‘The hostility was something I’d never experienced before’: The cost to women of the overlooked rise of Kenya’s manosphere

As the co-founder and executive director of Usikimye, a non-profit in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi that works with women – and some men – who are experiencing sexual and gender-based violence at home, Migwi said that the woman “couldn’t put her finger on what was changing” in her relationship with her husband at first, but soon thought she figured it out. The man had for months been consuming content by Kenya’s most prominent “masculinity influencers,” who lead Kenya’s arm of the more global “manosphere” — where content is put out across websites, blogs and social media accounts promoting a certain lifestyle, focused on masculinity and opposing feminism —  which she believes changed his views towards her. 

“From there it just became bad,” Migwi said “By the time she was coming to our safe house, he had actually become physically violent.” 

Kenyan societies are largely patriarchal. An estimated 34% of women have experienced physical violence at some point in their lives, with 13% having experienced sexual violence, according to the country’s latest demographic and health survey.  At the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020, cases of gender-based violence (GBV) increased by 92.2% between January and June 2020, according to Kenya’s National Crime Research Centre. 

But four years on, multiple women’s rights activists, lawyers and relationship therapists are raising the alarm about the rise of something new, sharing several accounts from the communities they work with of men starting to turn on women with whom they had been in relationships with for years. 

The rise of Kenya’s manosphere

In 2022, Andrew Tate became a global internet phenomenon promoting manosphere ideologies around misogyny and anti-feminist views, and was one of the most googled people in the world. He faced bans across multiple social media platforms that year, spurred by women’s rights advocates who argued that his content had harmful effects on his largely youthful followers, but by then his ideas had firmly taken root, and he has remained a prominent figure promoting hate and misogyny. He has faced allegations of human trafficking, rape, setting up a criminal gang to sexually exploit women and sexual intercourse with a minor, which he has denied. In a combative 2023 interview, the influencer claimed his controversial views were a “force for good” and that he was acting under the instruction of God to do good things.” 

While much has been said about the West’s grappling with this issue, what’s often overlooked is the growth and amplification of several other prominent manosphere voices in the Global South, with some countries leading their regions, such as Kenya. 

CNN carried out an analysis of Kenya’s manosphere between January 1, 2020 and March 31, 2024 and found that social media posts using popular terms and language from the manosphere are widespread on platforms such as X, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram all year, averaging more than 4,000 mentions each day on X in 2023. This included global keywords such as soy boy, a derogatory term used to describe men perceived as lacking traditional masculine qualities, and the red pill, referring to people confronting a supposed truth about societal gender constructs that favour women, as well as local keywords such as Kafukuswi, meaning a person who is dominated and dumped. 

Despite its relatively low number of users on X (1.8 million), Kenya was consistently in the top 10 of countries globally using known manosphere words and phrases (in English) across the platform in 2023.  The United States ranked first, reflective of the country’s high number of active X users (more than 105 million, according to data and trends website DataReportal).  

Kenya’s global ranking rose to third during January 2024, coinciding with a spike in femicide cases and resulting protests across the country.  

A CNN analysis of specific keywords helped illustrate the growth of the manosphere in Kenya in recent years. Keywords were chosen based on the frequency of their usage within manosphere conversations and threads, and their potential to capture movements and sentiments within the community. For example, data extracted from X indicates the word “simp” has soared in usage from near anonymity in Kenya five years ago to more than 80,000 mentions in 2021, levelling off about 60,000 annually thereafter, with the Covid-19 pandemic serving as the inflection point. When used in the manosphere, “simp” refers to a man who “apologizes for being a man, expresses himself in a feminine way that weakens his macho self,” Kenyan academic Esperanza Katola wrote in a 2022 research paper.  

The limitations of using keyword occurrence should be noted, however, as they may be used in a variety of contexts, and not always positively or in direct reference to the manosphere. 

CNN focused particularly on X for this investigation because despite its small user size in Kenya relative to other platforms, X occupies an influential space in the country’s political information ecosystem. 

Two figures, Eric Amunga, a public figure known by his alias “Amerix,” and Andrew Kibe, a former radio host turned podcaster have emerged as torchbearers of this movement in Kenya. Between them, they have over three million followers across social media. 

