Culinary Cultures and Their Discontents,The Life and Mind Of

One (Private) Ring to Rule Them All: A Case Study of One Acre Fund

By Christine Mungai

In Yala, Siaya County, Friday is market day. Wares of all kinds – farm produce, household goods, plastic knick-knacks and second-hand clothing – are lain out, the place is buzzing with activity. We arrive on Friday around 1pm, with the sun high in the sky and just as Friday prayers are concluding at Yala mosque. But just around the corner from the mosque and the market is Yala’s NCPB (National Cereal and Produce Board) depot. The place is still and eerie, the warehouses seem deserted, a railway track that runs through the depot has long rusted.

The only sign of life here is at one warehouse, which has been hired by One Acre Fund, a non-profit organization that supplies smallholder farmers with assets including seeds and fertilizer on credit, which are then paid back at the end of the season. One Acre Fund says it works with 400,000 farmers in Kenya – the majority in western Kenya, though it is now venturing further afield into other regions — providing not just financing for the critical assets, but also agricultural extension, training, support and crop insurance. Its loan repayment rates, going by its own data, are at 98% — extremely solid for any financial service provider, and especially one that directly serves rural, smallholder farmers, a constituency that is considered risky or otherwise unattractive to investors.

I first heard about One Acre Fund six years ago, when a book was delivered to my desk for review while I was a reporter at The East African newspaper. The book was titled The Last Hunger Season, written by American journalist Roger Thurow who spent a year in western Kenya chronicling the lives and seasons of four Kenyan farmers who had signed up to One Acre Fund.

The book was a beautiful piece of non-fiction: quite soon into the narrative, one gets invested in the stories of these four farmers, and far from merely being a glowing puff piece for the organization, Thurow handled the story with nuance and particularly brought out the risks and uncertainties that rural smallholders are constantly grappling with. Because of low prices of maize at harvest time, and a lack of proper storage, most maize farmers end up selling their maize at almost throwaway prices at harvest time, only to become net buyers of maize through the course of the year. In fact, as Thurow notes, the maize farmers in his story were actually food insecure and battled hunger at certain times of the year.

This, combined with the vagaries of nature and various unexpected costs, such as an illness in the family or an unforeseen expenditure at a child’s school, means that whatever benefit they received from One Acre Fund’s activities were ultimately tenuous: there were just too many moving pieces in their lives to contend with.

Still, during my recent visit to the western region at least, the positive testimonies of One Acre Fund’s activities in the region are many. In Bungoma, Kakamega and Vihiga, nearly all the farmers we spoke to had heard of One Acre Fund, and many gave us effusive accounts of how since signing up to organization’s programs, land that was producing measly yields or had even been abandoned altogether quickly started turning around.

Because of low prices of maize at harvest time, and a lack of proper storage, most maize farmers end up selling their maize at almost throwaway prices at harvest time, only to become net buyers of maize through the course of the year.

Winnifred Akiso, a communications officer at One Acre Fund, tells me that to join the program, farmers must be part of a group of about 16 farmers, and pay Ksh500 ($5). With that payment, they get a loan equivalent of about KSh8,000 ($80) worth of certified seed, fertilizer, pesticide and crop insurance; the company provides extension services such as soil testing and planting advice, drawn from a treasure trove of crop, weather and soil data. The organization has now expanded to Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi and Ethiopia.

I meet Benson Manyonyi, who runs One Acre Fund’s duka in Bungoma town, a repurposed 40-ft container that serves as a shop where farmers can come and buy all kinds of inputs – not just seed and fertilizer, but also chicken feeders, pesticide backpack sprayers and even the humble panga. Although not a farmer himself, Benson tells us of the travails at his parents’ two-acre piece of land, not far from the town centre.

“They had totally given up on farming,” he tells me. “On that two-acre piece of land, they would till half an acre, and the most they could get was a mere two bags of maize.”

