Mumbi Kanyogo is a Kenyan writer and researcher whose work wrestles with the intimate geographies of care, resistance, solidarity, and reimagining. Whether writing about the contradictions of domestic labour, the hollow gestures of imperial apology, or the language of resistance, Mumbi traces how systems of power are felt in the body, home, and everyday life. In this fourth edition of A Short Talk, Mumbi talks to Yvonne Wabai, a 2025 Rajat Neogy editorial fellow at A Long House, about what it means to write beyond catharsis, to choose interdependence over privatised care, and to insist that solidarity be material, not symbolic. This is a talk about exhaustion and joy, family and fracture, and what it means to live and write on purpose.
A LONG HOUSE
What does writing feel like for you?
MUMBI KANYOGO
For me, writing is an opportunity to connect the dots between the dominance of capital, imperialism, and patriarchy; the historical moments through which these forces make themselves felt; and the everyday experiences through which they naturalise their power. In many ways, writing—that is, making sense of these connections on a page—is clarifying. Writing—towards challenging the way power is infused with our everyday actions, our perceptions of each other and the state, and our memories of the past—requires some level of reflexivity and challenging of my own (sometimes unconscious) personal investments in power in order to prioritise what is true collectively. It is a tense, uncomfortable process, and it is not easy—that type of writing shouldn’t be.
A LONG HOUSE
Your work often intertwines personal narratives with broader societal critiques. How do you balance the intimate and the political in your writing?
MUMBI KANYOGO
I see people’s stories as sites through which we can make the violent logics of imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy known and deeply felt. Even if we aren’t familiar with the theories that explain a particular set of power relations, we all know what struggle looks like—what it means to be paid less than you’re owed, what it means to see loved ones struggle day-to-day because of unemployment or the broader price of life. At the same time, when we are wedded to a particular harmful relation (e.g. wage theft) because of the good life it delivers (e.g. more disposable income), thinking about these relations on a structural scale, might give us room for self-reflexivity or to make new collective demands, where pleasure might demand silence and seclusion from us. The intimate familiarises and the political defamiliarizes, and both are required to trigger new ways of thinking about a world that exists around and beyond us. So I always try to put them in conversation with each other.
A LONG HOUSE
Sisi Pia Ni Watu moved me deeply. In it, you write about the plight of domestic workers—the “exploitative, feminized labour that is carelessly positioned as a source of income for those who have been systemically dispossessed and deprived of economic and educational opportunities.” It reads like a meditation on both survival and solidarity. What has the struggle for dignified domestic and care work taught you about care, access, and interdependence?
MUMBI KANYOGO
In writing Sisi Pia Ni Watu, the question I really wanted to explore was: What can domestic work tell us about how pleasure and care are constructed—what can it tell us about lapses in solidarity? Domestic work has always been a pathway to escape men’s decision to almost totally opt out of child-rearing and homekeeping—a pathway that often has no alternative because of the state’s complete failure to provide public goods, including universal childcare. The state, the unequal global exchange of labour, and the wage (that is, the necessity of working particular hours a day for a salary or working countless erratic hours to secure a gig payment) constrain people’s pay and choices. Therefore, a reality is manufactured in which people choose to exploit poorer women at the level of the wage, but also at the level of time. The domestic worker organisers I spoke to framed this exploitation as a choice taken up by employers, because, as they put it, “For example, if you have 7,000 shillings you can pay your worker for a month, that 7,000 is not enough for work both day and night.” What they’re arguing here is that if employers cannot afford to pay at least the minimum wage, they must decrease the amount of time they expect domestic workers to dedicate to their households. That this may still be an unworkable arrangement for many demonstrates the impossibility of approaching care in privatised, individualised ways that are also structured by a logic of care and dignity for all involved. It shows us that the only thing that can truly resolve this contradiction is a shared demand for universally accessible, socially provisioned care, across class.