Kibe amassed more than 420,000 YouTube subscribers before facing a ban in 2023 after Google said he violated the platform’s hate speech policy, and further breached its Term of Service by posting content on another channel during his suspension. 

But he continues to publish videos on other platforms such as Instagram’s Reels and TikTok, posting content such as “10000000 reasons to fear women” and telling women that only men can protect them. His content is also widely available on YouTube through his followers sharing across platforms. The hashtag #AndrewKibe had garnered over 441 million views on TikTok as of the time CNN carried out its investigation.

In 2022 Amerix was among the most listened the most listened-to podcasts on Spotify in Kenya, and on X, his platform of choice, his followers rose from 150,000 in 2020, to 1.9 million today – a gain of more than half a million followers per year. He shares views that “noisy and angry women on Twitter are sex deprived,” that “the enemy of women is feminism”  and tells men not to “date or marry a woman who is FAT”. He is also the main propagator of the frequently trending hashtag #MasculinitySaturday, which he and his followers use when holding discussions on manosphere themes.  

CNN’s analysis also identified claims about the kind of behavior deemed to devalue a man’s worth, thereby making him a “simp.” This included being overly submissive or attentive to women or if men begged or nagged for a woman’s attention after rejection, and any men seeking validation from women through excessive or demeaning actions, such as apologizing or proposing marriage. Amerix is also well known for his advice, notably around fertility and men’s health often emphasizing diet, virility and the belief that men, especially Africans, should have many children.

Entrepreneurship and ambition are also prominent themes across the Kenyan manosphere, driven by the mantra that “a man without money is nothing,” and across the manosphere, a popular and controversial narrative portrays men as the real victims of societal imbalances, or gender inequality. 

But tech giants have rules guiding their moderation of content on their platforms. Meta, TikTok and X all have policies that explicitly prohibit hate speech, including bullying or attacks based on gender or gender identity, and CNN’s analysis found content that could fall foul of these policies is not consistently being removed. 

CNN spoke to two platform safety experts who acknowledged the scale of the challenge when moderating manosphere content, since context must be considered when determining whether words are being used in an abusive way. Richard Ngamita, a former trust and safety official at X, told CNN: “The content may not always explicitly violate community rules. It can be context-dependent, and there’s been a fine line between free speech and harmful rhetoric. Platforms have always struggled to consistently apply policies in these grey areas of emerging abuses,” Ngamita said. 

He went on to highlight additional challenges moderating this type of content in Kenya, explaining that the removal of X’s trust and safety team in Africa last year contributed to the scale of the problem today. “The teams focused on Africa have been significantly impacted by widespread layoffs and departures,” he said. “The whole Africa team was let go. Without them, platforms lose invaluable insights into local contexts, languages and emerging trends specific to countries like Kenya.” 

CNN contacted X, Google (that owns YouTube), TikTok and Meta about the growth of manosphere content in Kenya, and the rise of certain influencers. 

TikTok told CNN that its trust and safety teams investigated Andrew Kibe’s account and removed several videos that violated its Community Guidelines. Google also terminated multiple YouTube channels associated with the influencer for again violating its Terms of Service, and Meta removed Kibe’s Instagram reels highlighted by CNN. 

Google, TikTok and Meta reiterated that hate speech is prohibited, and further shared that they work closely with safety experts and councils to develop their policies and publish regular enforcement reports to show the volume of content that is taken down. TikTok and Google also explained that content is reviewed using a combination of technology and moderation teams, and Meta added that it designed several policies to address harms that disproportionately affect women, notably around hate speech, bullying and harassment. 

Spotify chose not to comment, and CNN did not receive a response from X.

'Hostility against women and girls’

Masculinity influencers wield power because they speak the “man’s language,” taking advantage of male vulnerabilities and distorting them to spread their rhetoric, believes a pastor and marriage counselor based in Nairobi, who asked to remain anonymous to ensure the privacy of his clients. 