“My parents would buy inputs from local agrovet shops, but the seed would either yield very little, or even not germinate altogether. Fertilizer was often adulterated with gravel and sand, and there was really nothing they could do. They might complain to the shop owner, but then they didn’t really have options. It was very discouraging, and I told myself I would never be a farmer if this is what it meant – constantly throwing money away.”

He tells me that since joining One Acre Fund’s program, his parents harvested 37 bags on two acres at the end of last season. “It’s really unbelievable that it’s the very same land that I saw causing them so much pain.”

Wilbroda Wangila is another farmer in Bungoma, who owns half an acre on which she grows maize, beans and groundnuts (njugu). Until a few years ago she had given up on farming too – it was taking too much of her time, energy and money – she was earning an income by working on other people’s land as a casual day labourer, or kibarua. On that half-acre, it would be a good season if she got two bags of maize on it; often it was less, one-and-a-half or even just one bag of maize.

“I signed on to One Acre Fund in 2010, and today I’m harvesting seven bags of maize on that same piece of land,” she tells me. “Two bags are usually enough to feed my family through the season, so last year I sold five bags of maize. I bought mabati (iron sheets) and finally finished building this permanent house,” she says as she proudly shows off her living room, pouring us copious amounts of tea and insisting we eat more njugu.

Stories like these abound in the homes we visited, and most farmers complained angrily about faceless, shadowy “cartels” that had ensnared the supply chains for seed, fertilizer and inputs of all kinds. The land in western Kenya is fertile but underperforming, they tell me, because of the poor quality inputs and the agrovet cartels that they believed were politically protected.

“How can someone supply fake seed and fertilizer year after year, you report them to the police and the local chief and nothing happens?” Benson says. “They always walked around here like there was nothing you could do to them. And that’s what most people believe – they are untouchable. And you know rural people are sometimes a little docile and they learn to live with such situations. People like my parents don’t want to stir up trouble.”

But even as the upbeat stories abound on the ground in western Kenya, among a more urban, middle-class constituency things are different. One Acre Fund’s headquarters is in Kakamega, a purpose-built facility which ticks all the right boxes for eco-features (its internal walls are made of maize stalks!), and hosts over 500 office staff – including agronomists, soil scientists, and weather specialists, and even in-house artists and graphic designers. The organization has more than 3,000 employees in total, the majority being field staff, extension officers and supply chain/ logistics managers. The staff roll has been expanding rapidly, and the company frequently posts job vacancies on various online platforms.

However, every now and then complaints bubble up on social media, especially Twitter, of the company seemingly re-advertising the same jobs over and over again, and taking applicants through a rigorous process that includes answering extensive case studies and test scenarios. Some suspect that the company is harvesting data and extracting labour from prospective job applicants as a form of “free” market research. There are also recurring complaints of huge pay gaps between local and expatriate staff, a grievance replicated in many organizations in Nairobi, a city whose reputation of opportunity – “Silicon Savannah” – has attracted investors and expatriates from far and wide, but has also ended up rapidly gentrifying certain parts of the city and deepening resentment among qualified locals who sense their value, labour and expertise is diminished simply because they are not expatriates.

One Acre Fund responded to these complaints – including a #SomeoneTellOneAcreFund hashtag – with a blog post published by the company’s co-founder and executive director Andrew Youn saying that their hiring process is “fairly unique” and that they are working on making the hiring process shorter and putting out better feedback, but iterating they “never reuse candidate exercises or share them beyond the hiring committee.”

I speak to Maurice Otieno, general manager of Mettā, a members’ club that supports entrepreneurs, connecting them with investors and creating spaces to collaborate. He highlights more structural challenges that have led to companies like One Acre Fund – and a handful of others in the tech space including Twiga Foods, Tala, Branch and a few more – taking up the bulk start-up and investment funds. For its part, One Acre Fund has received numerous grants, including $100,000 from the John Deere Foundation, $300,000 from the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, $765,000 from the Skoll Foundation, $10.5 million from the Perishing Square Foundation, and more in partnerships with the MasterCard Foundation ($10 million), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($11.6 million) and others.

