YVONNE'S TAKE: Tribute to activists

There’s a strange cruelty in how quickly we forget the price of our freedoms.

This past week, activists Boniface Mwangi and Agatha Atuhaire shared harrowing accounts of their treatment in Tanzania, including allegations of sexual assault. Instead of the solidarity such a revelation should inspire, what followed in some quarters was mockery, ridicule. A cruel dismissal of their pain. But also, disturbingly, a dismissal of who they are and what they represent.

Let me say this clearly: activism is a form of sacrifice. A choice to fight. Not for one’s children alone, or one’s community alone, but for the collective. For you, for me, for the stranger walking by on the street. That kind of courage, often loud, sometimes unpopular, occasionally disruptive has always been the engine of progress.

When you insult an activist like Boniface Mwangi, ask yourself: who benefits when he stands in the street with a placard, takes the blows, or braves the threats? Are those gains private for his children, his friends, his family? Or do they ripple into the spaces you now enjoy, the rights you now claim?

See, there are two kinds of citizens: those who live in the house, and those who protect it from burning down. Activists are the latter. And often, they pay dearly for it.

Without Wangari Maathai, there would be no Uhuru Park, just a skyline of concrete. She stood in the way of bulldozers, and in doing so, stood for all of us.

Without the bravery of the Release Political Prisoners pressure group, figures like Koigi wa Wamwere, Prof. Edward Oyugi, Mwandawiro Mghanga, and Rumba Kinuthia may never have walked free. That fight was not waged in courtrooms alone. Old women stripped naked in protest at Uhuru Park, shaming the republic into listening. That is what sacrifice looks like. I wonder what we would have said if they did that today.

Let’s be honest: many of us inherited freedoms we did not fight for. The right to assemble, to post, to protest, to criticise, even to insult. Those rights were not handed to us kindly. They were pried loose by people like Raila Odinga, who paid with years of detention and exile. And Yes, some of the same people we mock today.

That’s the great irony: activists often defend the very freedoms that allow others to insult them. They take the blows, online and off, to preserve spaces where speech, even careless or cruel, remains free. They don’t just fight for the agreeable; they fight for the right of all voices to exist.

Activists aren’t perfect. Their methods may be confrontational. Their language rough. But in every generation, we need people who are willing to raise their voice when everyone else has grown silent. People who stand in the gap, not for gain, but for the good.

The era of the hunter who kills and brings meat home for his own family is over. We now live in shared spaces. And shared spaces require shared courage.

So, the next time you see an activist speak out, don’t ask: “What’s in it for them?”