Toward Freedom

“Wiathi is a grounding and grounded word, a world-imagining, world-building word.”

“I return, as always, to the example of my grandfather, who taught in what were called independent schools, systems established to think beyond the frames the British created for the natives. Independent schools pursued freedom. When those schools were closed, Kenyan education changed forever, moving from pursuing freedom to creating state-building skills, suitable for the colonial and post-independent state.”

“What kind of knowledge is needed to pursue freedom? How is knowledge to be freed? How can our minds be freed?”

““Political vernaculars” announce a conversation about politics: they are the words and phrases that assemble something experienced as the political, and that gather different groups around something marked as the political. They are the words and phrases that disassemble people around the political, as when “I prefer not to discuss politics.” They create attachments to the political, and they also distance us from something known as the political. They create possibilities for different ways of coming together—from short-lived experiments to long-term institution building—and they also impede how we form ourselves as we-formations, across the past, the present, the future, and all of the in-between times marked by slow violence and prolonged dying.”

“What kind of knowledge is freedom-building, freedom-creating, freedom-pursuing, freedom-sustaining? What’s the relationship between this knowledge and state-sanctioned knowledge? What will ground this freedom-oriented knowledge?”

“Wambui Mwangi has been teaching me how to think about grounding, how to think and act from where one is standing.”

“Because I think with the black diaspora, I am also compelled to ask about how one thinks and acts from dispossession and deracination.”

“What does thinking with still-extant colonial villages produce as an orientation toward freedom? What does thinking with IDPs do? What does thinking with squatters do? What does thinking with those who live in “informal settlements”—I’m unconvinced that “informal settlement” is more dignified than slum; what gives a settlement form?—do? What does thinking with and from the North Eastern region do for how Kenya is imagined? What does thinking with women who have low rates of owning land do? How do we assemble these various dispossessions and create freedom-seeking knowledge with and from them?”

“Shailja Patel taught me how to say #mybodymyhome: “Our bodies are our first homes. If we are not safe in our bodies, we are always homeless.””

“How do we pursue freedom for and through our bodies? What claims to freedom should be made? What kinds of freedom should be pursued? If our bodies are the grounds on which we stand—the only grounding we can speak from, even when that ground is violated—how do we pursue freedom dreams?”

“Freedom will not come from learning how to speak and act as the state desires.”

“I’m also certain that the term freedom needs to be populated with meanings that work, grounded in love and care and mutuality. We must imagine and create and practice freedoms that promote livability and shareability.”