‘We know the Kenya we want, but do we have citizens for that new country?’

Activist Boniface Mwangi is arrested after he interrupted Labour day celebrations at Uhuru Park.[File,Standard]

“Chief, you don’t tip?” remarked Boniface Mwangi as I handed back the cash pouch to the waiter. Always unconventional, Boniface Mwangi was either asking a question or making a statement.

We had had lunch at 3Dee Restaurant in Kilimani, Nairobi. A previous lunch date aborted because he confirmed his availability too late. Today’s lunch nearly got ruined after he went in the opposite direction and ended up on Mombasa Road (where our offices are) and here I was on my way to Elgeyo Marakwet Road.

Thankfully, Bonnie (as he is often called by friends) found his way back.

Some would consider him noisy and a nuisance. At 38, he is effusive; full of youthful energy, restless, impatient, and prone to making uncalculated risks. Boniface Mwangi loves to push the envelope.

Quest for justice

In the quest for justice and fairness, he often pours out vitriol indiscriminately. His vitriolic volleys (on social media) land mostly on politicians, the police, bloggers. Even the media is not spared. Reading his book ‘UnBounded’ — a collection of personal stories that have shaped his life, especially how two women - his mother and grandmother (and probably a third, his wife) — contributed to making the Bonnie we know. He conflates photography and activism to great effect.

A prodigious photographer, Bonnie says he left the newsroom for the streets because he realised he would impact more with both his camera and with sustained street agitation against social injustice and bad governance. This is extended to ‘Softie’, a documentary about his life where the running thread is his belief in masses to agitate for change.

“Your photography is absolutely stunning and tells an important and powerful story for the world to hear,” said Hillary Clinton, former US Secretary of State.

Bonnie left Bible school convinced that he would change the world through his work as a journalist.

We chose a seat in the Traveller’s Garden. Clad in a Marvin, a pair of jeans, and spotting a spotted goatee, he was his usual self; chatty, animated in talk, oblivious of the stares from other patrons and occasionally letting out a burst of loud laughter.

He ordered roasted fish as I settled for dried fried chicken, sukuma wiki, and ugali. We reckoned that would slay the Nairobi cold.

We reminisced about his past in the newsroom where I worked with Bonnie, I as a sub-editor on the Daily Desk; he a photojournalist. Some of the memorable pictures he took include the front-page photo of a man being pulled out of the rubble of a collapsed building in Nyamakima area, Nairobi by Israeli special forces in January 2006. 

On the June 2007 crackdown on Mungiki - an outlawed sect in Nairobi’s Mathare slums, his front-page pictures encapsulated the anguish and pain of those caught in the melee fleeing the terror and violence of the police.

Besides that, Bonnie came across as an idealist and at times a disillusioned young man finding his way in the labyrinth of life.

“How long will it take to read all the books that one ought to,” he once asked me. He knew the world was broken – or so he said - but he thought it could be fixed.

Our conversation struggles to rise above the din of chit-chat from other patrons (out for a quick lunch, I suppose), the chink of glass, and the clinking of cutlery. In the background, soulful classical music reminded me of the famous KBC English Service’s programme Lunch Time Music.

In the aftermath of the 2007/08 post-election violence, Bonnie took pictures for the newspaper in Nairobi’s slums, which were the epicentre of the city’s intertribal fights and worse, where the police mounted ruthless crackdowns to quell the sporadic bouts of violence.

Through his camera lenses, Bonnie captured mob-lynching, police beatings, decimated homes, severed limbs, and bodies in one of Kenya’s darkest moments.

This seemed to have changed him forever.

He soon quit his job and plunged into full-time activism. Some think his “craziness” is because of untreated stress (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) from the job. He doesn’t agree.

The 2021 civil society space isn’t the one Bonnie plunged into. The country has experienced an epidemic of cynicism against change crusaders, including the voice of the church and the once vibrant civil society.

Scars of agitation

For the work he does, he says he gets threatened a lot :“By the big people and the small people alike.”

