On 11th May 2026, five students were arrested at the University of Nairobi main campus gate for contesting the France Africa Forward summit’s true intention.
We get to understand from the events of May 2026 that the arrest of the five cadres was not an isolated police action. It was the logical outcome of a deeper contradiction, the contradiction between a state that speaks the language of sovereignty and a material order that still binds Kenya to the interests of foreign capital. To read these arrests dialectically is to move past the surface charge sheet and ask what social relations the arrests were actually defending.
Kenya has worn the flag of independence since 1963. But a flag is a surface and beneath every surface there is a foundation. And the foundation of this state still runs through Global capitalism ,a semi-feudal and semi-capitalist neocolonial architecture.When people rise to challenge that foundation the machinery of the state does not hesitate. It protects what it was built to protect. Not the citizen. The base.
France wanted immunity for its soldiers. The same immunity British troops enjoy under BATUK which in practice places them beyond the reach of Kenyan law. Yet the Sahel has already shown France the door. Expulsion and the search for new ground are not separate stories. They are one movement. The same power pushed out of one corner of the periphery now looks to plant itself in another. So the question was never whether France can help this side of the periphery. The question is what help means when it arrives carrying the objective reality of a relationship already rejected elsewhere and when its first demand is that its soldiers answer to no one here.
Then came the Africa Forward Summit. President William Ruto and French President Emmanuel Macron stood together in May and called it a meeting of equals. Fair trade. Climate justice. Debt reforms. Stronger representation in global decision making. Ruto spoke of Africa moving away from dependency and being treated as a strategic partner rather than a supplicant for aid. This was the promise offered to the world.
But a promise is not a proof. The economic base of debt, trade agreements and extractive investment does not change because the language above it has been polished. The rhetoric of partnership and the heavy police barrier did not merely sit uneasily beside each other as if one were the truth and the other wasn’t. The barrier was the condition that made the rhetoric possible. The partnership could be proclaimed only by securing it against the very people it claimed to serve. And it was there at that barrier that the contradiction showed its face. Not a contradiction between word and deed but a contradiction within the deed itself. A deed that can speak of equality only by practicing exclusion.
Immunity is the clearest form of this logic. A partnership of equals does not require that one partner’s soldiers stand above the other’s law. The demand for immunity is the admission that equality was never the premise. Sovereignty is conceded in rhetoric and withdrawn in statute. The summit did not fail to live up to its ideals. It realized them exactly as they are. A partnership that presupposes inequality. A decolonization that renews dependence. A forward movement that circles back. The promise and the barrier are not two things but one , and the synthesis if there is one will not come from within the summit’s own logic but from those on the other side.
This was the reason for the arrest. Not for offensive conduct but for consciousness in motion. For praxis in action.Young people applying the analytical tools of class struggle to their own historical moment. This is precisely the dialectical process the summit’s organizers could not accommodate. Contradiction resolving itself not through the polished language of partnership summits but through the concrete action of students at a gate.
The five are not an isolated case. Solidarity organizations following the crackdown have reported that authorities banned further demonstrations and deployed military style checkpoints across Nairobi. The court case of the five is still ongoing.
