Baraza

Countless elders, adults, youth, and children converge beneath tents or in the shade of an old tree. The group welcomes those who join. The first agenda item is presented for deliberation.

“Baraza” is a Swahili word for large community gatherings that have been part of the fabric of village life in East Africa long before European colonization. Similar gatherings happen under other names in a variety of forms around the world, especially in the Global South. They provide a space for villages to participate in collective problem solving and can attract hundreds or even thousands of people. Political movements and organizations can tap into these spaces to bring forward critical issues, such as mitigating climate change, curbing domestic violence, or exposing a corrupt local leader. Barazas are a reminder that democracy is about more than voting and elections— it also means creating spaces where people can hear from one another and continue to participate in the issues that matter to them.

While barazas don’t always hold official power, their social power is real. Incompetent civil servants, greedy businesspeople, and dishonest politicians usually refuse to show up at barazas, for fear of being publicly shamed for their actions. Powerful individuals who do attend may feel social pressure to make amends for any harms they have caused to their communities.

Barazas are horizontal, directly democratic mechanisms for community organizing.

Barazas often assemble during crises affecting a whole community, enabling people to propose and discuss possible solutions. Once a solution is agreed upon, participants may form teams to develop plans for implementing it. Barazas are horizontal, directly democratic mechanisms for community organizing.

While it would be reductive to say that all precolonial East African societies practiced collective leadership, baraza-like meetings are ancient. Later in postcolonial history, shared decision-making was an integral component of the early years of ujamaa, a cooperative economics ideology and program championed by socialist Julius Nyerere where approximately 250 families would collectively govern their land and community. More recently in Abim—one of Uganda’s districts most neglected by the state—barazas have been used to evaluate the extent to which civil servants used local tax revenues responsibly. These citizen meetings offered stronger community oversight of local infrastructure, ultimately improving Abim’s roads and bridges.

Inspired by victories like this, the dispersed resistance network Solidarity Uganda organizes fireplace gatherings—the customary “meeting place” in many East African societies—to deliberate on issues like education, governance, and human rights. In 2022, a series of murders of university students in Bushenyi prompted members of one fireplace gathering to create a strategy that would force district leaders to take the matter seriously. They resolved to padlock local government offices, which prompted police to publicly address the matter they had neglected and deploy night patrols. There have been no murders in the area since.

People around the world have organized baraza-like gatherings under various names. Even while living under abhorrent fascism and violence, the people of Kurdistan gather regularly through one of the most intricate systems of direct democracy globally. The Constitutional Movement in Kuwait from 1986 to 1992 employed diwanyat, or local assemblies held at personal homesteads, to organize at a time when street protests were illegal. Due to cultural norms, police would never enter a diwanya. Diwanyat enabled mass mobilization, fueling a movement that eventually achieved the reinstatement of the suspended constitution.

Barazas and equivalent gatherings throughout the world emerge differently in different communities, but they tend to share a few basic steps. A coordinating team of volunteers determines the time, location, and agenda. That team then announces it to the public by tacking a sign to a centrally located bulletin board, posting on social media, or sending announcements home to the parents of school children. When the baraza convenes, the participation of all who show up is valued. Although driven by the discussion and input of attendees, barazas are most effective when they have an agenda to keep them on track. Lastly, if appropriate, coordinators inform participants of the next baraza’s time and location, and encourage them to invite others.

Not merely a mechanism for changing policies and making decisions, barazas practice sharing power and responsibility. They prefigure a world where vast distance between “governance” and “the people” is not inevitable. In the shade of the baraza, neighbors discover new aspects of their collective self-actualization and nudge more formal institutions toward genuine accountability.