A Mother’s Love: ‘I’m So Happy My Son Came Out As Gay’

By Kevin Mwachiro

Stigma has never been far from Rosemary Kasiva. In her case, you could call it quadruple stigma. She was brought up by a single mother in the sixties, brought up her own children as a single parent, watched her sister die of an AIDS-related illness, and today is the mother to an openly gay son, Leonard aka Mutisya.

Our meeting takes place in her son’s flat in a Nairobi suburb. The rainbow flag hangs limply in a corner. This was not the first time we had met. She had insisted that we meet at least once so that she could get to know me, and what I was after. She had good reason to mistrust the media in our society. Back to Rosemary. I was struck by how youthful she looks. Her spectacles sat squarely on her cappuccino coloured face. She wore a strong and somewhat serious face. She asked to make myself at home, and prepare whatever beverage I fancy. She’s been wanting to share her journey of being a parent of being an openly gay son. Especially following the recent ruling on the petition to decriminalize homosexual sex. She figured it was time to talk about her son, her first-born, the one she had when she was only 19.

Kasiva could possibly have been the only parent present at the High Court during the Repeal 162 case. I remember seeing her during the submissions and she was also among the throes of individuals who were present during the May 24th ruling. She wasn’t there for Leonard alone, she wasn’t there for the queer community alone either; she too had a stake in the judgement.

“I’m glad Leonard and I can talk openly about gay relationships, marriages and having children within the gay setting,” says Kasiva. “We share posts on everything and I sometimes question why I was so mad when he came out. This has been the best thing that has happened to both of us. There are no secrets we now relate honestly and openly.”

I know many other queer individuals who would love to hear their own parents utter those words. I know I would. There is acceptance, respect, and love in this home. Kasiva does not hide the deep love she has for Leonard and his siblings. But she is very protective of her children. Trust does not come easy to her. She has been hurt once to many times.

First, her sister. She tells me she wishes that when she had the same resolve to fight for her sister who died of an HIV-related illness the same way she now defends Leonard and his brothers.

“We faced stigma at the hospitals that I took my sister to. We were afraid then. When she died, who stood with us? No one,” she says. “I [wish I] would have made sure she would have gotten the best treatment and maybe she would have still been here. There was a lot of stigma and fear surrounding us. Now I am not willing to sacrifice any member of my family at the expense of the world.”

See where she is coming from?

We have the flat to ourselves, as both mother and son didn’t want to impede each other during the interview. Kasiva has her cup of chai, I’ve got my kahawa and for then, she gives me the precious gift of time. Time to re-open memories and remember her journey and subsequently, transformation.

Kasiva describes herself as a Nairobi hustler through and through. This city is her home. She was born in Pumwani Hospital, raised at the BAT Village in Bahati, in the Eastlands area and spent most of her adult life in Dagoretti, until recently when she migrated to Athi River. But she still commutes daily into the city for business and for church on Sunday. She had also made the trek into the city for this interview.

Kasiva beams with pride as she remembers how Leonard was a very smart child. He excelled academically both in primary and secondary school and earned himself a scholarship to study in Singapore and then the United States. She describes him as a gentle and obedient child. The ideal first born, though he suffered from a number of health challenges during his early childhood. She remembers he preferred playing with dolls more than cars or more ‘boys toys’. It was shocking at first but she opted to continue buying the toys that he preferred. She didn’t think much of it. It seemed like just a preference to her back then, something that didn’t warrant much fuss.

As she recalls Leonard’s formative years, there were little incidents here and there that hinted he was different, but she was dismissive of them. Like the time he had a close friend in primary school and during their Standard 8 exams, she came across success cards from this particular boy to Leonard. They had love hearts and affectionate messages. Leonard told her they were just friends.

However, it was not until many years later when Leonard was studying abroad did the matters of his orientation resurface. He had come back home for holiday from Singapore with a male friend and they went to the Maasai Mara together. While they were away, Leonard’s church friends came home to inquire on his whereabouts. When she told them that his away with a male friend, their reaction surprised her. She suspects that they knew Leonard was gay but she herself thought nothing of their interest in her son and his travel companion. To her, Leonard had just brought a friend who wanted to experience his friend’s home country. It was not until 2010 when Leonard came home unexpectedly from the US, where he was studying at the time, that things did begin to unravel proper. His university had been in touch with her a few times before asking her to intervene as Leonard seemed to be struggling academically. Leonard was halfway through his studies at this time, but he didn’t seem committal about his return to America. There was always an excuse for the delay, until after he came out clean. She remembers him saying he was considering celibacy and informing his mother that he didn’t like girls, not in ‘that’ way.

“I hope you don’t like boys?” she remembers asking. His response to her was, “Unfortunately I do.” As she recalls this conversation, she falls back into the sofa. She remembers that the revelation was painful. She tells me that she fired her son with a barrage of questions and even threatened to beat him. She verbally abused him, berated him and expressed her disappointment. Some of the answers to her inquisition were greeted with silence, and some revealed the bitter truth. One such truth was that some of the individuals with whom Leonard had gay encounters were also within the church. Her church. Their church. The church where Leonard and his brothers served in ministry. The family church. The sense of betrayal from within and outside her home was immense. Did everyone but her know of her son’s sexuality, she asked herself. Had people within the church managed to ‘recruit’ her son, she wondered.

They say hindsight is 20/20, and as Rosemary reflects on that moment, she tells me she regrets her reaction and wishes she’d have acted better. She describes the family as close-knit and expresses disappointment that she had not created an environment for Leonard to come clean about his sexuality earlier.

It was also around this time, she says, that Leonard got involved in activism. This added fuel to her fire. She hated the gay community for having ‘recruited’ her son and also from detracting him from his studies in the US. She recalls how Leonard’s coming out may have affected his brothers, as she hints their grades slipped around this time due to the tension that had come out in the home. Pun intended. An ultimatum was issued. She categorically told Leonard that he could only live in her house if she renounced his homosexuality. Then one day, he stepped out and never came back home. It was a harrowing six months that followed. There was no contact, nor knowledge of his whereabouts. Phone calls and text messages went unanswered. Some of these texts demanded that he came back home or else she was going to set the police on him. Leonard remained mteja all through this period.

“I lost so much weight during this time. Eventually, through my own networks and the rumour mill, I found out that Leonard was in Kisumu. I was on a matatu almost immediately once I got this news.” I’m astounded at the clarity at which she remembers things. She remembers it was a Prestige Shuttle that she travelled on. The two samosas and tea that she had for breakfast and the five hours she spent walking around Kisumu. She believed that Leonard was living as a street person and she was somehow convinced was going to meet someone, anyone, who would know him. Maybe he now went by the name of Mutisya. I must mention she had never been to Kisumu before and had presumed that is was the size of Machakos (it is much bigger). Her words, not mine.

She admits there was a mixture of naivety, bravery, and desperation during this expedition. The fact that Leonard was AWOL was a secret that was known only to her and her other two sons. Not even her mother – Leonard’s grandmother – knew. She wanted him back and still hoped he would resume his studies.

Kasiva was relentless in trying to contact Leonard. She kept on sending him messages. She endured numerous sleepless nights. She’d rack her brain, wondering what her son was doing in Kisumu, whether he was homeless, and what he is eating. There is nothing like a mother’s love. “Mutisya’s grandmother used to ask about him and when he was going back to the US. The bishop of my church would ask the same. I couldn’t tell them that I didn’t know where he was. I had to lie to them. I kept on telling them he is taking a break so that he could work on a project.”

“There was a rumour already doing the rounds in the church that Leonard had been chased away from America because he was gay. I also started being blamed for making him gay. People were saying that it was my male friends who had abused Leonard, which is why he had turned out gay. There was so much hate!”

The wagging tongues and lack of support from her church led Kasiva to walk away from a place that she believed was a sanctuary. It didn’t end there. On the home front, Leonard’s siblings started questioning their mother on their elder brother’s whereabouts. “They started telling me, if I had not been angry with Leonard, he would not have run away.” Her voice now sounding pained.

The period of Leonard’s absence accorded her time to reflect and ask herself some hard questions. Questions that made her think about his sexuality, her love for him, and whether she was going to live a life worrying about other people’s opinions. Despite not being in communication with her first born, she religiously kept on sending him money. She was trying to reach out.

Kasiva looks at me squarely, tilts her head and with a seriousness in her eyes and tells me she prayed constantly for her son. Prayed for him to come back. She got her miracle when Leonard called her one day and informed her he was working in Kisumu. A reunion and homecoming were delicately agreed on. By this time, she had to come to terms with two things – Leonard’s sexuality and his decision to drop out of university. Both were bitter pills to swallow for her because she had dreams for him once he graduated. Kasiva also realised that Leonard’s coming out would also put her in the line of a lot of criticism and being ostracised. However, she knew full well that she was not going to go through another six months or more of mental and emotional torture.

“I realised I loved him. I always loved him. And I told him that I didn’t look at him for who he slept with, but I looked at him as my son,” she recollects. She wanted her son(s) to be able to approach her with anything. In true Kasiva form, she laid down the questions again. She even asked Leonard whether he was dating. At the time he wasn’t, but she remembers him telling her that he’d let her know if there was anyone on the cards.

As I sat there listening to Kasiva, I remembered another friend who came out to both her parents and both were in full support of their daughter’s queer identity. There are many queer Kenyans who crave that kind of support from their parents or even friends. Unfortunately, the Kasiva’s of this world are still few and far between. I marvelled at Kasiva’s 180-degree turn. Their relationship is warm, Leonard is now her right-hand-man, her go-to-guy and more importantly her friend.

In accepting Leonard, Kasiva wonders what she was really scared of. Was it because he chose to drop out of school or was it about his sexuality? Was it because of what people would have thought or had her worst fear been realised? Did she blame herself for the many ‘red flags’ that she ignored?

Kasiva and Leonard’s journey is a blend of the biblical prodigal son without the demand an inheritance (and with a mother instead of a father obviously), but a request for acceptance. It was like the runaway Jacob getting back to his father Isaac or Joseph reuniting with his father Jacob. In ‘finding’ her son, Kasiva opened herself to a whole new world of activism and a whole new community of friends.

However, this has not been an easy process for her. This has exposed her to the politics of the queer community, which at times left Leonard holding the short end of the stick because of his work in the activists’ space. In those initials days, she admits that her feelings towards the gay community swung like a pendulum.

I learnt at a conference a few years ago that when an African comes out as gay/queer, they come out with their whole family. With Leonard’s sexuality being an open book now, and with him being back home, the rejection squarely kicked in. Kasiva was ostracized by relatives, friends, neighbours, church members, fellow business people, the whole lot! She had not realised what she had signed up for by openly standing in support of her son. She also feared for her family’s security at the home in the Dagoretti area.

“Nobody wanted to identify with me. I would go to the market to buy vegetables or to the butchery to buy meat and the moment I would turn my back, people would start laughing.” The pain stigma returned anew, this time, worse than those years ago with her sister.

In the years gone by, her relationship with Leonard has grown from strength to strength. “I am so happy that he came out as gay and decided to live as a gay man in Kenya. I’d be more worried if he came out as gay and he was away from me. I can see him happy, I can check on him and I have been able to see him transform.

“I’d like to encourage parents to embrace their children. Talk to them about what they feel about their orientation; let’s be open to our children. Let us not put barriers to communication.”

Kasiva has severed relationships with individuals who seem spiteful towards her and her children. The accusations have been levelled at the whole family, insinuating that they are in the business of recruiting young people into homosexuality.

“I wish we could have honest discussions within our churches. My bishop has been supportive of me, even calling me during the absence to find out why I had kept away from the church,” she says. “The problem, I think, is with the congregants more, the ones who are trying to prove they are ‘holy’.”

The church still plays a pivotal role in Kasiva’s life. Her faith has become more personal. “We need to practise what we preach, we need to practise love, preach love and loving everyone and not judging anybody. We do not know until such a time when God comes who is living right and who is living wrong.”

Kasiva doesn’t trust easily. She has now kept a handful of friends and I understand why. She has been betrayed too many times. When things were really rough, the only people who stood by her were Leonard’s siblings. She would break down before them often. Those were days she didn’t have the energy to face her fellow hustlers. It was too much. I sense that she is still grappling to understand how individuals whom she called friends or relatives could burn her at the stake because she had a gay son.

“Let’s be honest. We are not all the same and let us not hate people who are different from us,” she says. “All families are not perfect, even those with a father and mother. There are families that can have also gay parents. Let us be willing to judge and accommodate the other person. Let’s try and understand that we are not all equal.”

Kasiva knows that she is not the only gay parent in the village. She and another fellow mother occasionally check on one another. However, she knows that there is more than she can offer. She would love to start a support group to help parents understand and come to terms with their children’s sexuality or identity.

She urges parents to be more open-minded and to recognise that there are many forms of love that exist out there. Unconditional support and love are the bedrock of the family, according to Kasiva. Love, love, love is what she is calling for now.

As we concluded the interview, she tells me that she is surprised that she didn’t cry. She expected to be very emotional. It had been an intense one and a half hour interview. I left feeling envy for Leonard and his siblings, respect and admiration for Kasiva. I didn’t know how to respond to her statement on the crying then. It was only later that I found the words, where I wanted to tell her she had done her tears, and now it was time to enjoy the rainbows.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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A Mother’s Love: ‘I’m So Happy My Son Came Out As Gay’

By Kevin Mwachiro When Binyavanga Wanaina passed away it felt like the ground on which we walk froze, paralyzed with grief. The sky turned grey, drizzling its tears down on us. When I heard the news, I called up a friend of mine, one who I knew would understand this loss intrinsically because he, like me, had been heavily impacted by Binyavanga in high school, when his memoir, One Day I will Write About This Place first found its way to bookshop shelves. We both talked about how devastated Kenya should be for this Binya-shaped hole that had been left behind. We mourned a man who had been fundamental to the contemporary literary space in our country. We talked about everything from his work to his family to his impact to the sickness that ravaged his wholeness. And somewhere in that conversation this friend said something to me that struck me, “You cannot love Binya if you do not love his queerness.”

Since then I have had a few conversations that have run my blood hot. Red. Fire. In the middle of the conversation, a pause in the room. The silent, accusatory question lingering in the air, “The one who was gay?” An “aha!” moment. A sense of justification. As if that explains his death, as it was what he deserved. He becomes a lesson, in this broken understanding of morality that guides us.

In the same week as Binyavanga’s death, the Kenyan judiciary upheld the penal code sections 162 and 165 that criminalize sexual conduct between two consenting adults of the same sex, both in public and in private. The court cited regulations from other countries in their decision, including sections of the penal code in Botswana, which has itself recently decriminalized homosexuality. Other African countries that have revoked anti-homosexuality laws through penal code reform in recent years include Seychelles, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe, and Lesotho, but more than 30 other countries maintain the laws on their statute books.

In 2015, when then US president Barrack Obama visited Kenya and addressed the issue with President Uhuru Kenyatta, the latter categorically shut the matter down with his (in)famous line, “…For Kenyans today, the issue of gay rights is really a non-issue… it is not… at the foremost minds of Kenyans and that is a fact.”

I see this attitude fuelling a lot of Kenyans’ arguments on the matter. As it simply does not affect them, it can only be considered a non-issue. Part of the collective trauma we have as a country is the inability to deal with anything we do not want to deal with. We simply sweep it under the carpet and pray to God a gust of wind does not come in and blow the dust around, because that will be messy. Messy means confronting our own beliefs and contradictions, and dealing with how that impacts the people we have hurt.

