When Comrade Gacheke offered his reflections on five years of social justice work in Kenya, he articulated a vision that deeply shaped a generation of young organizers: to build Social Justice Centres as platforms for advancing the 2010 Constitution, nurturing substantive democracy, and cultivating vibrant movements from below. Seven years since I first walked into the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) as a seventeen-year-old fresh out of high school, I have witnessed the movement evolve profoundly, moving beyond mainstream civic society approaches and single-issue campaigns toward a people-powered, issue-based, and economically grounded form of organizing.
MSJC was founded back in 2014 by community members in Mathare with the aim of promoting social justice and advancing a more participatory and people-centered form of justice. The centre was established as a space for community organizing, political education, and collective action, grounded in the struggles and lived experiences of Mathare residents.
Since its founding, MSJC has been actively involved in a wide range of initiatives, including grassroots campaigns, local assemblies, and community dialogues. Through these efforts, the centre provides a platform for residents to voice their concerns, analyse systemic injustices, and collectively develop solutions to issues such as State killings, police violence, forced evictions, economic marginalization, and access to basic services. MSJC emphasizes on community building its own agency, thus sparking the social justice movement.
This article is both a reflection and a continuation of his journey. It tells the story of how MSJC has transformed itself through advocacy, popular education, ecological justice initiatives, cooperative economics, cultural and artistic organizing, and the courage of communities refusing to normalize violence and poverty. We begin with my own journey into MSJC, which illustrates how personal loss can catalyse collective struggle*.*
I joined MSJC in 2017, barely eighteen, carrying the raw grief of losing my favourite uncle, my mother’s youngest brother, Joseph Kyalo (aka Omari), to police killings. At the time, Mathare was experiencing rampant extrajudicial executions, especially of young men. My family’s loss was not unique; it reflected a broader pattern of state violence normalized in informal settlements.
When I attended my first MSJC meeting on a Saturday, the centre was preparing to release its ground-breaking report documenting 803 cases of police killings in Mathare and other Nairobi settlements. For the first time, I met people who not only understood my family’s pain but shared it, transforming grief into positive action.
I began volunteering as a human rights monitor, helping families document the loss of their loved ones, accompanying them to the Independent Policing Oversight Authority to seek legal redress, and contributing to cases later supported by public interest litigation from organizations like the International Justice Mission. Today, one notorious officer, Corporal Rashid, is finally standing trial, and a former Ruaraka Officer Commanding Station is serving a life sentence after years of court solidarity – a testament to grassroots documentation, organizing, and refusal to forget. This was where my journey as a community organizer began.
In the early years, the centres were heavily campaign-driven. Different localities focused on singular issues: police killings, lack of water and sanitation, forced evictions, and gender-based violence. Each campaign developed around a ‘problem’ specific to its locality. While this approach generated momentum, it also reflected the limitations of mainstream activism – short-term, donor-driven, and often fragmented. We realized that to achieve lasting change, our work needed a broader, more integrated approach.
Over the last five years, our movement shifted from single campaigns to issue-based community organizing, drawing on Paulo Freire’s pedagogy and global grassroots movements like Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement. This shift was not easy, it also forced difficult internal questions about the direction of the social justice movement in Kenya. One faction chose NGO-ization to remain deliberately non-political, shaping their organizing in ways that aligned with donor priorities and preserved access to funding. The other faction made a different choice: to continue investing in political education, grounded in the belief that change requires people to understand the structural roots of their problems and their own power to transform those conditions.
This divergence was not merely strategic; it reflected fundamentally different understandings of what liberation work demands. A deep belief in people being their own agency and creating dignity together. The split that followed was painful, but it clarified our path that laid the foundation for organizing rooted deeply in the daily lives of our community.
Today, MSJC’s organizing is centred around four core activities. First, our travelling theatre, as art has always been a weapon of the oppressed. The emergence of our travelling theatre has revived the Kenyan tradition of popular education through community performance. This theatre is a living tool of resistance, bringing consciousness, dialogue, and political education directly to the people.
