Often, we have gone about life with the notion that real men don’t cry. In an African home, it is easier to get a lashing for whistling at night than to find one's father shedding a tear.
In the Kenyan context, we can excuse the men who cry in churches every day as a common sight. But psychology says crying is one of the easiest and most efficient ways of dealing with stress, it works regardless of gender.
One of the reasons that an African man doesn’t cry is so as to not appear weak. It is an African man, or allow me say parent, who will make a mistake and not own up to it for fear of being considered weak by the children. This brings me to the famous saying that only children cry, so cry we will.
Generation Z, for instance, have no problem with crying. This generation of Kenyans let their tears roll freely. As a result, they are pushing for a new wave of revolution that the country has never experienced before.
This revolution has no special uniform, no red hats and no catchy well well-thought-out slogans. The new generation's revolution is not taken to the streets with war songs and freedom chants, that battle has already been fought. The new revolution takes place elsewhere, on social media.
Social media is the new avenue for the ongoing revolution and this revolution is strong and lacks not in numbers. In an average Kenyan household, a child aged 10 will already have been introduced to one or all social media platforms.
Freedom of speech and expression is a right contained in local, regional and international instruments. The Kenyan constitution under articles 33, 34 and 35 talks about the freedom of expression, of media and of access to information respectively.
Gen Zs have been accused of being lazy and afraid of doing an honest day’s work. We have also been said to be with the greatest number of people who would like to flee the country at the first chance we get.
Maybe we are all that, but the part the media and critiques won’t show is that Gen Zs are also the front runners of the new wave of revolution that has been taking place on social media for at least five years now. The papers won’t show that this is the generation that has managed to keep in check the government of the day that our parents lined up to vote for in August 2022.
The papers will not show that Gen Z is one of the most informed generations since Independence. Only the elites had information about governance in previous generations. That has drastically changed. Most people say that Gen Zs know nothing of the day-to-day goings-on of the country, but the joke is on them.
The current generation of teenagers and adults is the new revolution. Unlike our fathers, who won’t let their tears be seen or cries heard, we will cry and we will do it loudly. We will cry when the cost of living goes up unnecessarily, we will cry when government offices become nepotistic and tribalistic.
We will cry when funds meant for disaster cannot be traced and our mothers die in floods. We will cry when farmers cannot get quality fertilisers for their farms and we will cry when these rights are threatened.
However, we are Generation Z, we won’t rush to the streets, flinging stones and destroying businesses, we will not wear sufurias on our heads and walk with huge cooking sticks. We just did our nails, we got our hair done and we just bought those new sneakers, we won’t mess them on the streets!
Our revolution is on social media, our war will be televised for the whole world to see. Ours is not a game of cat and mouse with the police, ours is a war protected under the Constitution. We will streak, we will tweet, we will create, we will podcast and, in the end, we will be heard. Only the children cry and unlike our fathers, we will cry.
Student, Mount Kenya University