More protests, solidarity marches, and initial evaluations of the WSF

So much has happened in the last few days, I’ve not had a chance to sit down for even a minute! I will separate the blog into two.

24th on Jan: The gates (partially) opened, and the protests continue.

The story of the Peoples’ Parliament – a group perpetrating real moments of action during the WSF – continues to unfold. After numerous protests, they eventually got the organisers to wave the fee on the last day of the WSF. Within the giant sports complex itself you could notice the difference with an influx of vendors and street kids running around asking for the participants to hand over the radio sets used for translation.

Peoples’ Parliament did not stop there, for there were plenty of other injustices to confront. One such injustice came in the form of two restaurant tents that where selling the most expensive food, even more inaccessible to the average Kenyan than the initial entrance fee. The worst part about these two tens, however, was that they were the extension of a hotel company owned by the country’s internal Security Minister John Michuki. He was known for his harsh tactics as “the crusher”. His most recent abuse of human rights was to raid the popular Kenyan daily newspaper, The Standard. Through a few simple text messages, People’s Parliament quickly mobilised many of the hungry children in the stadium to demand that they be fed for free. The pressure during their sit in mounted, and eventually the staff started to hand out free food until they were all out. The police stood by, to late to do anything and with too many cameras to use force. An hour later they packed up and took down the tent. Check out the following report on the BBC

Swift and efficient action to correct yet another ethical and political blunder made organisational committee.


It has been moments like these that have injected the forum with a sense of relevance and connection with the issues concerning the poorest of the poor who face multiple forms of oppression everyday - like hunger.

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25th: Marching through the slums


The final day consisted of a solidarity march from a near-by slum to Uhuru park in downtown Nairobi. I went with some comrades from the Youth Camp: a Brazilian, by the name of Andre who worked in Mozambique and caught Malaria; Shim, an Israeli refusenik who spent 21 months in jail instead of going to university and thinks he actually ended up learning a lot more about life; and Juliana, a youth activist trained as a nurse who likes to teach street kids how to juggle.

The march through the slums brought a sense of what the real Nairobi was like. It was sobering to get away from the spectacle of the Kasarani sports stadium and the business centre of Nairobi. We started at 10am, and marched 16km through three of the main slums. Now that’s a long way to walk by any standards, but add unpaved roads where dust is so easily kicked up in the air, and dodging the multiple puddles of who-knows-what, shaking all the hands of the street kids who enjoy the novelty of having a ‘mzungu’ pass by, and to top it off, the hot hot sun relentlessly beating down, give any good sun block a run for its money.

Along the way, we talked about how right it was to expres solidarity with the slum dwellers, and to see some of the ‘real Nairobi’; but also felt uneasy at being such ‘poverty tourists’, and the fact that we were blocking the traffic and hence hampering the ability of many to make their daily bread. Slowing traffic down in the business centre is justifiable and makes a point, but in the slums it just pisses people off. Luckily, the mass of people we found ourselves marching with were mostly Kenyan; otherwise the solidarity component would have been watered down a tad.

We also began reflecting on the WSF, and how we conceive of the event, and the sort of space it comprises. Some saw it simply as a space for critical encounter, others as a platform for radical social movements to plan actions, and a few saw it as a moment of ‘global civil society’ where new forms of global citizenship are beginning to form. Some of the most critical, who were slightly embittered by their experience saw it as a form of political capitalism, each group vying to undercut the competition in selling its issue.

From my initial evaluations based on my experience, I would argue it is a place for critical encounters between groups and individual, and one that needs to be carefully managed so as not to lose its legitimacy. If it is ‘global civil society’, it is only one among many global civil societies, each with their own collection of contradictions; and if it is where new forms of global citizenship are forming, it only one node in a series of networks that are fundamentally rooted in local places.

The next entry will divulge a little on the International Council meeting held after the WSF, and due to popular demand, I will discuss how the filming for the documentary has been taking shape.