Colonial Echoes: Gen Z's Fight Against Police Custody Injustice in Kenya

Gen Z protesters march with the Kenyan flag on Kimathi Street in downtown Nairobi, demanding accountability for Albert Ojwang's death and calling for Deputy IG Lagat to face justice, June 2025. The street is named after Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi Waciuri, a commander in the freedom movement in Kenya who refused to surrender and was captured, tried and hanged by colonial authorities in 1957. Eliud Mutonyi Wanjie's manuscript records that such military titles were adopted by forest leaders "to enable them to command the respect of their juniors and maintain the discipline which was a cardinal feature in winning the war," embodying the movement's motto: say and act.

An examination of archival records and contemporary protests that links colonial detention practices to the death of a blogger in custody in 2025, and to the generational reckoning led by Gen Z.

This investigation is based on an unpublished manuscript held at the Kenya National Archives, official post-mortem reports, a resignation letter from police headquarters, oversight records and contemporaneous protest documentation.

Kenya became independent in 1963 after decades of British rule, during which the colonial government used detention camps, censorship and violence to crush African demands for land, political rights and dignity. In official files and settler newspapers, the main resistance was dismissed as "Mau Mau," a criminal cult, but a handwritten manuscript by former detainee and organiser Eliud Mutonyi Wanjie calls it something very different: the freedom movement in Kenya.

This story places Mutonyi's account of a killing in custody at Hola detention camp beside the 2025 death of blogger Albert Omondi Ojwang in a Nairobi police cell, an event that sparked nationwide Gen Z-led protests before quickly slipping from public conversation. It argues that the blogger's death was not an isolated tragedy but part of a longer pattern in which state power over detention and accountability has outlived colonial rule.

The Freedom Movement Names Itself

Mutonyi's unpublished manuscript sets out a detailed picture of how the freedom movement in Kenya organised itself, far from the caricatures found in colonial reports. He describes a Central Committee meeting in Nairobi at Kiburi House, a secret structure called Muhimu and a War Council that coordinated action once armed struggle intensified, with orders flowing from this leadership until mass arrests smashed its core.

He explains that the movement's motto in Kikuyu was Kuuga na Gwika, say and act, a rejection of leaders who made promises but never took risks or kept their word. The movement collected membership fees, administered binding oaths and tried to curb abuses by its own members, including a rule that anyone accused away from home had to be sent back to their own area for judgment so they would be tried by people who knew them.

Mutonyi is also careful about the famous titles that appear in history books, writing that ranks such as general and field marshal were not distributed from Nairobi but chosen locally by commanders who needed authority under harsh conditions. For him, these details matter because they show a disciplined political organisation rather than the chaotic cult imagined in colonial propaganda.

Hola: Eleven Men and an Official Lie

By early 1959, Mutonyi had spent five years in detention camps, repeatedly pressed to accept "rehabilitation," which meant renouncing the movement and cooperating with colonial authorities. Classified as one of "the blackest of the black," he was sent to Hola, a remote camp on the Tana River where hard-core detainees were held under especially brutal conditions.

On 3 March 1959, guards divided detainees into three groups: one to the kitchen, one, including Mutonyi, to the dispensary, and a third, younger group to forced labour in the fields, where they were ordered to dig irrigation furrows with hoes, basins and spades. From the dispensary, Mutonyi heard what he calls the most agonising screams of his detention, as warders beat the labour group, divided into clusters of five, "whipped and whipped" until at least eleven men lay dead.

Kabui Kaman, Ndungu Kibaki, Mwema Kinuthia, Kinyanjui Njoroge, Koroma Mburu, Karanja Munuthi, Ikeno Ikiro, Migwi Ndegwa, Kaman Karanja, Mungai Githi and Ngugi Karitie. He recalls their bodies being carried into the dispensary, where a young Red Cross doctor broke down in tears before treating the injured. The colonial government, however, announced that the men had died after drinking poisoned or contaminated water, a story repeated to the public and to Parliament in London until medical evidence and outside investigations made the lie impossible to sustain.

