The prospect of meaningful change. One day’s travel. Loss of three days’ wages. A well-fed foreigner asking for an impossible entrance fee. These were what faced dozens of homeless, hungry Kenyan children.
“(The street children) invaded a five-star hotel food tent and feasted on meals meant for sale at the World Social Forum in Kenya’s capital,” according to the BBC.
The World Social Forum was established to protest the efforts of the World Economic Forum, a yearly meeting to discuss such issues as economic partnerships. The World Social Forum developed as a “self-organized” counter to the corporation-supported WEF mega-conference.
This year, those in charge of the forum came under fire from locals for their attempt to charge a $7 fee for participants. Local citizens, who were enthusiastically invited to attend and give a local perspective to the forum, were outraged when they discovered the entrance fee was worth over three days’ salary. The living wage in Kenya is less than $2 per day.
After revoking this fee, there was still much resentment over the price of meals at the conference, which was also $7.
“This kind of problem goes way back,” said Guilford professor Max Carter. Carter made connections with the story of a family of Quaker leaders, the Smileys, who held several yearly retreats on American Indian issues without ever inviting an American Indian.
Most of the youth attending the conference were doing so at the expense of participating in food-procuring activities. For many, charging them for food created a burden. According to the BBC, the children had been begging for food. After being told they would have to pay for meals, the children stormed the tent and feasted.
This, viewed alongside the demonstrations earlier in the conference against the entrance fee, created a strange paradox for the World Social Forum – a protest against the policies of a conference meant to protest against another conference.
“This is a huge issue with the progressive movement,” said David Norton, a junior who has experienced a range of liberal organizations in his professional and academic experiences. “There is a divergence between the means of proliferating a perspective and what that perspective is meant to achieve.”
Much of this has to do with how activists are gaining access to resources.
“I think we simply need to be more creative to find ways of reaching out to the people with the resources without caving in to the culture, and we need to give them more credit that they will be open to it,” Carter said.
This distance between means and ends was resolved at the conference when coordinators decided to eliminate the fees and stop charging participants for meals.
“We are now not charging anybody; the event is free so that many people can participate,” Boniface Beti, WSF media director, said to the BBC.
This event brings up a bigger issue, which confronts Guilford, Kenya’s capital city, and activist communities throughout the world.
“The means don’t justify the ends because in the means you already have the seeds of what you want to accomplish,” said Carter, paraphrasing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “By using a medium that is so inconsistent with the message, you are sowing the seeds of failure.