To him, that is part of the course. He has seen worse. He bears the scars of his agitation. He has been arrested and thrown into police cells; goons have waylaid and beaten him leaving him bloody and bruised, not to mention the usual sneers and name-calling from those he is standing up to or their followers. 

He burst into the civil society at Nyayo National Stadium. He stood up and heckled President Mwai Kibaki during Madaraka Day in 2009 to protest at the rising cost of living.

Beaten down in the aftermath of the 2007/08 post-election violence and the ensuing push to hold those culpable accountable, the civil society (nicknamed ‘evil’ society then) is yet to recover its footing.

“We are still paying for that,” he says.

Bonnie is struggling to fill the void. He is a lone-ranger.

“There is a minority who listen to us, worse still nobody believes we do this for nothing,” he says with a wince.

“Is this all for nothing?” I asked him as I adjust my seat. Another waiter comes along to ask if we have made our order.

One would think that Bonnie obsesses with the ideals of justice, fairness, equality, and freedom.

“I was struck by your story, and I want you to know that I am grateful to support our shared values,” former US President Barack Obama wrote to him in a letter in 2015.

He is known for his knack of employing unorthodox means to pass his protest messages, usually on corruption and greed. Once he collected pigs from Dandora Dumpsite and took them to Parliament to agitate against the MPs’ greed for allowances and hefty emoluments.

Another time he drove donkeys into the city streets to symbolise the taxpayers’ pain of the ever-increasing burden of footing the bills for the “big men and women in high office”. And yet another time he appeared in the streets with giant polystyrene babies to depict the ruling class as immature and insensitive to the people’s plight.

Yet Bonnie feels his efforts are not rousing a groundswell of indignation. The people seem inured to the social injustice, police brutality, and corruption in their midst. Nobody dares raise a finger.

All is lost

“The poor in Kenya hate their poor counterparts and hate themselves too to the extent they can’t dream big. They don’t even believe that someone can fight to liberate the country for free,” he says.

He is idealistic about what can be done to uproot “parochialism.”

“If the poor united, we would change this country.”

“When they (the poor) see me, they first see me as a Kikuyu and even ask me who I voted for in the last election. Does it matter?”

I tell him his sentiments suggest that all is lost. “Not at all.”

It is hard to fathom how Bonnie manages to be a picture of hope and despair at the same time.

There is a reason for that; he draws hope from the generation born after 1997. 

“These ones that call Nairobi Kanairo, they are tribeless and don’t care about the tribe, a tribe elder and they are free to imagine their lives as they wish… these are the people to watch.”

Is he banking so much hope on a generation that has come to be dismissed as indifferent? He counters that the youth possess a real, powerful ardour for change.

“These are the kids who don’t speak their language, their grandparents are dead and they don’t even go upcountry.”

The question is whether his efforts will attain the critical mass needed to gain the momentum for change.

He cites the 2010-2012 Arab Spring. A Tunisian youth protesting against ill-treatment from the police and corruption set himself ablaze triggering a youthful revolution across the Arab world.

With one year to elections, who would he put his money on?

“I went out on a limb to support Mukhisa Kituyi and Prof Kivutha Kibwana. They came across as the progressives… but then Kibwana sat on the fence on BBI… he will have to win my vote again should he declare he is running.”

Bonnie believes campaign financing is where it all goes wrong.

“All those dishing out handouts and t-shirts will want to recover their investment… nobody cares to ask where that will come from.”

In 2017, through crowd-sourcing, he raised Sh15 million to fund his campaigns for the Starehe Constituency seat.

He says the voters have normalised being bribed to vote.

“More ideas, more policy, fewer votes, more money, more votes, that is crazy by any standards.”

He blames the IEBC for not sensitising the public on why people should vote and what to expect from those they vote for, and that they ought to hold their leaders accountable.

“The people vote thinking the work of an MP is to raise money when their wife delivers or when they have a patient. That should not be the case. An MP’s work is to legislate laws.”