We have reached a point where it is clearly time for us to do some spring-cleaning. We can no longer wish or pray queer people away. Queerness is just as present in our society as heterosexuality. After being pushed and suppressed into the confines of our culture, after being labelled demonic, unnatural, attention-seeking, perverted, and sin, queerness is simply asking to be seen and to be heard. It is asking for conversation. This is not an absurd or unjust demand.

Many of the strident arguments that have been used to foreclose the possibility of queer acceptance, of freedom and love, have been religious ones. This article is my attempt at having this conversation. I will delve into Christian arguments against queerness because first, this is the religious tradition I am most familiar with, and second, because Kenya is a majority, or at least, normatively Christian society – it is our culture’s immediate history, having been colonized by European Christians. I will attempt to have this conversation only being biased to the bend of freedom and love. These two will always guide the words I write.

Religion can be on the wrong side of history

Throughout history, religion has been a tool of good, just as much as it has been a tool of harm and violence. As much as we are taught to defend our religion with every fibre of our being, sometimes it argues for the wrong things. And you cannot honestly defend what you believe in if you have never interrogated the belief itself. Christianity has been used to defend under-education, slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, and racism. To call the religion itself blameless is to counter facts and historical evidence that have proven otherwise. This does not mean that religion is evil. I am in no way invalidating the intention of faith at its core as something beautiful and whole. I am simply stating that when your religion becomes the be all, end all, when there is no room to think, to listen, to learn, or to grow from those outside your worldview, then there is incredible potential for harm.

Many centuries ago, Copernicus discovered that the sun, and not the earth, was the centre of our solar system. The clergy of the day used Scripture to condemn this ‘outrageous’ argument. Even the Protestant radicals, who were breaking away from the orthodoxy of the Catholic church in other ways, opposed him. Martin Luther called him a fool, John Calvin implied it was blasphemy, and Melanchthon, a theologian of the Protestant Reformation, quoted Ecclesiastes 1:4-5 suggesting that, “severe measures be taken to silence” all those who agreed with Copernicus in order to “preserve the truth as revealed by God.” Obviously since then, science and evidence to the contrary have proved Copernicus right.

For many early Europeans – and even for many Christians today – the Bible was infallible. Yet, somehow, every interpretation always directly or indirectly privileged them. I find this very curious. The fact that slavery existed in the Bible was reason enough to have slaves. The fact that Africans were assumed to be descendants of Ham, the cursed son of Abraham – referring to a passage in Genesis 9 – was used as a further justification to enslave Africans, supposedly because this was their destiny and proper station in life. In fact, slavery was supposed to be a favour to the Africans, rescuing them from their heathen ways. This argument was later modified and repurposed in the interest of colonization, not only in Africa but in the Americas, New Zealand, and Australia where Native Americans, Maoris, and Aborigines were massacred, ran out, and for the longest time, by law, considered less human.

Examples from history have proven that religion in the hands of the oppressor has been used as a tool to validate the oppression. In Germany, church leaders and theologians provided arguments and preached sermons in support of Hitler, in so doing aiding and abetting the Holocaust. In the Jim Crow era of the US, white families would picnic after church on Sundays to watch lynched black bodies hanging from trees. During the women’s rights movement, patriarchy justified denying women the right to vote because men, in all situations were meant to be the heads.

Still, in all these scenarios, the courage of the oppressed to fight back has proven the ‘sensible’ and ‘infallible’ arguments that were supposedly supported by the religion itself, wrong. Acknowledging these aspects of religion that have been heavily problematic in history can open us up to the possibility that the today’s general accepted interpretation of Scripture may not always be the right, or the moral one. Ask Jesus about the multiple times he questioned the Pharisees, who were the custodians of the law, and the moral compasses of the time.

Scripture is not literal

Texts are written for a specific audience, time period, purpose, and context. As much as its wisdom can and has spoken throughout generations to guide and inspire hearts and minds, Scripture is still a text. That means it is injustice to not read Scripture without understanding its original intention. Reading the background and the whole context – whether it is poetry or song or theory or parable or history – informs your ability to interpret it as intended. There are several scriptures that we do not read or apply literally now, yet they are in the Bible! Kathy Vestal in her brilliant article, Sexual Orientation: It’s not a Sin shares several examples.

Exodus 13:14-15. Whoever desecrates the Sabbath day by doing any work on it must be put to death. (Harsh… also remember that time Jesus healed a man during the Sabbath and broke this rule?)

Leviticus 3:17, 11:6-7. Do not eat fat or blood or pig. (So bacon and sausages are technically a sin).

Leviticus 15:19-26. When a woman has a monthly period she is unclean for seven days. Anyone who touches her is also unclean. Everything she touches is also unclean. (I guess women can’t be touched for around seven days every month.)

Deuteronomy 21:18-21. If you have a son who is rebellious and stubborn, take him to the elders of the town and have him stoned to death. (Dear parents, here is a solution to your rebellious teenager.)

Leviticus 24:20. A fracture for a fracture, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. (Jesus later contradicted this with his “turn the other cheek” sermon)

These are just a few of the verses that exemplify how context, audience, and purpose are essential to interpretation of Scripture. During this time when the Israelites had no centralized government and were wandering around the wilderness with no written direction, God gave them laws. These laws were not merely a moral compass but also civil laws to guide the Israelites as an autonomous nation and to give them their own specific identity, setting them apart from the nations around them. They were extremely specific, covering everything from food to hygiene to idolatry and cleanliness.

Some of the laws such as the laws on cleanliness were for the specific purpose of good hygiene in a world before indoor plumbing and the scientific germ theory of disease. These were God’s rules for Israel, in the land of Palestine, at a particular time in history. Furthermore, the Jewish rabbis themselves have always tried to interpret the Torah for the day and age they were living in. They were sometimes actually unwilling to implement the laws that they read in the Torah, putting up technical and procedural barriers to their implementation without necessarily rejecting the Torah in principle. For example, laws that called for a death penalty could go years without ever being implemented – one passage in the Talmudic literature said that if the governing council of the rabbis (the Sanhedrin) went seventy years without implementing a death penalty, then that was a good Sanhedrin. It was obvious to them that killing every rebellious son, for example, would lead to a breakdown in society, and forecloses the possibility of reform, repentance, and even growth. Teenagers are not teenagers forever.

Trying to apply some of these laws in the 21st century is ridiculous to say the least. And in an evolving time, it is impossible to not have an understanding of Scripture that is willing to evolve as well. With this understanding, we can then delve into what Scripture says about sexuality with the willingness to unlearn, question, and reimagine.

Scripture on homosexuality

First, it might be important to note that the word homosexuality did not even show up in English translations of the Bible until 1946. Secondly, there are six portions of Scripture that refer to same- sex relationships directly in the whole Bible. Let that sink in. Only six places in the whole of Scripture. And yet, today’s Christianity makes it seem as if the conversation on sexuality and gender is the biggest evil in the Christian church that there has ever been. Furthermore, the Bible has over 2,000 references to the relationships between the rich and the poor, the inequity that accompanies marginalization and the call to justice. Six against 2,000. This statistic alone should be a compelling argument to re-evaluate the priorities of the gospel in today’s faith spaces. Still it is necessary to analyse the Scriptures in question in the entirety of their context.

Genesis 19. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah. The history of this story has been so often used as an argument against homosexuality that the term “sodomy” was drawn from the destruction of this city. If we read the whole story we see the unfolding of an interesting string of events. Lot hosts two messengers of the Lord (often referred to as angels). Some men in the city, upon seeing the foreigners, knock on Lot’s front door wanting to rape them. Lot, being reasonable, obviously tells them no. He then offers them his two virgin daughters to be gang raped instead (in my view, the mortal sin committed in the story is the intention to rape, but let us continue.) God, understandably, gets angry at the whole situation and tells the messengers that the whole city will be destroyed the following day.

This is not the end to the referencing to Sodom and Gomorrah. Several other points in Scripture describe it as a city with no morals, full of decay, injustice, and oppression – vices that have nothing to do with homosexuality. As is very clearly stated in Ezekiel 16:49-50 “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. 50 They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.”

Leviticus 18:22 & 20:13. The Exodus laws. These are verses that state very clearly, “If a man lies with a man as he does with a woman, both of them shall be put to death. It is an abomination.” My argument here relies on the unattainable Leviticus scriptures used as references above. Specifically, as the article Leviticus and the Holiness Code shares, for many centuries before Israel entered the land of Palestine, ancient Canaanite fertility cults used same-sex rituals to worship their gods. God prohibited Israel from adopting the cultic sexual fertility goddess worship of Egypt and Canaan. God’s biggest problem here seemed to be the correlation between same-sex ceremonies and shrine prostitution in relation to pagan worship of ‘false’ gods, which was a very specific situation.

If we choose to believe this law applies today then we must chose to believe that any person who touches a woman on her period is unclean and any man who shaves his side burns has committed a sin and anyone who has tattoos is heading for damnation (I say as I have three tattoos) and anyone who wears fabric of two different materials has committed an abomination and everyone who cheats must be put death and rebellious sons must be stoned to death and… you get the point. We can’t pick and choose which rules from Leviticus to follow and which ones to leave behind – if we do, then surely the 2,000 verses against economic exploitation and social injustice should be the ones we fall on. Ultimately, to do justice to the Scripture is to understand that these rules were written in a specific time for a specific people in a specific context.

Romans 1:24-32. Paul’s two cents. Many Christians use this portion of the New Testament where Paul talks about a specific group of the church that have fallen into wickedness and immorality as a case against homosexuality. Paul says specifically, “Because of this God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even the women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones… men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves due penalty for their error.” The text then goes on to talk about the other things that this group of people were doing wrong, “They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.”

Reading into the context of this time, as with Leviticus, expounds on the message of Paul. During this period there was a flood of Roman fertility cults and shrine prostitution. This was influenced by popular religions at the time that were devout to the god Apollo and the goddesses Aphrodite and Cybele. According to a historical article by St. John’s Metropolitan Community Church, “One of the many practices of both of these cults was drunken, frenzied revelry that involved wanton sexual abandon. The temple of Aphrodite employed free (non-slave) boys and girls from the ages of about 9 to age 13 whose job was to be used in sexually servicing the men and women who came to the temple. The cult of Apollo hired boys from the age of 11 to 15 for the entertainment and pleasure of older men.”

These were the stories and the actual events that Paul was addressing in his letter to the Roman church. He was boycotting a religion and space that made it acceptable for little boys to be prostituted to older men and little girls to older more powerful men and women. Same-sex relationships in that context had been attached to something more exploitive and dark. It is also good to note that the verse addressed several other problematic tendencies of the time, including corruption, deceit, idolatry, greed, and hate. When you read this Scripture from this perspective, it is honestly hard to find any correlation to a whole loving relationship between two consensual adults.

1st Corinthians 6:9; 1st Timothy 1:10 Lost in translation? I consider these verses together because they use the same Greek word, arsenokoitai. Paul includes the arsenokoitai when referring to a group of sinners and those who won’t enter the Kingdom of God. The interesting thing about this word is that it so rarely appears in ancient text, that the correct translation has been debated for centuries. As Justin Lee points out in his side of the great debate, The NIV translation could not even decide on one definition so they used two. In 1st Corinthians it is translated as ‘homosexual offenders’ and in 1st Timothy it is translated as ‘perverts.’

And yet, as Adam Nicholas Phillips argues in this article, when arsenokoitai is used elsewhere in ancient Greek literature, it references the abuse of the poor (an example being the Sibylline Oracles) or economic exploitation and power abuses (such as a 2nd century text called the Acts of John).

Linking the two interpretations of the word – that is, homosexual offenders and exploitation – brings about an interesting theory. As Justin Lee argues, “The extramarital relationships of men with boys in ancient Greece are infamous even today. Archaeological and literary evidence prove that these relationships were common for centuries in Greece, though they were frowned upon by many even while they were publicly practised… The most likely explanation then for this text in context would be that Paul was referring to a practice that was fairly common in the Greek culture of his day – married men who had sex with male youths on the side.” Paul’s letters would then be interpreted as condemnation of sexual exploitation, which again does not correlate to a whole healthy loving relationship between two consensual adults.

Where does that leave us?

After going through these Scriptures, there is a lot that is still left up in the air. There is a lot that can be and has been debated. As with so much else in life we simply pray for guidance and wisdom to understand wholly and interpret honestly. But for me it simply comes down to what I believe about God. I believe God exudes, exists in, and embodies love. I believe where there is no love there is no God and that God does not create any of us to live in a constant state of shame or fear, because that is the opposite of love.

I have had enough friends from conservative Christian evangelical backgrounds coming to me broken from beating themselves up as abomination and afraid because coming out as gay means experiencing rejection, discrimination, judgement, and condemnation. Hearing these journeys make you want to weep. The call of the church is to fight for freedom, love, and justice. I fall back on this Scripture in Micah 6:8, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

If, as a religion, we are not speaking to these spaces that then we need to rethink the religion. If as a country we are not even attempting to reflect on these principles then there is something deeply wrong with the state in which we are existing. Revolution is love, and love is love.

Further Resources

Romans and Shrine Prostitution Roman Cult Practices The Great Debate: Justin’s View The Bible Does not condemn Homosexuality… Seriously it doesn’t Candice Czubernat’s Blog on being Queer and Christian James Brownson — Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships Justin Lee, Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. A Mother’s Love: ‘I’m So Happy My Son Came Out As Gay’

By Kevin Mwachiro

2011

My relationship with second-hand clothing a while back was very intense. By 2011, I knew the second hand Gikomba clothes market in Nairobi like the back of my hand. You could blindfold me, put me anywhere in the market and I would know exactly where I was. I knew most of the vendors by name, and—despite my severe allergies—still got an amazing rush rummaging through piles and piles of clothes, because I would find the most incredible pieces. As I sorted through mountains of shirts—each costing Ksh50—my parameters for making decisions changed; at that price, it’s not really about cost any more, as it so often is with racks of new, ready-to-wear clothing.

I would pick a shirt for particular reasons—not for its colour, but the buttons, or how the sleeves fit. It is here that I begun to find myself stylistically. These open-air stalls were far more accepting of my curiosity than the air-conditioned boutiques we had in the few shopping malls in Nairobi back then. These stalls have been—and still remain to a large extent—the places where most of Nairobi’s and indeed Kenya’s fashion trends begin. It was here that new trends popped up first. If cigarette pants were in, the second-hand stalls would ride that wave way before any retail outlets in Nairobi did. The people who wore mitumba (used clothes) were actually the most fashion-forward in the city. Mitumba vendors led these trends, because they always had first access to the best piles. I found amazing treasures there, like a black Calvin Klein overcoat, and a fur stole.

With my friend Jim Chuchu, I started a project called Stingo—an old Kenyan slang word for ’style’ or ‘mode’. The general idea with Stingo was to organize regular photo shoots around any ideas we wanted to explore as a group. Jim also called up some other friends: producer Lucille Kahara and makeup artist Kangai Mwiti. I was the designated fashion stylist. Since there was no budget for shopping, every piece we used was mine: ‘stylist’s own’. I had to cheat by casting models who were my size. We put out the images resulting from the shoots on the project website and on Facebook—this was in the pre-Instagram age—and the response was wonderful. There was such excitement around the idea of a group of Kenyans coming together to create such images. We kept shooting every fortnight or so.