Secondly, domestic workers are also clear that care is work. This is important on its own because it refuses the bifurcation of the public and private spheres, which devalues everything that happens in the home. But, at a time when care is being resituated as a commodity—as a thing to acquire and own to guarantee leisure; as a shield against the heavy demands of capitalism—it is easy to mask and ignore the fact that many times “rest” and “enjoyment” are produced by exploited labour, often poor women’s labour. This forces us to contend with the fact that under capitalism, even pleasure, safety, and refuge are transformed into sites of dispossession and exploitation, even when we don’t intend it. This shouldn’t lead us to despair or to defensively ignore our complicities, but to instead (again) open up a pathway for shared demands for care as a public good. Capitalism and patriarchy force us to shrink our worlds to a constellation of blood relations only protected through the privacy of the home and the guarantee of a wage or maybe even the promise of profit. Here, “accountability” and order only flow in one direction—from the better off towards those who are more exploited. But care that is truly focused on shared well-being should encourage us to demand a system of care that is built around interdependence, where the duty of and access to care are shared and not commodified.
A LONG HOUSE
You grew up in Nairobi within a large extended family. How has that kind of closeness—living among many—shaped your vision of community, of holding and being held?
MUMBI KANYOGO
I grew up living very near my grandparents, aunties, uncles, and cousins just outside Nairobi. My cucu was my second mother, and my cousins were my closest friends. For over 20 years, we’d spend Saturdays at my cucu and guka’s, with everyone bringing a dish, a game, a song, a dance, or a new friend to share. We ate sugar cane, almost got kicked by cows, and climbed loquat trees (or, in my case, just watched)—we had so much fun with each other and we cared for each other deeply. But living so close to each other also meant we saw the worst of each other—abuse, deep unkindness, and selfishness. We also had class contradictions between us, and although these were partially resolved by the fact that we shared resources so seamlessly—my cucu was a farmer, so everyone always had veggies and milk; and we shared each other’s clothes and shoes without our parents’ permission—they still made themselves known through the schools we attended and the ages by which we were all able to move out.
Our community thrived when we shared things with each other, when we approached our problems as collective rather than personal ones; and it was always on the verge of collapse when we privatised and individualised our problems or secluded ourselves to protect the promise of privilege, only choosing to act as a collective on joyful occasions. As a result, for me, community means solidarity to meet each other’s material needs, even when we do not like each other; it means refusing the demand of privacy that the promise of social mobility makes of us; it means being held and holding are entwined in everyday productions of care that must encompass the material, as well as the social—one without the other feels dishonest.
A LONG HOUSE
You’ve spoken about transitioning from fear-driven choices to ones rooted in intentionality and desire. What practices or revelations have helped you attune to what feels right, and bring fullness into your life on purpose? And in that transition from survival to fulfilment, what has surprised you about yourself?
MUMBI KANYOGO
I think capitalism is a dream killer. The demand for stability makes fulfilment a secondary concern. When I said I wanted to pursue a life unburdened by fear-driven choices, what I meant is I wanted to take more risks that are centred around fulfilment and actualisation as an individual and in relation to other formations I’m in or would like to be part of in the future. For me, at the core of my dreams for my life is writing, teaching, and being part of movements where I can express solidarity through organising. I wouldn’t say I’ve made a full transition from a draining work life to fulfilment—I don’t think I’m disciplined enough for this. I would say that I’ve decided to be honest with myself about why I haven’t been writing as much: I am tired, and most of the time, I am exhausted. Work steals time and energy from us that we can never get back. What would it look like to reclaim my best daily hours for the work I actually want to do? What would it look like for me to accept that I am tired most of the time, but even my tiredness has gradations—some days I do have the energy to write, scrape archival records, and read deep theory; other days I need to recover, have fun, or just be? I’ve decided to accept exhaustion as a fact of this political economy and listen to my body as I work around it.
A LONG HOUSE
Are there emerging social movements—locally or globally—that give you reason to hope? In what ways do they reflect the world you’re writing toward?
