Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… Four years into his stint as a senior technician at the now-defunct Kenya Posts & Telecommunications, in 1971, a young Francis Atwoli took on the role of branch secretary for the parastatal’s employees union. It was the start of a journey that would eventually make him the definitive face of Kenya’s labour movement. Just two months ago, in March, he secured his sixth term as general secretary of the Central Organization of Trade Unions, an umbrella body representing over three million workers through 45 affiliate trade unions. He was first elected COTU’s general secretary in 2001. For reasons including his political pronouncements, boisterous personality, and penchant for rhumba and gold jewellery, Atwoli has become so ingrained in mainstream Kenyan culture and discourse that he has become a meme several times over. It’s easy to forget that the 71-year-old man throwing his iPhone in the middle of a live TV interview while discussing political formations is responsible for advancing workers’ interests in a country where even their Constitutionally-guaranteed rights are constantly trampled upon. Looking Back Kenya’s labour movement has always been intertwined with politics. Leaders, including Makhan Singh, Fred Kubai, and Bildad Kaggia, were responsible for the earliest unions in the 1930s–40s – including the Labour Trade Union of Kenya, Transport and Allied Workers Union (TAWU), and Clerks and Commercial Workers Union, respectively. Singh and Kubai worked together to establish the East African Trade Union Congress, with Singh as secretary-general and Kubai as president. Union leaders were often detained and intimidated by colonial authorities who saw them as a political threat. In 1953, after the colonial British government banned the Kenya African Union (KAU) and arrested leaders, including former President Jomo Kenyatta, the Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL) morphed into a key force in the struggle for Kenya’s independence. These efforts were led by leaders, including the vaunted Tom Mboya, who was himself a beneficiary of a scholarship from the Trade Union Congress for his studies at England’s Ruskin College. Mboya leveraged his role as general secretary of the KFL to demand African self-rule and connected with influential figures across the world, giving speeches and earning so much admiration that he eventually became the first Kenyan on a Time magazine cover in a portrait painted by Bernard Safran. After the colonial government allowed Africans to run for legislative positions in 1956, Mboya would be elected in Nairobi and went on to be a key influence in the independence government before his tragic assassination in July 1969. So what changed? The Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU) was formed in 1965 following the government’s dissolution of rival labour bodies, ostensibly to institutionalize the labour rights movement and unify workers. The biggest union in the country, the Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT), joined COTU in 1966. But this state-managed consolidation would actually herald the decline of the labour movement and its bargaining power. The consolidation under COTU led to heavy political interference from the then-ruling party Kenya Africa National Union (KANU), and fueled factional battles tied to patronage and ethnic networks. But the labour movement was yet to reach its lowest. Under Kenya’s second president, Daniel Arap Moi and the repressive one-party state, COTU effectively became subordinate to the government. It was formally incorporated into KANU structures in 1990 snuffing out independent labour action at a time when structural adjustment programs were causing mass layoffs, with tens of thousands retrenched. Union membership numbers cratered. THE ATWOLI ERA It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that KANU’s grip on COTU would be loosened, following pressure from international labour bodies and the US government, which set it as a condition