However, visiting Gikomba market became tedious—I now noticed the flaws in the second-hand clothes: a small hole from an iron burn, a frayed hem. While I could erase or hide these in the final image, I was no longer satisfied with just being able to put together a look. I was becoming interested in the story behind the garments. This made us wonder: was Stingo a design agency, a modeling agency or an online magazine? Beyond composing, styling and publishing beautiful images, could we do more to feature local design, and help address some of the challenges faced by the designers around us? I stopped sourcing clothes for the Stingo shoots from secondhand markets, and began to dress models in original pieces that had been locally designed and produced.

Going Local

One of the first local designers we featured was Sheila Amolo. I had met her at a small backstreet fashion show and I thought her clothes were stunning. I remember this one jacket she had made—it had beautiful peplum detail at the waist, long before such waistlines were trendy. I fell in love with it immediately.

We were overwhelmed by the response from our fast-growing audience: some wanted to collaborate with us, many wanted to model for the shoots, and others were excited to discover the very cool, new fashion designers we featured such as Blackbird and Blackfly, interested in buying their clothes. The requests by aspiring models were by far the most. Those we had already shot became incredibly popular online and were soon able to access a kind of instant celebrity status, based purely on these campaigns.

We continued to work with more designers, such as Kepha Maina. My interactions with him and other designers gave me a lot of insight into the fashion value chain in Kenya. I witnessed the development of garments from a concept to a toile, and eventually into a collection. The design process captured me: the time and effort the designers spent obsessing over the exact line of a collar or where to place a seam. It also began to bother me that I was working to create visual narratives and stories about my contemporary Kenyan fashion experience, but was not wearing clothes from local designers. After the shoots, I would fold the pieces neatly and hand them back to the designers. I gradually changed my wardrobe, moving away from affordable thrifted gems to pieces that had been designed and made by Kenyans.

2012

By this point, the Stingo team had become very busy with other projects.

Kangai had started her own beauty channel, Lucille went to culinary school, and I was out of school and working full-time at a boutique hotel in the city, and Jim had partnered with our friend George Gachara on what eventually became the multidisciplinary space we call The Nest.

From the many interactions and conversations we had with designers, we realized that many fashion designers were really struggling with the distribution of their clothes. Since most of them did not have retail spaces and often worked from home, we sought to find a solution that was effective and that would not cost much. Jim, George and I designed an online retail experiment and called it Chico Leco. We stocked a funky, edgy collection; a mix of locally designed accessories with some one-of-a- kind vintage pieces. We preferred accessories because they were easier to obtain— and we didn’t have to figure out sizing. Because of this, they were a lot easier to sell.

We put together a selection of ankara button earrings from Otenge, ankara bow-ties from Anyango Mpinga and some feather earrings from Bizzy Lizzy. We later added a few retro sunglasses I picked up from a really old optometrist’s store in Ngara neighbourhood in Nairobi that stocked amazing vintage frames from the 60’s and 70’s. We also got a few brooches from an obscure antique store that stocked delightfully elaborate costume jewellery. Brooches are usually a thing that only older people wear, which is such a shame because they are so beautiful and such an easy way to accessorise.

We put everything in place, including figuring out mobile payment options and delivery solutions. When the website went live, we were so excited the moment someone actually bought a pair of ankara button earrings! Chico Leco was soon receiving many orders and we were fast learning how fashion retail business worked. Soon, we gained some courage and began selling clothing. We stocked some cigarette pants from Kepha Maina in black and cobalt. We carried cropped pants with ankara roll-up detail from Nick Ondu, and some crop-tops from Katungulu Mwendwa. Jim and George ran the store in between their day jobs, and I—with any minute I could spare from my full- time job—curated the catalogue.

Since the early Stingo days, we had been disappointed by the rather uninspired safeness of the fashion images that had populated the mainstream until then: nothing was really fresh, new or exciting. Our editorials therefore had a rather sexual charge, ranging from coy and flirtatious to unashamedly risqué. We were exploring our adult freedoms and stretching them to shameless limits—‘manufacturing desire’, we called it. We became increasingly aware of how powerful images could be, and the clear space for considered image composition in the marketing of fashion.

Chico Leco was the first of its kind at the time, establishing an online Kenyan retail space in the early days when e-commerce here was such an experiment. However, most of our customers still preferred to see, touch and fit the clothes—just like they would in a physical store—before making a payment. As a result, our sales were mostly the accessories and other one-size items. Realising this, we widened our selection with leather laptop sleeves and clutch bags from Rift Valley Leather and clutches from Adèle Dejak. We also commissioned wool snoods—in black, white and cobalt—from a local women’s group.

We encountered many of the problems faced by young brands: effective pricing, packaging, managing overheads and logistics, ensuring a consistent supply of high quality products, as well as finding enough storage space for all our wares, which we had to move between our homes. We would have liked to expand our product catalogue, but we had limited working capital and would strain our cash flow trying to buy stock upfront. We were also aware that the consignment model was not sustainable for the young brands we were stocking. After about a year of operations, these persistent challenges led us to the decision to take a break from the retail part of our experiment in order to figure out a better way to grow the designers and their product, as well as the fashion value chain.

2013

In 2012, I left my job at the hotel to join The Nest with Jim and George, and we absorbed Chico Leco into The Nest as a program. We learned that fashion presentation was a recurring frustration for the numerous designers we were in conversations with. Many of them were growing disenfranchised with the model of fashion shows, as they are understood in Kenya. Designers are routinely asked to pay a fee to be included in the vast majority of shows, and these fees were often quite high—out of reach for many young designers, and without the certainty of any tangible returns or brand growth. The shows seemed to only benefit the event organisers, who would treat the runway as entertainment alongside dance and other performances.

Photographers covering these events were also not aware of the specific needs of fashion imaging, and would often shoot only the faces of the models, leaving out the clothes. Video coverage of these shows tended to focus on the general event. Therefore there was nothing that the designers could use for their own marketing after the show. We decided to use Chico Leco to address this, and our first project was a film project we called Chico Leco Presents. We called up some of the designers we had interacted with since the Stingo days and commissioned collections from them. In this project we carried collections from Katungulu Mwendwa, Sydney Owino and Zeddie Loky (Blackbird), Ruth Abade (Blackfly), Sheila Amolo, Kepha Maina, Wambui Mukenyi and Nick Ondu. I also challenged myself to create a collection alongside the others. I had dabbled in design since high school and through university, sporadically conceptualising and producing garments for myself, but never executing more than a few pieces at a time.

Referencing my multicultural background, I created a cross-seasonal menswear collection called Sun Seeker. It was an exploration of structures: fitted blazers worked in a variety of plaid suiting, slowly moving towards more relaxed silhouettes emphasised in light, richly coloured cottons. Working with a producer, a makeup artist and several models, the Nest team conceptualised and created short fashion films for each collection. We challenged ourselves to shoot eight videos in one location in a day and actually pulled it off!

We also wrote all the press releases that accompanied the fashion films. This was a necessary exercise in storytelling, designed to shift local fashion journalism from the use of vague adjectives such as ‘nice’, ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’, and make stronger reference to the technical and design elements of the collections. We put the videos out on YouTube, and the result was very exciting. We got unprecedented press coverage— with much better language because they quoted and expanded on our press releases—and generated a much larger audience than even the biggest local fashion show could offer. Two of the short films in the project—Dinka Translation and Urban Hunter—screened in festivals such as the Fashion and Film showcase at the Guggenheim, and art shows in other countries. This confirmed to us that there existed far more effective tools for fashion presentation than were being used locally.

2015

In 2015, we decided to have a go at another audiovisual fashion showcase, and this time we challenged ourselves and our designers to develop elements around an original narrative. We developed a short fiction script titled To Catch A Dream, then commissioned the designers Kepha Maina, Katungulu Mwendwa, Namnyak Odupoy, Ami Doshi Shah, Jamil Walji and Azra Walji to create pieces that would befit the fictional characters as described in the script. We also got additional complementary pieces from Ann McCreath and Adèle Dejak. It took about four months for the designers to develop concepts for the film, and produce finished pieces. After that, there were a few more months for pre-production, and four intense days of shooting in four different locations. We were incredibly privileged to have Ajuma Nasenyana play our lead character.

The resulting film allowed us to instigate conversations around the ability of Africans to access fantasy narratives in mainstream media, and ask many other questions beyond both fashion and film—particularly on the use of African languages in film (the film utilized six indigenous languages). To Catch A Dream went on to screen at numerous fashion and film festivals, and even won the Best Original Music award at the Berlin International Fashion Film Festival. 2016-

Many things have evolved in the local fashion industry since my early Gikomba days, when designer shop fronts were sparse, and local ones even fewer.

With a rise in cultural pride, Kenyan fashion is gaining visibility within the region, expanding possibilities for successful production and retail of local designs. There is a thriving industry in fashion support—bloggers, influencers and stylists; models who are becoming recognisable brand names; fashion photographers; overlaps between fashion, beauty, lifestyle and wellness; specialised fashion PR, etc. Conversations with government are also much more productive. They have become more open to the sector’s huge economic potential especially regarding job creation, and are figuring out how to chip in through policy reforms, as well as manufacturing and import subsidies.

Far beyond the commercial viability of the sector, I believe that fashion remains one of the most complex languages of human expression. It is capable of multidimensional communication by both the designer and the consumer, superseding seasons and trends. I have curated wardrobes for movies and TV series, as well as various design showcases and museum exhibitions, but in many ways, I remain a student of style, always rediscovering the immense power clothing and dress practice has to alter people’s moods, attitudes, the quality of their interactions and their experiences of their surroundings.

It is amazing to be part of expanding the collective imagination, as well as my own, with regard to how human beings occupy public space. With every new project I lead or am involved in, I am continually fascinated by and careful to harness the power of garments and their combinations to appease, honour, protest, subvert and transgress.

As part of The Nest Collective, we have continued to ask cultural questions through fashion. We have put together these ideas and images from a selection of emerging Kenyan designers who are contributing to the shifting aesthetic of our country. In this interrogation of what exactly qualifies as ‘authentically African’, we challenge narrow definitions of African design and showcase original, unencumbered thinking and practice in this challenging sphere. Not African Enough was our translation of a voyage into Kenyan contemporary fashion as an exploration of wider issues regarding Africa’s place in global cultural debates and dialogues.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. A Mother’s Love: ‘I’m So Happy My Son Came Out As Gay’

By Kevin Mwachiro

I’d been estranged from Binyavanga for over a decade and a half when I heard of his death. But hearing of his death took me back. To when we’d first met, through Tom Maliti, then an Associated Press Correspondent. At Trattoria, if I remember correctly. He’d been back in Kenya for just a short time from South Africa, was about to move from his family’s home in Nakuru to Nairobi. He was starting to gather people around him—to hold court, to pontificate, to talk about writing, our lives and our sense of possibilities.

He was spending time in Eastleigh, chasing down the matatu graffiti artists, bumping up against the Ethiopians and Somalis living there. He was high on sheng, on the then new Kenyan music emerging from Eastlands articulated by Ukoo Fulani from Dandora. This was maybe a year before the ‘unbowgable’ sensation by hip-hop artists Gidi Gidi and Maji Maji that swept the Moi dictatorship away and ushered in what we all then thought was a real transition, fronted by former President Mwai Kibaki.

We could taste it, the freedom to come. We wanted to be the new, unshackled Kenyans—our whole selves and not the staid old Kenyan selves epitomised by the then literary space whose walls he was determined to bring down. He moved into my flat. As did, for a while, all the people he was gathering around him. There was food—he loved to cook, messily, things full of butter and cream and everything as artery-clogging as it could be. There was drink—a lot of it—fuelling all the passionate conversations about writing and life. There was Tom and playwright Andiah Kisia and filmmaker Sagwa Chabeda. The journalist Parselelo Kantai and filmmaker Judy Kibinge. And so many more. There were many late nights. At the flat. All over town. At our many centres of gravity. I’d get up, go to the gym, he might be up when I got back to eat before heading to work. Mostly he wasn’t. Either way, I’d get a call each morning at work, telling me what he was up to—mostly meeting people, sometimes working on a piece. If his meanderings took him to my vicinity in Westlands, I’d join him for lunch with whomever else he’d swept up into his dreams. Actor Mumbi Kaigwa. And then there’d be the evening call: ‘we’re here, come.’ For it all to start again.

Read series: Binyavanga Wainaina

He sent off his entry to the Caine Prize in 2002. He preened and primped before he flew out. There were new clothes from fashion designer Anne Mcreath at Kiko Romeo. Not so much for the prize or anything associated with it. But for the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the correspondence between them having fuelled his writing trajectory. And too, love.

Correspondence. He hated the distance between him and those he loved. He flailed at it, cut through it with words, always words. I travelled a lot for work. I still have the emails upon emails we sent to each other. He wrote to anybody his singlemindedness about enabling a creative life brought into his ambit. He shared what he was working on. I still have the folder of his early stories: ‘read this.’ A command I took seriously.

That he won the prize is history. What’s not is what it set off. The gatherings of the flock became somewhat more focused. Between the food and the drink and the arguments and discussions into the night. There were planning meetings at all our centres of gravity, the homes on which we descended. Ali Zaidi, senior editor at the East African and his wife, sculptor, Irene Wanjiru’s most frequently. Where their daughter Tara was still running around refusing to wear clothes, where Irene’s stone and wood sculptures were all over the place, inside and outside, finished and not. Where there was always more cooking (if we were in luck, shami kebabs!) and always more alcohol. We would arrive with bags of supplies, sit outside, argue and debate some more. But also at author Rasna Warah and her husband Gray’s.

Somehow, something got done. We agreed on a name—Binyavanga’s suggestion. Kwani? We agreed on a Board – basically, everybody in the circle, especially the ones we thought had some gravitas (we wanted to be taken seriously). I wrote up the proposal for the Ford Foundation. We got the money. Everybody dug deep into their notebooks and computers for content for the first issue. Binyavanga magically choreographed and directed it. He made us believe we could do it. What we probably were less aware of was that he needed all of us to believe in himself and Kwani itself.

It was frenetic. Somewhere in that he moved out to Karen, with Parselelo right next door. Another centre of gravity. I remember Atieno Aluoch’s 30th birthday party around the corner. We were, as usual, the stragglers—her mother couldn’t believe finding us still there after the sun rose and chased us out. We barrelled back to his place for yet another cholesterol-filled breakfast for the cycle to begin again. We loved being around each other. There was nothing we didn’t know about each other’s business. French cultural attache Olivier Lechien and journalist Ebba Kalondo’s another centre of gravity—for African music and African film. They travelled. We took Jordan and Leah to the Giraffe Centre in Nairobi—astounded and touched that anybody would entrust their children to us. We had no compunction about offering utterly unsolicited advice and judgements about each other. With care at the beginning. But increasingly viciously when we were unravelling. Binyavanga was the queen of the absolutely devastatingly aimed arrow when he was hurt. Feeling that somehow, incredulously, we—I—weren’t seeing him. Him as he struggled with depression and the writing after South Sudan.Him as he struggled to come out. He didn’t tell us—but he never forgave us—me—for not knowing.

That time. That place. We started something together. With him at its heart. With his own big and encompassing heart—he dragged us all in, we swirled and twirled around him. We did love each other then. Only love could begin to explain the devastation as we tore apart. But Kwani went on. As did the whole generation of Kenyans it taught to believe that they could write their – our – stories and truths. And that writing was enough.

It wasn’t a waste. That time. That place. Him.

