2 million people held hands in a 600-kilometre-long human chain crossing the borders of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania marking a key moment of solidarity during the Singing Revolution
There is the truism that unless you name a problem (i.e., understand it), you may never begin to solve it.
Sun Tzu, the Chinese military strategist and philosopher, put it more dramatically: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles”.
A recent post by Dr Njuki Githethwa in the Ukombozi Writers Forum he convenes on WhatsApp read like this: “The protests quickly morphed into the #RutoMustGo movement which had – and still has – the potential to be a truly revolutionary movement if we can agree on two things. First, the noun ‘Ruto’ does not refer to William Samoei Ruto the individual, but rather the system that he represents, the system that produces Rutos. The second and more important thing we need to agree on is that ideological struggle must precede power struggle.”
The protests referred to in the excerpt are the now celebrated “Gen Z” demonstrations in June 2024 that drew global attention. The passage was culled from an incisive article titled ‘First Win the Mind’: The Need for a War of Position in Kenya by journalist Mohamed Amin Abdishukri in Ukombozi Review.
Despite reference to “war” in the article’s title, and as suggested in the excerpt, the article does not so much invoke a war cry as it expresses deep disappointment with studied intent for change.
Disappointment, as I’ve been learning from Rafael Holmberg, a researcher in philosophy and psychoanalytic theory at University College London, is not just a feeling, it is a political force.
It is, he observes, socially situated and politically structured. When political regimes fail us, it is disappointment that holds the radical potential for change.
As matters stand, to borrow another of Dr Githethwa’s observations elsewhere, the battle for change is in “a lull at which point a revolution seems to have subsided, or gone under. When the combatants on the frontline have taken a break to replenish their energies, to reassess their mission and to refocus their visions.”
It is about the vision. But Abdishukri in his article wonders “whether [the envisioned movement] will be another almost-revolution, another footnote in Kenya’s history of incomplete revolutions, another moment of rage contained and conquered by the ruling class, or whether it will be the beginning of total liberation brought by radical political education and consciousness.”
I would think that success cannot be other than by harnessing public consciousness, a part of “know yourself” in Sun Tzu’s take. If the activists in this model are the tip of the spear, the people must be the shaft that backs their claims to legitimacy and provides the momentum for change.
Abdishukri, therefore, is prudent to wonder whether it will turn out to be another dud revolution. Note that while he has named the “enemy”, the said enemy has likewise named its “enemy” and will be better prepared next time, especially after the novelty and spontaneity of the “Gen Z” ambush.
When my phone pinged alert to the WhatsApp post referred above, I had just finished reading about the Singing Revolution that waltzed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to their freedom and independence.
I thought that perhaps a lesson might be borrowed from it, not only to make a statement but probably derive a more enduring outcome.
A key highlight of the revolution was the moving spectacle of the 1989 human chain of two million people holding hands over a distance of 600 kilometres across the three states that would prove pivotal, propelling the momentum to their freedom.
The human chain was an expression of public consciousness that would also prove influential, birthing similar chains in other countries around the world, as noted below.
This is bearing in mind that each country is unique to its situation and circumstances and would require a solution distinctive to its experience.
It is also bearing in mind that, even in Kenya, there cannot be any illusions about how the world has evolved socio-politically, of which the Kenyan experience includes the past hard-won struggles that gave us the 2010 Constitution. Despite the relatively new constitution, as the Gen Z and other protests have shown, the work may not be complete.
The current struggle might, therefore, feature somewhere among the continuum of Sun Tzu’s rhetorical “a hundred battles”.
And, thus, the case for winning the hearts and minds of the people to power completion of the work, though this may depend on the scale such as the movement Abdishukri envisions.
Perhaps, then, the Singing Revolution, though removed from Kenya in time and circumstance, might lend a leaf?
It would best serve to tell it in some detail.
The three Baltic nations, together with Finland, Romania and part of Poland, had been Soviet spheres of influence beginning August 1939, after the signing of the non-aggression treaty between Germany and the Union of the Socialist Soviet Republics. The treaty would come to be known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the two countries’ respective foreign ministers who signed it.
The pact would also lead to the outbreak of World War Two a month after its signing. And in June 1940, as the war raged, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Estonia, Lativia and Lithuania, voiding the pact with Germany.
The decades that followed saw a process of aggressive Russification (forcing adoption of Russian culture and language) on the occupied states. It also saw exploitation of natural resources and encouragement of Russian immigration into the countries.
In Estonia, for example, ethnic Russian émigrés would comprise 40 percent of the country’s total population. Soviet songs were composed praising the Soviet state and the Communist Party. It became illegal to display the occupied countries’ national symbols such as flags or express nationalist sentiments including patriotic poetry and songs or music.
As needs not saying, but the sum of it was that it could only breed people’s resentment and yearning for freedom.
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in the Soviet Union and introduced the reform policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) that opened up the economic and political space.
Soon afterwords, People’s Fronts in the three countries — the Popular Front of Estonia Rahvarinne, the Popular Front of Latvia and the Lithuanian Reform Movement Sąjūdis — began to organise, drawing from their similar cultural pastime of poetry and folk songs going back centuries.
They used their musical traditions as a strategy to not only curry nationalistic fervour but to fire the protests and demonstrations that followed, especially beginning in 1987. It is these that would constitute the Singing Revolution, which Estonia best illustrates.
For a tiny country of only about 1.37 million people currently, as narrated by the International Centre on Nonviolent Conflict, Estonia is reputed to have one of the world’s largest repertoires of folk songs which they used as a political weapon for centuries. Songs were used to protest German conquerors as far back as the 13th century and as an act of resistance against the occupying army of Russian czar Peter the Great in the 18th century.
Laulupidu, a choral festival introduced in the mid-19th century, could attract crowds of hundreds of thousands around the country. Drawing from the tradition, it is the cornerstone of the resistance against the Soviet occupation, when—in addition to singing the requisite songs praising the state and the Communist Party—the organisers defied Soviet officials by including banned nationalist songs and symbols.
Despite divisions within the nationalist movement, and despite violent provocations by Soviet occupation forces and the Russian émigrés, the movement gained strength employing various forms of nonviolent resistance including public protests and nationalist displays such as the flag. These acts of defiance of defiance were replicated in the Latvia and Lithuania and would constitute the Baltic Singing Revolution.
On 23 August 1989, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the People’s Fronts of three Baltic states organised what came to be known as the “Baltic Way“, the 600-kilometre-long human chain connecting the countries’ capital cities.
Each state needed around 200,000 attendees to make the chain feasible, bringing a total of 600,000 people. Instead, two million showed up. A Wikipedia entry observes that video footage taken from airplanes and helicopters showed an almost continuous line of people across the three states.
The chain of peaceful demonstrators would last only 15 minutes, as the organisers had planned it. But it would prove a powerful symbol of solidarity and people’s will to freedom and independence.
Seven months later, in March 1990, Lithuania declared independence. Estonia and Lativia would gain theirs the following year in 1991, with the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics breaking up shortly after.
So impactful was the Singing Revolution and the Baltic Way it engendered that documentary material detailing the history leading to the human chain has, since 2009, been inscribed at the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. The Register is an international initiative aimed at safeguarding the documentary heritage of humanity so that it may never be lost or forgotten.
In the meantime, the Baltic Way has since inspired similar human chains in Taiwan with the 487-kilometre 228 Hand-in-Hand Rally in 2004, the 400-kilometre Catalan Way in Catalonia, Spain, in 2013, and, among others, the Hong Kong Way in 2019.
The author is a writer and development journalist.
X (formerly Twitter): @gituram
