What Kamala Harris's Nomination Means to Black America And

The Exodus: Corona-Induced Urban-To-Rural Migration

By Dauti Kahura

Eric Oduor was your archetypal suave, tech savvy, cosmopolitan millennial with an urban mien – well, until several weeks ago, when he called from Sigomre village in Ugenya location, Siaya County, to announce that he had now fully relocated to his rural home from Nairobi city. At only 37, recently married in the last five years, with two young children and working as an IT consultant, Oduor was every millennial’s dream: living in the fast lane, seeming to have been coping well with the city’s corporate rat race. Then coronavirus crisis struck and his life changed completely.

“In the five months that the pandemic hit Kenya, all my four major corporate clients that I used to maintain and service and offer IT solutions to closed shop. In one fell swoop, I was declared redundant; I suddenly had no income. My clients empathised with me, but said there was little they could do. They also had been hit hard (I didn’t need to be told), nobody saw the pandemic coming, nobody imagined it was here to stay. It has completely disrupted and disoriented our lives,” said Oduor.

With a young family that depended on him, Oduor found himself in a bind. Yes, his wife was in gainful employment, but the family was not going to rely on his wife’s salary and there was no the guarantee she would keep her job “So I had to think doubly hard, what I wanted to do with my life, with my family in these very difficult coronavirus times and beyond. Even after the coronavirus is finally said to have been tamed, our lives will never be the same again, and life will never go back to normal as we used to know it.”

So, after thinking very hard, one evening, Oduor broke the tough news to his wife: “We can no longer sustain our lives in the city and this thing isn’t going away any time soon. We must brace for the future now. The sooner the better, and the only way to do that is by retracing our footsteps back home, because that is the only way we can salvage our lives. City life is proving to be unsustainable.” To his great relief and surprise too, his wife agreed with him and paved the way for him to go and conduct a reconnaissance mission in Sigomre village.

Oduor’s wife is thoroughly urbanised – trendy and younger…in every sense of the word, an urban sophisticate. Above all, she is from the Mt Kenya region, so one can understand why Oduor was a bit apprehensive as he broke the “sad” news to his wife.

“This COVID-19 has had a terrible impact on marriages. It has led some marriages to break up, so you can imagine what difficulties mixed marriages like mine could be going through. My wife agreed with me that our lives’ and our children’s future lay not in the big city, but ultimately in a place where we can develop to our taste and we can always be sure whatever the disruption, we could always absorb it because we’re truly at home,” said a relieved Oduor.

To his great surprise, it was not only he who was relieved: “My father was worried about this new mysterious disease that was sweeping the world like a mystical wave and which had arrived in the country and was claiming peoples’ lives in the city. In a roundabout way, he suggested to me to temporarily relocate the family and bring it home. In a way, many rural folks, including my parents, honestly believe the coronavirus is domiciled in the city. When it broke, my father told me leave and come back home.”

As if that was not enough of a worry, said Oduor, when he told his father that is consultancy jobs had actually dried up, his father became really concerned. “Ordinarily, it’s we children who normally take care of our folks in their rural home. Now my parents were sending foodstuff to my family to beef up our sustenance. He would send beans, dry maize, millet and posho-mill flour. When I went to see him to tell him I was moving my family back home, he was overjoyed. He said, ‘Look my son, at the very least, there’s plenty of food and shelter here. The children aren’t going to school until next year. It will give you time to think about what you would like to do here.”

Oduor’s father farms maize, keeps chickens, sheep and goats, and has dairy cows for milk,. After leaving the city himself five years ago for good, he never looked back. “In those five years, my father. who regularly came to the city, has only spent two nights in town since he left,” said Oduor. “He would come on the night bus, spend the whole day doing his biasharas and in the evening, he would be on the night bus again heading home. I couldn’t persuade him to spend the night here. My father had always told me Nairobi is a place where people go to look for employment. Once that employment is over, you pack your things and return home where you came from.”

“Ordinarily, it’s we children who normally take care of our folks in their rural home. Now my parents were sending foodstuff to my family to beef up our sustenance…”

With his savings, Oduor is exploring several options: He had already built a two-bedroomed house on his piece of land given to him by his father, so, like his father said, food and shelter are not a problem. “If taken seriously and done well, agriculture is worth the risk because people will always eat. My father has become a full-time farmer and it’s been keeping him going. I’d like to take it further and see what will come of it, even as I explore other possibilities,” averred Oduor. That doesn’t mean that I will no longer be coming to the city. All it means is that the city has ceased to be the centre of our family’s life.”

Colonial constructions

Oduor could be the exception rather than the rule: It is unlikely that the majority of millennials will be migrating to their rural homes in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, but he is certainly an aberration that might as well explain the extent to which disruptions, such as a global pandemic or even an economic meltdown, can lead people in cities to reevaluate their lives and consider their options.

Economist David Ndii remarked once that in Africa, people travel to and live light in the metropolis because many cities in Africa were not built with the natives in mind. Cities have remained colonial constructions alien to the indigenous people. The great lesson for many people then has always been that in the cities, you must always have a way out of a calamity or a disruption.

But really, it is because Africans never consider cities to be their proper dwellings? Cities are still transient places for a majority of Africans. Many African cities were built by and for the colonialists, who accepted indigenous people only as indentured or migrant labour. If you did not have a pass to enter the city, or work there, you would be arrested and fined.

To date many people who live in cities have one foot there, the other one in a rural area where their ancestors hailed from and what they call home. The idea of a city to many Africans, young and old, has always been a temporary one. Their annual exodus from the city to their respective rural homes during the Easter holiday and more so during the Christmas festive season explains this notion of the reverse urban-rural migration. It also explains, why rural areas become the refuge of city dwellers running away from city calamities and commotions be they, for instance the 1982 failed coup, the 1998 US embassy bombing in Nairobi, the general elections held after every five year cycle, and especially after the disputed presidential elections of 2007 that led to an explosion of violence in the Rift Valley region.

Way before the coronavirus crisis came to bear on us, a millennial who owned an electronics shop at the famous Nyamakima area relocated back home to Murang’a County in 2018 after it become untenable to run his erstwhile lucrative business. “With the government’s crackdown on counterfeit goods, which we used to import from China, and the subsequent hoarding of our goods at the government warehouses in Industrial Area, I lost so much money, as did many other traders, that I decided to just leave Nairobi and go home. Kaba kuinoka. I’m better off in my rural home,” said the trader.

No safety nets

“When President Uhuru Kenyatta reviewed the cessation of movement between counties on July 7, 2020, it was to allow people in Nairobi to leave town and transport their families back to their rural areas,” alleged a senior civil servant. “We (the government), knew people were suffering in the city. Many had lost their jobs, they couldn’t pay their rents, they couldn’t feed their children. Life had truly become a burden. It was going to be just a matter of time before the situation possibly blew out of hand. The government had to choose between facing a boiling agitation from the people, who would soon take it no more, or risk the very same people transporting coronavirus to the rural areas. Whichever option it took, it was the devil’s alternative.”

Many of these people worked as casual labourers, drivers or housekeepers or as waiters or waitresses in bars, restaurants and hotels. Or in the informal sector as hawkers, street vendors and merchandise traders. I know this because I am in a group that has been pooling resources to buy food for families that live where we grew up in Eastlands. With no gainful employment, yet mounting bills to pay, and no safety nets to fall back on as they would in their rural homes, many of these people just waited for the government to reconsider cessation so that they could take their families to their rural areas.

One of the big factors that drove Oduor out of Nairobi is the fact that he continued to pay rent for five months for a house he couldn’t call home and without an income. “That is money I can invest in a small project in the rural area,” he explained.

So that is why a family in Kawangware, after exhausting its reserves, went to a merchandise shop that sells and accepts second-hand goods and hawked their furniture in return for cash, which it would use to pay for transport for the long journey to western Kenya. Kawangware is a sprawling peri-urban area that was originally inhabited by the Kikuyu, but which is now dominated by Kenyans from the western region. The odd jobs the man of the house was doing had dissipated. With several mouths to feed, the man had no choice but to retrace his footsteps to his rural home.

A visit to “Machakos” Country Bus Station in downtown Nairobi revealed that people were travelling back home in droves, and accompanied by hordes of children and household goods – from wooden beds and mattresses to sofa sets and utensils. It was evident that many were not planning to return to the city in a hurry, if they would return at all. The many travellers I spoke to said life in the city had become unbearable and it was time to go back to their roots. “Shule zilifungwa, hakuna kazi tunafanya nini huku?” Schools have been closed, there’s no work, what are we doing in the city?

“Because of the curfew, buses are only leaving in the mornings,” explained Vincent Musa, one of the groundsmen at the station, which serves buses that travel all over upcountry. To possibly tame the spread of coronavirus, the government also instituted a curfew – first the curfew was between 5am – 7pm, later on the president revised it to 5am – 9pm. “Everyday buses have been leaving here between 6am – 10am in order to beat the curfew at 9pm. Many of the destinations of these buses take an average of seven to eight hours. Most of the people who have been travelling are women and children. Since the children are not going to school, it is pointless to keep them in Nairobi.”

“It is easier for the man to survive alone in the city,” said a man who was accompanied by his wife and children. “Wacha waende nyumbani, mimi nitang’ang’ana na maisha hapa Nairobi.”I’m taking my family home, I will return to deal with the harsh city life.

Musa named for me nearly all the destinations that the people were travelling to: Ahero, Boro, Bungoma, Eldoret, Cheptais Chwele, Homa Bay, Kadel, Katito, Kendu Bay, Kimilili, Kisumu, Kisii, Kitale, Koguta, Luanda, Malaba, Maseno, Matunda, Moi’s Bridge, Mbita, Muhoroni, Ng’iya, Nyandorera, Olare, Rwambwa, Siaya, Urangu, Wagai and Webuye.

While at the station, I counted seven different bus companies that ferried people home: Climax Coaches, Eldoret Express, Greenline, Nairobi Bus Union, Nyar Ugenya and Nyamira Express. After coronavirus set in, many of these buses were grounded, and even though the lifting of the cessation had given the owners some reprieve, many are still grounded. “The bus capacity had been reduced. A bus that carried 67 passengers has now been restricted to 40 only. This reduction of passengers has meant that fares have had to be doubled,” said Musa.

Many of the fares to western Kenya ranged from between Sh600 and Sh800 before the pandemic. Now they are charging Sh1,400 or above to all destinations in Nyanza, Kisii and Transzoia. One bus to Kitale charges Sh1,750.

Majiwa, the supervisor told me the pandemic had been a wake-up call for many Kenyans. “Nairobi has never been a domicile for anybody – permanent or otherwise. I’m here because I still have work. The day they tell me I’m redundant, I’ll pack my things and head home. In Nairobi, you pay for everything, including going for ablution. In the rural area, food is plenty and free, children can never lack anything to eat. That’s why people are taking their children back home. Every morning 25 buses have been leaving here heading to western Kenya, packed with women and their children”.

There has been another reason why many parents from western Kenya living in Nairobi have been transporting their children back home in great numbers. “Once the government announced that schools will not reopen till January next year, circumcision rites for boys, which usually are conducted in the month of August and December, started early in July,” said Musa. “And these rites will go on till December non-stop. Wacha watoto watengenezwe.” Let the boys get initiated now that they are not going to school. Circumcision for boys, especially among the Bukusu people who live in Bungoma, Kitale and around Mt Elgon area, is an elaborate affair.

Not since the scare of the terrorists’ bomb at the former US embassy, then located at the corner of Haile Selassie Avenue and Moi Avenue in Nairobi, has there been such a scare leading people to migrate to their rural homes. While the scale of the Al Qaeda bombing had never been witnessed before in Nairobi, it nonetheless never took people’s jobs, or cumulatively threatened their lives. People rightly reasoned that if they escaped the city to their rural homes, they would be safe

The current coronavirus scare is compounded by the fact that normal life has been completely disrupted, so there is a possibility that those leaving might never return. There is also the issue of people believing that COVID-19 is basically a city disease.

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.

By Dauti Kahura

When the air shifts its scorching weight just so, and begins to allow the cool streams of summer’s evenings to take over, I find my courage to venture out for a walk around the neighbourhood. Another full cycle has come knocking, I say to myself, in cautious tones so it does not ring out loud like an admonition against self; a reprieve that I may have stayed too long in this land of cyclic seasons and strange sojourning.

Yet there’s something about this place that has lodged itself deeply into my becoming. There’s a foreign bone packed with the marrow of experience, encounters and educating. That bone is stuck in there, and over the years of accommodating its foreignness, it has calcified into character. It’s a bone that has made the soldier in me more prepared to take up arms and go to war for that which makes us whole, restores our dignity, and against that which diminishes our civility. And I’m about to go to war for Kamala Harris.

Walk with me

But first, take a walk with me. Up the street, just a five-minute walk from my home is the Natural History Society of Maryland building. I’ve been here before for neighbourhood events like paint night to raise funds for our arts festival. I come to the building’s parking lot on occasional Saturdays to buy fresh produce from the local seasonal farmers’ market.

This building is also the place where something phenomenal happened in 1913. A group of women suffragists marching over 200 miles for three months from New York to Washington DC stopped here to rest up for the night. I live in the shadow of one of American history’s most inspirational women’s movement that fought for the right of women to vote.

I stand there in the quiet of the evening summer breeze and close my eyes. In my mind’s eye, I can see the reported 5,000 to 10,000 women marchers finally arrive in Baltimore, worn out, shoes and laces desperately clasping the feet they protected with fierce resolve. The neighbourhood has opened their homes for the women to spend the night. The local priest, Dr. Cyrus Cort, is against the women’s fight to be heard through the ballot, but he is voted down, and the women are welcome to stay in the neighborhood.

This connection to history fills me with inspiration. It’s enough for me that my neighbourhood played a part in this struggle. No matter what, I will carry on that spirit of welcoming the warrior, giving them rest, and replenishing their supplies as long as I have the means. It is because of these women that I, an African in America, have pitched my tent here and can vote for the leaders I want.

The women suffragists stopping in my neighbourhood is all reported in a New York Times article on February 1913. The marchers woke up early the next morning and marched on down past where I live and headed on to Washington DC. With them they carried banners, one which read: “New York State denies the vote to criminals, lunatics, idiots and women.” When they arrived in Washington DC, they held up another sign, which read: “We demand an amendment to the Constitution of the United States enfranchising the women of this country.” But things were not going to change overnight.

It wasn’t until seven years after those women came by what is now my neighborhood that the 19th amendment was signed, giving women the right to vote. But that’s not what’s shocking. This fight started in 1848 when the women established the National Women’s Suffrage Association. It took them 70 years to achieve that goal!

Let’s zoom out and get an even truer perspective. The United States Constitution, written in 1787, states that all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But it took over 130 years for women to achieve that equality as voting citizens. This did not include black women!