Muthoni Wanyeki, PhD, is Africa Director with the Open Society Foundations (OSF) network. This tribute is written in her personal capacity.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

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A Mother’s Love: ‘I’m So Happy My Son Came Out As Gay’

By Kevin Mwachiro I remember the patriotic pride that swelled in me, as a teenager when I saw Binyavanga Wainaina on the cover of a Daily Nation pullout, when he won the Caine Prize in 2002.

The beaming beady eyes. The dreadlocks. The chunky body frame. With a kitenge top, to complete what we typically call the ‘African look’. And then, there was the name. Who names their kid Binyavanga? But in that little hardware shop run by my aunt and guardian, I knew a Kenyan had won some international award for a short story, and it was a moment of inspiration for a young man who loved books.

As an excitable teenager, I never thought in a few years I would shake his hand, that he would agree to my request to interview him for a piece that would appear in a third-rate, Indian, Delhi-based newspaper, and through him, I will meet some of my childhood and adolescent literary heroes such as Micere Mugo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Yvonne Owuor.

In my community, when someone dies at a relatively young age, with so much yet to give, women cry in a very specific way.

They touch and knock the coffin, screaming, all the while quarrelling with the body of the deceased, as if the body cares. They always ask the deceased: “Why have you shamed us?”

They ask in a manner that even the most macho man break down in tears. It is the palpable pain in their cries. Because, not all deaths are equal; some leave us more devastated than others. And I am sure, for the Kenyan literary community, Binya’s death, despite the premonitory strokes that he suffered in recent years, feels the same. He has shamed us, really mocked us. He pulled a fast one, choosing rest over work, and at only 48, when the life of a writer starts to peak.

Personally, I have been waiting for his novel, and newer works, as he promised during my last interview with him back in 2013. Because there has never been a better prose writer than Binyavanga, who with surgical eyes, pointed out at the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of modern life in Kenya and the world, and whose prose brimmed with vivacious sentences, peppered with wit, irony, humour and brevity that only an intelligent mind can conjure. And oh! His candour.

You just need to re-read his cinematic short story, Discovering Home, and how little has changed since he wrote the story about 18 years ago.

Discovering Kwani?

After high school, when it dawned on me that I would not earn a place in medical school, and my cash strapped background meant I could not privately sponsor myself for a degree in medicine, I wanted to be a novelist.

The mid-2000s were a beautiful time to be a creative. When I joined the University of Nairobi for my degree in Literature, among my earliest memories are the Kwani? Open Mic poetry sessions then held at Club Soundd along Wabera Street in downtown Nairobi.

We were young, new in town, smelling like freshly cut arrowroot. Our lecturer took us to Club Soundd, and we would meet journalists whose bylines we worshipped, poets so good but so understated and underrated, and the entire Kwani? brigade. The Open Mics were the best of the carefree freedom Kenyans were reclaiming since KANU was chased out of State House in that euphoric 2002 election. Annoyingly though, the drunkards always got in the way of some of the pithiest presentations. Still, to us, it was eye-opening, and my classmates of poetic disposition always had a chance to read their poems.

Local creatives in this city rarely have a place, much less a consistent platform where they can express themselves, even today. Places like the British Institute, Goethe Institute and Alliance Francaise often provide the physical avenues, but rarely do we have a truly local space where we can be Kenyan without trying too hard to fit into the sensibilities and artistic expectations of the benefactors. And that is what the Kwani? Open Mic was all about. Through it all, we were able to look at ourselves in the mirror, as the youth expressed their angst, capturing the zeitgeist of the 2000s, with tribalism, extra-judicial killings, corruption, the ever-widening class gap, and the soon to erupt post-election violence.

The Open Mics were made possible because of Binyavanga’s bohemian incorporation of all forms of art – poetry, music, prose, performance, painting and everything with artistic spirit in it. Literary scholars have a way of frowning upon other literary media not in their stable. Like the way poets often assume theirs is the best medium. Those who study prose think it is the only serious discipline in the department.

But Binyavanga was keen not to bring the scholarly cherry picking and the endemic genre in- fighting. He allowed Kwani? to incorporate everything artistic. And the results were amazing.

As a first-year student in 2008, I remember when Kwani? brought the future Nigerian superstar, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to my university. At that time, her second book, Half of a Yellow Sun was fresh off the press, and anyone with a literary brain knew that she was on course to be a super star. She was in conversation with Sierra Leonean author Aminata Forna and Angolan author Sousa Jamba. Read series: Binyavanga Wainaina

In a discussion moderated by the great late Prof. Okoth Okombo they talked about the role of conflict as a crucible of creativity. And these writers came in the aftermath of the 2007/8 post- election violence that crushed the myth of Kenyan exceptionalism in Africa. All the authors came from countries that had endured civil wars. Chimamanda Adichie’s novel was about the Biafra war that has refused to wash away from the conscience of the Igbo people. Forna’s mother country, Sierra Leone, had endured a protracted civil war and was just recovering. I remember Prof. Okoth Okombo saying that countries that have gone through traumatising events produced better music (DRC, he said), better novels (Nigeria), because conflict forges the best of writers and artists. I think this was an attempt to make the horrors of the post-election violence somehow redeemable for Kenyan creatives. I’m not so sure how well it worked.

In successive literary festivals, 2010, 2012, and additional events we would meet young and old, globally acclaimed authors such as Okey Ndibe, Teju Cole, NoViolet Bulawayo, Taiye Selasi, as well Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mukoma wa Ngugi and Micere Mugo. In all the festivals, Binya always hovered at the periphery, not addicted to hogging every space. He also wrote worthy praises of Yvonne Owuor’s Dust, a book that explored our collective silence towards the old wounds that hurt our country the most.

And for these fond memories, we can all be grateful to Binya, because it was the seed he planted a decade earlier in Kwani? that made it possible.

A Kenyan Literary Gem

In many ways, Binyavanga to me was like Bakayoko, the main character in Sembene Ousmane great novel ‘God’s Bits of Wood’. He is the absent leader of a revolution, only spoken in scattered references for nearly two-thirds of the books and only appears towards the end. But whose spirit is felt throughout the revolution. He was multifaceted, idealistic and practical, unrestrained, loquacious, arrogant where necessary, but always with good intentions.

Usually, in the literary sphere, older writers and seniors always look down upon young upstarts. Rather than accommodate new voices and new approaches to doing things, they sit prim in their quaint offices pining for the good old days, rhapsodizing about canonical writers of their time. Binyavanga did things differently, giving young creatives a chance, because with no one to hold the door open for you, you can die with your talent. And the door Binyavanga opened paved the way for many award-winning writers to launch their careers.

It is this generosity in a world of selfish gatekeepers that helped create the Kwani? fortress from whose well we would all drink the wisdom of our time. For this, I take a bow at the man we just lost.

Earlier in May, I complained to a friend that my biggest beef with Binyavanga was that he was less prodigious that he should have been. But I was thoroughly impressed by Isaac Otidi Amuke who made an online archive of all of Binyavanga’s writing, and what an oeuvre is he leaving behind! Someone should anthologise everything in a one-volume reader.

Still, I would have appreciated some more fiction from him. But maybe fiction was not his forte, as he was more a memoirist in the mould of James Baldwin, as Mukoma wa Ngugi mourned him in his tribute in Africaisacountry.com. Baldwin, indeed, is better when writing essays than in fiction. As a travel and food writer, few writers in Africa did a better job than Binyavanga. In the multiple magazines he wrote for, locally and internationally, his prose and cunning eye for irony leaves one breathless. The best trait of writing is longevity. When he came home, from South Africa in the aughts, he caught the spirit of the time, by his photographic prose of Nairobi in the early 2000s, and re-reading it now, I noticed little has changed since then. It is even worse, under the Jubilee regime with its similarities to the worst of the KANU regime.

At Nyamakima in downtown Nairobi, where he goes to board a matatu and travel to his hometown of Nakuru, here is how describes what he observes;

A man wearing a Yale University sweatshirt and tattered trousers staggers behind his enormous mkokoteni, moving so slowly it seems he will never get to his destination. He is transporting bags of potatoes. No vehicle gives him room to move. The barrow is so full that it seems that some bags will fall off onto the road. Already, he is sweating. From some reservoir I cannot understand, he smiles and waves at a friend on the side of the road, they chat briefly, laughing as if they had no care in the world. Then the mkokoteni man proceeds to move the impossible.

An ordinary writer may not have observed the irony of poor soul in Africa pushing a cart donning a Yale University sweatshirt. These images still recur in Nyamakima today. Despite the transition of two regimes in power, what he captured in the short story is still evident, a perfect demonstration of our stagnation as a country, even with its perceived growth.

Or his piece of satire for Granta, How to Write About Africa, still regarded the SI Unit of Satire; so illuminating, so piercing, that most white people who come to Africa, have to pay homage to the piece, and keep it in the conscience as they write about the African content.

In the interview I had with him for the Delhi based newspaper, he sounded more optimistic about a renaissance of the African arts, and at the time, he was contributing to Chimurenga, the irreverent South African publication that cherishes African languages, something Binya told me would grow in the days to come. And as you may notice, most Africans are now conscious of their image to the world. And when American and British media outlets that have tried to write nasty things about the continent, they have found themselves on the wrong end of the ire of the African Twitterati. I know Binya will stir from the grave every time a foreign journalist will attempt to misrepresent Africa.

In his memoir, ‘One I will Write About this Place’ the outstanding feature is his candour. He talks about masturbating to Pam Ewing with teenage exuberance. This is the same openness that makes him to tell off some Europeans who ask him to travel to Sudan and write about his experience. When they spurn the work he wrote for having unseemly language and not meeting the sensibility of the donor, he told them to ‘fuck off’.

“I start to understand why so little good literature is produced in Kenya. The talent is wasted writing donor-funded edutainment and awareness-raising brochures for seven dollars job. Do not complicate things, and you will be paid well…”

He would write more about what it meant to be a Kikuyu in Kenya in the disastrous years of the Kibaki administration, leading to the post-election violence. Some have accused him of falling to the trap of ethnic supremacism claiming that the undertones in his works tend to cultivate the myth of Kikuyu superiority.

Coming Out

Binyavanga was bold enough to come out in a country where most gay men lead double lives, because coming out will ruin their careers and family.

Most people hold strong reservations on what being gay means. Rather than try to understand, many choose to hide under the cover of religion or culture when they want to trounce on the rights of others.

To me, Binyavanga understood that you only live once, and rather than lead life as a hypocrite, you can still live a richer, far fulfilling life, if you are honest with yourself.

While his death has robbed us a literary genius, we can always remember his great writing, his fervor fighting for the African image, and most importantly, for defining the Kenyan and literary scene in the first two decades of this millennium.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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A Mother’s Love: ‘I’m So Happy My Son Came Out As Gay’

By Kevin Mwachiro I met Binyavanga, not in the way I had wished to meet him. I met him like a thief, lurking in the shadows. I was mostly fascinated by his writing, and later by the intriguing, disjointed, and frankly frustrating way he would go off on a tangent on social media. Sometimes throwing a perfectly crafted gem. Sometimes coming back to an idea. Sometimes never coming back. Sometimes disappearing in a fuzzy maze of rants. His legion of followers imploring him to stop. Others cheering him on.

One of those was against Caine Prize, in it, Binyavanga argued that Africans were according the Caine Prize far more significance than it deserved, in so doing neglecting its own homegrown literary institutions. It was about time someone told them, one said. Why are you spitting in the plate that you ate from? After you have become full? Another quipped. You only needed to have read Binya’s work, and interacted with his powerful, borderless imagination to understand why he put the Caine Prize to task in this way. And why not? He had founded Kwani? to address these same issues. To create a local platform where writers would meet publishers at a table of equality. And one where when work by a local author was published successfully, there was no added pressure of a sense of indebtedness to neocolonial charity.

Imagine the power dynamic at play those many years ago when Chinua Achebe snail mailed his only copy of his “Things Fall Apart” manuscript to the UK. Relying on the goodwill of an editor to reply to his mail. Fortunately, luck was on his side, but anything could have happened – the world could have lost one of the best literary pieces of work of all time. Those kinds of dynamics are still at play in the global literary scene, and Kwani? was trying to rethink and change these interactions, to balance the power and expand our imaginations beyond what is defined for us.

Take a book like Eva Kasaya’s “Tales of Kasaya”, a gut-wrenching story exploring the realities of being a househelp in Kenya, which was published by Kwani Trust. Eve Kasaya did not have the conventional writer’s pedigree before this book was published. She had a story. And there was a platform called Kwani?willing to give this story a chance.

I met Binya at his book-signing event at the Kenya Railway Station in 2012. I heard the news that he was launching his book, and I took a country bus from Kisumu to Nairobi, arriving just in time to get a copy of One Day I Will Write About This Place. The book was priced at a friendly Ksh500. And this, finally, was my chance to meet the man in person. Someone I met at the venue noted that everyone who was in attendance looked like they existed within some form of creative chaos. This was his way of acknowledging the absence of colonial rigidity that defines boundaries in settings like these. It was the first hint that this evening wasn’t going to go how most of these things go – that of a superhero teaching us, earthlings, the secret to his genius. When Binyavanga got up on the makeshift stage holding a bottle of Tusker, I put my phone away. I was not going to type any notes. This was not going to be any kind of structured interaction.I quickly grabbed a second Tusker.

Binya’s appeal was his down-to-earth nature. People who met him have various testimonies of his generosity. Others like me, online faithful disciples, mostly watched in awe as he dropped wisdom on social media. Stopped. Started a rant in the dead of night. Followed it with brilliant ideas the following day in a vicious loop of unpredictability. A hurricane of sorts. All you needed to do was to take a seat at this table of steaming buffet of ideas. All you needed to be was hungry.

Read series: Binyavanga Wainaina

A few years back I was struggling through Yvonne Adhiambo’s novel Dust. I had taken two long flights with the book as my sole companion. I could not crack it beyond a few pages. I sent Binya a quick DM on Twitter to seek his opinion on this book. I wanted to know if it had spoken to him. He replied promptly. He told me to “allow it to speak to me.” I should have taken his advice. I am taking it now. The funny thing is I knew he would reply. If it were another author of his calibre, I would have not held my breath. But I was still thrilled that he did.

Binya’s writing during his time in South Africa is a good window for peering into his life. He was a man who had been through the cycle of life. It is a story of resilience; staying on course when all evidence points to a life ending in failure. One of his stories, “Thank you, SA, for caring for me, says Kenyan student”, is a catalogue of gratitude to people who gave him a bed to lay his head when he was a struggling Kenyan student in South Africa. He writes about getting a bottle broken over his head when he stands up against a bully. He writes about South Africa convulsing through riots in the wake of Mandela’s release. How he is gripped with fear. He has outstayed his visa and everyone looks suspicious.

Binya’s generosity also lies in his open invitation into his family through his writing. We are growing up with his sister Ciru; leaping through the daily joys of upper middle class, urban African upbringing. We are there with Binya, his mother and uncles, learning the complexities of having a mixed heritage between multiple African countries. We are also with his Baba. “…I am racked with guilt and am avoiding Baba. He has been gracious so far – has said nothing. All that wasted money on my degree.”

His complex relationship with his father around education is something all of us, children raised by fathers who believe that formal education is the only way out of traps of poverty, have experienced. At this point, he is one of us, and we are him. Through writing he is getting a second chance at life. Self-motivation. Self-education. Who are we not to be awed by a man let down by an education that was too structured for his creative brain, before harnessing his innate talent to global recognition?

