The recent protests in Kenya point in various directions. Primarily, the inability of the government to provide adequate benefits to the citizenry. The catalyst was the death of Albert Omondi Ojwang, a prominent blogger and teacher, in police custody. His death, alongside long-standing frustrations over rising living costs, widespread government corruption, and police brutality, have galvanized Kenya’s youth, who a year ago also took to the streets to demand #EndFinanceBill and #RutoMustGo. But of curious importance is the social and political orientation of its language. I want to focus on the phrase “tribeless, leaderless, partyless”—what has come to describe the protests’ transcendence of “regional, political, ethnic, social, and economic boundaries.” What might this language reveal? What might it conceal? What could be slipping away, unsaid, in the protests, media, or political rallies?

I shall argue that the language of the protest, intentional or otherwise, conceals those “centers of complicity” which form part of our most immediate environments; it reveals our willingness to protect those environments by “othering” the source of our social and economic predicaments. Put plainly, by renouncing the “ethnic,” the “social,” and the “political,” we shield, in one way or other, our kin local actors and, in doing so, absolve them of blame.

This reflection was inspired by a series of rather arbitrary questions: Why is the protest aimed at the national government, the presidency in particular? Why are county governments and their leadership on the periphery of outrage? How have governors and members of parliament managed to escape the leash?

One recognizes in these questions the tension between the national and the local, the center and the periphery. But I find it much easier to ask whether there is something fundamental in the question: Why there, not here? In the end, I will draw from these questions a corollary political possibility, and that regards the nature of devolution. With this political feature, the overall reflection could be expressed this way: What does the language of protest say about our understanding of devolution, its practice, its actors, and even its core intent? What has it allowed us to conceal and reveal about our political and social selves?

A lot has been said about the origins and markers of the protest. Its facts are as good as its speculations. I will not indulge in that debate for fear that looking for origins often implies missing the point. Origins rarely matter where social consequences are profound. Whether historical antecedents of a war are myth, fact, or speculation is not the point. The point is: Whatever the reasons, things “took on a life of their own.” The result is war and its consequences, protest and its effects.

It has been said that the recent protests transcend “regional, political, ethnic, social, and economic boundaries,” as contained in the sequence “tribeless, leaderless, partyless.” Astonishingly, this representation has galvanized support across the country. Protests have been witnessed in various counties. For many analysts the reason for the movement’s effectiveness is simple: its transcendence of identities. But if we provoke this assumption, if we ask why this transcendence, the answer proves elusive.

I add to the pool of speculations the following meditation: The language is effective precisely because it is not meant to be. Or at least it does not purport to prove itself effective for its own cause. Such language recognizes itself as the source of a problem while alienating itself from that source. It is as though one looked in the mirror and, confronted by the potential horror of the reflection, refused to look again. That horror, constituted by elements of oneself, is deemed part of the predicament. Thus, my identity, tribe, class, or region becomes my enemy, a source of my depravity. The corruption in my country, the unemployment, and the destitution become consequences of my “particularity.” I conclude that, to escape my depravity, I must look away. And as I do so, I desire that other particularities echo that impulse, follow in that direction. We share in the predicament after all, and that mutual assumption makes us whole, one, formidable.

Yet this is a language of paradoxes. It conceals even as it reveals.  What it reveals is our constant anxiety regarding our identities, and more so, the potential and degree of their viciousness if untamed. It is then not surprising that the language of “non-identity” coexists with recalls of the ethnically charged events that culminated in the tragedy of 2008. It is as though “identifying” oneself would be to associate with that tragedy, to be its cause and its wielder: the tribe, the class, the party that “led” it. For even the title “leader” suggests confidence in one’s status, a crude conviction in oneself that negates the rank of others. To have a particular orientation is at once to assert one’s difference, and to be different potentiates the exploitation of those less like us. It is thus far nobler to be “less” of oneself— tribe -less, leader -less, party -less. In taking on this “lessness,” one aims to become an unidentified particular of an unidentified pool. One pool. One nation.

But as one would guess, the story of “our nation” is too recent to weather all particularities. That is one reason: We are too young to age in a melting pot. The second reason is that identity is not a metaphor; it is not a feather easily plucked by wind. If anything, it is a psychosocial orientation that endures any attempt to tame it in words. Language fails us all the time; the depth of our experiential lives, that echo at the deeper ends of our brains, resists any naming, any language. So, we arrive at the crossroads, at the paradox. What we renounce affirms itself. What is concealed in language escapes our vision.

