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Short abstract:

This paper explores existing online social communities and movements in Kenya and the ways their organization promotes sustained offline action. It proposes an assembling logic of Ujamaa Mtandaoni that emphasizes community, well-being, justice, indigenous knowledges, and digital transformation.

Long abstract:

This contribution aims to explore existing online social communities & movements in Kenya and how their organisation promotes sustained offline action. It examines online social platforms as tools that can be repurposed to empower the collective human experience by shifting the focus in scholarship from narratives of systemic failures/oppression to narratives of resilience. The objective is to reimagine, rediscover, and inspire new ways of making and doing social activism to facilitate material life within radically unjust systems. What happens when these organising strategies are inspired by a hope ethic firmly rooted in joy as radical resistance?

Drawing on this, the paper proposes an alternative logic of “Ujamaa Mtandaoni,” which translates to extended-family online in Kiswahili. This framework is grounded in community, human well-being, justice, indigenous epistemologies, and “Digital Alchemy” (Bailey, 2021). It aims to subvert online platforms founded on logics of wealth accumulation, dispossession, extractivism & obfuscation a lá Surveillance Capitalism by reclaiming them as instruments for personal and communal transformation.

We examine movements such as #nuNairobi, #KOT, and mental health online peer support groups in Kenya as examples that embody Ujamaa Mtandaoni. We pay close attention to the logic(s) in action that shape formation of these communities, and the existing “social algorithms” on the ground, e.g. language like Sheng slang, mutual aid practices and creatives’ collectives. How do these social networks challenge existing extractive logics to inspire generative models? Which critical insights emerge that might be used to propose/design liberatory prototypes for the future, e.g. policy, technological objects, art?