This resonates loudly with many of us who have been let down by the colonial structure of African education systems that emphasise obedience over creativity. And its enforcers. Parents. Teachers. Professors. We are getting inspired to challenge it. To think out of imposed and inherited mental boundaries.

His relationship with Baba earlier on also brings to fore the complexity of his sexuality. We witness how the identity of an African male child is strongly tied to their father, and how breaking such identities to discover ones true self is a complex, layered process. It is no surprise that he comes out to his mother after her death, in an article published in 2014. It is the emotional writing of a son, longing, wishing for what would have been, had this opportunity have presented itself earlier. In a different more accepting world, this would have taken place earlier, face-to-face. Mother to son. Son to his mother.

There are very few books where a writer really opens the doors to the house of his family’s life, and takes readers through a spiritual and emotional journey like Binya did. One Day I Will Write About This Place introduced us to intimate stories about Nakuru. Prior to the book, I would honestly just consider this town a stopover for bathroom break and food for people travelling on country buses between Nairobi and the Western and Lake regions of this country. I never imagined the town had any artistic life until Binya wrote about finding his childhood and teenage years in it. This coming of age narrative deals with complex issues of identity, belonging, politics and culture across decades and multiple African countries. Binyavanga weaves it unapologetically in a playful style that only he could.

Through this beautiful journey we are all struck by this force of nature. We hold our breath excited, fearing what may come next out of this inspiring genius of a man. A human rights activist.A pan Africanist.A force of nature.

Go well Binya.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. A Mother’s Love: ‘I’m So Happy My Son Came Out As Gay’

By Kevin Mwachiro

Binyavanga Wainaina is dead.

This sentence and its finality breaks me; the mere thought of it: The Binj lying still, never to raise his small hands and crook his fingers, animated by an idea. The placidness of this 4-word sentence ruins me. Its clarity and unadorned nature deals with me. Its bland texture offends me. Where is the Anglican velvet and inventiveness?

The Binj has checked out.

This is jauntier. It has a bump to it, a swagger if you like. Might even make the beautiful man smile. In these hours of immediate tributes and outpouring of grief, I imagine Binj is somewhere, holding court, a cigarette smouldering in the crook of his fingers, critiquing the language memorializing his death.

This deathly blow lands on everyone who knew and was affected by the man. My mind has been a whirlwind of flashbacks, a hurricane of memories. The first time I saw him. The last time I saw him. The inauspicious moments in-between. Not chronologically numbered, but my mind tries to number it. I try to grasp something, some kind of order, perhaps to distract myself from what has happened, that Binyavanga won’t call me when he is in Lagos again, for quick advice or consultation on medications for him or his friends, for drinks and intellectual conversations that leak into the wee hours of the next morning.

An elephant has collapsed.

This has about the right amount of idiom, proverb, imagery, and, quite robustly, carries the weight of what just happened. This loss stings and singes every cranny of Africa. I am pouring out my thoughts in a room in Lagos but I know that this despair I feel is the exact same with what someone else feels in another room in Accra, Dakar, Nairobi, Nakuru, Limbe, Douala, Ibadan, Cape Town, Jo’Burg, Harare. The internet is already agog with tributes, phones smarting with social media updates.

Rest in Peace, Binyavanga Wainaina is already a hashtag on steroids.

A rockstar bows out.

The first time I met Binyavanga was in 2007. He had accompanied Chimamanda Adichie to Ife for a reading of her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Pit Theatre was filled to its capacity within minutes. Tinuke Adeyi and her future husband, Tosan Mogbeyiteren and I had jettisoned afternoon lectures and clinic duty to catch a glimpse of these writers. While the spotlight beamed on the ebullient Adichie, only the intellectually curious would have taken interest in the heavyset man with shoulder-length locs and a penetrative stare wearing a white jalabiya, if my memory serves me correct.

That day he came across as intense. A few months earlier he had respectfully turned down the World Economic Forum’s nomination as a Young Global Leader with an eloquent letter to Queen Rania of Jordan. He read from his Caine Prize winning story, Discovering Home. It was inspiring to hear that he jumpstarted Kwani? the literary magazine with his prize money. Two years later, Emmanuel and I would start Saraba magazine. We were in Pit Theatre at that same time (we had not met), under the influence of his voice, his ideas, his convictions.

The sun has set.

Binyavanga was a force of nature. He lived in full throttle, on his own terms. He did things in full, no place for half measures. And was he generous? He was selfless, even to a fault. He had a large heart and cared for everyone in the room. His generosity was not restricted to humans. He cared for ideas and cherished the opinion of others. He championed other writers. While holding court in the most informal settings, the Binj was recommending writers for MFA programs, magazine programs, helping with grants and fellowships. He would always ask me what I was working on and if I daresay being a doctor, he will regard me with his side-eye and remind me about Frantz Fanon.

The Binj has checked out.

Hotel Nairobi. Hotel Africa. Hotel Life. Never again will a man of such generosity stir this loam. Never again will a man of wit and wisdom and warmth thread this way. His warmth is what I will miss most. His childish grin. His girlish mannerisms. The way he cocks his ear when he is about to say something punchy, funny, mischievous.

The Binj is gone

But some have said this day was coming, it was only a matter of time. Indeed, it is only a matter of time for everyone but for The Binj, it was only a matter of acceleration. Bring forward the day—the day, death cures us of our lives. But till then, we must do what humans do. We must anchor our pain to memories.

A great man once walked this way.

Binj loved Nigeria, loved Lagos, loved her writers, loved her beaches and the good times the tide brings. I will not forget the night at Kuramo beach before its erasure. Circa 2009. In the company of Binj, Jumoke Verissimo, Niq Mhlongo, Igoni Barrett, Eghosa Imaseun, drinking beers without abandon. Broken men marking time as itinerant jukeboxes, willing to play you any song, for some loose change. Substantially inebriated, we choose Bob Marley’s Redemption Song and sing along between cigarette puffs into the small hours.

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.

I remember that night at his house in the Nairobi suburbs. Circa 2015. Emmanuel and I had been in town for Storymoja Festival. Binj had found out and sent word to us to come to his house. Wanjeri, Clifton and Emmanuel and I in a taxi knifing through cold Nairobi nights, while we discussed colonialism and why Kenya does not have a National dress.

At the Binj’s, it was like a Pan-African party at the patio. There was a festival director from Jamestown in Ghana. A political ally from Burundi. A bespectacled academic from the Kenyan coast. A Nairobi poet in a plaid jacket. Jalada’s Moses Kilolo and his American PEN lady friend. Parselelo Kantai, Binj’s longtime collaborator, spewing his expansive ideas. We were expecting Billy Kahora who had promised to come.

Read series: Binyavanga Wainaina

There was a lot to eat and plenty more to drink and a medley of discussions that ambled from dance to music to colonialism to neo-colonialism to books to governance on the continent. It could have been a party but it felt like a normal day in the life of Binj, sitting till the wee hours of the morning, smoking and espousing ideas about things he loved. I would leave from his house to the airport, eyes bloodshot and body smelling like a dutiful ashtray.

A few weeks later, he had that master stroke.

Ikú b’olá jẹ

This death knell has been inexorably visceral for me. It feels like a tightening somewhere in my solar plexus. Then it slinks, with its raw coldness, to my lower gut. Then it bites me, this grief. And I want to find a better way to express what I feel, a way that goes beyond trite words, beyond routine, beyond duty, beyond the socially sanctioned performative nature of bereavement.

Now we write our hearts and grief and pain. We say that Binyavanga was a great man and a selfless soul. We contextualise his generosity with personal encounters.

I have been reaching out to my friends in Kenya, to see how I can join my grief with theirs, in some kind of quizzical solidarity. My mind is in Nairobi and my body is in Lagos. My mind and body have become paralysed by this grief. I surrender to a numbness that aches.

The Binj is dead. What a brief wondrous life! What a moving force! What an acceleration! He moved so frantically through life, ideas and spaces that it is difficult to imagine he has transitioned. And his legacy? It lies in the beautiful words he left us and the beautiful gestures and ways he touched us. It lies in the now comatose Kwani? which must be propped up by whatever means necessary. It lies in the manuscripts that will be gathered, revised and issued in due time. It lies in the memories we made.

The last time I saw the Binj was in October 2017. He was at a panel discussion at New York University with Chris Abani and Taiye Selasi. His speech was slurred but he managed to remain his jovial and quirky self. What was different: he had become more spiritual and reflective about his own mortality. He spoke a lot that night about his Sangoma and extra-terrestrial dimensions to his stroke, that master stroke. After the discussion, I walked up to him and he was pleasantly surprised to see me in New York. He invited me for dinner but I declined. I was thoroughly jet-lagged and needed my rest.

I wish I had hung out with him that night. But these minor moments come and go, innocuous in their initiation but significant in retrospect.

The Binj is no longer here.

But we are grateful that we met him, we laughed with him, read him, danced with him. These fond memories and all things he held passionate—literature, culture, food, music, dance, Africa—will continue to keep him in our consciousness.

The restless one has found his peace. Let those who live trudge on with their burdens.

Travel well, ancestor.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

A Mother’s Love: ‘I’m So Happy My Son Came Out As Gay’

By Kevin Mwachiro

Dear Baba, we’ve been needing to talk.

We haven’t really had a chance to talk since you died, three years ago, and I thought today would be a good day.

Of course you may be aware that mom … we had a conversation in January with mom – about me and about stuff in general.

In April 2001, Baba, I had just come back from Cuba for spring break. I’d gone of course to misbehave and I had a lot of fun. In fact, it was difficult getting out because I didn’t know in Cuba you couldn’t use an American credit card. I had to rush back on that Sunday to get back to teach on Monday – and on Monday, my head felt weird.

I thought, ah, too much rum. My body wasn’t moving properly, things were awkward.

Monday, Tuesday – taught class – Wednesday Thursday…On Friday it felt like there was water moving all over my head and I took myself to the hospital. They took an MRI and they told me I had had nine small strokes – this was April.

And they said they have to put a pipe through here [gestures to hip area] because that vein was 70% full and it would go inside and reach here [gestures to left side of his head] and then it would burst open and there’s a 5% chance that I would bleed and things would happen – of course, you know.

Remember most conversations were happening on the phone and I was away for 14 days. We really didn’t get to talk.

Later, months later, Auntie Muthoni came to visit and said to me, “Oh, you know your father called me in tears and said please save my son,” Now, you know, Baba, we really never have these sorts of conversations:

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

“Fine”

I ended up in hospital again because of having panic attacks when I was trying to get home after coming out from the operation with the stroke.

It was terrible – those three days.

You sent me an email while I was in hospital thinking, and it was true, that I was too afraid to come home and said please come home and I came home.

I didn’t see you and I came to Nairobi and I was so freaked out, Baba, you know. I don’t know why. It was impossible at the time to interact with people. So, I went into hiding in Nairobi. I went into hiding because…at first I thought it was the shock from the operation – it turned out it was some kind of medication that I had had (and I didn’t know about). At this point, you did not know and I did not have time to see you.

So eventually, I decided to go to Ghana with my lover.

We were going to do a conference in Nigeria and I was going to just go and chill out and think about nothing. I decided on the last day to come see you in Nakuru. We booked a hotel and came to see you that night.

My partner had malaria and we were seated in the evening and I was trying to explain to you what was going on in the hospital, and as we were talking you stood up and tears came to your eyes. You rushed out of the house because you really couldn’t hear or didn’t want to hear what had been going on with your son.

You came back 20 minutes later, we said goodbye, and in the morning, I took a plane to Ghana.

We played and had fun for three weeks and I came back and on July 7, which was the anniversary of mom’s death. I woke up in Nairobi, in a rented apartment, with my lover.

Read series: Binyavanga Wainaina

Clem, your partner, called and she said, “Your father is not feeling well.”

At first we thought it was indigestion (we know he is stubborn). She had queued, standing parked at a testing place because he didn’t want to see a doctor. He wanted to go do medical tests.

So I said to her, “You know he’s very stubborn. So what I suggest you do is, if he hasn’t eaten well, take him straight to the hospital and put him on a drip. Don’t ask. Don’t argue. Just turn the car around … I don’t even want to talk to him. Let me reverse.”

When we sat in your living room three weeks before, you had said to me something. You said, “Kenneth, you know I’ve prepared a room for the two of you.”

And I remember very clearly my head saying, “What? This is unusual and clearly you’re opening a file.”

You know, Baba, you never asked me where is your girlfriend.

And I can’t say there was any consistency in the love you gave. You never said there was anything wrong when I was dressing up in girls’ clothes with Shiru and getting into strange kinds of trouble – it seemed to least bother you. Or me twirling like Michael Jackson.

There were clearly concerns on your face but it didn’t affect the love you gave me.

So when you said that, I thought to myself this is the time to bring it up with you.

Surely, this is the time for me to say, that I need to hear from you, to be freed to love, and that I am 40-something years old and I need that freedom. And I need to hear from you that it’s okay.

But I didn’t because I wanted to go to Ghana.

So, Clem takes you off, to Rift Valley General Hospital. They put you on the drip.

And then she called me at midnight and says, “Something is wrong” … something is wrong. And then matron calls and then we’re in the car in the middle of the night rushing to Nakuru.

My brother is trying to get a plane to ship him out, something has clearly happened.

And then I am in Nakuru, late night. And we are sitting.

That hospital has only a small heater to keep you warm and your eyes look like glue. They don’t look like eyes at all. But your hands, arms are warm and they’re strong. When I touch – grab – your hands, your hands seem strong.

That’s the anniversary of mom‘s death.

So I’ve asked myself: Did you decide? Was it you saying it’s time to be with mom again, 11 years later? Why that day?

Because even if the doctors declared you dead, five days later, it was that day that everything – a stroke, like mine, but bigger, destroyed your brain and you were effectively dead.

So there must be something to that, right?

But at the same time, I also feel…this cost of parents, that they themselves gave themselves to their own children…what damage was I doing to you… those 14 days in hospital, possibly dying…and how much was this thing that we both carry – this genetic thing called stroke – activated by the stress I put you through in the hospital? We’ve been needing to talk about that.

Errr…we also need to talk about the fact that I have taken to wearing skirts and clearly this must bring you some measure of consternation.

Of course because I didn’t have a chance to really talk to you about it, I decided to bring it up to the whole bloody planet.

I went to Nigeria and those people in Nigeria, the people I’ve known – the writers, welcomed me. Not only did they just welcome me, they insisted I come. Not only did they insist I come – of course you know that many of them cleared the way for it to be possible for me to be there – in Nigeria; where you could die or be arrested, and killed for being the kind of guy who wears skirts like I do. And had a lovely time.

I went to Senegal for four months. They shut down an exhibition on homosexuality there – the Emami people went making all sorts of noises about it. Me I swam and enjoyed myself.

You know, in a way, me I want to become an adventurer.

Me I was the son who was shy in your house. I was not, eeh, the brave one. I wasn’t the brave one. Shiru was brave. James was brave. Chiki was brave. I really wasn’t the brave one. But I feel like now, my season is beginning.

In this continent called mine, and I am an African, I want no space to not welcome me.

There was a moment in April, after I came out, where I was supposed to go to Italy. And it seemed as if you could hear these swirling noises of people. And it wasn’t so much that there were any threats – there were no direct threats, Baba, because I felt that enough people who disagreed with what I am, agreed that you could not doubt my sense of honour and the work that I have done for many years to change this continent. And therefore, even the people of the church, up to the cardinal, were unable to confront me directly.