“The reality is if you are dealing with foreign investors, they really want to hear the ‘we-are-saving- Africa’ story. As a local entrepreneur you are entering a space with certain narratives firmly in place,” he tells me.

“It’s understandable we are angry [about the apparent racism in the space] but the question is, how do we navigate these realities? Local individuals and companies have the money, but we have found it to be a real struggle to get them to invest in great local ideas. Most of it goes into real estate. Perhaps it has to do with how many of these people made their money – if it is through unorthodox means, then they hold on tighter to it.”

Maurice adds: “This might be unpopular to say, but I think there’s also some reluctance by local investors to invest in sectors that most foreign money is going to – such as AgriTech, EdTech and HealthTech. Local investors tend to want to put their money in the shiny, glamorous, business-to- business solutions, especially FinTech which is the hot new thing today,” he tells me.

Some suspect that the company is harvesting data and extracting labour from prospective job applicants as a form of “free” market research. There are also recurring complaints of huge pay gaps between local and expatriate staff.

But Phares Kariuki, CEO of Node Africa, an information management firm, strongly disagrees with this view. “This is a very problematic statement,” he says. “First of all, new innovations struggle to find capital in all economies. Tech companies took a while to become an attractive sector for investment, even in the US.”

Phares adds that secondly, local Kenyan investors have been putting their money in ‘boring’ businesses that folks haven’t heard of; it’s literally the foreigners going into the shiny spaces.

“It was local investors, knowledge, developers and government policy that made Kenya one of the most connected countries in Africa and made it the attractive place it is now for immigrants and expats. And about not wanting to serve the poor — look at companies like Equity Bank that brought banking services down to the villages, where people had long been overlooked. Safaricom’s ‘Please Call Me’ and Sambaza features, were all ways of servicing the needs of the poor. It is not only foreigners that want to help poor people – they just monopolize the narratives and make it seem like they are the only ones doing so; they are good at storytelling.”

I see the gaps even more starkly on the ground in western Kenya. When you consider that a whole swathe of smallholder farmers were basically abandoned to their own devices by Kenyan authorities, left to contend with substandard seed and fertilizer and lack of credit, to the point where they had given up on farming, then entities such as One Acre Fund can come in and fill a gap that has been allowed to fester. The silent NCPB depot in Yala is proof of this — One Acre Fund is able to find warehouses to rent because NCPB is not working the way it used to. And the reason for this is, to some extent, neoliberal policies in the agricultural sector that diverted government investment away from places like western Kenya.

It didn’t have to be this way – with private (neoliberal, foreign-funded) solutions to public problems. And the gaps are so stark, and the bar so low, that even small interventions – only reliable seed, for example – can have such a huge impact.

The question though, is how One Acre Fund is managing to make such big gains in a bandit economy, as former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga described Kenya. How is the organization able to circumvent the cartels? Is it just a case of swapping one cartel out for the other?

“I no longer believe that the people who caused this structural inequality through colonialism, racial segregation, exploitation and more, are the ones who can resolve it,” Phares concludes. “Author Anand Giridharadas speaks about this phenomenon in his book Winners Take All. In Kenya, people who have privilege in the largest economy in the world – the US – come to Africa and many times capitalise on the very structural problems that they claim to be solving. These companies are, in fact, exploitative – they exploit local talent and labour, as well as taking advantage of the ‘white saviour’ narratives.”

But I obviously couldn’t say this to Wilbroda that day. She was just really happy about her new house and the progress she has made in her life. “You know, I only went to school until Standard 8,” she tells me. “Lakini sasa ninaheshimika, kama mtu anafanya kazi ya mshahara.” I’m respected in the community, like someone with a salaried job. That strikes me in a way that I can’t quite explain, and I keep sipping my tea.

Written and published with the support of the Route to Food Initiative (RTFI) (www.routetofood.org). 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.