There’s a sadness about this struggle that only America’s foundation of racism could have enabled. White women who fought for equality left out black women. Some of those in the leadership ranks voiced out their concern that black women did not have the same rights as white women. Ida B. Wells, a black woman suffragists born into slavery, fought for black women’s place in the struggle. They were allowed to march from the back of the parade. History records that she bravely led her team of black women to the front. While the 19th amendment of 1920 gave women the right to vote, it wasn’t until 45 years later that black women gained their right to vote. This background connects the dots from women’s suffrage to the nomination of Kamala Harris, a black woman, for the vice presidency.

Kamala Harris in the African context

European society looked upon women as men’s property, childish, prone to irrational thought, and therefore dependent on their husbands for decision-making. Unfortunately, this is a worldview that European colonisation imposed on Africa.

African societies had women in positions of power and public influence long before European intervention. They were queens who ran kingdoms alongside men. They were warriors who fought in battles and medicine women who healed. They were priests who held oracular power that could be more powerful that the king’s political office. They also comfortably occupied the private space of their homes as mothers and nurturers of life.

While the 19th amendment of 1920 gave women the right to vote, it wasn’t until 45 years later that black women gained their right to vote. This background connects the dots from women’s suffrage to the nomination of Kamala Harris, a black woman, for the vice presidency.

Sufficient research by African scholars shows that before the intervention, African societies recognised the complementarity role that both male and female genders played. The ordinary African woman was not considered fickle of mind like the European woman. In fact, in most societies, she ran the markets, determined the prices, and controlled the location of trading. This phenomenon is still very present in African countries where, for example, “mama mboga” is the predominant trader in local markets. If something happens to the market spaces, it is women who speak out and fight to have things corrected. The Western concept of markets, on the other hand, is dominated by men. There are still very few white women in political and trading spaces. In the United States, there are only seven black women who have conquered the heights of financial bosses in big companies. The Western world has a lot to learn from pre-intervention Africa.

So why are African women celebrating the nomination of Kamala Harris to the vice president candidacy in America if they were way ahead in recognising the complementarity of genders? Because things changed, and now we draw inspiration from the global black woman who rises against the odds. Colonial powers in Africa strategised to place men in powerful positions and relegated women to private spaces where decisions affecting society were not made. Over time, colonial and post-colonial African men began to think of themselves as superior to their women. This was never the reality.

When Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi admonished the environmentalist, Professor Wangari Maathai, in public, telling her she should know that African culture demands a woman should be subservient to men, he was wrong. African elders raised in colonial Africa are not to be trusted with Africa’s memory. They are the ones who sided with the white usurpers and kicked our mothers out of their places of honour. Many have misled a generation that is now slowly beginning to discover the truth about an Africa whose civilizations fully included women. In ancient Africa, from a gender perspective, Kamala Harris’s nomination would have been ordinary.

We have forgotten the African institutions that had nurtured powerful women who were not an oddity to Africans. In spite of the destruction of Africa’s gender complementarity systems, Africa’s new nations have not needed to fight the same battles that Western women have had to fight. Kenyan women do not need a suffrage movement.

To arrive at the place of complementarity that satisfactorily caters to women’s needs and talents in leadership, African women activists must include a restoration of memory, an education on how African societies so naturally came to produce women like Mekatilili wa Menza, Yenenga, Asantewa, and a string of queen mothers across Africa. What white women have been fighting for is a place that African women had long figured out how to structure, and then violently forced to forget. The novelty of Kamala Harris in American politics comes from a society that is still very young in building institutions of gender complementarity. America is culturally a baby compared to Africa’s ethno-cultural nations and territories before they were arbitrarily bunched up together as Westphalian nation-states. Yet the irony is that African women now find inspiration in Harris’s nomination as one of them.

Perhaps someday, African scholars will teach and inspire America in building what Africa once had so that the occurrence of a Kamala Harris or a Barack Obama in the 21st century would not be so shocking an achievement. When Cheikh Anta Diop attempted to teach about the ancient wisdom of Africa’s matriarchal systems and civilizations of black Kemet that contributed to Western knowledge, he was fought ruthlessly by the French and denied the right to teach.

Slowly, the present-day Anta Diops will arise, return memory to Africans, and gift the Western world with the idea of how to make a black woman presidency as common as that of a rich white male. When Shirley Chisholm, an educator and writer, became the first black woman elected to the US Congress in 1969, where she served seven terms, and then boldly ran for president on a major party ticket in 1972, she carried within her this easy knowledge from her African ancestors – the knowing that there was nothing out of place about a black women leading a country, a kingdom, an army.

I’m caught between celebrating Kamala Harris and chastising America for its exceedingly slow pace in bringing women to powerful public spaces. The black movement does not yet have the power to steer more Harrises to the top. There’s a war of intra-black identities brewing. And I’m caught between different blacknesses. Racial identity in America is a web of chains that you struggle through. One encounters three streams of consciousness: unquestioned belonging of whiteness; uncertain discomfort of in-betweens; and the dangerous branding of blackness. Kamala Harris belongs to the in-between identities that have lately kept shifting and disturbing a nation that demands neat extremes.

Kamala, the in-between

She’s black, she’s Indian, she’s American. In this country, race is everything. It is the thread that knits this country’s identity, with the warp and weft of black and white extremes inextricably holding together the character of a nation knit with the needles of structural and performative violence. This aspect of violence comes out with shocking clarity in the dissection of George Floyd’s murder.

In spite of her mixed-race heritage, in the American construct, Harris is considered a black woman. In Kenya, she would be called white – mzungu – either as a result of her Anglophone American culture or on account of her much lighter skin. The black/white racial dichotomy in Kenya holds little to no relevance in the functional identity of Kenya. And if you are mixed-race with one of your parents being white, you are still more mzungu than mwafrika in Kenya. The way it goes in America, if you even have a drop of black in you, you are considered black.

Historically, some people with that drop of black chose to pass for white in order to have an easier life in a country where being black is a heavy cross upon which one is hung and bleeds from wounds of indignity to the end of their days. It doesn’t matter that a black person becomes the president, a billionaire, a Nobel laureate… if they are black, they are just below the line of consideration as human beings. Kamala Harris, a black women who is also in-between races, to have been nominated as the Democratic vice presidential candidate, is both discomforting and at once dangerous for Americans.

Conspiracy theories as puerile as birtherism and their manic regurgitation have been a hallmark of this current regime. That Ms. Harris is now a victim of this idiocy fueled by the president is no surprise. Something tells me she has the firepower to fight back that Obama did not have. She showed her mettle during the Democratic presidential candidacy campaigns when she fearlessly confronted Joe Biden. The debates against their Republican opponents can’t come soon enough. Black people do not have the luxury to play nice. They have to know how to throw lethal punches using nothing but their smarts. And as a Howard University alumna, Ms. Harris comes with confidence and pride. She is fearless because she inculcated black intellectualism as a dominant body of thinking during her four years at this university.

But the black identity is growing more complex in America, especially when it comes to power. Harris’s nomination is not only discomforting to white nationalists and good white folk who silently feel threatened by the encroaching shadow of darker-skinned people that translates to lowered value of life and living; it is also discomforting to some black people who are unable to think outside of the compartmentalisation of race purity.

The identity psychosis of black purists

On the black identity extreme, accusations of “she’s not black enough” have already started. The smear campaigns that she’s not black at all are staples that benefit both extremes of racial purity. The keepers of both black and white racial purity have built a thought citadel of power and belonging that is tiered, with the top level of political representation, social influencers and paradigm shifters belonging to a select few for the rest to gaze upon and feel proud and well represented.

These citadels of black racial purity are heavily fenced in with qualification criteria that range from parentage, ancestry, political ideology, social association, upbringing, and yes, the unspoken inanity of skin tones. Black purists, such as the American Descendants of Slaves movement (ADOS), are peddling she’s-not-black-enough prejudices – an accusation that is as callous as the president’s fueling of birtherism conspiracies.

Harris has fully embraced her mother’s Indian heritage and proudly declared her black identity in America. Yet there is still a problem for some vocal ADOS members who argue that her black Jamaican father who came to the United States as a student is not a descendant of American slavery, and therefore his progeny cannot claim to understand the issues that black people in America really face. It does not matter to these black purists that Harris was born and raised in America as a black person with the same racist experiences an ADOS would have faced.

During desegregation, Harris was bussed to school as a black girl and faced the isolation and rejection of the white school she was being bussed to. When you are the instrument of experimentation in the pursuit of a more perfect union, the whip of the master’s fightback lands on you through the jeers and indignities you suffer alone in school. Regardless of privileges she might have had as a light-skinned educated woman – because this is America where human value is often measured by the shade of one’s epidermis – Harris has worn that branding of blackness since she was born.

But the psychosis of racism for black people has been long and brutal, and some have reacted to it by taking that very same excoriating system and building a caste system of black identity. This tiered privilege is presented by influential ADOS persons as “lineage”, where an up-coming black person is pushed into declaring her ancestry. By that declaration, she gets shelved into the appropriate caste of blackness: Pure Black; Pass for Black; Not Black Enough, Not Black at All.

As a continental African immigrant, I belong to the last tier – Not Black at All – and I dare not be caught by an ADOS speaking authoritatively on any issues of black experience in America regardless of the fact that the American system considers me a black person. The police will kill a black immigrant African with no less depravity that they killed George Floyd; and my resume will and has often been thrown into the bin as quickly as Shaniqua’s because we both have an African or black name.

Last year, Don Lemon, a CNN anchor sympathetic to ADOS, sparked a fury about Kamala Harris’s lineage: “She’s black, yes, but is she African American?” he asked. A splitting of black hairs and hierarchies. Like Barack Obama before her, these keepers of American black purity questioned where these problematic in-betweens should fit in the black identity spectrum.

Meanwhile, right wing blacks have also joined the bandwagon of policing the black identity against the collective interests of a people who share the same enemy. Observing all this is the Master who chuckles gleefully at the spectacle. So, gleefully, the president’s son retweeted a black right wing provocateur who claimed about Kamala: “She comes from Jamaican slave owners. She’s not an American Black. Period.” Whether such tweets are generated by Russian bots or not, there is enough communication with real black purists that hold the same views.

This tiered privilege is presented by influential ADOS persons as “lineage”, where an upcoming black person is pushed into declaring her ancestry. By that declaration, she gets shelved into the appropriate caste of blackness: Pure Black; Pass for Black; Not Black Enough, Not Black at All.

If these black purism voices rise to a critical mass, they would win the argument that Harris could not possibly represent or understand the grievances of American descendants of slaves because her Asian-Jamaican lineage disqualifies her. It’s mind-boggling.

The psychosis of exclusive belongings kneecaps black rising everywhere. Purposeful black unity is possible and necessary in conquering the 21st century institutions of modern slavery. In the United States, the main one is the prison industrial complex that incarcerates black people at over five times the rate of white people, according to the US Department of Justice. Globally, the institution of economic slavery binds us all. The Washington Consensus economic hegemony still holds hostage African nations and the global black economy. It is naïve to not understand this connection between all descendants of African peoples. It needs to be clarified that I speak of a black unity of purpose that could and should be achieved through black diversity and through the necessary recognition that blacks are not and never have been a monolith.

Healing the black mind

What has happened and is still happening to black people in America can never be fully expressed in any manner of language. The one thing that ADOS have right is the insistence that they have a unique experience that no other black person who has not borne the inherited burden on the enslaved ancestry can fully understand. Uniqueness though does not mean that a non-ADOS is incapable of learning the history of African Americans and making intelligent decisions that dare to build a country that helps heals the minds of black people, restores justice and recognises their humanity. Is Kamala Harris up for this challenge? Time will tell.

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.

The Exodus: Corona-Induced Urban-To-Rural Migration

By Dauti Kahura

The death of George Floyd in the United States has sparked a number of important conversations, particularly around racial justice and policing. As protests against brutal criminal justice systems and demands to address colonial legacies have spread around world, the penal system – the one particular institution that brings the two strands together – has not received as much attention. The prisons that litter the African landscape are both a legacy of colonial subjugation and a site for egregious human rights abuses. Yet there have been few calls on the continent for their abolition or defunding. In fact, even throughout the period of anti-colonial agitation and struggle, there seem to have been few such demands. This is curious given the fact that incarceration as punishment was completely unknown in Africa before the arrival of the Europeans.

Pre-colonial justice systems “were victim rather than perpetrator-centered with the end goal being compensation instead of incarceration” notes Prof. Jeremy Sarkin. Though pre-trial detention was common and some centralised states, such as the West African kingdom of Dahomey, had permanent prisons, these were not penal institutions but rather facilities for temporary detention as suspects or convicts awaited justice.

However, even in the pre-colonial epoch, interaction with Europe had begun to influence penal systems and ideas around confinement. According to Florence Bernault, author of A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, “the intensification of the slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the violence it entailed at the time of abolition meant that unprecedented numbers of Africans faced capture and enslavement and that Europeans’ pre-colonial influence over African penal systems came mostly from the diffusion of antiquated devices of bodily restrain and torture”.

In indigenous systems, corporal and capital punishments were reserved for the worst crimes, while, according to Leonard Kercher’s 1981 treatise on the Kenyan penal system, “ostracism, religious sanctions and expulsion were … employed mainly against lesser habitual offenders who had outraged the conscience and exhausted [society’s] patience”. Such expulsions in some societies took the form of enslavement and the slave trade incentivised this punishment to be imposed for an increasing range of crimes. Those sold off were held in camps where men were shackled, though in some instances, women and children were allowed to wander free in guarded compounds as they awaited shipment.

Similarly, as the abolition of the slave trade was enforced, both slavers and slave rescuers kept victims in enclosed compounds – the former to avoid patrols and the latter to house and supervise them in so-called “villages of liberty”. In this way, the idea of confinement became increasingly familiar to many on the continent, though it was not yet linked to punishment; that came with colonialism.

There is no evidence of the existence of pre-colonial prisons in Kenya. However, it is notable that prisons were among the first buildings the British built whenever they went into a future colony. Within 16 years of their arrival in Kenya in 1895, they had built 30 prisons with an average daily incarcerated population of over 1,500. In the next 20 years, the numbers of both prisons and inmates would more than double. By the dawn of the Second World War, Kenya was incarcerating a far greater proportion of its population than British colonies elsewhere in East and Central Africa, with 145 out of every 100,000 natives in prison. And in 1951, on the eve of the Mau Mau war, prisons held nearly 12,000 people.

Daniel Branch attributes the high incarceration rate to the fact that Kenya was a settler colony and to the fact that, as fellow historian, David Anderson relates, “law and order had been a near obsession with certain section of the European settler community”. This is another link with the US, where for a long time, the phrase “law and order” has been used to conflate black resistance to the racist hierarchy with criminality, most recently in its use by President Donald Trump with regard to the Black Lives Matter protests.

Similarly, in Kenya, imprisonment in the service of demands for “law and order” was not about dispensing justice. As Branch observes, “Kenya’s prisoners were serving sentences in institutions with no historically derived meaning, having been convicted for activities that they would not themselves consider offences”. Prisons were rather an extension of the colonisation project, a punitive device to ensure compliance with the racist colonial order, as well as its dictates and privileging of white authority.