Because I believe, Baba, this continent is ready to agree to disagree and at the same time to tolerate.

I must tell you a story Baba.

So, I just come out, right?

Here I am being this public homosexual. And the news is going crazy; everywhere there’s this noise.

So I get this phone call from the Nation Media Group (who are the most important media group)

“Oh, is it Binyavanga?”

“Yes.”

“You know, there’s this program we do about role models and the boarding school you went to, Mang’u High School – the oldest secondary school in the country and one of the most prestigious ones. They say they want you to come on Saturday to film this show we do, to be role models for school children.”

So I’m like, and Baba you can’t believe, “Are you crazy? Don’t you know that I’ve just come out as a public homosexual? This is Kenya! Are you mad?” He’s like, “No, I’ve just spoken to the literature teacher. The school says they want you there on Sunday, they are shooting it live and they say that you are the most important alumni after President [Mwai] Kibaki. So you have to come.”

So I say, okay, I’m going to Mang’u.

We reach there and the head boy takes me around the school. We see the dorms and they’re telling me everything. Mr Kiwanuka, who used to teach chemistry, (which I flunked) is still there. I left that school in 1987 and that man is still there! He hasn’t even changed.

And the guy tells me, “Oh, Binyavanga, you know we’ve been seeing you on BBC, we’re very proud.”

So I’m trying to ask him, “What have you been seeing on BBC?”

He doesn’t say anything!

We sit in the hall, they are ready to shoot. The whole school is there. No one looks weird or anything.

And then we see a man in the uniform of a priest running – it looks like he’s running from 500m – from administration block. He’s running followed by another man in a suit.

They come there to the front where I’m sitting and the man (he’s the school chaplain) says “I’m very sorry, the cardinal called. We can’t do this. You know we are very close to the church. We can’t do this. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” In front of the whole school.

And I said to myself, Africa has changed. Or maybe it’s never needed to. That those people who came from that time of colonisation to split us apart until our splitting apart comes from within our own hearts, that inside the space of that Mang’u high school, there was no such feeling. Until the brokers, until those fake moral hypocritical brokers of our freedom to be diverse, we, the oldest and the most diverse continent there has been, we, where humanity came from, we, the moral reservoir of human diversity, human age, human dignity …right?

Who are these appointed brokers, Baba?

Who are they?

Because wherever they sit you see Boko Harams tearing us apart. You see political things tearing us apart.

The simple acceptance of our right to be and to be diverse is the biggest and strongest thing to defend. Nothing will release our energy in this age of moving forward than that, Baba

Baba you taught me honour.

You are the one who said, “I’m the CEO of a company – you see those ones, they can’t come for your birthday party.”

I’m like: “Why can’t they come for a birthday party?”

“Because their father is a thief. That car you see them driving around in, they are thieves. And thieves will not be in my house.”

You brought us up in a nest of security; hidden away from a similar kind of elite – who we were jealous of because they had things. They went to England. They went on holiday to these glamorous places.

You could have and you did not.

You did not die rich. Your old 505 Peugeot was still there.

You created an industry. You built houses for workers. You retired and saw the pyrethrum board collapse, under mismanagement.

But you set a bar.

My bar is not like yours – I don’t do understated and tweed, but it’s the same sense of honour that you taught me, Baba.

So I’m here today to tell you that I would like us all to be adventurers for this continent. By adventuring for this continent, what for me I feel cannot be stood for is that there’s any place that one cannot go. And there’s nothing that one cannot imagine. And that we need to step out of the simple spaces of dogma that are fed by brokers – almost all of whom profiteer and gain political capital from rendering us apart and separate.

There’s nothing that is a priority about being a homosexual and an African. But there’s everything that every African has to defend; every kind of diversity that we carry as an African, even when you do not understand it.

For me what has come to be is to arrive at this place where I am living in plain light.

I am not living in a dark continent.

I will stand free – the way I need to be as a moral being on the continent and nobody will stop me from going where I will. If you decide to, I will go through you or you will stop me. We cannot think of our continent as a hostile place. Too many of us have learnt to fear it.

And I feel that if you trust it, engage with it and be involved with it in the conversations of building as adventurers, that this continent will start to sing to us again.

That’s all I have to say.

This is a transcription of a talk given by Binyavanga Wainaina at a TEDxEuston event in 2015. You can watch the video here.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. A Mother’s Love: ‘I’m So Happy My Son Came Out As Gay’

By Kevin Mwachiro

The last time I had a conversation with Binyavanga Wainaina was in 2011 at the Washington DC launch of his book One Day I Will Write About This Place. I had just started my first semester in a creative writing graduate programme. It was a dream that had come true, in big part because of Binyavanga. Just a few years prior to this, I had just about given up on this idea that I would ever be a writer.

In 2005, after completing my undergraduate studies I had started working at Kwani Trust, first as an informal internship that grew into a fulltime job. For a while, this was the most exciting thing to happen in my life. I was working around writers I admired. Before getting this job, I had been stalking Kwani, attending their readings at Yaya Centre and at Paa ya Paa Art gallery. By the time, I came looking for this job I had read Kwani? 01 maybe twice, and Kwani? 02.

The first time I met Binyavanga, I had just followed my friend into a meeting with him. I sat there wondering why everyone was talking in such loud voices.

Kwani was many things – a literary journal, a monthly open mic, a writers’ collective, a physical space for creative people from all backgrounds in Nairobi to think and dream together. The Kwani office, at Queensway House, in the middle of Nairobi City, was a sublet space. It was part of a cyber café with old furniture, the kind of chairs that had to be sat on with care because they were falling apart. For practical reasons, not everyone could be in the office at the same time – there just wasn’t enough room.

When a colleague needed to have a meeting, some of us would have to vacate the space – we would sometimes go on “unnecessary” errands around town. Other times the cyber café needed its chairs back to deal with customer overflow. Still, not all these inconveniences, including the fact that the office had only two computers and a landline that had to be loaded with airtime from those Telkom cards, discouraged me. I knew from the get go that I was taking part in something big.

I was thrilled to be taking part in putting together the Kwani? 03 edition which was a work in progress. I spent days at the Kenya National Archives reading through old articles and advertising copy, looking through images of old editions Viva and Drum magazines from the 1960s to the 1980s, to find and compile images that would be included in the publication. On some days, work involved collecting a CD-ROM with edited drafts from one reviewer at one end of Nairobi and then taking it to another reviewer on another side of Nairobi. Entire days went like this. Other times I could not work because a writer’s handwritten story needed to use one of the computers to type it out.

Kwani Open Mic was a space where college students, med reps, advertising executives, retirees, musicians, actors, artists, filmmakers, lawyers and accountants, people from all kinds of professions participated in the readings and regular open mics. I was often amazed seeing people show up in dull office-wear after work, with hand written poems, sometimes not so good poems, that they wanted to read out to an audience of strangers. Some of them even carried a change of clothes just to look appropriate for their performances. Some got standing ovations.

I could see people working on their craft, rewriting and improving their stage presence, growing. One of my favourite memories is an open mic event where someone did an acoustic rendition of Kalamashaka’s Tafsiri Hii and just about the entire audience at Club Soundd joined in singing all the lyrics word for word. It was wondrous. When “Tafsiri Hii” came out in 1997, singing or rapping in Swahili and Sheng was something that was just so strange, something that was rejected in the mainstream. Here we were, years later singing this anthem.

It was maybe in August 2006, we had this staff meeting, including some writers whose work had been featured Kwani?, where Binyavanga shared the idea to host a literary festival in December. I felt lost when he and others present at the meeting listed names of famous and other unknown writers and editors to be invited. As with everything Binyavanga, it was very urgent, we had less than four months to prepare.

Here’s the thing. The latest Kwani? and other new titles were in the production pipeline to be printed in India for the first time, and launched at this festival. No one in the office had the expertise to handle the many event and travel logistics. A team was assembled; many of the volunteers who showed up were writers or artists themselves, all wanting to make a success of this literary festival. We had people coming from India, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Angola, Cameroon, Canada, the US. It was hectic – frantically working on programmes, seeking event sponsorships, pitching and sounding slightly off kilter using terms like literary landscapes and literary tourism. There were days spent pleading with the immigration department to waive visa fees or make it less complicated for the Africans not arriving from their home countries to attend the festival.

We hardly slept and somehow pulled something off. The writers came, Nairobi’s audiences showed up. There were gatherings in different places in Nairobi, it was a celebration and also included writing workshops. Binyavanga made the strong case to have Jack Nyadundo performing at Club Afrique where Malindi-based artist Richard Onyango shared his story published in Kwani? 01.

Jack Nyadundo’s distinct ohangla style was so different from what I imagined was the aesthetic we were creating. I did not see how this could work, and yet it did. For me it was a lesson in not being stuck in ideas of what is cool or what forms of expression are important. Bring everything. We sold many Richard Onyango prints that day. Doreen Baingana and Chimamanda Adichie headlined a poorly attended event at University of Nairobi. M.G. Vassanji got interviewed on KBC radio. There were writing workshops. The final leg of the festival was in Lamu, and when we got there, things thankfully slowed down, and the whirlwind ended with a public reading at the Lamu Fort. My colleague Mike Mburu and I often joked that it was as if we had gone through all of that drama to organise a friends’ get together. This was the general feeling.

These linkages had always existed but the Kenya I grew up in felt isolated from the rest of the continent and the world. Kenyan writers were dissidents who lived abroad. Art was something only weird people did. It certainly was not real work. Moi’s propaganda and my 8-4-4 education had been effective. Perhaps Binyavanga’s insistence that each individual had to be included showed us that Kwani Trust was not so much a pioneer, but another writing collective, maybe creating its own niche, maybe looking to be included in a much longer literary lineage. Femrite in Uganda, Chimurenga in South Africa and Farafina in Nigeria were also doing something similar. Transition started in Uganda and Black Orpheus in Nigeria, though now defunct, was a predecessor.

Before Kwani?, Pan Africanism in my mind had been something people had done to end colonialism on the continent. It was a weekly URTNA broadcast on KBC TV and serious meetings at the African Union Headquarters in Ethiopia. These gatherings, helped many artists who had been working in isolation find community both in Kenya and around the world, and people who could support and encourage them. I certainly found my people.

For me, a lot of it was the learning. The cover of Kwani? 03 has a quote from Shuka Mistari by the rapper Kitu Sewer,

“Badala ya aerial, ekeni sufuria niwapee food ya ubongo”.

I won’t translate this phrase from Sheng to English – it will lose the whole vibe. Suffice it to say, it is about food for the mind. This was true about Binyavanga as it was true about any edition of Kwani? You were going to learn something. I learnt about what Nyayo House torture chambers – not as a rumour, but as very recent Kenyan history of people with ordinary names and faces. I learned about David Sadera Munyakei, about Ukoo Flani’s work at Maono, about Enoch Ondego, about Jogga’s murals, about Joseph Muthee, about Bessie Smith, about Brenda Fassie, about St Kizito High school.

Here, the people and the stories, all that is beautiful, strange, sad, ugly, brave, and exciting about us, things we should not forget, were kept alive.

With Binyavanga, everything was urgent. Even when he was teaching in the US, his Kwani-related email correspondence often had the word URGENT in the first paragraph. I would know that Binya was back in Kenya not because he had been in touch but because of the surging phone calls, or people who came to the office looking for him. It was futile explaining that I didn’t know where he was or that Kwani Trust the organisation and Binya were separate entities. I probably came off sounding territorial or like a gatekeeper. Anyway, I probably suffered from this same affliction – the organisation and the individual had happened at the same time for me. Read series: Binyavanga Wainaina

Leaving Kwani in late 2008, it felt like I had done three years of nonstop running. There had been many successes and loads of disappointment. I did not think I would ever write – having witnessed different cycles of the ever unpredictable and sometimes-brutal publishing process, I never wanted to risk sharing my messy first drafts. Or maybe this work had become my biggest excuse for not writing. In 2010 after lots of nudging, I emailed a draft of something I had written to Binyavanga. On the day he called with feedback, I was having one of those “Where are you nowadays?” conversations with an acquaintance at the car park in church. On the phone, Binyavanga was laughing that big laugh and sounded happy about what I had sent him. He said I needed to work on the edits. It was, of course, urgent. I hang up the phone and told the person I was talking to, feeling quite smug, that my editor had called and I needed to leave immediately. The piece was later published in Kwani? 06.

When I told him I wanted to go to graduate school, Binyavanga went the extra mile. He, alongside other writers I had met or worked with at Kwani helped me work on my applications. The support was overwhelming. Over the years I had seen Binyavanga link other writers with similar opportunities. If I had ever doubted it, in this instant I knew I was valued and cared for. This was the fresh start I needed.

I’m not sure why I never reached out to catch up with Binyavanga when I got back to Kenya in 2014. Parts of me wanted to make something of myself apart from my identity as of Kwani. Parts of me just never got over the ways I had felt swallowed at Kwani and the multiple ways we in this now much bigger vibrant writing community that nurtured my dreams have wounded and continue to harm each other. I want something else, not this.

When I think about Binyavanga’s YouTube series, “We must free our imagination”, I recognise how many of the responses to his public life, his homosexuality, and his death, are the same demonology he talks about in this series.

Binyavanga Wainaina set us on a path to do some very necessary and vital work. We have to free our imaginations.

Thank you Binya.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. A Mother’s Love: ‘I’m So Happy My Son Came Out As Gay’

By Kevin Mwachiro

On the night in August 2017 when the results of Uhuru Kenyatta’s electoral win was announced, my neighbours broke out in celebration. Red flags waved outside windows. Vuvuzelas punctuated the loud night. My father and I went to the main road to watch the spectacle. Men, women, children, it seemed even dogs and cars… everyone sang and cheered along the road. A river of bodies winding along the road chanting their gratitude to whichever deity was listening.

In the preceding weeks, I had sensed a lot of tension among my friends and various social circles. But I had told myself that it was inevitable that the incumbent would win.

“Nothing can happen. Uhuru has the numbers anyway. There’s no way he’s not winning this election,” would be my unyielding refrain in those charged political discussions.

The chorus continued like the unbroken chime of a clock.

“Tyranny of numbers.”

“Tano tena.” “Wembe ni ule ule.”

We went to sleep with smiles on our faces. Happy that “our man”, a designed Jesus from Gatundu had won and would continue with the “great” work he was doing.

But on the “other” side of the political divide, things were not so peaceful. There was anger and disappointment. At first, I was dismissive about it. It felt like the same old song by the supporters of opposition leader Raila Odinga. How could they have been robbed when they didn’t have – at the bare bones of it – the tribal numbers?

It was practically common sense that in Kenya’s political landscape, all you need to win a presidential election is solid votes from Rift Valley, Central and half of Nairobi. And those places bled and swore red by Jubilee. Tuko Pamoja. So how could opposition supporters think that their election was “stolen”?

“Accept and move on,” came the rhetoric from “our side”.

But accept and move on to what? And the honest truth is, I was completely aware of the sins of Jubilee, and yet I had supported them and celebrated their victory. I cannot even begin to explain the disconnect here, which makes it all rather unforgivable. Why was I so quick to forgive Jubilee? Was it because I had accepted their mendacity and moved on, and now expected others to do the same? Was it because I am Kikuyu? Because I from middle class Nairobi and the status quo suits me better?