Through storytelling, movement, music, and dramatization, the travelling theatre exposes injustice, affirms dignity, and sparks conversations that lead to action. Where formal systems fail, it transforms public spaces into stages of truth-telling. Our role is to mobilize people through art, translating lived experiences into performances that educate, empower, and unify communities. In this way, our theatre is both a cultural weapon and a community institution, strengthening grassroots organizing and fueling collective resistance.
Second, our Organic Intellectuals Network is a broad-based collective of writer-activists and researchers from social movements in Kenya. Our goal is to cultivate writers and thinkers within the movement advocating for social justice. The network strives to create a platform for writers and thinkers to articulate and advocate for an egalitarian society, to produce and disseminate critical content on socio-economic issues in Kenya, and to engage the community through innovative mediums to foster awareness and action against oppression.
The network’s role within the broader movement is to raise critical thinking about the role of activists in Kenya’s socio-political landscape and educate communities on political oppression, economic exploitation, and human rights violations. It also serves to build confidence among movement members to create a more equal society and promote effective and well-rounded organizing within social movements. Some published works include Kenya: A Prison Notebook by Prof. Maina wa Kinyatti.
Third, while culture and ideas shape our movement, ecological justice demonstrates how environmental action strengthens social justice. The Ecological Justice Network mobilizes youth groups to green Mathare through tree planting and community parks. Mathare, once an ‘iron desert’, has seen initiatives such as the Wangari Maathai Community Park and Mathare Community Park.
The mission links ecological struggles with social justice, recognizing that environmental degradation is tied to poverty, inequality, and state neglect. We promote climate resilience, advocacy, and community engagement, ensuring that residents often excluded from policy debates become central actors in shaping Kenya’s climate and justice agenda. Beyond environment, we turn attention to economic empowerment, critical for sustaining grassroots organizing.
Fourth and finally, cooperative economics represents a transformative evolution. Informal workers, domestic workers and waste pickers gain a collective voice, shared dignity, and economic power. The cooperative model fosters solidarity, organizes advocacy for better conditions, and strengthens understanding that systemic exploitation, not personal failure, drives hardships.
This is evident in the Dhobi Women Network, where domestic workers in Eastleigh raise issues collectively, share resources, and negotiate better work terms. Cooperative economics thus builds self-reliance, grassroots solidarity, and a movement for workers’ rights and social justice.
The 2024 Gen-Z uprising did not emerge in isolation. While it appeared spontaneous in form, it was deeply rooted in a decade of social justice organizing, public political education, documentation of state abuses, and community resilience. This uprising is part of a continuum that stretches back to the Saba Saba protests, organized annually by the Social Justice Movement to demand accountability, economic justice, and political reforms. These protests have historically mobilized young people and communities across Nairobi to confront inequality and state violence, creating a culture of resistance that empowered subsequent generations.
One of the greatest hurdles, however, is economic sustainability. Volunteer organizing without material support is emotionally and physically draining. Cooperative models therefore serve as strategies to finance organizing, create dignified livelihoods, build autonomy from donor dependency, and nurture democratic culture. Substantive democracy requires people to have the economic power to participate meaningfully in community development.
Reflecting on seven years at MSJC and the movement’s evolution, one truth stands out: social justice is a long walk. We have journeyed from grief to organizing, from campaigns to issue-based politics, from fragmented struggles to cooperatives, ecological justice, legal empowerment, and popular education.
The journey is far from complete, but the transcendence is real. We are building not just a center but a new organizing culture rooted in community power, economic justice, the unfinished promise of the 2010 Constitution and the Mau Mau revolution for land and freedom. This is democracy grown from below, and this is the movement we continue to build.
Njeri Mwangi is a community organizer based in Mathare, where she works with the Mathare Social Justice Centre. She serves as the Chairperson of the Domestic Workers and Waste Pickers Cooperative Society, advocating for workers’ rights, dignity, and collective empowerment. Her work is rooted in grassroots organizing, and she is passionate about building movements from below that center community agency and social justice.
Photo: Njeri Mwangi at an event organised to remember those killed during earlier anti-government demonstrations (July 2025, copyright DreamTown).