By Christine Mungai

“Look at your plates when you eat. These imported grains of rice, corn, and millet – that is imperialism.” – Thomas Sankara

The violence that accompanied European colonisation of Africa people was a well-known fact. But while a lot of emphasis has leaned towards the political, military and economic changes forced upon the colonised people, the matter of food – the very source of survival – is seldom considered. Yet food has always been a fundamental tool in the process of colonisation. Through food, social and cultural norms are conveyed, and also violated. Indeed, one cannot properly understand colonisation without taking into account the issue of food and eating.

In 1895, Britain annexed the future Kenya as an East African protectorate. However, the expansion of the British Empire was met with resistance in some parts of the protectorate. The British suppressed the opposition by using different methods, from divide-and-rule tactics to military campaigns, signing treaties with local rulers, and controlling food to quell dissent.

The scorched-earth policy of burning crops and killing livestock proved to be a most effective method for suppressing rebellion and colonising the population. In his book, Kenya Diary 1902-1906, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen describes official policy in matter of fact terms while reflecting on how during his many expeditions the burning of huts, crops and livestock proved to be a very effective means of suppressing dissent and subduing the African native. Feeding the monster

Once the British consolidated power in the colony, there was an influx of thousands of European settlers who were invited by the colonial government with offers of huge leases for the most fertile land in the country. The fertile expanses that later became the “White Highlands,” were opened for settlement through the forceful displacement of the previous inhabitants, most of whom ended up in the drier margins of their former homelands. Africans who didn’t find a place to settle became squatters on white farms or worked as labourers for Asian merchants.

The colonial state used white settlers to introduce commercial agricultural production as the mainstay of the colonial economy. The state forcibly seized land, livestock and other indigenous assets from certain communities and households on behalf of the settlers and the colonial administration, systematically marginalising and subordinating indigenous African agriculture.

Among the Kipsigis, writes Dr Samson Omoyo in a paper titled “The agricultural changes in the Kipsigis: A historical analysis”, describes how colonial manoeuvres depleted the native stock critical for the Kipsigis’ economic and social reproduction, clearing the way for the increasing numbers of European settlers. The capital-driven process eroded the Kipsigis’ indigenous land tenure systems and gradually undermined and changed their previous way of life.

By the mid-1930s, about one-fifth of arable land in Kenya was under the exclusive control of the settlers. In addition, the state provided the settlers and corporate capital with the necessary infrastructural, agricultural, marketing, and credit facilities. Above all, the state sought to create, mobilise and control the supply of African labour for capital.

The forbidden fruits

Cash crop farming quickly became the choice source of income for the settlers, who benefited from the cheap land and the large African labour force that they conscripted. British colonialists forced Africans to work on their farms and this facilitated the introduction of European food crops. Often, African workers in settler farms were paid in sacks of maize due to its high nutritional value that created a strong and healthy labour force and its easy access and availability in the colony.

When the Africans returned to the so-called “reserves”, they introduced maize into their subsistence farming systems, cementing its position as the colony’s primary staple crop, and replacing crops like millet, tubers, legumes, and kale, which were commonly found in traditional farming systems.

In 1923, the government announced that it would promote commercial crop markets in the reserves. Little came of this because African farmers, who were more intent on providing for local food needs, showed little interest in producing for the export market.

By the mid-1930s, about one-fifth of arable land in Kenya was under the exclusive control of the settlers.

Strong opposition to the planned introduction of cash crops led the colonial government to instead subsidise European production in order to maintain the colony’s food security. The indigenous smallholder farmers who attempted to make a living selling cash crops could not compete as a result. Eventually, in 1937, the colonial government reinstated cash crop growing in the reserves as a mainstay economic activity.

As land became scarce, Kenyans increasingly began favouring cash crops in place of subsistence farming. This made peasant household food security a tenuous affair. Commercialisation resulted in the emergence of new types of households: commodity-producing households; labour-exporting households; squatter households; and working-class households. This massive displacement of people not only deprived Africans of food and ceremony, but also of traditional knowledge of food and its preparation as communities became reliant on the new economic system.

