Exploiting Pan-African Digital Peacebuilding Infrastructures in Kenya: The Case of Maskani

Introduction

Maskani is an ambitious online and offline digital peacebuilding movement that was conceived in 2020. It involved six public universities in Western Kenya, and over sixty students, twelve faculty members, and members of their networks using WhatsApp, Facebook and Zoom. Maskani’s methodology was recently adopted in the review of Kenya’s digital peacebuilding architecture in a UNDP-supported study,¹ in collaboration with CODE for Africa and the Ministry of Interior and Coordination of National Government that reviewed Kenya’s peace and security architecture. The universities that pioneered Maskani are: Rongo University, Kisii University, Maseno University, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology, Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology and Kibabii University. This peacebuilding movement also included the participation of community youth around these universities. The goal was to address online and offline polarisation (digital peacebuilding) ahead of the 2022 elections in Kenya using digital tools. WhatsApp was used for mobilization, resource sharing, and hackathons (intensive learning through chatting); Facebook was used for sharing lessons learnt, peer to peer learning, and social support captured through the NguvuPamoja hashtag (#NguvuPamoja); and Zoom was used for monthly feedback interactions and for online inception workshops.

Pan African Digital Peacebuilding

Maskani not only demonstrates the importance of co-creation in tech innovation and adaptation, but also the salience of local nuance or context in digital peacebuilding inspired by local research-based interventions. Maskani’s icon on WhatsApp (see Figure 2) features a Luo² traditional house symbolic of African traditions of peaceful “communal belonging” (Harambee), co-existence or communal being (Ubuntu/Utu or Humanity), and collective freedom (Uhuru) where humans blend with nature (natural resources) for ultimate balance. The icon is the image of a granary or Dero in Luo, capturing the promise of perpetual peace in liberal peacebuilding³ which is symbolic of a spiritual commitment (godly peace).

Maskani equally demonstrates how local communities emerging from the cultural space are critical objects and subjects of peacebuilding and therein, integral to local infrastructures for peace (offline), as they transform into digital spaces (online networks) as cyber citizens (digital subjects). They are the drivers of the much-desired local approaches to peacebuilding, otherwise known as the local turn in contemporary peacebuilding,² especially around the pursuit of perpetual peace.  The latter revolves around the moral question of human free will (spiritual question) and the agency to make the pursuit for peace an everyday spiritual duty (endeavour) at both the individual and collective level.  Therefore, for digital peacebuilding to succeed, both online and offline infrastructures must interact. Maskani is a good example of the success of that interaction.

This raises the important question of how that interaction takes place. Maskani is inspired by a spirit that calls for unity, collective responsibility, and humanity in everyday interactions, including political interactions and competition. Political competition in Kenya is often characterized by incidents of ethnic violence, especially during general elections that are often perceived to be perpetrated by the opposition who are perceived to belong to the Luo ethnic community. Thus, Luo cultural artefacts were symbolically used to subvert the widespread public perception that the Luo are the primary drivers of electoral conflict in Kenya. Perpetrating such stereotypical public discourses around elections often amount to disinformation.⁵ Maskani icon is represented by “Dala” or home, assigned to ancestral origin or heritage of those belonging to the Luo community.  Kisumu, although largely cosmopolitan, is a Western Kenya City, christened Dala or Lakeside home because it is the ancestral home city of the Luo community (See Figure 1). The city harbours a mixed fortune, both as a hotspot for violence and a beacon of peace.

Local Peacebuilding Infrastructures

Tech-savvy university students (micro-influencers) and community youth from different demographics (gender, ethnicity, and geographic location) were trained, not only to be literate about the use of social media platforms but to also to account for the ethnic balance equation in political competition to address electoral violence. The training adequately equipped them for digital problem-solving (from the comfort of their homes regarding) the usual challenges facing Kenyans, mostly how to address ethnic conflict in the context of Covid-19, at that time (2020), and other problems like ethnic and religious intolerance and extremism (both political and violent extremism). Therefore, Maskani became a Media Information Literacy Movement that seeks to ensure these youth and a mega-network of their networks across Kenya are social media literate. The purpose of achieving this social media literacy is  to harness the positive potential of these digital platforms by engaging creatively on social media through positive messaging using artistic expressions such as music, poetry, painting and spoken word (digital peacebuilding). Social media literacy is therefore a critical component of digital peacebuilding through the Maskani approach.

Social Media Literacy

Social media literacy has been a key focus at the Center for Media, Democracy, Peace, and Security (CMDPS) in Rongo University, Kenya.⁶ Such literacy is about the ways in which users can acquire literacy skills through the co-creation of workshops regarding the positive exploitation of social media spaces. These workshops are conducted both online and offline to introduce students and community youths to digital peacebuilding strategies and online engagement through WhatsApp and Facebook. During piloting, each of the six public universities had a Maskani WhatsApp group where ideas were explored and weekly exercises given regarding the project, followed by a monthly Zoom feedback interaction. There was also a Maskani Commons WhatsApp group and Facebook page comprising all the students, used for digital mobilisation, activism, and peer to peer learning (knowledge sharing). The workshops helped in building consensus among the students on what constitutes polarization in Kenya by identifying and interrogating existing positive and negative hashtags.