But those who refused to accept these election results endured gunfire, teargas, armed raids from the security forces, and even death, and continued to say no. Some of the victims were not even actively involved in demonstrations. Yet those on “our side” still defended Uhuruto. When I began to speak out against police brutality – the innocent victims had begun to tug at my heart – those on the “other side” called me foolish for imagining that the only crime here was police brutality. They were right – when I compiled Jubilee’s biggest transgressions before 2017, I might as well have worn a neon sign marked, “Dunce”.

In 2013, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto arose like sainted phoenixes from the ashy aftermath of the post-election violence that rocked the country five years earlier. “We won” against the white man’s broad sweep of justice. “Our boys” made it out alive.

Their vision seemed clear enough. Umoja, Uchumi, Uwazi. Unity, Economy, Transparency. The President himself was a billionaire; one of the richest men in the country. There was no need to worry about corruption.

“He’s already rich. He won’t steal,” I heard it said many times. And I agreed. It seemed logical.

After 2013, Jubilee has come under fire for various issues plaguing Kenyans. In 2014, the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board nipped the laptop in 2014 project in the bud after it was discovered that the tender to supply the laptops wasn’t awarded fairly.

In 2015, the National Land Commission found that land belonging to Lang’ata Road Primary School was invaded on by the Weston Hotel, which the deputy president owns a stake in.

That same August, the Auditor General, Edward Ouko found that Sh100 million of taxpayers’ money was used by deputy president William Ruto to charter a private jet.

In October 2016, investigations found that the Health Ministry had misappropriated Sh5.2 billion. Not forgetting Chickengate, where a British national (who has jailed and has since been released) paid bribes of up to Sh50 million to Kenya National Examination Council and Interim Independent Electoral Boundaries Commission.

And of course, the catastrophe that was Eurobond. In September 2016, Standard Media reported that the Auditor General was unable to account for Sh215 billion which the government said had already been allocated to ministries.

The list goes on and on.

Jubilee’s continued its signature insistence of fixing dire issues with cosmetic solutions. The First Lady, Margaret Kenyatta, organised an annual marathon to deal with maternal health care in the country. So far, reports indicate the project hasn’t been a success.

In 2016, Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission chairman Philip Kinisu spoke to Reuters about the issue.“The state budget is now approaching Sh2 trillion, a third of it is being wasted through corruption,” he said.

The Elephant itself has a very helpful guide pinpointing each and every major corruption scandal from 2013 to 2018.

By election time, we were monikered Uthamakistan, due to our relentlessness in calling Uhuru the chosen one. We lined up on that cold August morning believing that somehow the plunder would stop if we gave the “dynamic duo” a second term. Party primaries a few weeks prior had been chaotic, but we told ourselves that the “bad eggs” had been eliminated – it would get better.

It didn’t. Just after the announcement of the victory, Raila’s camp went to court to contest the victory. The ruling declared Uhuru’s win invalid. We were ordered back to the ballot on October 26th. The opposition wasn’t having it. They wanted complete electoral reform.

We rose up again less vocally this time, “Kwani you want a constitutional crisis?”

The most moderate of the uthamakistanis made a hollow concession that yes, the electoral process had been a mess. “Accept and move on,” they still said, before quickly adding, “but we understand where you’re coming from. IEBC really handled that poorly.”

After the October election, an eerie calm settled over the city. Things were either about to get a lot worse or marginally worse. They got worse. For a while, it became scary just to go out.

One Friday afternoon while I was at work, protests broke out in Kawangware 56, which is on my route home. A friend who was the same route called me to warn me off.

“Don’t use that route. Go to town or Westlands. There is chaos huku.”

“What is happening?” I asked, panic rising.

Street gangs from opposing camps had split the area in two, he said, and woe to you if you were caught on the wrong side.“Ukiwa hii side unaulizwa kama ulipiga kura. Na kama ulipiga wanakuchapa. Alafu ukienda terminus wanaangalia kama una rangi kwa kidole na kama hauna wanakuchapa.” (If you’re on this side, they ask you if you voted, and if you did they beat you up. And if you’re on the other side of the bus terminus, if they don’t see you voted by the ink on your finger, they beat you up.) My friend told me he escaped any chaos because he had no ink and he is multilingual. No accent to betray him. No “special” features. Others didn’t fare so well.

Reports say that at least 10 people had died in Kawangware that day. Social media was inundated with messages demanding the local leaders to go cool the storming hotbed of violence. The last thing the country needed was more bloodshed. The violence lasted four days with the real number of victims remaining a mystery.

After 2017, I woke up and smelled the dead roses. However late, it happened. There wasn’t a particularly triggering event. But a subconscious harboring of anger and resentment that simply overflowed. I don’t yet know how to make peace with the fact that I had a hand in legitimising probably the worst administration this country has had the misfortune of enduring. I will never deserve that peace.

Shamefully, I recalled a correspondence I had with a friend during the 2017 election, when I exposed myself as a Jubilee supporter.

“Why are you voting for Uhuru?” he asked me.

I shrugged, and said the rote answers, “Let him finish his work. It’s difficult to beat the incumbent anyway. Raila isn’t a better option. Better the devil you know. ODM is so disorganised. There is no way they can lead this country to prosperity. At least Jubilee have done some development.”

“But he has had the most corruption scandals since Moi.”

“It’s not him, it’s the people around him.”

“But China…”

“Our debts to China won’t be repaid now. They’ll be repaid later.”

“But inflation…”

“That’s just the usual progression of an economy.”

“High cost of living, squandering government money, lower job security…”

“Aii kwani you want to vote for Raila?”

Then one day, the cognitive dissonance became impossible to bear. It all slammed into me like a truck with no brakes. How could I keep up this charade? How was I still capable of defending him? The administration had been rogue all along.

Last December, a video surfaced on Twitter in December 2018 tagged “Business Community Speaks”. A woman spoke to the camera, her voice betraying the anger and frustration most Kenyans felt.

“Tuna amka tunaskia mafuta imepandishwa,” she lamented, “Na tuli amka asubuhi kuchaguana… Nina mtoto mdogo nilimwacha kwa nyumbandio nikachague president… mwenye anaweza kututetea. Na saa hii hawajuisisi tunaelekea wapi.” (I heard this morning that fuel has become more expensive, yet we woke up early to vote. I left my baby in the house that day to vote for the president, someone who can defend us. But now, I don’t know what’s going to happen to us).

Thus far, a lot of the government’s actions have brought swift abandonment from their more resolute supporters. And the issues have been there all along, and they continue to intensify – hunger, extrajudicial killings, a failing healthcare system, a coal project in complete disregard to the environment, increased reports of femicide, and most recently, punishing whistleblowers. And we cannot call it corruption any more, as if the looting is an unfortunate outcome of an otherwise benign system – the plunder is the entire point. It is state capture.

I have no clue how any of this will be solved.

I wonder about an electoral boycott in 2022. Algeria has gone radical and conducted massive demonstrations forcing their president Abdelaziz Bouteflika to abandon his plans to run for a fifth term. Their transition won’t be easy. A caretaker government has been appointed to oversee the country until the next presidential election. Algerians want a clean slate. The military may have helped push for the resignation of their former leader but what role will they play in ensuring the protesters get what they were fighting for? It is still uncertain.

Sudan also held protests for months to oust Bashir and ensure a transition of power conducted by civilians rather than the military.

So, what if not voting is the answer? What if, instead of going to queue to vote for fresh faces that make the same non-deliveries, Kenyans just didn’t show up to vote?

I ran this idea by a friend but he disagreed.

“Political parties are the ones with power. If you want to make change, you’d be better off showing up in droves to vote for the person you chose. You can vet the candidates during the primaries. And then make sure the best candidate is representing you.”

The idea of boycotts isn’t new. They have been used by civilians to show displeasure at the practices of those in power. Understandably, this may also have the added effect of enabling the status quo. Let’s call it a last resort; a drastic measure to be taken when there are no viable candidates to rally behind. Then again, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 was seminal event in the Civil Rights Movement in the US. The Anti-Apartheid Movement which led to boycotts of South Africa helped abolish apartheid in 1994.

The Kenyan constitution currently doesn’t have any provisions for extremely low voter turnout. But if people refused to show up, it would send an undeniable message. Thy will is not being done. There would be no added leverage of legitimacy. At the very least, it would establish a kind of controlled anarchy that would display an unwillingness to be taken for fools. While this may not provide an instant avenue to rebuilding a structure that is more acceptable to Kenyans, it may lay the groundwork to foster desired change.

With no visible grassroots organisation, an intrinsic fear for our lives and our livelihoods, perhaps the best solution at the moment, is not a nationwide gathering but a disappearance, one that won’t have consequences on jobs and lives. On that day of the vote, nobody goes.

There seems to be an unspoken truth that Kenyans are waiting for a “trigger”. The sayings punda amechoka (The donkey is exhausted) and Kenyans are tired keep being thrown around, to the point of becoming clichés. There is a simmering belief that at the right moment, the people will rise up and disenfranchise the hold Jubilee has over the people.

Still, going by the Huduma Number exercise, Kenyans are not keen on defying the government and they queued for hours to comply with the government directives. If a simple act of civil disobedience can’t be agreed upon, how can a revolution based on unified rebellion ever work? Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

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A Mother’s Love: ‘I’m So Happy My Son Came Out As Gay’

By Kevin Mwachiro

Today, when talking about refugees and immigrants fleeing from war-ravaged countries, the debate is completely polarised in the Western world. Instead of a multitude of different opinions and voices, there are only two parties. You either want the “aliens” out of your country because they’re evil monsters that will steal your job and money, or you must help them at all costs because “races are just a cultural construct.” The entire debate is highly emotional, and any opinion that falls in between is either branded as racist supremacy or soft liberalism. But what’s happening in the Western world? I worked for years for an important NGO and saw the reality of what immigrants live through first-hand. More importantly, I saw how hypocritical the world that surrounds them on both sides is. Those who want to help them and those who want them out of our country are just two sides of the same coin. A fake one, indeed.

It is easy to manipulate the minds of countless people by repeating the same story over and over again. The less educated people prefer to see immigrants (especially those of colour) as enemies, while more educated people fall for the “noble savage” rhetoric and do all they can to take care of them more like pets than like humans. Vested interests and political parties stand behind this enormous operation of social manipulation, which is nothing but an excuse to protect entrenched privileges and fuel class warfare. However, among many alleged winners, there is only one real loser in this endless war of hypocrisy – humanity as a whole.

***

Shortly after taking my medical degree (Masters in Pharmacy), just like many other people of my age I had to face the terrible spectre of unemployment. After so many years spent studying complex subjects such as medicine and pharmacology, the only things I had to succeed in life were a piece of paper that defined me as a “doctor” and a wealth of knowledge I had to exploit fully. However, the young me did not care much about money – I felt the urge to put this knowledge to some use, and achieve a higher goal. I wanted to find a way to provide the so-much-needed medical care to those who really needed it. I wanted to help those masses of destitute refugees that were crossing our country in search of a better life rather than selling high blood pressure pills to wealthy and spoiled retirees.

That’s why I decided to start working for an NGO – do my part to make the world a better place, help these poor fellas who lost everything they had: their (already scarce) finances, their families, and often even their dignity. It was an incredible experience that allowed me to see the world from a completely different perspective. I felt their just rage as they vented on me their disappointment about the lives they found here. I was overwhelmed by their pain and shame as they remembered all the torture and cruelties they had to endure only to reach our coasts. All those positive and negative feelings made me realize that all we experience here in Europe is dull and bland. Our “first world problems” are nothing compared to all this. But while I had to put everything in perspective once again, I also realized that those feelings were so much stronger than what we are used to. Empathizing all their struggles was an inebriating and intoxicating experience. I felt like everything else I had in my life was meaningless and pointless compared to doing what really mattered – helping them all, saving them from their destinies.

I started meeting other people who worked in the world of NGOs and volunteering, shared my experience with them, and saw that most of them felt the same way. Empathy got the best of them as well, and their mission has rapidly evolved into a crusade: Saving people. But saving them from who, or what, exactly? That was when I realised that reality was slowly warping in front of my eyes. My ability to perceive things objectively and correctly was hampered – empathy drives strong emotions, but emotionality is the opposite of reasoning. All these volunteers were not fighting to save other people from a terrible destiny by really changing society as a whole. We did not see the broader structural and historical issues at play. We were only driven by a basic survival instinct – the instinct to protect the weak and to protect our offspring. In a twisted and convoluted way, these poor, suffering people had become our children, and we had to fight to nurture them one by one blindly. But charity has never been a solution to anything, it was eventually clear to me that we were all doing it the wrong way.

*** The world of volunteering and NGOs solely focus on one (quite important) aspect of the constant struggle faced by refugees and immigrants. All the current debates are centered on the policies on the reception of immigrants, and what kind of life we may grant them in terms of employment opportunities, human rights, education, and healthcare. That is fine, those are really important things. But the root of the issue lies somewhere else, instead.

Most refugees arriving in Europe risked everything they had in the often vain hope they could find a chance to live a better life. But their illusion crumbles once they meet the truth of what our Western world really is. Their deep disappointment comes from the fact that our world is not so much better than theirs, after all. Yes, here we don’t have to struggle to get health care, clean water, or fresh food, but every other aspect of our society is just as decaying and corrupted as it is in Africa. Just as decadent as humanity is, and has always been. But for them, as foreigners, it is even worse. No place can ever provide you with happiness when you’re living in a country that is thousands of miles away from home, from your family, from everything you love. You are renouncing everything that matters in life, only to find yourself estranged in a rakish society that is infected by the same vices, the same corruption, the same urge to warp reality around you.

Western governments tell their people the same lies that are told to Africans by their own administrations. We are just as blinded and our perception is as distorted as everywhere else. People are unhappy in Italy as in any other place – we enjoy more freedom and more wealth, that’s true, but only if you’re born here. For everyone else, even just other Western people coming from different countries, you’re either rich already, or you’re lost. This is a problem that affects the human society as a whole, and it is the consequence of educating countless generations to prevarication and hate. Hate that knows no boundaries and that ironically draws its strength from The Other. It is the instinct to bully and prey on the weak to take whatever we want right here, right now.

A basic lesson of common sense that every one of us learns as we grow is that we can’t help others until we’re able to help ourselves. All immigrants and refugees in the world flee from home to achieve the same goal: finding happiness. The Western world has nothing to offer immigrants, though. It can’t save them from unhappiness because it is ultimately too emotional and irrational to be able to help itself, and it projects that irrationality on those coming in.

***

Meanwhile, as much as the NGO world was driven by blind earnestness, racism was on the rise. It took just a few years for our European society to morph into the crucible of hate that it is now. Today, neo-fascism is said to be a disease that is corrupting the very roots of our culture, distorting our most recent past and deconstructing history through a lethal admixture of propaganda and revisionism. In the first half of the 20th century, fascism was a tragedy that ravaged the whole continent. It was the beginning of an age of brutality and repression that culminated with Nazism. Together, these dictatorships regenerated a distorted sense of national pride that justified the massacre of thousands of Africans behind the excuse of “civilising through colonialism.”