Everything from the loss of teachings about indigenous plants to cultural exchanges thorough regional indigenous markets were destroyed. As such, African farming systems were forever altered, traditional practices were lost, and cultural norms were destroyed.

But what the colonial economic system didn’t obliterate, the church did.

Things go bananas

By the 1930s, the missionary schools and other church institutions had made concerted effort to rid local cultures of their traditions. Although earlier travellers and missionaries like David Livingstone had reported on Africans’ healthy diets, many of his predecessors held the racist and eugenicist view that food shaped the colonial body. In other words, the European body differed from that of the African people because the British diet and culinary habits differed from culinary habits of the local Africans. Bodies could be altered by diets—thus the fear that by consuming “inferior” African foods, Brits would eventually become like the “natives”. Only proper European foods would maintain the superior nature of European bodies, and only these foods and British food sensibilities could also civilise the “African savages” to be more like their colonisers.

In their minds, as one Chloe Campbell suggests in her book Race and Empire: Eugenics in Colonial Kenya, food not only functioned to maintain the European body’s superiority, it also played a role in the formation of social identity and Britain’s “civilising mission” across its empire.

The campaign to “civilise” the African was more successful than the missionaries could have ever hoped for. The primary vectors for the cultural indoctrination were the mission schools, churches, boarding schools and public health programmes responsible for educating African youth. These methods of “education” uniformly reduced knowledge related to the cultivation and preparation of traditional and indigenous foods.

Traditional knowledge was devalued as the education of children was shifted from tribal elders to the imperial powers via the church and school. British education encouraged “sophistication”, which included the rejection of traditional foods and ancient methods of food preparation, and an emphasis on British culinary sensibilities and food practices. Traditional cereals, herbs and vegetables were promptly dropped for those with high market value and perceived desirability. Thereafter, traditional foods would only be consumed in secret and infrequently mainly in the African reserves.

The pie in the sky

The symbolic nature of food was also seen in the imposition of religion, another destructive aspect of the British conquest. The Bishop of the Church Mission Society (CMS) Robert Merttins Bird, in a letter to the Christians and elders of the pastorate in Kikuyuland, forbade the consumption of local manufactured alcohol on 1st January 1930, deeming it evil and devilish, hence the need for it to be abandoned by all members of the church.

This policy, however, didn’t take into account that many cultures in Kenya had a long tradition of beer-making, the consumption of which was reserved for ceremonies and cultural events. Just as the church demonised the consumption of local alcohol, there was also a concerted effort by the colonial government to control native alcohol consumption to keep the African labour productive. Both of these policies reinforced the racist perception that Africans could not hold their liquor and disrupted production in native cereal grains used in the brews.

Traditional knowledge was devalued as the education of children was shifted from tribal elders to the imperial powers via the church and school.

In 1963, when Kenya gained its independence, a new class of African elites took power. But as Franz Fanon writes in his seminal text The Wretched of the Earth, this class of (mostly) men and women did not reform the colonial state but, in fact, perfected it and exacerbated its venality towards its people. Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, in cahoots with his cronies and senior government officials, acquired huge tracts of land and resources as they pleased. While indigenous communities suffered poverty, the confiscated resources became a source of wealth and prosperity for the political and business elite.

The effect of this massive land grab by the elite would consolidate the neocolonial system by replacing “peasant” modes of production with capitalist modes, and the establishment of a new African petit-bourgeois strata within sectors of the economy. Their primary occupation would be in activities of the intermediary type, scheming and hustling, and firmly entrenching their role as mediators for former colonial powers.

These elites, in cahoots with their Western allies, have passed draconian laws, illegally grabbed land, manipulated food and agricultural policies, and engaged in rampant corruption to control the food Kenyans consume. Of these, weaponising corruption has proved to be most effective means. In the maize sector, for instance, since 1965 – when the first maize scandal was reported – the politics of maize (Kenya’s staple) has been used by the political class as a system of reward and a means to pacify or punish communities for political expediency – the same tactics used by the white colonialists to suppress resistance.