Emerging Exercises

Some good exercises that were explored included:

1. Tracing the original creator of a hashtag and the context in which it was used by searching “the first tweet website,” which provides information about a word, a tweet, a hashtag, or anything on a tweet. For example, in the famous #Ruai, it was revealed that the first creator was one Ms. Owir, who simply used #Ruai in 2009 to suggest that she was going there. This formed an important part of our understanding on the use of social media hashtags.⁷ #Ruai was later used in 2020 to capture the narrative of politically driven demolitions that seek to remove squatters out of ‘government reserve lands’ in the outcasts of Nairobi.
2. Finding, analysing, and creating positive hashtags that could potentially counter the trending negative hashtags. In this exercise, it was clear that negative hashtags had serious reactions compared to positive ones. An example was given on how the negative polarising hashtag, #HowRutoBetrayedUhuru, could be countered by #UhuruToBetrayKenyans in order to bring about commonality regarding political realities.⁸

Digital Peacebuilding Strategies

Maskani was centred around five key peacebuilding strategies:

1. Listening and de-escalating online conversations
2. Creating change from within through one’s own ability
3. Humanising peace or sharing inspiring stories from other online users
4. Positive messaging
5. Facilitating depolarising dialogue or supporting those online posts that seek to reduce friction or polarization online

These strategies were faced with many obstacles, echoing the challenges faced in digital peacebuilding interventions at the local level. The challenges ranged from user challenges due to literacy levels on platform use, audience challenges related to hostile audiences, and process challenges related to specific approaches individual users chose when building peace digitally–for example, some participants found it difficult to locate personally inspiring stories to share because they simply did not have one, or they found it difficult to create positive stories to share.

Despite these challenges the digital peacebuilder learnt useful lessons. For example, lessons about the social media audience and how they respond to interventions, the technical process, and which strategies work best to create engagements. Most important is the lesson about the nature of social media e.g., social media has been designed in a way that negative news sells more than positive information, and therefore individual users should know who they are (learn lessons about themselves) when exploiting social media application.

The most important issue is how Maskani has now inspired the emergence of digital peacebuilding communities of practice from Eastern, Southern and Western Africa, where digital peacebuilding scholars are replicating the Maskanimethodology for local everyday digital peacebuilding. Maskani has opened the door to digital peacebuilding partnerships beyond the continent and has featured as a case study on social media and electoral peacebuilding at Swisspeace, supported by Swiss National Science Research Fund. Maskani also featured as the Carl Schlettwein keynote lecture at the 2023 Conference of the Swiss Association for the Study of Science, Technology and Society (STS-CH), titled: Science, Expertise and other Modes of Knowledge – Trend, Patterns, and Prospects at the University of Basel, co-organised with the Center for African Studies.⁹ It was also cited as a promising emerging digital peacebuilding initiative in a 2024 policy paper titled: Digital Technology and Inclusivity in Peace Mediation by the Agency for Peacebuilding (European Peacebuilding Liaison Office, EPLO).¹⁰ Finally, it was one of the indigenous digital peacebuilding movements studied by Dr. John Sokfa, Center for Mediation, University of Pretoria in his Africa Peacebuilding Network (APN) Fellowship research project, captured in his 2024 essay titled: Local Dynamics, Everyday Peacebuilding in Africa. Dr. Sokfa is currently collaborating with Prof. Fredrick Ogenga (a former APN fellowship recipient) of the Center for Media, Democracy, Peace and Security, to pilot a digital peacebuilding community of practice in Africa.

Endnotes

1. Cheboi, Allan, Fredrick Ogenga, and Peter Kimani.Review of Kenya’s Digital Peacebuilding Architecture Report, September to November 2023. Code for Africa, 2023.
2. The Luo are one of the dominant ethnic communities in Kenya with historical rivalry with the ruling Kikuyu and Kalenjin ethnic communities since 1963 when Kenya gained its independence from the British. The Luo, led by Raila Odinga, whose father Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was Kenya’s first vice president and the Doyen of opposition politics, have always been the face of the opposition in Kenya since independence.
3. Boutros-Ghali, Boutros. “Peacebuilding Initiative- Democracy as Seminal to Peacebuilding.” Accessed April 11, 2022.peacebuildinginitiative.org.
4. Leonardsson, Hanna, and Gustav Rudd. “The ‘Local Turn’ in Peacebuilding: A Literature Review of Effective and Emancipatory Local Peacebuilding.”Third World Quarterly 36, no. 5 (2015): 825–839.
5. Ogenga, Fredrick. “A Local Turn: Influencing Online Peacebuilding through Evidence-Based Interventions in Kenya’s 2022 Election.”Africa UpClose, 2022. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/a-local-turn-influencing-online-peacebuilding-through-evidence-based-interventions-in-kenyas-2022-elections.
6. Ogenga, Fredrick.Kenya: Social Media Literacy, Ethnicity and Peacebuilding. In Social Media Impacts on Conflict and Democracy: The Techtonic Shift, edited by Lisa S., 2021. London: Sage Publications.
7. McCann, J. “Maskani Maseno University WhatsApp Group Daily Interaction,” 2020.
8. “Carl Schlettwein Lectures.” Accessed December 11, 2024.https://zasb.unibas.ch/en/carl-schlettwein-lectures/.
9. “PeaceTech Policy Paper 2024.”European Peacebuilding Liaison Office, 2024. https://eplo.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/AP_PeaceTech_Policy-paper_2024_web.pdf.
10. Sokfa, J. “Local Dynamics, Everyday Peacebuilding in Africa.” Kujenga Amani, May 10, 2024. https://kujenga-amani.ssrc.org/2024/05/10/local-dynamics-of-everyday-digital-peacebuilding-in-africa/