By the dawn of the Second World War, Kenya was incarcerating a far greater proportion of its population than British colonies elsewhere in East and Central Africa, with 145 out of every 100,000 natives in prison. And in 1951, on the eve of the Mau Mau war, prisons held nearly 12,000 people.

Colonial prison differed from its counterpart in Europe. “The body and pain are not the ultimate objects of … punitive action,” wrote Michel Foucault in his book, Discipline and Punish, which details the long-term changes in the focus of European penology. However, according to Bernault, “while the Western penitentiary reframed free individuals as equal citizens and legal subjects, the colonial prison primarily construed Africans as objects of power”. It was about the exercise of power over them and ideas like rehabilitation of offenders that were being propounded in the West by the prison reform movement. These reforms had little impact on how the colonial prison was run.

As Branch notes, from the beginning, Kenyan prisons were deemed by critics to be “insufficiently harsh”. In his paper, “Imprisonment and Colonialism In Kenya”, he quotes one visitor to Lamu in 1909 complaining that the prison was “a farce – the punishment instead of acting as a deterrent only encourages the prisoners to commit offences, they have no proper work to perform, they are given all the holidays”.

Forced labour

Incarceration was not just about punishment; it was also a means to extract labour and resources for the colonial state. Prisoners were forced to work on public projects and penal labour was considered a vital part of the colonial economy. As Bernault points out, “By 1933, forced labour had become such a frequent sentence that the government began building prison camps entirely devoted to agricultural and public works”.

This reliance on prison labour contributed to a preference for jailing people. In his testimony to the Bushe Commission, set up in 1933 to look into the Kenyan justice system following a series of scandalous incidents, Sydney Hubert La Fontaine, the Ukamba Province Provincial Commissioner, demonstrated the preference for jailing people. He admitted that he would rarely entertain alternatives to putting natives in prison for a first offence, nor give them time to pay fines. “In the vast bulk of cases they are detained.”

Another incident related by British anti-imperialist Norman Leys in his book, A Last Chance for Kenya, demonstrates the connivance of colonial authorities in locking up Africans they knew to be innocent. He tells the story of how one District Officer was shocked, upon taking up a fresh appointment, to discover that white settlers were in the habit of getting his predecessor to imprison and punish their less efficient workers for up to 6 months with hard labour, even though the workers had actually committed no crime! When he tried to stop the custom, the settlers wrote to the governor and he was reprimanded and a commission of inquiry set up to investigate his actions.

It is also important to note that settlers were large beneficiaries of the forced labour of convicts on their farms, which would establish a precedent for future African elites. In 1954, the Kenyan Minister for Defence, Jake Cusack, would say about the use of Mau Mau detainee labour: “We are slave traders and the employment of our slaves are, in this instance, by the Public Works Department.”

Such attitudes, however, inevitably ran up against the limitations of the penal system, which was severely undermanned and under-resourced. By the early 1930s, according to Branch, the Prisons Department employed just 20 Europeans (mainly based in Nairobi) and over 400 Africans. By comparison, the total number of persons they were expected to watch over in the course of 1930 was over 21,000. Pay was also pretty poor and a job in the prison service was the preserve of those without other options and so staff turnover was high. Education standards, by contrast, were abysmally low as the colonial regime preferred to recruit prison staff from among often-illiterate former soldiers.

Not only were the prisons poorly funded, but they relied on the free labour of inmates to keep them running and to finance a significant part of their operations. In 1930, for example, earnings from prison industries accounted for a fifth of the total cost of the Prisons Department – some £8,856, the equivalent of nearly £600,000 today, or about Sh80 million.

Further, prison facilities and especially the detention camps that had been introduced in 1926 to cater for petty offenders in a vain attempt to ease overcrowding, were ramshackle affairs. In general, they tended to be run on the terms of the incarcerated rather than the warders. In many camps, there was little segregation of the prison community from the rest of society, with inmates in some cases free to come and go as they pleased, which made for some rare comical moments. For example, Branch relates an instance where a magistrate in Mombasa, while inspecting a detention camp, came across an inmate he had sentenced there earlier in the day “having tea with his wife and children just inside the wire”. And in Thika in 1952, inmates would be allowed out for a stroll and could brew their own booze at the Municipality Club.

However, these momentary escapes perhaps did not make much of a difference as life outside the prison had increasingly come to mirror the conditions within it. As Caroline Elkins notes in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Britain’s Gulag, “For decades before the [Mau Mau] Emergency, British colonizers sought to control the African population through a complex, apartheid-like set of laws dictating among other things where Africans could live, where and when they could move, what crops they could grow and what social places they could frequent.”

The prison was just a part of the system for enforcing this brutal racist hierarchy, other elements of which included public floggings and extortionate fines. For example, as related by Leys, there were reported cases of African boys being fined the equivalent of a month’s wages for stealing a loaf of bread.

The predations and impositions of the colonial state and the resentment they evoked were on the rise, culminating in the outbreak of the Mau Mau uprising in 1952. This would fundamentally change the already brutal Kenya prison system for the worse as tens of thousands of Mau Mau detainees and convicts flooded the system, upending the established hierarchies within it, as well as cementing the place of the prison within the popular imagination as one of physical desecration and social death. It became a terrifying modern-day chimera that combined the pre-colonial corporal and capital punishments, ostracisms and expulsions and applied them on a hitherto unimaginable scale. 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.

The Exodus: Corona-Induced Urban-To-Rural Migration

By Dauti Kahura

Just as the 9 o’clock curfew kicks in around the country, the crickets fall silent at the approach of stomping footsteps: it is the new witching hour at Sitikho Police Post in Bungoma.

Steel bells clink in rhythm to the monosyllabic sound of the whistle—blown repeatedly in accompaniment to the throaty chants of young women singing and men humming the new corona song: “Beware the new corona disease”, starts the soloist.

“Keep one metre away”, the chorus roars back.

The band of up to 50 youths crowd together with clubs raised above their heads, peering into each other’s faces in the dark as they shuffle in, circling the police station up to three times before going back to the ceremonial homestead to regale waiting crowds with the new crop of ribald songs that are composed each circumcision year.

The police dare not come out. At the start of this year’s Bukusu circumcision season, which can only occur between August and December every even year, three assistant chiefs, two chiefs and a posse of administration police officers were repelled with sticks and stones from Mechimeru sub-location in Bungoma when they attempted to enforce the nationwide curfew and social distancing measures adopted to slow down the spread of COVID-19.

Messages about social distancing to slow down the spread of COVID-19 have reached every corner of the country, but they are far from lived experience.

Across the country, police have killed at least 15 people since the imposition of COVID-19 restrictions for failing to comply with regulations such as wearing face masks in public and being outdoors after curfew.

Circling the police station at the start of curfew is not only an act of defiance but also a dare to the base commander to step out of his house at the risk of certain forced genital cutting. The base commander at Sitikho Police Post is believed to come from a community widely known not to circumcise males.

Although measures to restrict movement have remained in place since March 27, the advent of the circumcision season has presented an impossible choice between tradition and civil obedience.

Tradition won, and the new crisis in the community is negotiating the impossibility of circumcising a boy from one metre away.

Bukusu circumcision—which mythology claims began with the first woman, Sela, operating on her husband, Mwambu, the first man—is more than the physical cutting of the foreskin. It is a public event invested with ritual and lore that form the core of individual and community identity.

Ancestors are spoken to in cajoling tones from early evening into the night, and animals are sacrificed before the operation at dawn. It is not a dry-eyed daylight affair, but it cannot also be privatised to a hospital surgery without attracting intolerable ridicule. The nightlong ringing of bells, the singing and ribaldry prepare the candidate psychologically for surgery at dawn, performed in the anaesthetising August cold after a visit to the river where the body is caked in mud before an icy walk in the nude to numb the pain and slow the flow of blood when cutting occurs back in the homestead.

Every two years, when the tassels of millet and maize begin to dry and the ears are full in readiness for harvest, boys from 12 years and older begin to smith bells from steel and tie stick holders onto them as well as the sisal strands that will create the visual spectacle in preparation for one of the most important rites of passage.

The bells are the calling card to the ceremony—the boy taking the initiative to travel to distant relatives to inform them that he is ready to face the knife. On the eve of the ritual, he visits his maternal uncle to acknowledge his joint heritage and is often feted with a bull—slaughtered and the rumen hang around his neck.

On the afternoon of August 3, the evocatively poignant sioyaye, a guttural melody that strikes a mixture of trepidation and anxiety in the souls of boys turning into men, rises to meet the road at Bukunjangabo on the outskirts of Webuye Town, as a group of youth and boys sing and chant as they escort a circumcision candidate back home. He is returning from his maternal uncle with the gift of a bullock.

Behind Lukhokho School, in Matete location of Kakamega County, another band of youths are dancing and singing as they walk another circumcision candidate back to his home with his heifer.

The air is replete with social licence. Men who have inherited the spirit of the circumciser get their knives down from the centre pole of their huts and begin to hone them. Once, when I was about 10 years old and learning the esoteric magic of past, present and future tenses, our English teacher heard the stirrings of the sioyaye, the soulful, haunting melody that brings the circumcision candidate home from his uncle—or early in the morning from the river.

He bounded over the low wall where space had been left for a future window, and cut across the football field faster than any of his stripling pupils could follow. He reached the candidate’s homestead a kilometer away where the hired circumciser calmed him by letting him hold the knife in his quivering hands.

Once the circumciser’s spirit is upon someone, he is not responsible for what will happen next. And the same licence often applies to others who may not themselves be circumcisers.

Local legend in Lugari rehashes the story of a senior manager at the large National Cereals and Produce Board depot who disregarded the counsel to take leave in August and was seized one Saturday as he attempted to rush the day’s collection from the store sales to the bank. A motley crowd collected around him, divested him of his clothing and took him to the river through the market to demonstrate that, indeed, he was in need of surgery. A circumciser alerted by the singing of the sioyaye ran to the scene and performed the surgery in seconds.

Although the matter ended up in court, no conviction was entered, and this has emboldened this form of cultural bullying that sees many teachers and public servants who may not fit in with the culture take leave during the season of temporary madness.

Night after night, village and sub-county administrators have to pretend to be in deep sleep as youths roam the land singing ribald songs as they keep the circumcision candidates awake before the dawn reckoning. It is a fight the government has no stomach for.

During the months when movement into and out of Nairobi, Mombasa, Kilifi and Mandera was limited by government edict, the Bukusu Council of Elders briefly considered whether or not to postpone this year’s circumcision activities, which would throw a spanner into the age set naming. After a little prevarication, it appeared that the rite would proceed because within the community, circumcising during an odd year can attract bad omens.

The only other time the idea of postponing circumcision was publicly broached was in 2008, in the aftermath of the 2007 election crisis in which over 1,000 people were killed. Some elders at the time felt that it would not be wise to launch a new generation of adults into the world with the stain of that year’s bloodshed, but they eventually overcame their fears.

The cultural pressure to conduct traditional circumcision among the Luyia communities living in Bungoma, Busia, Kakamega, Trans Nzoia and Vihiga counties generally, and the Bukusu in particular, had been obviated by a growing influence of churches which discourage heavy emphasis on traditional rites and sacrifices because they compete with Christian teaching. The church, however, is no ally of the government in the COVID-19 war. The restriction on congregations in places of worship has embittered church leaders and congregants in the region.

Public sympathy for health regulations to contain the spread of the coronavirus has also been severely eroded by restrictive orders around burial, another significant rite for the communities in western Kenya.

Funerals, which would previously be arranged for days and are important sites for performing public politics, are typically concluded in a day, with burials as early as 8 a.m. if the family is poor and cannot stand up to the bullying of the provincial administration and county officials. It is a source of great bitterness, resulting in families secretly exhuming the hurriedly buried dead in order to give them a befitting send-off.

At Kuywa market in Bungoma, a pastor of the Holiness Pentecostal Church was preaching to the bereaved, limited to just 15 as the government had ordered, when the Holy Spirit reportedly descended and threw official social distancing plans into disarray.

Schools remain closed across the country, with the youth roaming villages and hamlets. In public transport across the western Kenya region, the wearing of facemasks is mandatory but at markets, traders and buyers carry on without any of the new encumbrances.

Although the number of COVID-19 cases has reached 30,120 nationally, the five counties where the communities are in the grip of the circumcision dilemma have a combined total infection count of just 837 cases. Busia, the inland gateway to Uganda, has recorded the highest count of COVID-19 cases at 770, but this is believed to be on account of truckers crossing the border into Uganda. The neighbouring counties of Bungoma and Kakamega, Trans Nzoia and Vihiga have recorded under 20 cases each.

For as long as the spirit of circumcision hangs in the air in the five counties, curfew remains impossible to observe and enforce.

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.

By Dauti Kahura

Who would have ever imagined that the church would one day be closed? This has been the question that I have repeatedly heard among the clergy and worshippers that I have interacted with during this coronavirus pandemic. The disruption was abrupt and precise – nobody saw it coming, no one was prepared for such an eventuality, and the clergy and Christians alike are all agreed on this.

In a hyper-religious country like Kenya, religious activities, like going to church or praying in a mosque or temple, had been taken for granted so much that when the coronavirus crisis happened, it created a sense of confusion and panic. The “responsorial psalm” has been: Why would we even think of contingency measures when such a thing could never ever happen. Not the government, not any (evil) force, not even the devil himself can stop us from going to church.

So, when the global pandemic – an invisible contagion that is threatening the very existence of human life – came to Kenya’s doorstep, it completely upended centuries-old religious practices. “The Church, as currently constituted, will never be the same again,” said a Catholic priest. And when I say the Church, I mean the entire church fraternity, including the Catholic Church”.

Some people, said the clergyman, will never go back to church again. “I’m not sure whether some of my fellow Catholic clergymen are aware of that. The fear among many Christians that if you fail to go to church continuously it would cumulatively lead to going to hell has been debunked. The people have realised, ‘oh, so if you don’t go to a church to perform the Sunday ritual, I’ll not end up in purgatory’ has very much liberated the people from the clutches of the control freak clergy”.

The missionary priest who cannot be named because he is not authorised to speak on behalf of the Kenyan Catholic Church, observed that what the coronavirus crisis had done is to alter the relationship between the clergy and the laity. “This has really scared the priests. The power the priest wields over the laity is so enormous, he is literally a god unto himself: He threatens fire and brimstone, he gives favours – whatever favours they may be. He orders the laity around. As he gives favours, he also demands the same from the laity.”

The thought of the priest not being the central figure in religious activities has become very scary: “How do you exercise control over people who are not physically in the church? How do you demand offertory, for instance, from people who are not physically present?”

The priest, who is also a university don, noted that coronavirus had created a “new normal” that is threatening the very fabric of Catholicism globally, and especially in continental Africa, where Catholicism is believed to be growing exponentially. “Our church demographics shows the church attendance is over 65 per cent youth. Their Catholic faith is not as entrenched as their parents’, who are a dwindling lot. If they get something to distract them from not going to church, they will gladly oblige. They are tech savvy and social media had come define to their lives. Not so the clergy.”

