The concluding chapter considers this book’s implications for understanding popular politics in Kenya and the study of publics. It emphasises how potential change through public discussion in urban Kenya is more precarious than ever. Change does not neatly follow from intentional efforts to alter the terms of debate. Features that contradicted normative visions have been crucial to the power of publics to change shared imaginaries, for instance, material insecurity or elite networks. Further, social media has brought its own challenges. The conclusion finally reflects on the implications of this book for engagement with Arendtian scholarship on publics. Everyday publics in Mombasa show deeper and more varied insights into publics are possible when extending Arendt's ideas to take into account the implications of colonialism, anti-colonial struggles and postcolonial contexts. It also argues there is a need for serious engagement with the particularities of digital technology, and how they provide for a disjuncture between experience and control in publics.

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.