We know how horrible fascism was, but we tend to forget a fundamental, yet underrated aspect of this political drift. Fascism was an anti-cultural phenomenon that vocalised some of the worst, but innate, aspects of human behavior. It was the triumph of egocentrism, individualism, and that irresistible desire for supremacy through abuse that every human being feels – even if it’s buried deep inside our psyches. We often debate about the fact that there’s a huge difference between the idea of fascism, its ideology, and its main drivers, and the way it manifested in practice. Some argue that just like any other ideology, had its good points, but the way humans eventually put it in practice was a dysfunctional parody of an otherwise enlightened form of government. That’s not true. The form that was actualised by Benito Mussolini was exactly what fascism is and it is supposed to be. A gigantic lie portrayed by a bunch of mediocre individuals that draw strength from numbers – a pack of brutes that abuses other people by using “violence in numbers” to obtain undeserved privileges. Fascism is the exaltation of mediocrity; it preys on dissatisfaction by channeling the rage that comes from frustration and using it to manipulate less educated people. That’s why it now looks so appealing once again to the masses of less fortunate, less wealthy, and poorly educated people of the European society. Neo-fascism promises them the chance to fight against an unjust society, to get back what got taken from them by more influential individuals through violence and brutality.

In what it promises to achieve, it is not so different from progressivism or leftist ideology. It promises to give these people a more equal society and enjoy some of the privileges that are now the exclusive preserve of a handful of individuals. It gives the illusion of improving the quality of their lives, and finally get the happiness they deserve just like any other human being. Neo-fascists perceive themselves as a minority – just like women or the LGBTQ community – they feel they have the right to be treated more equally, to enjoy a better world to live. They need an enemy to survive, someone against which they could fight because it’s the reason why they are deprived of their rights. The more this enemy is de-humanized, the more this illusion becomes real. For neo-fascists, the enemy is a black man, speaking a different language, with a different culture, praying a different god, coming from a distant place. It must barely look human to them – they know he or she is like them, but the wider is the difference, the easier it gets to hate. For leftists and progressivists, the enemy is not a Muslim, a homosexual person, or an immigrant. The object of their hate is the neo- fascist itself: a brute that renounced all humanity.

The main difference, however, is that the neo-fascists think they can obtain all their goals of equality through the only mean they have – violence and brutality. Leftists despise violence, and more often than not, they fear it. They can’t use it as a mean to obtain their goals – unless it’s passive violence. Is that better? In many ways it is. But it doesn’t matter actually, because eventually, it all comes down to one simple fact: both these ideologies are nothing but lies told to small people to convince them into putting some other manipulative individual into power. It doesn’t matter whether its Benito Mussolini, Iosif Stalin, or Adolf Hitler. It doesn’t matter if he’s Donald Trump or Matteo Salvini. They’re just lies used to prey on the masses to obtain power, and in today’s world, the neo- fascists win because of their willingness to use brutality.

***

The rhetoric of hate may appear different for the rhetoric of charity since it must appeal to a different audience, but they both draw power from irrationality, emotionalism, and, ultimately, mediocrity. If we want to live in a world where we can enjoy true equality, we must take our distance from all the empty words of those who tell us what we should do. Personal education, individual growth and a collective spirit are the only weapons that let us defend against these forms of propaganda and manipulation. The world isn’t either black or white, right or left, fascist, or communist. The world is built upon differences, but there are many more than just two.

Children describe things around them as either “good” or “bad” and trust instincts and emotions to make decisions. Adults know that there are many shades of grey between black and white, and that only logic and reasoning can help us know what’s good and bad for us and everybody else as well. We need to open our eyes and grow if we want to survive as a species. If we keep experiencing and understand the world as irrational children, humanity is going to lose badly in the end. Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

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A Mother’s Love: ‘I’m So Happy My Son Came Out As Gay’

By Kevin Mwachiro

Kondele neighbourhood in Kisumu is famous and infamous. It is a place torn between its cultural richness and vibrancy, as well the lurking darkness of violence. You can almost feel it. “Kondele inachomeka” (Kondele is burning) are two words that have been communicated in texts and calls amongst the residents of Kisumu more than any other during election cycles. These words have ominous foreshadowing of blood loss, violence, death and destruction. And news of riots in Kondele with accompanying images of tyres burning and riot police chasing demonstrating youths, always delivered in a matter of fact way, has been one of Kisumu’s greatest infamies. I have received quite a number of “Kondele inachomeka” messages on my phone. I have become accustomed to the weight of meaning in these messages. When I receive these messages, I know to prepare. I know it will take me longer to travel between Kisumu central business district and my house on the other side of town. I also know that people travelling between Kisumu and Kakamega will not make it home on time. I also know that “Kondele inachomeka” triggers panic in the hearts of my non-Luo colleagues. Their relatives will call worried about their safety. Especially those who come from communities with political leaders who are in opposition to Raila Odinga or involved in some political tussle with him. And sadly, a few moments after “Kondele inachomeka” text messages, “Urgent request for blood donation” texts with images of victims of violence, fresh like a scene of a massacre, would follow. This will be a confirmation of the expected – that demonstrations have descended into chaos, and Kenya Police have excelled at the sport they are best at, that is quelling demonstrations with brutal and deadly force. As expected, Kondele and its youth will bear the brunt of this political contest.

Kondele is also a place of ironies. One of the biggest ironies is that the regional blood bank is located within two hundred meters from the heart of Kondele. It is almost a perfect design. That one area of Kenya that has experienced most bloodshed during political contests between opposition and government sits within a few hundred of meters from a regional blood transfusion center. Makes a lot sense. People will lose a lot of blood; why not lose it within the vicinity of a transfusion center? On tragic days, such as during the post-election violence of 2007, the regional transfusion center would completely run out of blood. Most of it had been soaked up by the red dust of Kondele where young men lay in pain, bleeding in the hot afternoon sun from bullet wounds from Kenya Police. Some lucky ones made it to the hospital where they lay down, in pools of their own blood on floors of then Nyanza Provincial Referral Hospital. Kondele had quickly transformed into a war zone akin to Baghdad or Mogadishu with disturbing statistics. Some reports showed that during the 2007 post- election violence, as many as 40 people were getting shot dead in a day.

But before post-election violence, there was Kimwa Grand Club. As the name suggests, it was indeed grand. It was a one-stop shop for entertainment, food and accommodation at the heart of Kondele. Kimwa was loved when politics was good. And loathed when politics was bad. And politics being the thread that holds the fabrics of the Kenyan society together, would also sneak into Kimwa, into people’s drinking tables, into their drinks and soon into their conversations. Kimwa was a happy place most of the time. One only needed to visit it on a good night to appreciate the spirit of Kondele, of Kisumu.

Kimwa defined this spirit, absorbed it and embodied it. Apart from Kimwa Grand Club, there were really no landmarks commensurate to the behemoth name of Kondele. Club Dona across the road from Kimwa tried but couldn’t keep up. Hotel Cassanova down the road had long lost its glory. There was nothing really comparable, beyond the roads that split the Kondele into two. Sometimes it looked like the chaos present where the Kibos road met the Kisumu-Kakamega road defined life in Kisumu during elections. Everyone in a car, matatu, boda boda or on foot wanted to move forward, but there was nowhere to go as people got in each other’s way on the small, congested and neglected tarmac roads. Vehicles traveling towards Mamboleo, or Kibos or Kisumu CBD would negotiate for space through high-pitched horns and curses from their drivers. If you were sitting at the top of Kimwa’s balcony, one would watch the full display of this negotiation in daily life. When the night would fall, some of these men and women would end up at Kimwa, to close their day in dance and merriment of sorts. It is like Kimwa would lure them in the evening with their pockets full, and expel them the next morning with their pockets empty, to go look for more.

Kondele is notoriously cosmopolitan. The most famous shops in this place have historically been owned by people not native to the region. There is always a “Kwa Karanja” with the best nyama choma, or a “Kwa Njoroge” selling all types of goods. These places could be destroyed and razed to the ground in one week of political madness. The following week, when normalcy would return, they would be up, rebuilt with the same hands that destroyed them.“Kwa Karanja” is like the local phoenix that rises from the ashes to remind people that life must move on, in the peculiar Kenyan way.

Then there was Kimwa. To think that a random Kenyan, Miriti Mbui from Meru, could come to Kisumu and set up Kimwa Grand, a successful club worthy of hosting international superstars, is indeed a testament of the Kenyan dream. This was proof that one could make it anywhere. To also think that this same man would lose everything in 24 hours of madness; that the same people that danced to the stars at Kimwa, would set upon her and dismantle her block by block, before setting her on fire, is also a testament that the Kenyan dream rests on political quicksand. It could sink at any moment.

My fascination with Kondele began in the mid 1990s. I was traveling with my mother in a matatu towards Kisumu when a man as old as my mother, without any warning, vomited all over the floor of the matatu. My natural conclusion was that the man was sick and needed help. The matatu tout and driver held a contrary opinion. When this man was done vomiting, the conductor informed him in an ominous voice that he would drive to Kondele where the man would be taught a lesson. When he stopped in Kondele, the tout left and came back with a gang of young men who took great pride is slapping this man around. I remember him pleading for mercy, saying he had malaria. No one cared. Out of nowhere, a bucket full of water arrived. The bewildered man got on his knees and washed that spot of the matatu, picking pieces of vomit from the floor. He also paid 100 shillings for “wasting people’s time”. I did not understand why the tout and his driver felt that Kondele would the best place for this man to get a taste of street justice. But then again, there are places like Kondele all over Kenya. Places where the violent services of men can be outsourced cheaply, for a drink, and the men dispensing these crude forms of justice neither have remorse nor subject themselves to any law.

While I was at Kenyatta University, this place was Githurai 45. When university students would refuse to bow to the forces of extortion through arbitrary doubling of fares from Nairobi CBD to Kenyatta University, the matatus would take a detour into Githurai 45, and drive to some shady, nondescript place. The vehicle would stop, the driver would switch off the car and the tout would approach a band of young men. After a few exchanges, the tout would walk back with the young men in tow. One could tell that these men were adept in the act of exerting fear into the hearts of men and women. And just like bloodhounds, their sense of smell for fear was so sharp that when they walked to the matatu, they knew that the job was already completed. Everyone would rush to pay the exorbitant fares.

After this extortion ritual had been finalised, the touts would taunt us, “Mbona hamukulipa mapema”, (Why didn’t you pay before) as if blaming us for not allowing ourselves to be extorted promptly. How could we not know that there was a parallel world out there that had grown and thrived in the rich medium of corruption? Thriving as a result of the government’s penchant for disappearing without official leave of absence? This is the world that had created the angry youth gangs of Kondele, the Mungiki, Chinkororo, among others. They knew that with the absence of government involvement in social welfare, political players would use these gangs to leverage their anger and disenfranchisement for political gain, as a cheap source violence against their opposition. Or destroy them when it felt threatened.

I first visited Kimwa in the year 2000, while waiting to join campus as I worked at the law firm of my late cousin, Grace Awino. The corridors of justice were littered with stories of past night parties at Kimwa. I was very curious and wanted to visit this club and feel its spirit, which as I had been told, was reflective of the spirit of Kisumu. It was rich, dark, powerful and very expressive, just like Kondele, I was told. During my visit, we mostly spent time at the basement, which was a full-blown discotheque. The first floor was an open-air club where older people enjoyed live benga and rhumba from famous bands. The entrance was manned by muscled men acting as bouncers. These were young men who spent long days in backyard gyms building muscles for lack of anything else to do. Employment in Kisumu was hard to come by. Most of industries had withered slowly before shutting down. The remnants of Kenya Breweries depot and Kisumu Cotton Mills (Kicomi) stood in shame as reminders of what a mixture of mismanagement, corruption and being on the cold side of Kenyan politics could accomplish. Men and women who had lost their jobs in these places would wake up when the sun was over Lake Victoria, wear their threadbare shirts and shoes with paper thin soles, and head to jua kali, a stone throw from these once vibrant industries. They would engage in political and philosophical talk before splitting whatever little they had made through menial work or small deals. At sunset, they would take a final look at Kicomi and the Breweries, before walking slowly towards their residences in the shanties on the fringes of Kisumu’s CBD. Kimwa kept some of these young men out of trouble. It provided a place where young men and women from slums surrounding Kondele could earn a living as cleaners, waitresses or bouncers.

Kimwa was also a cultural hub where Luo benga music was curated. Musicians such as Okach Biggy, Musa Juma and D.O. Misiani were common names on the roster of musicians playing at Kimwa. They were not only assured of a good crowd but of good earnings. During the day, one could see these musicians basking in the sun at Kondele like brightly colored iguanas, seeking the strength of sun before turning into entertainment powerhouses at night. At the height of Kimwa’s glory, Awilo Longomba, the 1997 Kora Awards winner in the “Best New Artist” category for his chart-buster, Dibala bala, visited Kisumu. No international artist of this repute since Franco in 1988 had visited Kisumu since. This was partly because despite Kisumu being a town where the local people were lovers of a good life, no investor had put up facilities that were capable of playing host to an artist of Awilo’s stature. So when Miriti Mbui, an ambitious entrepreneur would come and build an audacious club and hotel at the heart of Kondele, Kimwa and Kondele became a match made in heaven.

Awilo Longomba performed to a delirious crowd. He was wild. They were wilder. They asked for more and he gave them more. My late cousin, Grace, was in that crowd. She would later tell me of how ecstatic Kisumu was. How Kimwa had put the city on the map and that there were plans for bigger artists. Seven years later, Kimwa would be caught up in a violent political struggle between Raila and Mwai Kibaki. The youth in Kondele, and across Kisumu, felt that Kibaki’s government had carried out unforgivable injustices with the disputed presidential elections of 2007. They decided to rebel violently and attack everything that had any semblance to imagined or real enemies. Kimwa would be one of the casualties.

It was evident that the fate of Kondele and Kimwa were tied together like that of a mother to her child. Kondele gave birth to Kimwa, nurtured and made her whole, big and powerful. Kimwa opened Kondele to the world, made it more cosmopolitan and a true representation of Kenya. The day Kondele started burning, we were locked in the house, following the violence through news bulletins and text messages. The air outside was thick with burning tyres and screams punctuated with burst of gunfire from Kalashnikovs. We heard a knock at the door and saw a man standing there with his eyes wide with news. “Niko na TV kubwa, 60 inches yenye nauza aluf tano” (I have a big TV, 60 inches, I’m selling it for five thousand shillings). He said this hurriedly while glancing from side to side. We were talking to him through the window as the city was under curfew. When he sensed our hesitation, he took off and disappeared in the mixture of the afternoon sun and death. The smoke from Kimwa quickly engulfed the whole of Kondele. All its memories wafted slowly away to the sky, as looters carried whatever they could.

Thinking about it now, the anger against Kimwa must have been personal. In those preceding few weeks, thousands of youths had been killed in Kondele, yet Kimwa Grand stood there in its majesty, as if daring the angry youth to challenge it. Kibaki’s government was a dominating violent presence, yet Kimwa stood there, looking at these people who gave it life, offering no help. This indifference was too much to take. Kimwa must have also been symbolic of economic dominance and marginalisation of the Luo community stemming from the political fallout between Jomo Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga in the late 1960s. How can they be killing us, yet they want our money? They must have asked this as the body count in Kondele kept climbing. The violence and determination with which Kimwa was destroyed reflected how deep and painful political losses are. That people were willing to risk their lives to destroy such a magnificent property shows how Kenyan politics precipitates dark, deep-seated political grievances. When the spirit of Kimwa had been broken down by fire and stone, hundreds of youth could be seen with chisels and hammers, breaking through mortars, pulling out twisted metal like vultures scavenging on the meat from a dead buffalo. At the end of the post-election violence season, only memories were left where Kimwa once stood.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

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