JAMES WAKIBIA STORY - PART 2 : How to ban plastic bags from a country ?

Victor Fontaine
Sep 25, 2019
3 min read

Here is the second part of the story of James Wakibia, the Kenyan photographer and environmental activist who convinced his country to ban single use plastic bags.

Please find the first part of this article following this link

#SUPPORT BAN PLASTIC - Interview from with James Wakibia - PART 2 :

In the first part of this interview, James Wakibia told us how he carries out his campaign for several years to be successful. However, we also wanted to understand his inner motivation, the thing leading him to be an environmental activist.

Why a fight against plastic bags? Why the environment?

(...) I felt like I had a responsibility in the environment which is my home. Having been born in a quiet, clean and always green village and then moving to a town which was polluted may have played some role in me becoming an environmental activist.

And also, during my first year in the university, I studied an environmental Unit in my Journalism course which really opened up my way of thinking and view towards the environment, I was taught among other issues kinds of pollution and climate change by a very passionate lecturer by the name Dr. Stanley M. Makindi, who is a Senior Lecturer, Department of Environmental Science. Faculty of Environment and Resource Development. Egerton

How did you live the pressure of such a campaign on your shoulders? Were you blackmailed or threaten?

There was a lot of pressure but friends that I worked with (a WhatsApp group by the name streetnakuru) helped me reduce it.

Sometimes when I felt like giving up I received messages from anonymous people in the streets and the internet that motivated me to keep moving, but many times I felt like abandoning the campaign, doing the same thing from 2013-2017 using my own money and time was tough, very tough but something fueled by passion is hard to stop, it almost became an obsession. In all my campaign period I did not get threatened, the only threat to my life and possibly my family came later after the campaign (...) because of a post I made about the management of my own town.

What are your daily actions toward the environment?

(...) I create awareness on plastic pollution and try to educate people to conserve and protect the environment using the social media, I also do little cleanups once in a while for the purposes of creating awareness. (...) I also advice people across the world on how to run social media campaigns and to draft petitions calling for bans on single-use plastics.

To deeper understand your motivation, let's take a leap into the past:

How people described you as a kid ?

I have been told I was a difficult kid who experimented with dangerous things. Once, I carried a swarm of bees huddled on a tree branch to my beehive at home. Another time I killed a snake and took it to my mom, she thought I was crazy. Possibly that’s why I was taken to a boarding school.

What were your hobbies ?

From the age of 8, my hobby has been photography. My dad came home with a Yashika camera and I immediately fell in love with it. I also remember I loved reading storybooks and magazines especially when I went looking after my parent’s cattle.

Chinese portrait - If you had to describe yourself as the following items :

An animal: I would be a bird, a humming bird (proverbial) that did the little it could to put out the big fire in the forest while other animals watched.
A sport: Cyclist – To keep your balance you have to keep moving …it’s a great quote from Albert Einstein too. It’s also because in the past I have been a cyclist before I got a nasty accident.
A music: I would be Bob Marley’s reggae Music "Get up, stand up… fight for your rights" .The song demands for people to rise up and fight for their rights, aptly talks to me.

To finish, what do you admire in others?

Their hidden superpower, I think there is a point where even the quietest people explode and their true color is seen, their real super power comes out. I admire when I see people freely expressing themselves especially when angry, tired and when they think they are helpless.