A hard nut to crack

Today, there has been growing interest in the battle for control over land, food and even seeds in Kenya. Under the guise of improving food security in Kenya, a new wave of food imperialism is taking shape. A series of public-private partnerships are aggressively shaping a food policy geared towards helping corporations access prime resources and markets within Kenya’s food systems. Farmers are being forced to change from low-cost sustainable traditional agriculture to intensive, industrial farming with intensive application of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and corporate-owned seeds. This domineering framework to control what food people grow, how they grow and consume it, is in contrast to what many are calling food sovereignty.

These elites, in cahoots with their Western allies, have passed draconian laws, illegally grabbed land, manipulated food and agricultural policies, and engaged in rampant corruption to control the food Kenyans consume. Food sovereignty is about the right of a people to determine their own choices with regard to food and agriculture as opposed to having their food supply subjected to external forces, such as imperialism or the global economic market. Food sovereignty, therefore, according to the U.S Food Sovereignty Alliance, states that people must reclaim their power in the food system by rebuilding the relationships between people and land, and between food providers and those who eat it. It must go well beyond ensuring that people have enough food to meet their physical needs.

Food has never merely been about the simple act of eating; food is history, and identity. Hence, colonialism, as a violent process, fundamentally altered the way of life of a people, including their culinary habits. Since European occupation of Africa, its people have encountered a radically altered food system. Therefore, because food choices are influenced and constrained by cultural, political and economic values, they are an important part of the deconstruction and decolonisation of our social identity.

Indeed, for Africa in particular, food and food production has to go beyond just being about health, well-being, economic resilience and cultural heritage; food must be used to restore a balance of power, restore dignity and re-imagine a better future for its people. Food is power.

Written and published with the support of the Route to Food Initiative (RTFI) (www.routetofood.org). 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.

One (Private) Ring to Rule Them All: A Case Study of One Acre Fund

By Christine Mungai Meals, beyond meeting our dietary and nutritional needs, is pretty much one of the most telling signallers of Kenya’s social sensibilities, in which food preparation, serving, availability, and taboos give insights into our people’s histories, geographies, ethnicities, tragedies, and self-perceptions.

That we’re a crop people, with crops making up 81% of our food output and yet milk products records the highest consumption belies the fact that our supply systems are still better geared towards industrialized supplies.

Still, maize and wheat and their related products come in at a close second and third respectively in national food consumption. According to the status of traditional vegetable report, 200 species growing naturally in Kenya are used as leafy vegetables. About 10 more exotic species introduced during the pre-colonial period have been integrated into the traditions of various communities and can therefore be regarded as traditional vegetables.

Ethnobotanist Patrick M. Maundu’s research documented 10 exotic species introduced into Kenya in the pre-colonial period of which the top three of maize, milk and wheat have recorded higher profitability pegged on the large scale technological production. Consequently this has entrenched the food industries the primary arbiters of Kenya’s culinary aspects with the resultant cartelism, artificial shortages, oligopolies, market inefficiencies and food safety issues. Food occupies this complex place in society and social order, a fact that led the pioneer gastronomy Jean Brillat-Savarin to remark ‘Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are.

Pretty much all indigenous foods chiefly Cassava (8th), Sorghum (15th), and Millet (19th) position, have been edged out of the primary consumption basket. Mass production of the top industrial food items, pegged on their mass marketing, industrial production and the resultant lower prices put them at the top of the totem pole of food intake. Even then, the distinction between foreign and indigenous foods is fluid and often tentative given the transitory nature of ethnic cultures including food and culinary habits among ethnicities over time.

Food and Meaning

Food, therefore as a cultural and ethnic text, expresses the truism that man, since his prehistoric times, was able to link nutritious foods not just with robust health but also its capacity as a social marker, cultural identity, and insight into the economic, myth-making, and resource constraints of his immediate ecology.