Rev. Francis Omondi of the Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) agrees with this assessment. “The Church, as currently constituted, is not ready for change. It is not ready for the new normal, because the priest is still stuck to the idea that he is at the centre of religious activities. The priest has failed to realise that online churches could be the churches of the future. The institution of the church, as we know it, will collapse.” What coronavirus has done is to expose the vulnerability of the Church, said the clergyman.

“For the longest time, the expression of Christianity has been the Church – what coronavirus has just done is to teach the contrary,” explained Rev. Omondi. “The Church has frozen, it has no idea what to do…the presence of coronavirus has shaken the very foundations of its reigning theological thinking…so the Church is at a gridlock. And the tragic thing about all this is that the Church is not preparing to change…it is not ready to change.”

“The study of theology, unfortunately, teaches you not to think critically, not to question your subject matter, as well as not to confront the reality of your worldview with an opposing view,” said the Catholic priest. “Theology is the only academic discourse where students are not required to interrogate their central subject: God. You begin from the premise that God is unquestionable, He cannot be criticised or faulted. What is said of him is infallible and true.”

With this kind of training and in the wake of the global pandemic, said the Catholic priest, the Catholic clergy suddenly feels like a fish out of water, like an endangered species. “What do you expect to be the reaction of such a person when confronted with a global phenomenon of the proportion of the coronavirus that shakes his very existence and foundation? First, is to be confused. After the befuddlement has settled, he interprets the events of the day as the work of the forces of the devil, out to wreak havoc and contest God’s domain.”

When the government finally announced that all churches must shut down in the wake of coronavirus, the Catholic clergy’s immediate reaction was to be furious at the state, said the missionary priest. “Who are they to close the Church? Are they God? Only God himself can tell us not to go to church,” was their reaction. For the clergy to imagine they could lose their control over the laity in what they consider to be their ultimate realm was unfathomable. For a church that believed it was so powerful that not even the government would issue a decree on Christian matters without consulting it was astounding, according to the clergy.

“The Church had become imperial,” said Rev Omondi. “Of course, this wasn’t always the case. Yet today the Church in Kenya finds itself in a bind. The government has found a way of dealing with the imperial Church.” The reverend said that from henceforth, the government will be dictating to the Church, what it should be and how it should operate. “It is high time religion was deinstitutionalised”

The onset of coronavirus is a wake-up call for Christians. Can one be Christian without the institution of the Church? The reverend believes this is possible: “The strength of the Islamic faith is that, unlike Christian evangelists, pastors and priests, the imam is not the centre of Muslims’ religious activities. The Muslim is not dependent on the imam to practise his faith. The Muslim faithful prays at home, at work, when he is traveling, wherever he is, essentially. The Muslim is his own imam; he leads prayers for himself, for the family. He doesn’t need to go to the mosque if he doesn’t have to,” explained the reverend. “Muslims do not rely on the government to be told how to go about religious activities in these times of coronavirus,” he explained.

The reverend observed that Muslims had not been affected by the coronavirus or the government edicts on the pandemic. “It is true the Anglican Church has been gravely affected by the pandemic: financially the church has been hit hard – giving of offerings has gone down, leading to some churches closing some programmes that were on their agenda. You cannot demand money, whether in the form of offering or tithe, from people who are not coming to church, from people whose income is no longer guaranteed or who have lost their jobs entirely.”

“The strength of the Islamic faith is that, unlike Christian evangelists, pastors and priests, the imam is not the centre of Muslims’ religious activities. The Muslim is not dependent on the imam to practise his faith…”

The mosque, unlike the church, does not rely on offerings and tithe of Muslims to run their operations, said Rev Omondi. “When a Muslim gives charity to the less fortunate members of his community, it is an act of giving his offering.”

“Some of my brother priests have been holding secret masses for the people, in total defiance of the government’s order,” revealed the Catholic priest. “This was even before the government relaxed its rule and limited the number of people who could attend religious holy places to 100, which they were not been happy with. I thought this was dangerous and stupid. Why would someone, because he has been bestowed with some powers, endanger the lives of so many people? Don’t these priests care about the people’s well-being?”

This situation is not helped by the fact that one fairly young Catholic bishop claimed that the government had no jurisdiction over the Catholic Church. “If people can be allowed to shop at supermarkets, why can people not be allowed to attend church?” questioned the bishop. In a bizarre argument, he countered that the Church had holy water, which it would sprinkle the congregants with, hence protect them from the coronavirus.

“Without a complete mental shift, the Church will find it very difficult to not only combat the pandemic, but also fit into the new normal. With this kind of thinking coming from its supposedly top echelons, does anybody really need to be convinced not to go to church? Yet the laity is also not blameless. Conditioned to observe religious rituals every Sunday, some of the Catholic faithful have been encouraging their priests to hold secret masses,” said the priest. The Catholic Church, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, has been beaming masses live on Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) and Capuchin TV. “Yet,” said the priest, “some Catholics have been coming to me and saying, ‘Father, can we hold mass for so and so, who my son is named after? Father, my grandmother has not received the Eucharistic sacrament for three weeks and she would like you to preside over a mass for her to feel better’”. Used to not missing mass, some Catholics have been looking for every excuse to relive the experience of an actual mass service by enticing priests to go against coronavirus protection.

“Coronavirus is the great disruption that nobody could foretell, or predict,” said a senior pastor at the Maven Church. “Never did we imagine that the Church would ever be closed for whatever reason, but here we are, this is the new normal and let’s be candid, things will never be the same again for the Church. It is the Church that will be forward-looking that will survive the tumultuous times of the coming years. We cannot pretend COVID-19 has not hampered our church operations, the way we relate with Christians and the impact we’d like to have on our community.”

For the Mavuno Church leadership, the coronavirus crisis has become a catalyst for scenario- building that the church had already begun exploring: How can the church move from being just a Sunday service ritual to being a church that is lived daily within the hearts and minds of Christians? What will the church be like in the next 15, 20 or 30 years from now? As the church is intent on growing exponentially, how should that growth be? What should dictate that growth? What kind of a Christian is the church looking forward to in the coming years? Who will be an integral part of its formation?

“These discussions, which began two or three years ago, were difficult conversations among the Mavuno Church community. Not only among the worshippers, but also among the pastors and deacons,” explained the pastor, who asked that his identity be hidden. “There were Christians who felt they were being involved in matters that don’t concern them. ‘I faithfully come to church, I give my offering, I pay my tithe regularly, what else does the church demand of me?’ posed some worshippers. The church leadership position was that there was more to a Christian than just giving his offering and observing the commandments of Malachi 3:10.”

The pastor told me that the coronavirus pandemic had taught the Mavuno Church leadership a lesson on the problems of a bifurcated church: the dichotomy between the gathered versus the scattered church. “We would like to be the scattered church, a church that, in a manner of speaking, is not tethered to one place. A church that grows organically, that is found in the hearts and minds of our people, a church that perhaps in the next 30 years or so should really transform into a movement.” The pastor added that in their discipleship programme, they hoped their followers would see the interconnectedness of action, practice and the Word.

“Take the example of the big congregation churches that host anywhere from 5000 to 20,000 worshippers. Right now they are not in a good place. Why? They just cannot meet. Because they are used to meeting in one place and they know no better. Even after the government relaxed the rule on the right to attend church and allowed 100 people, it brought even more confusion. Who do you admit and who do you leave out? And just how many services can you hold on a Sunday?” The other difficult discussion the church had way before the onset of the coronavirus was the issue of bi-vocational obligations – church workers, including its corpus of pastors and deacons, should look for an additional job or business to supplement their incomes and be productive when not busy with church work. “This was the most difficult discussion: so what if you couldn’t get an additional job? What if you are not business oriented? Was the church suggesting it couldn’t fully take care of its workers?”

Rev Omondi said the Anglican Church was now grappling with this very question: “How do we encourage our priests to look for alternative productive engagement to supplement their church income? Because coronavirus has just shown that it will be increasing untenable for the church in the future to guarantee prompt salaries to its clergy and other workers. The priest said that many Anglican priests, over time, came to view the Church’s work as full-time employment. “This shouldn’t be the case – church work should be a vocation, not a career.”

Away from canonical conversations, and on a more practical note, the Mavuno Church pastor said the church had taken practical measures to mitigate and vitiate the coronavirus crisis. “We decided we’ll not send any worker home, but they will take a pay cut. The senior pastors took a 45 per cent pay cut, while the other workers took a 10 per cent cut. We also initiated a programme called ‘Spread the Hope’ where the church community members are encouraged to give relief food to the less privileged in their respective localities.”

The pastor said their annual June assembly of nearly 3,000 people dubbed, “The Fearless Summit”, usually held at the Hill City campus in Athi River, had gone virtual. To the surprise of all, the one- week online meeting that had attendees from all over the world attracted a virtual total viewing of over 18,000. For a church that has a 30-year-old vision, the coronavirus crisis was a wake-up call to consider alternative possibilities.

But even as the Mavuno Church toys with the idea of infinite possibilities, Rev Omondi observed that with the advent of coronavirus, the Christian religion has lost it power and mystique. “At a time when Christians hoped their religion would come to them in their greatest hour of need, it has failed them: it cannot perform miracles, it cannot not cast away the pandemic, its clergy have failed to exorcise the demons of the devastating coronavirus, pastors who claim to pull miracles have just vanished.”

Hassan Mwadzaya believes that the coronavirus pandemic has shown why going to a mosque is not so crucial to Muslims. “During the existence of Islam, Muslims have been faced with floods, plagues, even torrential rains that made attending prayers in a mosque impossible and risky. So this is not the first time mosques have been closed because of a situation where going to the mosque might endanger the lives of believers. Throughout their lives, Muslims are taught that Islam is a way of life – fiqh – and therefore nothing should stop a Muslim from observing the tenets of Islam.”

Once the coronavirus became a global crisis, the Muslim world responded accordingly and promptly, said Hassan. “Way before many countries thought of shutting down their religious places of worship, Kuwait was the first Islamic country to implement the standard operating procedures in dealing with the pandemic – it ordered all mosques closed and from then on, the adhan, the call to prayer, ‘hayya alal swalah’, which means come to prayer, became, ‘aswattu min bayyutukum’, which means pray in your homes.”

Here in Kenya, said Hassan, just like in Kuwait and all the over the Islamic world, the adhan hayya alal swalah became aswattu min bayyutukum. At Jamia Mosque in the centre of the capital city Nairobi, where he goes for his prayers, “the mosque was soon shut down, not really because the government said all religious places should be closed, but because the mosque’s central committee had already consulted Muslim doctors who had advised that the mosque would have to close down”.

“We Muslims are not afraid of the coronavirus,” said Hassan. “The World Health Organization, and indeed the Ministry of Health of Kenya guidelines on the measures to curb the pandemic are not anything new to us Muslims and therefore do not affect us. The Muslim way of life in itself is a life of cleanliness and observance of greater hygiene. As a Muslim, I’m required to wash my hands, my face and feet 15 times a day, that is five times three, every time I go to the mosque. Water is a prerequisite in all mosques. The coronavirus pandemic may be a disruption, but it has not stopped the Muslim from going on with his religious life and observing his religious obligations like giving zakat (alms) and sadaqa (charity).”

“The mosques will remain closed until such a time that the Muslim experts – religious and medical – and not the government,” said Hassan. “A mosque is not only a place of prayer, but a place also for brotherhood and camaraderie. You cannot decree that only a 100 people should attend a mosque. How do you select who should attend and who shouldn’t, for instance? So at Jamia Mosque, we have decided the mosque will remain closed to all people until it is safe to be opened to every Muslim.”

Christians in Kenya seem to be learning from the Muslim faithful; many are choosing to pray at home or wherever they happen to be. “Even with 100 people being allowed to go to church, people have refused to go back,” said Rev Omondi. “People have found new ways of doing church and the priests and pastors better prepare for this stark reality.”

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.

The Exodus: Corona-Induced Urban-To-Rural Migration

By Dauti Kahura

The coronavirus spread rapidly across the globe. One person at a time, it has passed through millions, reaching every corner of the earth. And it has not only infected people, taken innocent lives, but it has reshaped society in lasting ways. From how we travel and where we live, to the level of security and surveillance we’re accustomed to, to how we work and interact and even to the language we use.

But if there is a symbol that completely captures the zeitgeist and the magnitude of this change, it is the surgical facemask. When history looks back on the pandemic of 2020, those white, blue or mulitcoloured objects that hide the mouth and nose will be what we see.

Below, a collection of images from staff photojournalist Vincent Muchangi captures people doing their best to keep others and themselves safe during these corona times.

These images will serve to chronicle this moment in history for years to come. A second hand clothes hawker in Thika town in a wrestling style mask. His love for wrestling inspired him to get that mask. Credit: Vincent Muchangi

Caleb Kamau, a mask seller poses for a picture donned in a facemask. Credit: Vincent Muchangi

Oyugi Opiyo an upcoming musician and street poet poses for a photo outside Aqua World Studio in Thika town. Credit: Vincent Muchangi

Due to high demand of facemasks necessitated by strict government regulations, many street vendors have taken to selling surgical masks to capitalise on the increasing demand for the facemasks. Above a street vendor selling his wares in Thika Town. Credit: Vincent Muchangi

Francis Waweru aka Fraja, an artisan and an electrician photographed as he was carrying his craft in Thika town. Credit: Vincent Muchangi

A mask vendor sorting out his masks before selling them to nearby customers. Credit: Vincent Muchangi

Businesses in Nairobi have to adhere to government regulations of social distancing, sanitizing and wearing of masks as they carry out their operations. At Hive pastries in Thika town, a customer in a facemask waits in line as she was purchasing pastry. Credit: Vincent Muchangi

A photo of a used facemask. Credit: Vincent Muchangi

With strict government regulations, social institutions have too been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. William, a young lad donned in a facemask styled like the Kenyan flag on his way to church in Ngoingwa Estate, Thika. Credit: Vincent Muchangi

Public awareness campaigns to sensitize the public on the COVID-19 measures have been conducted by many stakeholders. Credit: Vincent Muchangi

Written by Joe Kobuthi

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.

By Dauti Kahura

On my first visit to Mogadishu in November 2011, what struck me most about the city – apart from the shattered, bullet-ridden buildings and the broken infrastructure – was how visible the city’s women were. Women of all ages – some veiled in black hijabs, others donning colourful headscarves – were all over the city running all manner of enterprises, from selling petrol stored in huge drums (apparently, there were no petrol stations in Mogadishu then) to hawking khat and vegetables from makeshift stands along the roads.

Outside the mayor’s office, there were long lines of women queueing up for jobs, mostly those of street cleaners. The entrance to the office was also “manned” by a few female security guards who obviously had little training but who had been hired nonetheless. Women were literally running Somalia’s capital city.

“Where are the men?” I asked a male Somali aid worker. “Busy having coffee and gossiping about politicians,” he quipped, only half-jokingly.