MUMBI KANYOGO
I am really inspired by us. I’m energised by the people across generations in this country who worked together in 2024 to reject the finance bill, Ruto, and, by extension, the entire political class. I think it is especially inspiring because of the history of resistance in this country. In Kenya, one consequence of the emergence of neoliberalism, the rerouting of the duty of social provisioning away from the state and towards the non-profit system, was the transformation of everyday Kenyans into recipients of services. In the case of the professional classes, we have been transformed into intermediaries who deliver aid, capacity-building, and so on in place of political confrontation, based on the misanalysis that the crises we have been experiencing are primarily ones of ineptitude and technical incompetence, not ones of power and its distribution. Though there are exceptions, it is always the most dispossessed among us who emerge to contest capitalism and imperialism—for example, the Njaa Revolution. Twenty thousand and twenty-four represented a fissure, a refusal of that outsourcing of resistance, and a moment of deep solidarity where those who had always been fighting for a better present were joined by a mass of Kenyans who also began to see themselves as agents of history.
At the same time, I think it also spoke to the limits of a solidarity that is guided by a desire for “good governance”, one that doesn’t pay attention to the root causes of the corruption or undemocratic governance we see today—patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism; and how they manifest in Kenya. As a result, in my writing, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role that professional classes play in limiting the ambitions of movements like Ruto Must Go because of our attachment and deep belief in things like the rule of law, constitutionalism, and democracy (under capitalism). It’s not new—it’s a contradiction that we have always had to confront since the radical anti-colonial period, and eventually after post-independence. Yet, exactly as Cabral and Fanon predicted, though we are few, we constantly choose to forward our own interests, instead of sacrificing them to align with the working classes of this country and continent. That is what I spend my time writing against now, most recently on my Substack, Notes on Solidarity, and my most recent piece published on A Long House, Solidarity, as in Betraying Our Kin.
A LONG HOUSE
Reflecting on your journey so far, what would you tell emerging writers and organisers who are drawn to the intersections of storytelling, justice, and care?
MUMBI KANYOGO
Lately, care and justice as a thematic focus in writing and storytelling, otherwise known in the international development sector as the “care economy” or even the “migrant care worker crisis”, have focused on highlighting the struggles of the workers who are being exploited and dispossessed. This is important. But these stories are very often evacuated of the perpetrators of this exploitation. Additionally, when the audiences of these stories and articles are also complicit in this exploitation and dispossession, these stories in turn become voyeuristic. In Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, Fargo Tbakhi writes that many of us writers are trained in Aristotelian narrative structures which he argues figure as “coercive tools of the bourgeoisie, serving to purge an audience’s revolutionary emotion and with it the obligation to intervene in an unfolding narrative as an active participant.” Tbakhi writes against writing that makes passive witnesses out of audiences, writing that names an unreachable, all-powerful, wicked other without naming audience complicities that enable the status quo to continue unperturbed. Tbakhi writes against “catharsis” in “the hour of genocide”, but we writers on care and justice are guilty of reproducing catharsis in the hour of exploitation, dispossession, and migrant care worker abuse. Instead, we need to reposition our writing as a call for solidarity, where solidarity must mean more than a solidarity statement, and must instead mean divesting from structures that enable exploitation, even as they sustain our own comfort and pleasure, and meaningfully supporting movements organising for an end to exploitation. As Tbakhi writes, “Nobody should get out of our work feeling purged, clean. Nobody should live happily through the war.”
A LONG HOUSE
Looking ahead, what themes or projects are you yearning to explore in your future work?
MUMBI KANYOGO
I am really looking forward to exploring the impact of neoliberalism on the kinds of demands that movements make of the state. I’m interested in, for instance, why it is that feminist movements across the continent have, on separate occasions, sought legal reform as justice to domestic violence, but don’t demand more access to care-focused resources with as much fervour. I’m also interested in exploring the emergence of the “youth bulge” discourse on the continent, including its resonances with and connections to old colonial and contemporary imperial population anxieties and how African governments are negotiating these anxieties through labour, social welfare, and population control policies.