Peoples are what they eat and the dietary consumption and what we choose to imbibe, or not consume based on habits, health, religion, or taboos symbolically reflect this dynamic. Our respective food traditions communicate to others, our beliefs, cultural and social backgrounds, incomes, and experiences. Granted there are many reasons why we exclude certain foods from our diet, from basic health issues to deep cultural and personal beliefs.

An intuitive survival need such as eating, that all humans share, is also something that we use to differentiate ourselves; our psychologies, anthropologies, individual preferences, desires, sense- making, economic capacity, health concerns, farming practices, and social limitations.

Food political Failure

At the economic level, resource constraints and starvation occasioned by the current political failure, limits dietary choices in terms of available food, pricing, alternative meals, and future food needs, with drought warning mechanisms estimating one-third of the 4 million Nairobi residents as starving.

In many ways the frequent food shortages and the attendant perennial famine are reflections of political and policy failure to modernize our supply systems, audit our food systems, and mainstream food security initiatives. This phenomenon isn’t just a city problem as shrinking land sizes have necessitated the need for food purchases even in rural Kenya.

New City Norm

The average Kenyan therefore, robbed of the capacity to consistently afford, and access quality variety of meals is forced to a primary dependency on the Kibanda food stall culture. These Kibandas as profit-making ventures definitely go for the cheapest easy-to-mass-produce foods on the menu item.

Their lack of proper food safety notwithstanding, the Kibanda culture plugs the gaps in urban food supply systems, and shortens the elaborate process of food production at home, for an exhausted and fast-paced urban dwellers.

Grocerants and delis in supermarkets meanwhile play the same role Kibanda do but for the middling and upper classes. Keenly aware of the changing lifestyles of the ingredient shoppers, supermarkets shifted from only selling ingredients and recipes to also fixing the meal and selling it like a restaurant. This trend started with the retail outlet Tuskys supermarket in 2014 before their competitors caught on, buoyed by the convergence of tech and hospitality, and the desire for fresh food, access, and convenience at decent prices.

Cucumbers on Sale

What’s never obvious to the average Kenyan is that the structure of society closely correlates to the nature of its status foods. Societies with small social classism tend to have more elaborate staple foods and go for larger portions, while highly unequal and stratified societies place inordinate emphasis on culinary style, quality and even presentation. Hence, depending on the society’s structure, food either becomes a bonding mechanism for neighbours and friends, or a signifier of exclusivity, distance, class, and prestige.

Further to that, culturally homogeneous communities designate uniqueness of an occasion based on quantities of foods served. Meanwhile the interactions in heterogeneous cultures say during inter- ethnic dowry negotiations, special occasions are designated uniqueness based on the variety of cuisines served. Despite the stratified nature of our local society haute cuisines and fine dining haven’t taken root since Kenyans-even the elite strata-still prefer foods they know. This lack of experimentation with food has curtailed fine dining restaurant culture even as casual dining, kibanda culture, and fast food outlets continue to grow and expand.

The underlying issue here could be that Kenya lacks a notable process of aristocratic acculturation such as can be spotted among Rwandese, Ugandan, French or South African nobilities. Hence we’re stuck with a financial and economic elite who besides monetary outlay do not have any binding social sensibilities, dining rituals, and any unique markers of identity formation outside of high incomes.

Markedly, in cultures where there is an abundance of food, slender bodies are associated with privilege and status, while in societies where food is scarce, there is the perception that being chubby is a status marker. However body image, in relation to food, has increasingly lesser social meaning, given that we’re more inundated with Euro-American notions of fitness, beauty, and bodily aesthetics.

Eat Your Caviar

These Euro-American notions do not stop at how we perceive bodies, even what’s often considered good food whether in movies or Instagram is mostly white food, American food or generally processed foods. While I’m focusing on white foods here, coffee, tea and alcohol are also used in similar ways. Brand name Euro-American beverage and food varieties pasted on our digital profiles are overtly supposed to signify prestige and implicitly convey taste and status.

