Sometimes a name can cause us to think of a question. In this case, it’s the podcast called ‘Until Everyone is Free’, and it makes us ask ourselves: are we still, as a people, as a nation, stuck in certain bondages?
In the spirit of archiving forgotten histories, Stoneface Bombaa and April Zhu came together, bringing their interests and experiences in community organizing and journalism, to create a radio story about Pio Gama Pinto: a Goan-Kenyan freedom fighter assassinated in 1965.
Until Everyone Is Free is a sheng’ podcast that started with the aim of sharing about the life and work of Pio Gama Pinto, a socialist, and the victim of independent Kenya’s first political assassination. But as they started researching, Stoneface and April decided that they didn’t want the podcast to simply be a historical biography of one man, but rather an exercise in political education.
In each episode, the podcasters cover one role that Pinto played in the liberation struggle—as a Mau Mau ally, a land justice advocate, a trade unionist, a radical journalist, a political mastermind—and draw out one aspect that still resonates with people today. Questions like: what is solidarity? what happened to labor organizing in Kenya? what does mass unemployment have to do with capitalism?… are answered in the three episodes released so far.
The information in each episode has come from intensive research, and as April shares, “Sometimes a single episode required reading four full books, dozens of academic papers, and a couple of interviews. Finding primary-source information about Pinto himself was difficult because so much correspondence and documents about him were destroyed after his death (to protect collaborators from meeting the same fate) or were censored during the authoritarian Kenyatta and Moi eras. As a result, we had to rely on whatever sources still existed.”
One of their key sources of accurate information was Pio Gama Pinto: Kenya’s Unsung Martyr (Vita Books, 2018), edited by Shiraz Durrani. “Durrani, who fled Kenya in 1984 after being interrogated at Nyayo House for an article he had written about Pinto, did not stop collecting documents and information about Pinto, for almost forty years. His archiving work is the foundation for this project; without his work, ours would not exist.
A unique feature about this podcast is it embraces another aspect of Kenyanism that is sheng. This was a creative risk on the creators’ part, but they believed that it was important for the podcast to reach an audience that mattered to them: “masoffarer, the underprivileged, those in Nairobi’s urban informal settlements.” And they ensured information was as politically overt as possible. For this, Felix Omondi, a community journalist from Mathare, was brought on to translate significant portions of the script.
Stoneface Bombaa is a community organizer at the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), where he runs the MSJC Kids Club and Art for Social Change. He is also a member of the Mathare Green Movement (MGM), a group of volunteers who, through planting trees throughout the informal settlement, practice collective imagination and action.
April Zhu is a freelance journalist based in Nairobi, where she has written on gender, urban inequality, and China-Kenya as seen from the margin. While interviewing Stoneface for pieces on police brutality in Nairobi’s ghettos for The New York Review of Books Daily and The Baffler Magazine, a theme kept emerging in their conversations: archiving forgotten histories of resistance in Kenya.
With that, listen to Until Everyone Is Free