And what do we affirm without naming? What do we see without pointing with our fingers? A more rudimentary possibility is this: Beyond the recognition that one’s identity might be the source of one’s predicament lies the almost impossible task of critical introspection. I turn away from the mirror, but the mirror does not turn away from me. Unbeknown to me, turning away from the horrors of myself disguises an attempt to shield myself from the condemnation of others. It is hell to be seen in my elementary skin. It is hell to be called a tribalist, a loyalist of a particular party, a descendant of a certain class. So I must turn away. But even then, I have escaped my predicament without critical acceptance; one can say I have undertaken this turn involuntarily. I have turned away, not so much because I have made peace with my culpability but because I want to dissolve in the blamelessness of others. The melting pot I have entered is a dissolution of other turnings, other hells, escaping tragic associations and guilt. In this pot we are all blameless, all tribeless, all leaderless, all partyless.

Without critical, organic introspection, the language of this melting pot is a metaphor. It fails to capture the echo in my brain, or the stimuli of my immediate environment. For with or without my knowledge, attempting to shield myself from blame inevitably entails shielding all those of my kind, those in my immediate environment. When I enter the melting pot, I enter with tetherings. I enter with my tribe. So what remains of my “tribeless” insignia?

There is something to be said about why devolution made sense as a mechanism for unifying a nearly fragmenting country after the 2007–2008 tragedy. A similar sense extends, albeit unsuccessfully, to efforts in other African countries adopting decentralization. In the case of our country, the rationale for devolution was countering the centralization of power which had marginalized communities. Concentration of power had proved unsustainable. The elections were the tipping point, where accumulated ethnic resentments linked to social needs like access to land and autonomy came to fore. The 2010 constitution introduced devolution, providing an avenue for local autonomy over political and social processes, including land appropriation.

Hence explanations often attribute this political shift to the desire for inclusion, the need to bring peripheral voices to the center. The ideal was to realize a national whole with shared “values and principles” and to limit avenues of tension. Invoking Dr. Migai Akech, Nic Cheeseman and colleagues, in their essay Decentralisation in Kenya: The Governance of Governors observe, “the new Constitution establishes national values and principles of governance that seek to diffuse, if not eliminate altogether, the ethnic tensions fueled by perceptions of marginalization and exclusion.” One might argue that this ideal has coalesced over the last ten years, despite staggering in some regions, like in the north; but even in those regions, it has occurred, with considerable intermittence.

We might interject here that, at the most fundamental level, the devolution intent was to localize resentment: to turn the tribal inward, and in doing so, displace blame from the once hegemonic center historically aligned with certain ethnic interests, to organic peripheries. For, by seeking inclusion, devolution simultaneously affirmed ethnic localization.  “The production of locality and the production of nativeness,” writes Achille Mbembe in Afropolitanism, “constitute two sides of the same movement.”

If devolution aimed to localize resentment, how then could we explain a language turning away from its periphery? Why is protest de-localizing, or precisely, de-tribalizing? In the language of protest, to be native is to be the tribal self; the local arena is “autochthonous,” and here kinship produces solidarity. Local actors are my tribal kin with whom I share identity. In becoming “tribeless,” I annihilate my identity, and simultaneously, those tethered to me. That way I shield myself and them from blame. To say “I am tribeless” is to say “I have no tribe; my tribal kins do not exist.” Where there is no existence, there is no culpability, there is no blame. There is no corrupt tribal actor—no complicit governor or member of parliament. What explains my predicament, my unemployment, my insecurity, and all my economic immobility, must thus be located somewhere else. It must be beyond my immediate environment, perhaps at the center, not on this periphery. Perhaps it is at the seat of the president.

We may not know the direction the latest round of protests will take. But so far, its success or effectiveness has been punctured by strife and loss. Could it be that by claiming to be less of oneself, one invites more tragedy than one aims to avert? And could the language of the protest profit by embracing its fullness, turning back to the mirror and reclaiming itself, with its horrors and anxieties? And could the logic of devolution be revitalized and utilized to place burden on peripheral actors who may well be complicit in the predicament?

Devolution brought its blessings and demons to local landscapes. It brought considerable autonomy. But as Jeremy Lind observes, it also shifted resource competition from the center to the periphery. Governors, MPs, and members of the County Assembly are the new “centers of complicity” within these peripheries. Could a de-localized language muddle the essential frames of identity and, more so, blur borders of blame? Could it cloud vision, turning it away from itself? Perhaps a precarious turn, perhaps a self-destructive one? It is true the history of our country has revealed to us the complicity of our center. But it is also the case that if the predicament is so acute at home, the default should be to scrutinize our own kin. The periphery is also the new center.