“I feel like (the masculinity influencers) speak on so many truths and struggles the man is going through, and so the man can identify because he feels that no one else in society is understanding them,” he told CNN. But he explained that when doing this, Kenyan influencers are using certain facts or selected advice to engage men, then tack on distorted information or guidance to impact their mindset. 

For example, they “can give good advice about the importance of investment and personal finance management,” the pastor said. “But then within that investment message, now they will add something, for example, ‘and don’t tell your wife about it’ or ‘these are things that you do quietly.’” 

Mental, sexual and reproductive rights advocate Onyango Otieno agrees, adding that he believes influencers exploit the country’s patriarchal structure. 

“Patriarchy gives (men) the illusion that they are above everything,” Otieno said. “It promises boys this power they saw with their fathers, they want to emulate the same thing in the future.” But he explained that this also tells men not to express their emotions, that it would make them look weak, creating a deep-rooted instability that masculinity influencers then take advantage of. 

Amerix and Andrew Kibe did not provide a response to CNN when asked for comment, but instead posted the request online.

“We need more investment in overhauling the single narrative of what a man should be.”

Onyango Otieno

The impact seen in the pastor’s counseling room is “a noticeable shift” in the nature of the problems couples are bringing to him, he said. 

Before the pandemic, the pastor commonly encountered couples struggling with lack of communication, personality clashes, and differences in upbringing, which he said are “standard challenges couples face.” But today, he believes a new form of disconnection has evolved. 

“Now, I could be seeing five to six couples a month where the issue is the man being completely emotionally disconnected and even physically being absent from the home – leaving every Friday evening to supposedly spend time with their male friends, and coming back on Monday morning, just in time for work,” the pastor added.

Women’s rights activist Migwi is also worried about the impact of this popular rhetoric on Kenya’s younger generation of men. Her team (all women) often visit high schools to discuss sexual and reproductive health, she explained, and are now seeing a significant change in the way young boys treat them. 

“The hostility against women and girls was something I’d never experienced before,” she said.“ “It was shocking to hear how 15-year-old boys were describing girls, using very degrading language as objects to be used and dumped. This is not how we would be received in a boys’ school even two or three years ago.”

Media scholar Dr. Muthoni King’ori is concerned by the normalization and mainstreaming of misogynistic ideas. “When people are exposed to a certain kind of media content, for a long period of time, they get a distorted view of reality,” she told CNN, regardless of whether they come from a stable or broken home. “Just by watching and listening repeatedly to the masculinity content online can give you the idea that ‘actually, what I know is wrong, and this (misogynistic way) is the way things are supposed to be.’” 

But Otieno believes change is possible. For him, this means investing in programs and initiatives that focus on men’s emotional well-being and identity, in addition to women’s empowerment programs. This would involve promoting more positive male role models and guidance for young men, to help address the current identity crisis many of them are facing, and, in turn, build “new narratives of what it means to be a heterosexual man.” 

In Otieno’s words: “We need more investment in overhauling the single narrative of what a man should be. That single narrative is what’s killing many men and women.” 

Methodology

CNN used a mixture of methods for its analysis. Key steps included the selection of keywords relevant to both global and local contexts, ensuring they directly related to common manosphere topics such as masculinity, men’s rights, gender dynamics and relationships. Keywords were chosen for their frequent usage within manosphere discourse and their potential to capture movements and sentiments within the community.

A glossary of both global and local terms was developed, featuring terms such as “Red Pill,” “MGTOW,” “Incel” and local terms like “Kafukuswi” and “Kinuthia.” Data was then collected by analyzing various social media platforms for usage and trends of these keywords, including X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, between January 2020 and March 2024.

The analysis noted significant increases in keyword use, particularly post-Covid-19. It also examined the engagement and influence of key manosphere figures using tools such as Crowdtangle. A thematic analysis identified predominant themes, such as fertility and men’s health, entrepreneurship, sex and relationships, and gender inequality, and examined their intersection with local issues in Kenya.

The role of platform algorithms in amplifying manosphere content was investigated, documenting instances of algorithmic promotion and the frequent trending of manosphere-related hashtags. A toxicity analysis using Perspective API was also carried out on the content to identify and quantify the levels of harmful language in our dataset.

-CNN