with Moi. It was inherited, refined, and re-fitted for the multiparty era with new actors and new vocabularies. Every election cycle, the Kenyan poor are mobilised along ethnic lines, vote faithfully for their community’s champion, and return home to the same poverty, while the champions, regardless of which community they claim to represent, return to Nairobi to divide the spoils among themselves. The handshakes happen at the top. The hatred is maintained below.
The Virginia planter class understood something in 1676 that has proven, across centuries and continents, to be the most reliable tool of elite survival: a divided poor is a manageable poor. Give the bottom something to fight each other over—a racial status, a tribal identity, a manufactured grievance—and they will never turn to face the top with the unified fury that terrified Jamestown.
But there is a problem, a Bacon-class problem. The Gen-Z are tribeless. They are outside the matrix. And that is their superpower.
Mr Mathiu is a communications consultant and farmer. [email protected]