To him, the people have not been sensitised enough to be active citizens where duty doesn’t end at the ballot.

The man with 1.7 million followers on Twitter and 400,000 others on Facebook reads a lot and is a motorcycle enthusiast.

How does he keep his sanity?

“Who says I am sane? … I am a madman on a mission to transform Kenya.”

He showers his wife Njeri, whom he met through photography, with praise “for agreeing to stay with him where others would have walked away”.

Njeri runs 254 Pawa, the NGO he founded in 2011 which helps upcoming writers and activists gain skills and exposure.

But he quickly admits that his family of three children (Nate Simphiwe (14), Naila Sifa (10), and Jabali Mboya (9) are a counterbalance to the “madness”.

“Will he consider running for political office again?”

He hasn’t made up his mind. He thinks the politics are still toxic and the people more inclined to vote “for the money than the policies”.

Yes we can

The only way for him to win, he admits, is to allow himself to be carried by a popular wave from one of the political parties. But he can’t imagine compromising his principles “for politics’ sake.”

“For Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson had to start with his slogan Keep hope alive … you could say Yes, we can. I believe I have made it easy for someone else to win in the near future; change is gradual.”

“I want to disabuse the public of the notion that civil society lives on handouts. Which sponsor would give me money?” When I utter some of the things I say they will run away.”

He finds his fish too delicious and quickly kills the idea of leaving a piece of it.

He is religious but also “believes in ancestors the way Jews believe in Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses.”

Willy Mutunga, the former Chief Justice is his mentor and often reprimands him when he insults people online.

“That man is not your teacher. Just because he behaves in a bad way doesn’t mean you should also behave the same way,” Mutunga told him recently.

And so is Martha Karua, the former Justice minister who refers to Bonnie as ‘son’ on her social media posts.

They often take family road trips and go camping. They love travelling and hiking. He confesses that a lot of them are no-frills trips.

“Sometimes we spend in people’s backyards and we love it.”

He loves cooking but dislikes washing dishes.

“The joke in the house is that when I am cooking, they make sure all the dishes are dirty so that I am left with none to dirtify.”

Though many Kenyans lack patience with him online and often abuse and dismiss him as a busybody, he says the same will troop to “my DM” to beg for help.

Debt collector

“Sometimes I get a call from a governor who tells me I am in this thing, but I want you to expose it. Some get into deals that backfire and lose money and then come running to me to expose them… I flatly refuse because I am not a debt collector.”

“The problem with Kenya is that we know the Kenya we want, but do we have the Kenyans for that new Kenya?”

According to him, given a chance “most Kenyans will steal and break the law.”

He goes to wash his hands and when he returns he reinforces his point.

“In most restaurants, there is a notice “do not spit in the sink”. Why? Civilised people do not spit so you don’t need that sign here.”

He confesses that the Kenya he envisions will only be realised “starting with the education system”.

“A child will go through eight years of school having not used a dustbin or flushed a toilet. How do you expect them to behave differently when subjected to the laws?”

“We need to fix our education system and parenting.”

For example, encouraging children to express themselves. “At home when I raise my voice my children will ask me why am I raising my voice.”

“We might get the right leaders but are Kenyans ready for these leaders?” He imagines that good leaders will be driven out by the bad guys because they outnumber them.

He cites Raphael Tuju, James Orengo, and Anyang’ Nyong’o who were punished “for going against the grain in their regions”. At different times, these three have run for election in parties that were not led by the local kingpin and they lost.

He jokes that Mutunga asks him to run for president if there is no one to vote for.

And what does he think about that?

“Time is on my side... I will decide about that.

Besides capturing moments behind the lens, Bonnie trains photographers and does speaking engagements and trainings on activism advocacy. He has given talks at Harvard and Yale “about my journey”.

He has given talks at Occidental College (President Obama’s former school) and Amherst College (where President Uhuru Kenyatta went to school).

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