Throughout Mogadishu, especially in the late afternoon, I would see men gather in coffee and tea shops and restaurants to gossip, chew khat or ponder the future of their war-torn country. Women were not part of these gatherings, I realised, because they were too busy working and taking care of their families

In fact, throughout the civil war in Somalia, it was women who kept the country running. Like in many countries ravaged by conflict, Somali women have developed a deep resilience and a practical business acumen. Women became the main breadwinners during the conflict when battles between clans and “revenge killings” had decimated large sections of the male population. Gender roles became confused and distorted, because physical and social disruptions caused by the conflict had eroded men’s gender roles as providers and protectors. So women took on greater financial responsibilities, but with little authority within the family and community. (Authority in much of Somalia rests with male clan elders, who are considered the leaders and arbiters of their respective clans. Even women who head households have little decision-making powers within their own families.)

So while men sat around in cafés sipping tea, gossiping or jostling for power or influence in Somalia’s highly dysfunctional clan-based federal government (whose capacity to provide basic services is almost nil; most services, such as education, are provided by private individuals or Islamic charities), women were taking the lead in providing essential services, such as healthcare.

Although provision of healthcare is scanty or virtually non-existent in many parts of Somalia, in places where there are health facilities, you are likely to find women running them. The reason, I believe, is because when there are no healthcare facilities, women suffer the most, because not only do they need these services more than men (especially in their childbearing years), but also because they are the primary care providers for their children and families. Hence, they have a vested personal interest in ensuring that these services are available.

One woman’s hospital

The death of Dr Hawa Abdi Dhibwale in Mogadishu this month at the age of 73 has highlighted how critical women’s contribution has been to the provision of healthcare in Somalia. Dr Hawa Abdi was born in Mogadishu when Somalia was still a United Nations Trusteeship under British administration. (After the Second World War, Italy lost its colonies in Africa, including Somalia.) In the 1960s, after Somalia gained independence, she studied medicine in Kiev, which was then part of the Soviet Union. After obtaining her medical degree in 1971, she returned to Mogadishu where she worked as a physician while studying law at night. (The decision to study law was made after she learned that Somali laws prevented female relatives from inheriting land.)

In 1983, she set up a one-room clinic on her family-owned farm 20 kilometres outside Mogadishu, where she provided free obstetric and gynaecological services to rural women. In an interview, she said she decided to open the clinic because she couldn’t believe that rural women in Somalia had almost no access to neonatal services. The clinic eventually evolved into a 400-bed hospital and relief camp. During the 2011 famine in Somalia, the camp housed 90,000 drought-stricken people on the 1,300 acres surrounding her hospital.

Working in Somalia was, of course, fraught with difficulties. She faced constant pressure and threats from the terrorist group Al Shabaab, who in 2009 tried to shut down her hospital. Many of her experiences of running the hospital under precarious circumstances are captured in her 2013 memoir, Keeping Hope Alive: One Woman, 90,000 lives.

Dr Hawa Abdi’s amazing work in a hostile and difficult environment gained her recognition and awards internationally. In 2016, the University of Pennsylvania awarded her an honorary Doctor of Science degree. The following year, she received an honorary Doctor of Law degree from Harvard University. In 2012, Dr Hawa Abdi was also on the shortlist of nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. If she had won, she would have been the first Somali to have ever been awarded this honour.

Dr Hawa Abdi’s two daughters, Deqa and Amina, who are also medical doctors, are continuing with her work through the Dr Hawa Abdi Foundation.

Providing maternal care in Somaliland

It is interesting – but perhaps not so surprising – that Somali women are leading the campaign to provide healthcare to their people. In Somaliland (which broke away from Somalia in 1991 but has still not gained international recognition as a sovereign state), Edna Adan Ismail, who qualified as a nurse-midwife, established a maternity hospital that has gained international acclaim.

In a part of the world where maternal and child mortality rates are extremely high, and where there is a high prevalence of female genital mutilation (FGM) – which makes childbirth complicated, if not life-threatening – Edna Adan’s maternity hospital in Hargeisa provides much-needed assistance to thousands of pregnant women.

Adan, who was circumcised when she was just eight years old, also campaigns against FGM, though she does not talk openly about it like many Western feminists might because it is still a delicate topic, and being so widespread (it is estimated that almost all Somali women and girls aged between 15 and 49 have undergone this painful procedure), it is difficult to broach the subject in a way that will not offend the women she is trying to reach.

I met this remarkable woman at the Hargeisa Book Festival in 2014. I found her not only to be extremely articulate and fluent in English (she was once Somaliland’s foreign minister), but very committed to her work and vision. She spoke about her well-equipped maternity hospital that has trained more than 1,500 nursing students, and the need for more women to go into the field of medicine.

When I asked her about what she was doing to eradicate FGM, she did not answer directly; instead, she handed me a brochure, which had detailed drawings of the procedure, and which explained why it was a health risk for women and girls. (It was only later that I became aware about why most Somali women do not like to talk about their personal experiences of FGM. It is because, as one female Somali writer based in the UK told me, “Somali women don’t like to be reduced to their vaginas”.)

The obsession with FGM and hijabs also obscures the fact that women’s oppression is structural and systemic – women and girls will be raped, violated or oppressed even if they stop undergoing FGM and even if they throw off their hijabs. As the Sudanese women’s rights activist Hala Al-Karib noted, “Most Northern institutions reduce women’s rights and violations against women to a one- dimensional fight against FGM . . . In this context, the rhetoric of gender mainstreaming becomes a box-ticking exercise while minimising the root causes of women’s subordination and the politics behind the subordination. The few publicly-aware activists become the outsiders, bearers of bad news, and are often labelled difficult – too political.”

Coming home

There are many Somali women living abroad who have decided to go home and contribute to their society. It seems astonishing to me that so many of these women in the diaspora would choose to do this, given the dangers and risks involved and given that Somalia is a highly patriarchal society where the threat of sexual discrimination and violence are ever-present. Hodan Nalayeh was one such woman.

Hodan, a Canadian citizen and broadcast journalist, returned to her homeland in 2014 to make a documentary about Mogadishu. She said she made the decision to leave Canada and go back to Somalia because “nobody looked at me like I was strange, nobody cared if I had a dark complexion . . . And we never had that belonging in the diaspora”. More importantly, she came back because her “country needed her”.

She then launched the popular Integration TV on YouTube to tell “positive stories” about Somalia. After visiting Kismaayo (once the stronghold of Al Shabaab), for example, she posted images of its beautiful beaches and stunning sunsets. She told the BBC that her mission was to “uplift the spirit and inspire young Somalis around the world to take charge of their destinies”.

Hodan and her husband were tragically killed last year in an attack on a hotel in Kismaayo believed to have been carried out by Al Shabaab. She was 43 years old and pregnant at the time. After her death, a Twitter user posted: “I don’t know a single Somali who didn’t fall back in love with Somalia through Hodan Nalayeh’s broadcasts”.

Giving women a voice

Hodan’s death was a tragedy, but her resilience and spirit reflect the desire of so many Somali women to see their country become a functioning state. I truly believe that if more women like Dr Hawa Abdi, Edna Adan and Hodan Nalaye took over the running of their country, Somalia wouldn’t be in the mess it has been in for the last thirty years.

The civil war in 1991 devastated Somalia, but rebuilding the country has been an almost impossible enterprise due to clan divisions, corruption, and Islamic fundamentalist forces that are sustained through extortionist practices (such collection of “protection money” – a form of taxation imposed on people who live in Al Shabaab-controlled areas) and foreign meddling and financial support to regressive forces within Somalia.

I don’t mean to generalise, but I do feel that if there were more women entering Somalia’s very divisive and corrupt politics – where clan and gender often determine who gets what position – the country would have more schools, more hospitals and better services.

Women would also ensure that regressive legislation that is harmful to women and girls, like the “Sexual Intercourse Related Crimes Bill” that was tabled in Somalia’s parliament recently, would not see the light of day. This bill, if passed, will not only allow child marriage once a girl’s “sexual organs are mature”, but would also allow forced marriage “as long as the family gives consent”. Critics say the bill would weaken protection for victims of sexual violence, especially girls, and would contravene international human and women’s rights conventions.

Anarchy and lawlessness in Somalia have embedded a culture of violence that allows men to rape with impunity. A survey by Trust Law, a project of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, found that Somalia was one of the worst places in the world to be a woman. There have been cases of women being ostracised and even killed when they report having been raped.

Therefore, male-dominated governing bodies in Somalia, including clan elders’ councils, cannot be trusted to ensure that women and girls in Somalia are protected and get the services they – and all Somalis, including men – need. Women should be given a voice in the running of their country because, being the “invisible clan”, women are more likely than men to unite their divided, clan- based country, and bring about a semblance of sanity, gender-sensitivity, order and accountability in the country’s nascent governance and administrative structures. 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.

The Exodus: Corona-Induced Urban-To-Rural Migration

By Dauti Kahura

When Charles Bukeko attended Jogoo Road Primary School in the 1970s, it was a bastion of sporting, athletic and academic prowess in an era when the emerging Eastlands urban spaces were orderly, neat, well-tended, and provided a quality environment In which to live.

Bukeko lived in Lumumba Estate, the council estate where many civil servants lived in the 1970s and 80s, and where he developed a love for football above all else. To be fair though, the football frenzy of the seventies had a psychological grip on the national psyche, and provided the safety valve for a nation that was still reeling from the political mistakes of the mid-to-late 60s. The Abaluhya Football Club (AFC), in particular, enjoyed a winning streak year- on-year despite the cancellation of the 1971 national league halfway into the season.

The national team, Harambee Stars, had qualified for the Nations Cup finals in 1972 and at the City Stadium, Gor Sirkal had secured a big win in 1975. At the same time Kenneth Matiba had become the Kenya Football Federation chairman. The likes of the double-foot dribbling wizard Chege Ouma, the all-rounder Jackson Aluko, and maestro Livingstone Madegwa were harassing African soccer giants Cameroon, Mali, and Togo in their qualifiers group, and setting new precedents in Kenyan football.

It was inevitable then that, Papa, who had schooled just down the road from the then Jogoo Road Stadium (now City Stadium), would give football a shot, just like many youths from Mbotela, Maringo Estate, Lumumba, Jericho and along Jogoo Road. ”I’m an ardent fan of AFC Leopards. My dad took me to the field to watch AFC Leopards when I was 4 years old,” Bukeko once remarked. This love for football, a legacy from his father, would grow through the decades and he became an ardent fan of the local leagues, while throwing his support behind clubs like Sofapaka and AFC Leopards.

Bukeko was born in Buhalarire in the central Marachi region of Mumias, in Kakamega. The eldest son of Valeria Makokha and Cosmas Wafula, Bukeko first lived in Lumumba Estate before he was transferred to Mumias School, as an unsuccessful last-ditch effort by his parents to dissuade him from focusing too much on football. He still went on to play central midfield for Mumias FC in Kakamega, Nzoia FC and Pan Paper FC in Webuye, and for Congo boys in Mombasa. It’s during his stint at the coast that he earned the name Champezi, a transliteration of champion, given to him by former president Moi’s political kingpin at the coast, the late Shariff Nassir.

Bukeko eventually hang his boots and exchanged the sea and football for a life back in Nairobi, moving to a house in Uhuru Estate next to Kisimenti Building, and right around the corner from where he grew up in Lumumba Estate. Neighbours describe him as an affable man who took over the estate’s security affairs in the 1990s as crime rates rose in tandem with the negative economic impact of the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the early 90s. Together with his wife Beatrice Ebbie Andega, Bukeko had three children – Anthony, born in 2006, Charlie in 2007 and Wendy in 2009. He was also man of quiet faith, an ardent teacher of the scriptures and a church leader.

Bukeko stumbled onto the stage by sheer fate when working as a halls custodian at the University of Nairobi; the set of a theatre play that his friend was staging, fell apart, the actors bailed out and Bukeko stepped in and saved the day. That act in the late 1990s marked his first appearance at the Kenya National Theatre and sparked a flame that became a burning ambition. His friend Patrick Kanyeki recalls Bukeko’s laser-focused, borderline obsessive approach to acting; Papa would write his own scripts, master and rehearse his lines and start his morning trek into the city so that he would arrive at the KNT early in the day.

And so, long before he became Papa Shirandula, Charles Bukeko had established a name for himself at the Kenya National Theatre, working in the late 1990s and early 2000s alongside the likes of David Kinyua, Ben Kivuitu, Fred Muriithi, Patrick Kanyeki and Peter Mudamba, under Pambazuka Productions. He later moved to the French Cultural Centre to work alongside such emerging young talents as Nice Githinji and Shiko Mburu.

Bukeko’s first big break came when he acted in playwright JPR Ochieng’ Odero’s The Film Doesn’t Film, earning Sh30,000 for a minor role at a time when cast members regularly took home Sh300 at the day’s end.

The veteran ecologist and thespian Ochieng’ Odero would become Bukeko’s first director before he moved on to the Phoenix Theatre and met producer Ian Mbugua, the man who introduced him to the legendary Scottish ex-serviceman and sailor-turned-thespian, James Falkland. Falkland, had just founded Phoenix Theatre with his partner Debonnaire. Bukeko spent the next three years at the Phoenix working with Falkland and his friends James Ward and Kenneth Mason. It was also around this time that he started putting together his own shows under Mbalamwezi Productions in collaboration with producer Peter Mudamba.

Faces for TV

Enter the celebrated filmmaker Bob Nyanja of Cinematic Solutions who had been a literature undergraduate at the University of Nairobi when Bukeko was employed there as a Halls custodian. Bob had returned from South Carolina with a Master of Fine Arts in film in the late 90s ready to transition Kenya’s stuttering creative arts onto the screens.

Nyanja first featured Bukeko as a night guard in the 2007 film Malooned! in which Peter Ndambuki aka Churchill played the role of a street urchin. “We walked all over town looking for a guard’s uniform that would fit Papa”, Nyanja remarked in a tribute to Bukeko. Bob Nyanja was also the muscle behind the massive TV comedy hit Redykulass.

It was during the opening of Malooned! at the Junction Mall that Royal Media Services director Wachira Waruru proposed the idea of expanding the role of the guard into a television series. Bukeko, sensing the opportunity to do something remarkable, wrote the first scripts of what went on to become this hugely successful show, and Papa Shirandula was born.

There was a visionary zeal to try out new programming for local audiences in the mid-2000s pioneered by Wachira Waruru, Bob Nyanja, Catherine Wamuyu and a band of local directors, filmmakers and producers. This risk-taking paid off and released a tide of relatable content that beat back the dominance of foreign soap operas.

For Bukeko, Papa Shirandula was the culmination of nearly 12 years of stage productions at the Kenya National Theatre, Braeburn Theatre, Phoenix Theatre, and dozens of screen productions. When asked about his big breaks Papa remarked, “My breakout role was when I was cast as Herod for the play, Nativity at the Braeburn Theatre”.

