The recent events of abductions, forced disappearances

Anti-riot police officer arrest a suspected protester during a demonstration against the government in Nairobi, Kenya, on August. [AFP]

Recent abductions, forced disappearances, and mysterious killings push us to reflect deeply into who we are as a people: Africans. Kenyans. When the state responds to dissent with excessive force, it signals more than a failure of policy. It reveals a deeper crisis of legitimacy and purpose.

According to the Frustration–Aggression Theory, institutions facing blocked goals often project aggression toward weaker or more accessible targets. In Kenya today, this dynamic is tragically at play. The frustration of a fragile governing elite, unable to deliver on public expectations, haunted by corruption scandals, and disconnected from popular struggles, erupts in coercive actions against citizens. Protesters are suppressed, civic actors intimidated, and voices of dissent silenced.

This redirected institutional rage is not accidental; it is systematic. Worse still, it echoes the architecture of colonial control, only now enforced from within.

This is the tragic irony of post-independence Kenya. We fought for liberation from colonial rule only to risk reinventing the same oppressive systems under our own watch. The British left, but their instruments of control remained: surveillance, suppression, enforced silence, and elite impunity. When government agencies curtail freedoms, when enforced disappearances resurface, and when civic space shrinks, we must ask: has the skin color of the oppressor changed while the structure of oppression remains intact?

We are in danger of becoming our former colonisers, only this time, colonising ourselves. This phenomenon, which I call Black-to-Black Neocolonialism, is not just a political failure; it is an ontological contradiction.

African ontology affirms the sacredness of life through the concept of vital force, a foundational idea described by John S. Mbiti, who argued that in African thought, "life is a rhythm which must be kept in harmony with the total cosmic order." Every person possesses a unique spiritual energy that must be nurtured, not extinguished. In precolonial communities, harming another was considered to weaken the communal life force. The unexplained disappearance of a young activist or the silencing of a dissenting voice is, therefore, not just a human rights abuse; it is a spiritual crime. It diminishes not only the individual but the collective essence of the community.

Furthermore, African communal philosophy, as articulated by Kwame Gyekye, emphasises that the individual's well-being is deeply intertwined with the health of the community. Gyekye’s idea of “moderate communitarianism” insists that while individuals possess autonomy, the community must create the conditions for their flourishing. A government that permits or participates in violence against its citizens betrays this ethical commitment. Such acts rupture the moral fabric of society. In Gyekye’s terms, justice and political power must serve the common good, not repress it. When that balance is broken, the very meaning of governance loses legitimacy.

In African metaphysics, the elders and ancestors are ever-present guardians of justice and memory. They do not merely reside in the past. They inhabit the moral fabric of the present. Molefi Kete Asante, in advancing Afrocentric thought, insists that African societies must be centred on their own cultural and spiritual values, not mimicry of colonial models. A culture that represses its people dishonours the sacrifices of those who struggled for independence and defiles the spiritual foundations laid by generations past. The current trajectory of state repression can be seen as a kind of ancestral desecration, a forgetting of sacred covenants. Black-to-Black Neocolonialism thus becomes a spiritual amnesia, a refusal to remember who we are, where we came from, and what our liberation cost.

We have a distinct identity that we proudly call African.

We must therefore be extremely cautious. Kenya stands at a dangerous threshold where the liberator could become the jailer, where state power becomes indistinguishable from colonial oppression. Black-to-Black Neocolonialism is not just a rhetorical device. It is a lived danger. If we do not interrogate our governance practices through the lens of our cosmology, we will perpetuate outdated foreign systems of domination using indigenous hands. True decolonisation requires more than removing the coloniser; it demands the rebirth of an ethical African state, one grounded in dignity, justice, memory, and sacred life. Anything less is not liberation; it is betrayal.