Even after acknowledging the beatings, senior officials kept their positions, and Mutonyi notes that Hola was later removed from maps and renamed Galole, a change he interprets as a second attempt to bury the camp's history. For him, no new name can erase the horror of Hola or the warning it offers about what governments can do when detention sites are hidden from public scrutiny.

A Blogger's Death in a Nairobi Cell

On the night of 7 June 2025, teacher and blogger Albert Omondi Ojwang was arrested at his home in Homa Bay County after a senior police commander filed a complaint accusing him of spreading "false and malicious" statements on social media. Police transported Albert more than 350 kilometres to Nairobi Central Police Station, booking him into a cell late that night as friends and family waited for news.

By the next morning, Albert was dead. The first police statement claimed he had taken his own life by repeatedly hitting his head against the wall of his cell, an account that collapsed when government pathologists recorded severe blunt-force injuries to his head, compression of his neck and multiple bruises across his body. These findings matched a violent assault rather than deliberate self-harm, and the Inspector-General of Police later withdrew the suicide claim and apologised for releasing false information.

An investigation by the Independent Policing Oversight Authority found that cameras that should have monitored Albert's cell were switched off or contained unexplained gaps, raising questions about who controlled the CCTV system that night. Prosecutors eventually charged six suspects, three police officers and three civilians or fellow inmates, with murder, all of whom pleaded not guilty as the case moved into a slow-moving pre-trial phase.

Only junior officers and civilians appeared in the dock. The senior commander whose complaint triggered the arrest was not charged, highlighting a familiar imbalance between the treatment of those at the bottom and those at the top of the policing hierarchy.

A Deputy Steps Aside, Then Returns

Nine days after Albert's death, the senior commander issued a statement on official Kenya Police Service letterhead announcing that, in view of the "unfortunate incident" and ongoing investigations, he would step aside from his office as Deputy Inspector General.

The letter said his deputy would perform the duties of the position temporarily and expressed "immense condolences" to Albert's family, promising full cooperation with investigators. Months later, after investigators indicated he would not face charges, the Deputy Inspector General quietly returned to his post, even as the murder case against junior officers inched through the courts.

For Albert's relatives and civil society groups, this sequence, complaint, death in custody, apology, temporary stepping aside and reinstatement, raised sharp questions about how far accountability travels in Kenya's security institutions.

Gen Z on the Streets, and the Risk of Forgetting

News of Albert's death turned online outrage into street protest, with mostly young Kenyans organising demonstrations via social media in Nairobi, Mombasa, Homa Bay and other towns. Protesters marched with banners reading "Justice for Albert Ojwang" and calling for the Deputy Inspector General's removal, chanting that no one should enter a police cell alive and leave as a corpse.

In central Nairobi, demonstrators carried the national flag between banks and office towers, some in bandanas and streetwear, others in office suits, recording events on their phones as they moved. At one point, protesters staged a die-in, lying across the tarmac while others raising posters with Albert's portrait under the words "Most Wanted" printed above the image of the senior officer they blamed.

At Albert's funeral, the procession turned into another march towards a nearby police station, mourners chanting against deaths in custody and what they described as a culture of impunity in uniform. Yet by December 2025, as this piece is published, those Gen Z-led protests have largely slipped from national headlines even though the court case drags on, echoing how the Hola killings were once buried under official lies and bureaucratic indifference.

The Continuity of Custody Deaths

Mutonyi's manuscript the experiences that the colonial state tried to erase with a story about poisoned water and a later change of place-name, while the documents surrounding Albert Ojwang's death, post-mortems, oversight reports, court files and protest images, perform the same work for an ordinary citizen of independent Kenya who did not emerge alive from a police cell. In Hola in 1959 and Nairobi Central in 2025, someone dies in state custody, officials offer an implausible explanation, independent evidence exposes the falsehood, and limited accountability is directed downwards rather than upwards.

The digitally organised Gen Z protesters who filled the streets in 2025 may not have read Mutonyi's manuscript, but their demands resonate with its central insistence that words without deeds are worthless. By setting an archival account of colonial detention alongside a contemporary death in custody, this investigation reveals a continuity: the struggle over truth and accountability in Kenya did not end with independence. It simply entered a new phase.