The name Shirandula is made up of the Wanga word khurandula which loosely translates as tenacity. It’s clear why Bukeko would go for that moniker given his own personality. The name’s resonance with the public also spoke to his impressive ability to transform seemingly mundane acts and phrases into social currency.

As a thespian, Bukeko embodied a dogged determination and constantly decried the youth’s desire for quick success. While he often spoke about the urban youth’s predicaments, he also didn’t shy away from criticising their impatience and the effect it had on their young budding careers. As a testament of his belief in the youth, Bukeko, now Shirandula, was the first guest at the Churchill Show set up by his contemporary Peter Ndambuki to show-case emerging talent.

His own show, Papa Shirandula, fed into the emerging classist posture of Kenya’s viewership at a point where Mexican soaps like La Mujer De Lorenzo, Cuando Seas Mia, the South African TV series Reflections, and Asian acts like Kyunki and Kahaani had dominated the screens. By the early to mid-2000s, the Vioja Mahakamani, Vitimbi, Sokomoko and Tausi had long been edged out, while the Boomba Train youth culture of the early 2000s, was demanding for a yet-to-be figured out screenplays.

At the outset, Papa Shirandula’s viewership was limited to its blue-collar origins and brand but soon developed crosscutting audience appeal, partly because of Bukeko’s performance where his persona and his alter-ego blended deeply as both fed off each other. On screen, Bukeko would give way to Papa Shirandula, this security guard who had three wives and a white girlfriend and who manages to hide his true profession from them all. Bukeko seamlessly morphed into Papa Shirandula, a burly guard in a red uniform; an impostor who sustained his double life as a patriarch, polygamist, elder, doting father, and scheming character across a series that ran for 13 years.

As Kazungu Matano (Captain Otoyo) recalls, outside his inner circles, Papa’s weight was a sensitive topic and something he privately admitted to struggling with and, indeed, the 1990s build of an athletic man had changed drastically as the years progressed.

In South Africa, Papa was well known through the viral Vodacom ad in which he played the role of a dictator, evoking the role of Joseph Olita, the man from K’ogelo who had played Amin in The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin (1981). The ad is hilarious, comical and very relatable across the continent, a feat only matched by his signature Brrrrrr! moment in the 2007 global Coca Cola advert. Papa went on to feature in the internationally acclaimed Fernando Meirelles book-to-film adaptation, The Constant Gardener (2005), in Malooned! (2007), and in The Captain of Nakara (2012).

The Cultural Phenomenon

In losing Shirandula we have lost something more than a thespian of great prowess and an industry trailblazer. He also mainstreamed a kind of Kenyan blue-collar masculinity which previously had little representation in our popular imagination, where the preacher and the politician are the epitome of masculinity. Out of these two flow all the sub-archetypes that dominate the public imagination of what it means to be a Kenyan man and, therefore, Shirandula’s blue-collar, masculine sub-archetype rarely received the kind of visibility that a lot of other urban sub-archetypes in this country do.

And so, throughout the 80s and 90s, we see a masculinity where the man would comfortably live in the tea estates of Kericho, or Kaloleni—as Marjorie Oludhe chronicled in Coming To Birth —while his family lived on the land in Whisero, or Kanyadhiang. Guess who had done that decades earlier?

Bukeko played into the paradoxical stereotype of the Luhya man as a potbellied guard which fits a little too well with the all too familiar portrayal of Luhyas as dominating the private security sector, Kalenjins the police, Luos the handicrafts sector, Kikuyus trade, and Kambas as loyal civil servants and juniors to Asian bosses.

Ethnic stereotypes range from the funny to the downright disrespectful; a trope which papa had to fight as he exemplified the stigma associated with the job of a security guard. Shirandula gently managed to almost single-handedly give voice, representation, and nuance to the talented, pragmatic, modest, blue-collar masculine sub-archetypes that work in the shadows of capital and its structures. He explored the struggles of that type of man to fit in, the black tax that those men paid, and their complicated relationship with the Juma Andersons (his boss) of capitalist racketeering.

Papa made the careers of many along the way, famous of them all Felix Odiwuor (Jalango), his counterpart, Kazungu Matano (Otoyo), Papa’s onscreen wife Jackie Nyaminde (Wilbroda), Daisy Odeko (Naliaka), William Juma (Juma Anderson), Jackie Vike (Awinja) and Kenneth Gichoya (Njoro), all of whom have also had significant success on radio, on YouTube, as MCs and as comedians.

So when the news of his demise reached the Kenyan newsrooms, a strong sense of loss engulfed the public, a rare occurrence in this age of post-humous flagellations. We haven’t just lost Bukeko, we’ve lost Shirandula, the embodiment of the work ethic of the blue-collar worker, his tenuous relationship with the city—the tough underbelly of capital—and his struggle for dignity and identity.

In a country where the most dominant masculine sub-archetypes are inadvertently generated by the idealized preacher and the politician, Shirandula succeeded in giving voice and nuance to a whole masculine sub-archetype, and to working-class families, and that’s no mean feat. Go well Charles Bukeko.

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.

The Exodus: Corona-Induced Urban-To-Rural Migration

By Dauti Kahura On 14 June 2020, a Sunday afternoon, a young South Sudanese entrepreneur-turned-insurgent died a macabre death in the Lakes region. By Monday morning, gruesome pictures of Kerbino Wol Agok had already circulated on social media, especially in the WhatsApp groups of South Sudanese all over the world and soon, from Adelaide in Australia to Boston in the United States, to Khartoum in Sudan and Nairobi, Kenya, speculation was rife about who had killed him. But outside South Sudan and South Sudanese circles, not many people had heard of Kerbino, a soldier-turned-businessman who had lived in the United States and had trained with the American Special Forces.

One gruesome picture was of Kerbino lying on the ground in the bush surrounded by men in military garb, with a man who seemed to be their leader taking a photo of the dead Kerbino with his smartphone as his colleagues looked on. Another was a close-up of Kerbino’s face showing a bloodied hole in his left cheek, a jungle cap next to his balding head. A third picture was of Kerbino lying on the ground, dressed only in a sweatshirt and boxer shorts.

The official explanation by the South Sudan government is that Kerbino was an insurgent who had been killed in a skirmish with the government security forces. According to the army spokesman, “SSPDF [South Sudan People’s Defence Force] had succeeded in containing a rebellion in its infancy”.

But my interviews with South Sudanese nationals living in Nairobi and South Sudan paint a different picture altogether. Examining the ghastly pictures with a South Sudanese medical doctor in Nairobi, the consultant physician said that the hole on his left cheek suggested Kerbino may have been shot by his captors at close range, the bullet entering the right side of the head and exiting through the left cheek.

Kerbino had the muscular body of one who took his exercise regime seriously. He was born in 1982, just before the rebellion broke out in southern Sudan in 1983, and would later join the “Red Army”, the child-soldiers who were used in the war against the dominance of the North.

In 2010, five years after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005, Kerbino, went back to South Sudan and founded Kerbino Agok Security Services (KASS), headquartered in Juba and which by the time of his death had spread its operations to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Nairobi. He had also started Kerbino Executive Conferences, as well as a philanthropic organisation, The Nile Foundation. In total, Kerbino’s organisations employed about 2,000 people.

Despite not being well-known outside the borders of South Sudan, Kerbino was a fast-rising star, at least, according to many South Sudanese who live inside and outside South Sudan. They may not have entirely agreed with his modus operandi, but many of the South Sudanese I interviewed agreed on this one thing: the 38-year-old man was destined for greater things.

Kerbino’s problems seem to have started when he was detained in April 2018, held incommunicado at the Chinese-built Blue House, the headquarters of the National Security Services (NSS) in Juba, the capital city of South Sudan.

In a recorded testimony, American academic Robert A. Portada, who had forged a lasting friendship with Kerbino, said that, “on April 27, 2018, Kerbino was arrested without charge and incarcerated inside the infamous and notorious Blue House. Despite getting closer to signing the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R-ARCSS), the summer of 2018 saw the arbitrary arrests, most prominently of the political activist Peter Biar Ajak in July”. Ajak was a PhD student at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.

Ajak, who has been in Nairobi since his release alongside his friend Kerbino, told the BBC on 24 July 2020 that Kerbino was captured and executed by government security forces. He also said that the National Security Service (NSS) has been sending him threatening messages telling him that they will kidnap and send him back to Juba. That NSS officers roam the streets of Nairobi is an open secret. Two years ago, they kidnapped some South Sudanese youth from the streets of Nairobi and ferried them back to Juba, where it is believed they were imprisoned and tortured. Their crime? They had been posting criticism of President Kiir on their Facebook timelines.

Kerbino was among seven detainees at the Blue House who faced trial. In the “Testimony of Kerbino Wol”, Portada, an Associate Professor of political science at Kutztown University, wrote: “Since March 21, 2018 seven prisoners have sat for trial in Juba. From their cells in the Blue House, the headquarters of the NSS, they are escorted to and from the courtroom while closely guarded by the NSS officers. Among the seven is Kerbino Wol, the young South Sudan entrepreneur and philanthropist. Though the trial is being held in a civilian court, each day NSS soldiers surround the building, armed with automatic weapons. NSS officers are stationed at all entrances to the court, and roam the courtroom during the proceedings”.

Portada also wrote that, “adding to the repressive environment in which the seven prisoners are being tried, the United Nations released a report on April 30 stating that it is highly probable that Dong Samuel Luak, a prominent South Sudanese lawyer and human rights activist, and Aggrey Ezbon Idri, a member of the opposition SPLM-IO [Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-In- Opposition], were abducted and killed by the NSS in 2017. It is no secret that the NSS has committed atrocities with impunity in South Sudan. But now, Kerbino Wol and his fellow prisoners must sit for trial in the full presence of a national security agency revealed to have executed and disappeared nonviolent activists”.

South Sudanese sources that cannot be named because of the sensitivity of the information they shared and to protect their identities, alleged that Kerbino was executed by NSS officers. “Kuol Fidel, head of NSS, which also acts as the internal security bureau, and one his officers known as Akol Khor, did not get along with Kerbino. They had always been thinking of how to neuter him. So, when news came through that he had been found dead and considering the circumstances that had led to his confrontation with the NSS, many South Sudanese couldn’t fail to immediately connect Kerbino’s death with NSS”. Why would Kerbino pick a quarrel with top ranking NSS officers? Kerbino, Kuol and Akol are all Dinkas who come from Tonj, which is north of Lakes region. “Kerbino as a civilian was rising all too fast. It was suspected he had political ambitions in his home region of Lakes. Kuol, too is believed to harbour political ambitions, if the peace agreement between Salva Kiir Mayardit and Riek Machar holds, there could be a general election in 2023”. With his rising star, popularity, youth, access to big money and international connections, Kerbino posed a threat to certain individuals were he to choose to contest the governorship of Lakes region, for example.

One of the first things that Kuol and Akol are alleged to have done, as they continually harassed Kerbino, was to close his businesses before throwing him into detention. Portada’s testimony says that “Kerbino Wol’s businesses and bank accounts were shut down by NSS”. In justification, the NSS alleged that Kerbino was supplying arms to Riek Machar. “But this is a spurious allegation”, said a South Sudanese source in Nairobi. “All this time Kerbino is alleged to have been sending arms to Riek, he was holed up in South Africa. It is evident and obvious that there are some people in the NSS who were hell-bent on nailing Kerbino”.

“On September 27, 2018”, wrote Portada, “the President of the Republic, H.E. Salva Kiir Mayardit, issued Republican Order Number 17, ordering that all political prisoners be released with immediate effect under the supervision of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Nevertheless, detainees including Kerbino and Peter were locked in the Blue House”. The next time the world would hear of these cases and of Kerbino in particular was during the prison break incident that took place on 7 October 2018 “to call attention to their illegal detentions”, said Kerbino during his trial.

“The Blue House already had earned a notorious reputation as one of the several sites where NSS authorities had arbitrarily arrested, detained, tortured, and ill-treated people to the point of death according to a report released by Amnesty International”, explained Portada’s testimony. “On October 7, for the first time, prisoners in the Blue House were able to communicate with the international media and testify to these conditions themselves”.

What happened at the Blue House on 7October 2018? Some South Sudanese who knew Kerbino’s character well said Kerbino had become increasingly incensed with his continued detention and harassment by some of the NSS officers, and had demanded that they either release him or charge him so that he could defend himself in a court of law. “On this day, a fracas ensued at the Blue House and Kerbino is believed to have staged a kind of a Rambo-style prison break in which he led a group of fellow prisoners into storming the warehouse which also acted as an armoury”.

In his notes, Portada says that, “though the state security responded by encircling the Blue House and repeatedly firing on the compound, the nonviolent prisoners negotiated a peaceful end to the standoff”. It is after the “prison break” that the state now decided to take Kerbino to court and charge him with the criminal offence of causing a skirmish within the NSS precincts”, explained my South Sudanese interlocutor. That now became his main charge. “Kerbino was taken to court in April 2019 and charged with causing mayhem on 7 October 2018”.

In his testimony, Portada says, however, that “following the October 7 incident the Pan-African Lawyers Union (PALU), working with friends and associates of Kerbino Wol, immediately brought his case before the East Africa Court of Justice (EACJ), seeking justice for his unlawful arrest and illegal detention. In suing the Government of South Sudan, PALU asked the EACJ to order GoSS to produce Kerbino Wol before a competent and impartial court, and to restore to him his properties and stop attacks and seizure of Kerbino’s businesses. Though GoSS acknowledged the authority of EACJ by sending a representative to a hearing on March 25, 2019, they have not produced Kerbino before the regional court nor accounted for the circumstances of his incarceration or seizure of his property”. Instead, what the court in Juba did was to begin the prosecution’s case on the same day the EACJ asked that Kerbino be presented before it. On 25 March the South Sudan government representative said the Juba trial removed the necessity for adjudication in the EACJ.

“Called to the witness stand by the defence at the Juba court, Kerbino spoke in both Arabic and English as he delivered his testimony”, said Portada. On 11 May, after two weeks of imprisonment, NSS officers accused Kerbino his security company to conspire against the state. The NSS placed Kerbino in solitary confinement with the threat that, “we have other means of getting the truth”. But in a surprising twist of events, President Kiir offered a presidential amnesty to Kerbino.

Kerbino went home, but something had been implanted in his mind, said a South Sudanese who knew Kerbino personally. “Kerbino started toying with the idea of forming a movement that would agitate for political change. He called his movement 7th October”. Friends and foes have faulted Kerbino for seemingly acting in a rush. A South Sudanese who knew Kerbino told me that “Monydiar Maker, the youth leader of the ethnic group called Rup, duped Kerbino that he could mobilise young men for him to form a ragtag army and it seems Kerbino, in his unprocessed anger against what he considered to be inhuman treatment from the state, believed he could orchestrate change by forming a guerilla army in present day South Sudan”.

Monydiar was killed four days before Kerbino’s sudden death, possibly by the same people who killed Kerbino.

