A free and open discussion is always limited. It depends on specific linguistic conventions, forms of expression and norms of social engagement that make mutual understanding possible. Together with Chapter 4, this chapter explores the nature and scope of plural and open discussions in everyday Mombasa. They identify the possibilities and limits on how people might engage in public based on the specific characteristics of discussion. This chapter focuses on street parliaments, which are gatherings that form on the ground both in the central business district and in residential neighbourhoods. Together, these chapters make an important contribution to understanding the openness of publics in Mombasa. They not only show how everyday publics existed in Mombasa, but also differentiate between forms of exclusion. They show how some forms of exclusion prevented public discussion from taking place at all, while others constrained its openness but were refutable or contestable, such as gender.

The introduction sets out the context and framework for exploring popular politics in Kenya in the 2010s. It begins by juxtaposing a dynamic political communication landscape, with protracted and familiar repertoires through which political differences are understood. From here, it lays out the purpose of the book: to make sense of how, and to what extent, everyday publics explain continuity and change in shared political imaginaries in Kenya. It considers conceptual resources in Africanist scholarship on publics that exist to help understand the power of everyday publics on the continent, and suggests a revision of Hannah Arendt’s ideas of the power of publics as a way expand this scholarship to better account for the power of everyday publics. Finally, it also introduces Mombasa’s people’s parliaments, everyday informal gatherings that are the empirical window through which Kenya’s popular politics are examined.

Chapter 2 provides the historical antecedents for everyday publics in Mombasa in the 2010s. It brings an original perspective on the city’s political history, by looking at how forms of rule and belonging emerged through interactions between people and media. Through waves of foreign occupation, Mombasa’s residents navigated different foreign and domestic claims to authority, which were presented and contested through government structures, face-to-face baraza, radio and print. From its early days, the city was marked by migration, trade and a cosmopolitan community. The transition to independence invoked new ideas and experiences of marginalisation as coastal communities. This informed post-independence patterns in citizen–state relations, in which ideas of political belonging and advantage were tied to religion, ethnicity, place of origin and race. The chapter concludes by commenting on the communication landscape of the 2010s, and situating the people’s parliaments, as this book’s empirical focus, within this landscape.

Chapter 6 interrogates how controversies over land affected the convening of public discussion on the ground in Mombasa in the 2010s. Land conflicts are longstanding in Kenya, with particular tensions on the Coast. They have been a central tenet in narratives of historical injustice, and have been instrumentalised by political elite for electoral gain. Kenya’s 2010 Constitution brought new conditions, actors and ambiguities into debates over land and citizen–state relations. Ambiguities over land had very real and distinct effects on Mombasa’s street parliaments. None of the gatherings observed occupied a clearly recognised and uncontested ‘public’ space, and none were without the threat of eviction. This chapter argues that ambiguity over the gatherings’ legal right to occupy space in the city could protect the street parliaments from state control. Their spontaneous and informal nature helped them to adapt to dynamic contentions over land.

Chapter 5 examines how interactions between global and local systems of meaning within the neoliberal political economy shape sex workers’ dreams and plans for the future. This is done by examining the notion of a ‘good life’ that prevails in sex worker narratives. The first part of the chapter considers what such a ‘good life’ consists of and how an understanding of the ‘good life’ differs according to how successful a sex worker is in her trade. The second and the third parts of the chapter analyse what strategies and plans women have to reach their aims. The second part concentrates on women’s ideas about attaining the ‘good life’ through marriage; the third focuses on how a ‘good life’ can be secured through business and work. The final part of this chapter discusses what differences sex workers show in their dreams for themselves and their children, and what might be the reasons behind these. The argument put forward points to the duality of neoliberal logic: some women who live in precarity dream about a 'good life' that means basic survival and living conditions, while women who have already secured their basic needs dream about accumulation and social progress.