What does it mean to be Kenyan?

There is a kind of psychological tension that defines Kenyan life, something closer to what Frantz Fanon described when he wrote about how systems of domination don’t just shape economies, they shape how people think, react, and even imagine survival. Kenya feels like a place where that shaping never really ended, it just changed form. The violence is no longer only physical. It is administrative, economic, emotional. It is the slow normalisation of instability. To be Kenyan is to learn instability early and adapt permanently.

Prices change before wages do. Fuel rises and everything follows. Food, transport, rent, school fees, even the small negotiations of daily dignity. And people adjust. Always adjust. That adjustment becomes identity.

This is why the recently called-off matatu strike mattered beyond transport politics. It was not just about operators and fuel prices. It was about how survival is negotiated in this country. Matatu operators raised fares as fuel costs climbed. Passengers paid because they had no alternative. Then came the strike threat, briefly paralysing movement across parts of the country. Negotiations followed and the strike was called off. But fares remained high in many areas, and ordinary commuters were left carrying the final weight of the disagreement. That pattern is familiar in Kenya. Collective pressure rises, negotiations happen, and the cost  returns to the ordinary person who was never at the table.

It reveals something uncomfortable about our political and social structure: solidarity here is real, but often temporary. It burns intensely, then dissolves into individual survival.

Economic unrest

Compare that with Bolivia, where economic unrest has repeatedly pushed different social groups into broader collective action. Workers, indigenous movements, students and citizens have often framed hardship as shared injury rather than separate grievances. Even when fragmented, there is a stronger political memory of collective struggle, a sense that economic pain is not isolated but structural. Kenya struggles with that continuity. Here, suffering is shared in reality but negotiated separately. We are one of the most communal societies in practice, yet one of the most individualised in response. That contradiction defines everything.

The Kenyan political system has sharpened this fragmentation over time. Identity is organised through tribe, region, religion and political loyalty, not just ideology or class. It becomes easier to defend “our leader” than to interrogate the system that leader operates in. It becomes easier to argue over representation than over redistribution. The result is a politics that feels emotionally intense but structurally stuck. And yet beneath that fragmentation, everyday life constantly contradicts it.

Kenyans rescue each other in ways institutions rarely do. During floods, citizens raise money before state response arrives. During medical emergencies, strangers contribute through mobile money faster than hospitals can process admission. During protests, people share water, transport, shelter. Social media becomes an emergency infrastructure long before it becomes entertainment. That is another layer of Kenyan identity: a society permanently compensating for institutional absence.

Even humour fits into this architecture. Kenyan humour is not just entertainment; it is emotional management. It is how people process things too heavy to carry directly. Floods become memes. Fuel hikes become jokes. Political betrayal becomes sarcasm. It is not denial. It is survival language.

The philosopher Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o often wrote about language as a site of power, how the way people speak shapes how they understand their reality. In Kenya, humour, slang, and online expression have become a kind of counter-language to official narratives. When institutions fail to explain suffering, citizens create their own vocabulary for it.

Political identity

The Gen Z protests made this visible in a new way. For a brief moment, political identity shifted. Tribe mattered less. Party loyalty mattered less. What emerged was a language of shared exhaustion. Young Kenyans organised online without traditional political structures, raised funds for victims, documented violence, and challenged authority in ways older political systems did not anticipate. It unsettled power because it disrupted the oldest logic in Kenyan politics: divide people enough and governance becomes easier to manage.

Kenya continues to produce citizens who are politically aware but economically trapped. People who understand the system but still must live inside it daily. That produces a specific kind of exhaustion: knowing too much, while being able to change too little.

You see it in everyday life. A mother leaving home before dawn to catch cheaper transport. A graduate refreshing job portals for years. A boda rider calculating fuel versus income in real time. A teacher stretching salary through loans. A small business owner adjusting prices weekly because the economy changes faster than planning cycles allow.

Still, life continues. Matatus fill again in the morning. Churches are full on Sunday. Football debates fill barber shops. Markets reopen after floods. Nairobi forgets yesterday’s crisis just enough to function today’s. This is where Kenyan identity becomes almost philosophical. It is not just survival. It is continuity under instability. A refusal to fully collapse, even when collapse feels rational. A form of endurance that is both strength and burden.

There is something deeply tragic and deeply ordinary about it at the same time. Because to be Kenyan today is to live inside contradiction long enough that contradiction stops feeling unusual. You learn to hold anger and humour together. Hope and disappointment together. Community and isolation together. And still, in the middle of all that tension, people continue showing up for each other in small ways that rarely make headlines. Maybe that is the only consistent truth about Kenya. Not that it works. But that people keep working through it anyway.

This writer is a journalist and a human rights defender. [email protected]