Trapped in the bush and possibly realising his folly that forming a guerilla army is not the same as starting a security company, Kerbino contacted one of his friends for help. “It is believed that Kerbino reached out to a friend, one Omar Isaak, and asked him to hire a helicopter to airlift him to Khartoum”, said my South Sudanese source. “Kerbino could have given Omar upward of $200,000 for the job”. Many South Sudanese believe Omar betrayed Kerbino and that is why he was captured.

The circumstances leading to Kerbino’s death reflect those of the death of George Athol Deng. Deng was a Dinka from Jonglei state. Short of stature but a lethal soldier, he was a favourite fighter of John Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).. In 2010 Deng, who was in his 50s, ran for the Jonglei governor’s seat. When he lost the election he returned to the bush, but is believed to have been captured by government forces and summarily executed.

Despite the return of Riek Machar, leader of the SPLM-IO, to his old job as Vice President – which has however been split into five positions – South Sudan is a country still very much ill at ease with itself. “As we are talking, the country is on fire”, said a South Sudanese in Nairobi “Militia gangs are roaming South Sudan with abandon, because Kiir is a lame duck president. He does not have the control of the country beyond Juba”.

My friend said South Sudan is currently on fire: “There could be at least 10 – 15 internecine wars going on in South Sudan. The greater Dinka of Gumuruk and Pibor is at war with Murle. The Murle, who are viewed as a war-like ethnic community in South Sudan hence, always seen as an aggressor community is at war with a coalition of Dinka and Lou Nuer”. The South Sudanese also said the internecine wars have not spared intra-community’s wars.

“The Dinka sub-clans of Apuk and Aguok that come from the President’s home county of Gogrial are at war with each other. The intra-communal war among the Agar people has been going on for nearly 20 years. The Nuer of Bentiu are busy fighting the Dinka Twic Mayardit”. The Nuers, observed my friend, just like the Dinka have been fighting among themselves. “The Nuers from Bentiu have been warring with the Nuers from Warrap state. So, if the ethnic communities are not fighting between themselves, they are fighting among themselves. These inter-state fights and unrests, have made South Sudan seem ungovernable”.

Said the South Sudan national: “As if the internecine wars inside South Sudan are not enough, there has been unrest between Sudan and South Sudan. “The Malual Dinka have been quarrelling with the Missinya Arabs of Sudan. The picture coming from South Sudan is not good at all. It is from this backdrop that Kerbino met his untimely death”.

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The Exodus: Corona-Induced Urban-To-Rural Migration

By Dauti Kahura In pre-colonial Africa, before the Berlin conference that led to the “Scramble for Africa” among European countries and the subsequent creation of arbitrary territorial boundaries we now refer to as countries, “states” were defined by some form of shared heritage, not just in the form of hard tangible artefacts, but in culture – practices and knowledge that are acquired by peoples in situ. When populations moved, they carried this heritage with them and adjusted it to fit in with the new realities they encountered in their new homelands.

The current crisis precipitated by the COVID-19 global pandemic has severely restricted travel for recreation and business and the sharing of experiences and ideas across the world. In a manner of speaking, it has put globalisation on “pause” as countries must look inwards for ways to mitigate its impact on health, social, and economic systems.

The complexity of the COVID-19 pandemic lies in the fact that there is still no universally accepted approach to its mitigation or management. Individual countries have, therefore, been compelled to draw on their own intellectual and material resources to address the impact of the pandemic, with varying levels of success. Some countries have taken a reactionary approach, while others struggle to find direction, illustrating the need for us to retake control of our living heritage and re-imagine ourselves in the light of our own needs and aspirations.

Double standards

The true origins of this pandemic may never be known, so those of us who are lay people take what the media give us. The spectre of a zoonosis “jumping” from wild animals into humans through the consumption of their meat and the sheer speed of communication (or mis-communication) about this are among the most startling features of this pandemic.

I have often spoken about how the portrayal of the consumption of wild animals is one of the most overt and widely accepted expressions of racial prejudice in our times. It has long been an accepted norm that the meat of wild animals must be described in genteel terms when it is consumed by white people, as is the killing of all manner of creatures. The nature of conservation discourse has normalised the use of the different terms “game meat” and “bush meat” even to describe consumption of flesh from the same animal species, based on the ethnicity of the procurer. Slaughter is routinely described as “sport” and dignified as ““noble” all over the world when perpetrated by white people, and occasionally elites of colour. After 20 years as a conservation practitioner, I am familiar with the cult-like manner in which we pursue the cause. It is considered above reproach, and all manner of ills can be visited upon human societies as long as they can be demonstrated to be serving some environmental conservation goal.

When the pandemic started, the media were instantly awash with (frankly revolting) images of people of Asian descent eating whole bats in soup. Suddenly, newly-used terms like “wet markets” were de rigueur in news bulletins, as were images of Chinese markets with live and dead creatures of all kinds for sale, either whole, live, or in various stages of dismemberment. It was, therefore, a feeling of déjà vu when the tone taken by the Western media portrayed the outbreak almost as some kind of “divine retribution” visited upon the Chinese people for the consumption of meat from wild animals. (This was before the virus spread globally and stopped being regarded as a Chinese problem.) Indeed, scientists were falling over themselves to look for coronaviruses in all manner of trafficked animals, like pangolins. Racial undertones have always been part of global conservation practice, and that is the reason why Europe and the United States have largely escaped the opprobrium that has been visited on China for the ivory trade, despite it being third globally behind the former two in this vice.

When wildlife is used as food in the global South and East, it draws near universal revulsion in the West with regards to the “cruelty” of the activity. Those who have visited the United States, however, are familiar with the seasonal hunting and eating of deer, elk, moose, squirrels, opossum and rabbits, not to mention turkeys, ducks, and other wild birds.

Those who are so irked by “wet markets” would do well to familiarise themselves with the “rattlesnake roundup”, an annual activity in the state of Texas in the United States. The roundup is a display of extraordinary cruelty where thousands of rattlesnakes are collected from the wild, mostly by being flushed out of their dens with petrol. It takes around two weeks to collect the required number of snakes for the festival, during which time the captive reptiles are kept in the dark without food or water. Come the weekend of the festival, the entertainment of visitors will include the ritual decapitation of snakes and the participants (including children) competing to strip skins off the still writhing snake bodies and flaying them for meat (which is served on site and consumed with a variety of drinks). Children also engage in making murals from hand prints in snake blood, amongst other activities.

A close observation of the reportage on this reveals the degree of effort put into “cleansing” this strange ritual, notably its description as a “celebration of culture” that brings in $8.4 million into the town of Sweetwater, Texas. The scale of the carnage hit a record high in 2016 when 11 tonnes (24,262 pounds) of rattlesnakes were reportedly harvested. The reporting didn’t specify that this represented around 10,000 snakes (calculation made from the average weight of a rattlesnake).

How then does the Western media contrive to maintain this critical focus on “unacceptable” animal consumption practices in the global South while maintaining studious silence on the same in their own countries? What then is a “wet market”? Can the Texas rattlesnake roundup be described as such, and if not, why not?

Characterising the consumption of reptiles, rodents, chiroptera (bats), marsupials (opossums) as “Asian” traits is simply racial prejudice. Similarly, the capture, caging and sale of wild animals in Asian markets is described as cruel whereas sport hunting, whaling, and foxhunting by Caucasian peoplesare accepted, celebrated, and even defended robustly, when need be.

Conservation, tourism and dietary tastes

Personally, as an individual with very conservative (some might say pedestrian) tastes in food, travelling is full of challenges in terms of foods that I encounter around the world. I remember particularly an incident of a Maasai colleague being perturbed by a dinner offering of “venison” at a lodge in rural Quebec in Canada. I had to clarify to him that venison is deer meat.

The Maasai are traditionally livestock producers and are known to frown upon the consumption of meat from wild animals. But this was a relatively mild challenge for him, compared to various raw meats, raw fish, marine crustaceans, and snails that he and I have encountered on our travels to different continents.

The variety of dietary tastes and preferences around the world are one of the most prominent indicators of human diversity, and have long been celebrated and studied by travelers and scholars. This pandemic, however, has upset the genteel veneer with which we present our differences and has left our class, racial, and cultural prejudices ruthlessly exposed. If indeed the slaughter of wildlife is a vile aspect of human nature, then why is Theodore Roosevelt’s 1909 hunting safari in Kenya so celebrated by a conservation body (The Smithsonian Institution) over a century later? This expedition was a bloodbath, where the hunters killed and trapped more than 11,000 animals, including multiple specimens of the “big game” species that Roosevelt took particular pleasure in killing.

Conservation and tourism have long been an arena that struggles with racism and classism, and my country Kenya has for the last 100 years been the poster child for what is good and wrong about the nexus of conservation and tourism in Africa. Due to travel bans and lockdowns, tourism in the country has largely collapsed. The obsession with foreign tourists (referred to lovingly as “arrivals”) has left established facilities struggling to appeal to indigenous and local clients for whom they had very little time under normal circumstances.

The real tragedy, however, is in the wildlife conservancies, where conservation NGOs had been going out of their way to convince and coerce previously resilient pastoralist communities to spurn their livelihoods and identities (that were based upon livestock production) and to share landscapes with wildlife. The narrative was that livestock was bad and their numbers had to be suppressed. The landscape didn’t belong to the people, but to the wildlife, and the wildlife had no intrinsic cultural value. It was for tourists, and pastoralists’ livelihoods would reside in service to the tourists.

To be a “good” (read: compliant) community worthy of handouts, the community needed to move to the periphery of their lands, leaving the best parts for tourism They had to reduce their herds (or move them away to go and overgraze someone else’s turf), and learn to serve (be a waiter, ranger, cook, or beadwork maker) at the altar of tourism.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, reports from community conservancies invariably feature penury – communities struggling to make a living and depending on food handouts, all due to the collapse of tourism. For those who understand the livestock economy, pastoralist communities depending on food handouts is unthinkable in a year that has seen such abundance of rainfall and pasture growth. The conservation cult had succeeded in compromising the resilience of entire communities.

The language of environmentalism and assistance

Students of political history will experience déjà vu; 200 years after its initial foray, Western neoliberalism is once again bringing rural Africa to its knees by destroying resilience and creating dependency. The only difference is that this time it is hidden in the language of environmentalism and assistance.

The world today needs to wake up to the threat to social stability posed by the global environmental movement fashioned in the West. The pursuit of its goals is relentless, and has the hallmarks of a cult. Nonagenarian Westerners like Sir David Attenborough routinely prescribe future goals to young populations in the global South (backed by environmental cinema that deliberately excludes human populations from the frame). As our youth struggle with the visions of old Westerners, our leaders are confronted with advice and “guidance” from a European teenage girl, delivered with the glib assurance of someone who doesn’t have anywhere near the amount of knowledge required to confer a modicum of self-doubt.

As African students of environmental sciences strive to make their voices heard in academia, they get confronted by ludicrous theories like the half-earth theory, proposed by E. O. Wilson, a pioneer of ecology from Harvard University, one of the pinnacles of academia. This theory proposes that half the earth should be “protected” for the survival of biodiversity.

However, what proponents of this theory don’t state is that this biodiversity will be protected mostly in the tropics, because the temperate lands do not have biodiversity worth protecting in such a drastic manner. Any attempt to actualise such a move would amount to genocide, but the world routinely accepts such fascism when environmental reasons are used to support it.

Indeed, the United Nations and other global bodies like the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) have taken up the cause, proposing to raise the recommended percentage of land under protection, from the current 14 per cent to 30 per cent. The voices pushing this movement are varied, but two uniformities persist – the voices are of white people and they say nothing about the difference in consumption patterns between themselves and the global South.

So-called “global” environmental targets must be tailored to meet the needs and aspirations of individual nations, or we run the risk of imperialism. Yellowstone National Park was created by violence and disenfranchisement, but it is still used as a template for fortress conservation over a century later, and celebrated as a world heritage site.

For generations, our consumption patterns have never been spoken about globally, because to do so would be to acknowledge that we in the global South have always been sustainable societies. Logic dictates that our consumption patterns shouldn’t now be used to vilify us as the source of a scourge, which strangely appears not to have affected us in the way the global North expected.

The term “new normal” has been bandied about ad nauseam to describe the post-COVID19 world. In reality, the manner in which the people and the environment of the global South have been exploited by the Occident over generations has been abnormal. The coronavirus crisis may have just set a few things right.

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This article is part of The Elephant Food Edition Series done in collaboration with Route to Food Initiative (RTFI). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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The Exodus: Corona-Induced Urban-To-Rural Migration

By Dauti Kahura

It is 1 p.m. on a hot, sunny, Friday. Across from the Sigona Golf Club on the Nairobi-Nakuru dual highway that is being reconstructed by the Chinese construction company China Wu Yi, Phyllis Ikoa’s food kiosk is teeming with men in helmets and overalls munching their hot, fresh lunch with their rough seasoned hands. At Ikoa’s food den, it is break time for her customers, who have just ended a gruelling morning shift.

Ikoa’s food kiosk, popularly known in local parlance as kibanda (shed), is nothing to talk about: it is small and many of Ikoa’s customers lack sitting space, which comprises form benches and makeshift tables. The kiosk is occasionally smoky because she often uses firewood as fuel for cooking.

Yet, despite the apparent “discomfort”, nothing beats Ikoa’s steamy, well-cooked food served at the most affordable of prices. Nothing compares with the camaraderie that her food brings among the easy-going, jocular, casual labourers who congregate at Ikoa’s eating den to gossip about their supervisors and site managers.

“I practically know all my customers by their first names,” said Ikoa. “It is important for me to know them because they keep my business going. Without them, I wouldn’t be in Kikuyuland.”

Ikoa is a Mteso from Adungosi village in Malaba town, Busia County, which is more than 400 kilometres from the Sigona area, which is 17 kilometres from the Nairobi city centre. From Tesoland, Ikoa brought her culinary skills that have diversified, as well as rivalled, the local cuisine. The local cuisine is mostly unsophisticated and usually consists of githeri – a stewed broth of maize and beans, occasionally spruced up with potatoes and chopped carrots.

Photo. Kiki Photography

Ikoa’s food menu is diverse: Chapati and madondo (beans), rice and ndengu (green grams), ugali and tilapia from Lake Victoria, stewed matoke (bananas) from Uganda, and stewed or boiled meat that can be accompanied with either chapatti, ugali or rice.

Ikoa told me her customers prefer to eat her specially cooked meat, Teso style, with ugali. But it is her chapatis that have made Ikoa a popular name in Sigona, a location within the larger Kikuyu constituency in Kiambu County. Because of the popularity of her chapatis, some customers demand the inclusion of tea in her menu, so that they can enjoy the option of chapati and tea as a snack.

Phyllis Ikoa’s chapatti-making skills have turned her into a household name in and around the Sigona area. “They’re people who come from Kikuyu town to eat my chapatti,” said a proud Ikoa. Kikuyu is just about three kilometres southwest of Sigona. There are others who come all the way from Kiambaa. Kiambaa is a bit further; it five kilometres up north of Sigona. “They all say my chapatis are really big and tasty.” I asked her why her chapatis have become famous and popular: “What now can I tell you? I prepare them well, they’re soft and they are big enough for one to enjoy them with either tea or with an accompaniment of your choice.”

I found a female customer who works at the Sigona Club house at Ikoa’s eating joint. Looking sophisticated with her permed hair, she heaped praise on Ikoa’s chapatis. Despite looking out of place, the lady said she was not restrained by those concerns.

Photo. Kiki Photography

“Because of the lady, I’ve been getting orders to make her chapatis for ‘important’ people,” said Ikoa. By important people, Ikoa meant people who ordinarily would never be seen ordering chapatis at her kibanda, or even letting people know where the chapatis were cooked. She also makes, on order, chapatis for families who may not have the time to make them, or because they think she makes them tastier, and for unmarried men and women living alone.

“Phyllis’ food is the best around here: it is well-prepared, it’s nutritious, it’s fresh, it has variety, but above all, it’s affordable,” said mzee Santana, one of her loyal customers. Santana is a caddie at the Sigona Golf Club. Now in his mid-70s, he carries a wide range of experiences. He has seen it all. He has been a caddie for 46 years since 1974, when he first came to look for work in Sigona from his home town of Limuru. Without food sheds like the one run by Ikoa, Santana told me, many caddies would be going hungry.

“Where would we be eating and there isn’t a food kiosk inside the club? In any case, the club would never ever dream of having such a structure inside the club’s precincts,” he said.

With a club house that can be seen from the road, the golf club only caters for the golfers, who happen to be some of the wealthiest Kenyans and privileged foreigners working in the country. At lunchtime, as the golfers took their break and troop to the club house, the poor caddies’ had to worry what and where they would fill their stomachs with.

“Phyllis just came the other day,” explained Santana. (The other day for mzee Santana is about 10 years ago.) Before the arrival of Ikoa, there wasn’t any kibanda anywhere; the caddies would just laze in the sun during the lunch hour while the golfers enjoyed the sumptuous meals.

Photo. Kiki Photography

Before the real estate construction boom around Sigona area started about a dozen years ago, caddies comprised nearly all of Ikoa’s customers. “Over time I developed a rapport with them and even when they did not have ready cash, I’d still give them food and they would pay me afterwards once they had the cash, said Ikoa.

Ikoa has an exercise book in which she records her debtors’ names. Today, most of the people who are in that book are casual labourers who are paid weekly, on Fridays. Because of Ikoa’s credit facilities, they can eat and pay later.

“When I began my business here, I realised two things”, said Ikoa. “My customers were the lowly- paid rough and tumble workers who operated on a shoe-string budget, hence they required pocket- friendly priced foodstuff, if they were going to afford to eat it. It’s true, people can’t do without food, but only if they can afford it.”

The food seller said that to keep her customer base happy and always coming back to her, she knew she wasn’t going to compromise on the quality of the food and the pricing wasn’t going to fluctuate too much. “If you want to keep your customers intact in this industry of ours, quality of food is of utmost importance.”

For Sh50 Ikoa’s serves you with a hot plate of rice and madondo and a spattering of vegetables (either cabbage or sukuma wiki), or rice with ndengu, or stewed matoke. For Sh70, you get, depending on your preference, a big brown or white round chapati served with madondo or ndengu.

“Phyllis’s food is filling especially for us guys who do tough manual work, because she serves it in good portions. Here, you know, you’ll be served with fresh food because the food is cooked on a daily basis. You can never hear of anybody complaining of stomach upset, for example, so we’re good,” said Kimani.

Ikoa’s sumptuous delicacy of ugali and tilapia with staked soup, at Sh100, is a favourite among her customers. “She introduced a delicacy that was not very much known in this area. Now people eat fish here with the expertise of the lake region people,” observed Kimani.

Friday is a particularly busy day for Ikoa. It is when the casual labourers are paid their weekly wages. On Fridays, Ikoa knows that she has to prepare lots of chapatis and bean and ndengu stew because of a special clientele that passes by at around 2 p.m. Some Muslim youth who work at the Shell petrol station on the opposite side of her kibanda, have formed a good habit of passing by her kibanda on their way back from the mosque, which is 600 metres up from her food kiosk. They order lots of chapatis, which they eat with bean stew served in a large bowl for the four lads to share, and eat with their bare hands. After eating chapati with madondo, the lads drown the food with copious cups of black tea. Photo. Kiki Photography

Ikoa told me that with the onset of coronavirus, her kibanda business has been badly affected. “Many of my customers have been laid off and I had really to scale down on the food I was used to preparing. Some of my customers would come to me and beg to be given food, with the promise of paying me later, but from what work? It was difficult”.

Mzee Santana told me once coronavirus was declared in Kenya, “the first thing our bosses did was to lock themselves in their houses and keep away from the club. When they gathered the confidence to trickle back to the club, they said they didn’t want to see us near the club and near them. Can you imagine?”

So, outside the club’s main gate, one can see many men waiting outside in groups of three and four. Santana said the club’s management had decreed that all caddies, henceforth, would only be let in the club’s premises with the express permission of their respective golfing bosses. “This means that work becomes intermittent and therefore unpredictable. But one cannot stay at home waiting to get a call from his boss for work.”

Likewise, Ikoa cannot afford to stay at home doing nothing. “After a couple of weeks into the lockdown, I was getting calls from my customers, asking me to venture out and make some food for them. Some of them just wanted a place to hang out, away from their restrictive homes, which they were not used to staying at all day long.” Photo. Kiki Photography

Hence, during this coronavirus crisis, Ikoa’s kibanda has become a meeting place for her customers, who discuss their trials and tribulations, and pool their little cash and buy food from her, while persuading her to provide them with food and keep a record in her exercise book.

Not an entirely new phenomenon, vibandas have always been around since the early 1970s, when they served only tea (in heat-resistant glasses) and mandazi, mainly in estates in Eastlands, which lies in the south-eastern part of Nairobi. Today, they are found practically along every road and street in the city, especially in working class and informal settlements. They, in essence, have become an integral part of the city’s culinary food parlours, serving exotic indigenous dishes and foods that were once ordinarily made in homes.

Street food embodies the essence of Nairobi’s culture, and during the COVID-19 crisis, it is street food vendors that have sustained people who do not have the luxury to have a home-cooked meal or to order food from restaurants. It is the likes of Ikoa, who with their expertise in preparing food that is nutritious and affordable, that have revolutionised the culture of street food in the city.

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This article is part of The Elephant Food Edition Series done in collaboration with Route to Food Initiative (RTFI). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.

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.

The Exodus: Corona-Induced Urban-To-Rural Migration

By Dauti Kahura “History is the science of the state, while memory is the art of the stateless.” – Wendell Hassan Marsh

I’ve never been good at drawing. My hand-eye coordination is rather mediocre, and my visual intelligence middling. Even academic concepts that required some level of 2D/3D visualisation, such as geometry, made me have to actually apply myself. My home was always the written word, in language, in libraries, in novels and stories, to the level of pure abstraction. Which is why algebra and calculus, though challenging, were still somehow delightful – they were a kind of language of their own.

And yet, I’ve always found myself lost in maps. Even though I “dropped” geography as a subject as soon as I was able to – this, I would attribute to my geography teacher whom I was clashing with at the time – I still kept my beloved Philips World Atlas. I used to pore over maps of obscure places like Kiribati and Patagonia during night preps in boarding school instead of doing my homework.

The map is a visual representation of space, compressing land, distance and physical features into a super birds-eye view – if a bird could fly high enough to gain a glimpse of a whole country, continent, or world. By this, maps become instruments of power, giving humans a perspective that is impossible to acquire in real life. Thus maps are never neutral, and are not unequivocally factual or objective – politics and power are always packed into each line and curve, each hill and valley.

What would it look like for Africans to create maps that represent the way they see and experience their own lived realities and experiences? How would one pack in our histories, struggles, movements, triumphs and identities into representations of physical space?

The Pan-African quarterly gazette Chimurenga Chronic explored these ideas in their March 2015 issue titled “New Cartographies”, but questions still remain. For instance, when representing Somalia should one go by the lines drawn by Europeans at the 1884-5 Berlin Conference, or should one go with the territories that Somalis call home, which encompass parts of Ethiopia and Kenya? What of the Swahili Coast, “which extends from Kenya through Tanzania and northern Mozambique to include parts of the Indian Ocean, and whose reluctance to be integrated into any nation-state project other than its own goes back seven centuries”? How about the Sahel region, where the sand obscures the pretentions of “international” borders for people like the Hausa and Fulani? What would it look like for Africans to create maps that represent the way they see and experience their own lived realities and experiences? How would one pack in our histories, struggles, movements, triumphs and identities into representations of physical space?

That edition let memory run loose on history. The idea of memory and lived experiences being transgressive in the face of officialdom has stayed with me since, and has recently re-emerged in my mind in The Nest Collective’s comic book series on Mekatilili wa Menza and Wangu wa Makeri, illustrated by Joe Barasa and Daniel Muli, with Ray Gicharu as art assistant.

For me, the comic book is the transgressive counter to stifling and oppressive official narratives. Being a visual medium, just as the map is, the comic in my view a kind of counter-cartography that centres people, which imperialist narratives would rather see reduced and captured into the extractive logic of mapped territories and nation-states – a logic that has now evolved to the point where, as expertly elucidated by Kalundi Serumaga, African people have become hostages to their elites, for whom borders assume a menacing role, not just in keeping others out, but to ensnare and enclose “their” people in. And in combining text and pictures – which are typically drawings, not photographs – the comic book exists in this liminal space where possibility, not foreclosure, is at the heart of representation.

“Working with the comic book form was quite an adventure because we as the Nest Collective don’t typically work in comics, but we were attracted to the infinite possibilities of the comic form because in comics you can draw a thing, whereas in film – which is one of our primary forms – you’d have to build a whole set,” Njoki Ngumi, member of The Nest Collective, tells me. “The comic book form allows you some distance, your idea doesn’t have to exist corporeally; it can exist directly from the imagination of the illustrator.”

This series in particular takes the stories of two formidable women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whose encounters with the colonial apparatus elicited very different reactions from both. The story of Mekatilili wa Menza revolves around her resistance to British taxation of the Mijikenda people. She dances the kifudu dance at village clearings, a funeral dance that would attract curious onlookers because it was out of place and out of context to perform on an ordinary day. When she had attracted a crowd, she would challenge the people to resist British taxation and control. In the comic’s rendering: “Are you slaves or are you free people? Are you not sons and daughters of this good earth, just like these pale ones? Why then do you let foreigners dictate to you how you shall live your lives?”

For this disturbance of the peace, Mekatilili was banished to Kisii, some 800 kilometres away from her coastal village. Twice the British exiled her, and twice she returned to her people in Mijikenda. How she travelled all that way, at a time when there existed a very rudimentary transport network, and without a map, isn’t addressed in the comic strip, though the LAM Sisterhood, in their Brazen theatre performance in 2018, imagined her walking all the way for weeks until her feet blistered, bled and eventually became calloused and mangled.

Wangu wa Makeri, on the other hand, reacted to British taxation by becoming a headman, a colonial tax collector and an enforcer. She gained this position by leaning on her relationship with her lover, Karuri wa Gakure, who was paramount chief of the Kikuyu at Fort Hall (later renamed Murang’a). Wangu’s husband, Makeri, knew about this relationship as Karuri often would spend a night at their home in the course of his duties and travels as paramount chief. (Traditionally, when a male visitor came calling, one of the host’s wives was expected to “entertain” the visitor at night.)

However, in time, Karuri and Wangu’s relationship developed into an intimacy that was beyond the bounds of their traditional arrangement, and when Karuri let it slip that he was looking to name someone headman, someone “strong and trustworthy, that people can respect…who can collect taxes and punish lawbreakers”, Wangu declared: “Let it be me!”

Wangu ended up being the only female Kikuyu headman/woman during the whole of the British colonial period. She would acquire a reputation as a brutal enforcer. “Her outlandish punishments for tax evaders were the stuff of legend,” the comic book states. “Lawbreakers would have to carry her on their backs, suffering humiliation and ridicule from their neighbours.”

Is this why Wangu wa Makeri is taken to be such a “controversial”, “notorious”, and “near-mythical” figure (descriptors that all appear in the text)? Because she was unashamedly ambitious, amassed power and embarrassed men?

Her rule came to an abrupt end in 1909 when Wangu joined in to perform the kibata dance, a dance that was reserved for young warriors. In the process of vigorous dancing, her garment falls off, exposing her. Her detractors say she intentionally danced naked before her people.

Unlike Mekalilili, for whom dance was revolutionary and redemptive for the people, Wangu’s dance – with her in the precarious role of a woman in a traditionally male role – leads to her singular downfall. The system of colonialism which she had served so diligently could not save her in this instance.

The comic series maps these contours of power and patriarchy, revealing how, like in all oppressive systems, the oppressed often do have a chance to become complicit and collude with the system, but that this power is ultimately uncertain and tenuous. Or, they can fight back, and risk punishment and exclusion.

Still, thinking of the comics as a series of people-maps is useful to appreciate that the past is never really the past. We are still living with the fallout from the actions of those who resisted the colonial state and those who colluded with it – and sometimes that binary is not as neat as it first appears. Wangu’s role as an enforcer of the colonial state upended patriarchal expectations of her, and Mekatilili’s status as an old widow made her an unlikely revolutionary because fighting is usually expected of the young and male.

More than any other medium or form, comics straddle this divide between the world of concepts and the world of lived experiences, between the way the world should be and the way it really is, the place where hard, “objective” data fails and life happens. Just as one scans back and forth on a map to orient oneself and the physical space represented on the map, the comic book reader scans back and forth in order to refocus on previous panels and to find new elements for the construction of meaning. Readers literally make sense of the story through a “plurivectorial” reading experience, as if each page were a map.

Quoting Chimurenga Chronic again, “The syntax of comics – specifically, its reliance on visual substitution to suggest continuity, the representation of time through space, and the fragmentation of space into contiguous images, demands an active participation on the part of the reader. This fosters a unique intimacy, a physical and emotional closeness between creator and audience, the reader and the text.”

Comics are the medium that grapple with the most with uncertainty and even lack of data – most comics set discrete borders around their gaps, the “gutters” between panels. Comic critic Aaron King describes these comic gutters as “bordered entropy”, a place where the artist chose not to or did not have the means to portray information.

And this is what makes the comic form so life-giving, especially in a context where the official written histories typically capture the perspectives of those in power and erase those on its underside. How exactly Mekatilili got 800 kilometres across a wilderness teeming with dangers isn’t the point. It’s that the kifudu dance was danced again and that the Mijikenda are still striving for the return of vigango (totems representing ancestors) that have been stolen and taken to Europe and America. It is that there was a woman who was officially given the title of headman.

It’s not about being as direct and as practical as a map, but more about letting memory run transgressively loose on history.

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.