Indigenous Kenyan foods are then exoticised within the make-believe Kenyan high-society and sold as special cuisines. These classists and racial notions of food hierarchy relegate local dishes to healthy but low-status meals best left to the sick, the aged and those in the rural enclaves.

The politics of food much more poignantly plays out even locally with the Kikuyus and their stereotypical soupy foods, political connotation of wishy-washy politician as watermelons, and the signifier of tribal rank in the disdainful phrasing uthamaki ní witù, thamaki ní ciao, as well as Luhyas and their typecasted food quantities.

Who Moved My Cheese?

Further away from tribal stereotypes foods as religious markers distinguishes local sects, genders and communities who are bounded by certain edicts. The growing yoga community in the country desigantes certain food consumption so does the vegan society, as well as the vegetarian communities.

Adventists relation with red meat, Halal foods for Muslims, Kosher for the Jewish community and the organic feeders work within a wider framework of food censures and freedoms for cultural, health, ideological or religious reasons.

Eat of the Ground

The organic food network is gradually gifting a growing cluster of health and safety conscious Kenyans with a healthy and well-curated food system. The Kenya Organic Agriculture Network (KOAN) has designated the organic markets in Nairobi to include the Organic Farmers Market next to Hillcrest, US Embassy Organic Farmers Market, Kids Ventures Garden Estate, and Karengata Farmers’ Market both in Karen, Community Sustainable Agriculture and Healthy Environment Programme (C-SHEP) farmers market in Rongai Township.

Grocery stores such as Kalimoni Greens in Karen, Zucchini at ABC Place, The Corner Shop at Diamond Plaza also sell organic food products. Chandarana Foodplus, Carrefour, and Tuskys retail outlets have organic food sections. Where tech meets food distribution deliveries; Mlango Farm, Sylvia Basket, Greenspoon, and Kalimoni Greens make doorstep deliveries.

The conservative dietary streak however, has not stopped a small but growing cluster of Kenyans who’ve begun exploring foreign dishes, newer urban cuisines, and flavours made accessible by online recipes, specialty meals, food carnivals and galas. For such a complex society Kenya makes up for a lack of unique and authentic Kenyan dish by constantly evolving its servings to meet the demands of a diverse community.

The Semiotics of Kitchen tools

Curiously, unlike in large swaths of the urban homes where citizens lay out elaborate cutlery, in many rural homes, eating with the hands is the norm in many households. That even pop culture icon Oprah Winfrey couldn’t fathom such cultural differences through her now infamous phrase ‘’I heard Indian people eat with their hands still” belies the hard to discard stereotypes.

The underlying belief being that eating with well-set cutlery as is the norm in modern homes is superior, more culturally evolved and sophisticated. These attitudes towards eating with hands is grounded in the never-ending war on germs and hygiene-related Non-Communicable diseases especially in our informal settlements.

This health concern isn’t farfetched given that the rapid growth in the use of cutlery partly acted as the definer of space among diners, and later on as a means of dealing with the disease outbreaks that hit rapidly urbanizing metropolis. Cutlery therefore went beyond practical consideration to being an indicator of space, safety, class, cultures and the relationship between man, place and food.

The kids too need to eat

The place of children in the food system is significantly evolved from the traditional open homes setups that had no delineation or gender. Progressively most modern food outlets have had to develop manned indoor play area with small pitches, swings, huts, and ball games to accommodate family and kid’s needs.

Children are major influencers on where a family eats, wine and dine in which little attention given to amusement, food variety, space, gifts, and furniture, paying off hugely. The centrality of the kid’s concerns to parents elevate their comfort as among the primary determinant of whether the family will patronize a food outlet.

Food considerations built for convenience of toddlers equals happy family dining experience, a key premium for most parents that equals great returns for the food business. Kids nutrition, their allergies, preferences are front and centre in the Kenyan family dining experience and while the children may not have the most sophisticated tastes they are very discerning eaters. The modern day dining experience whether in restaurants, homes or events have to prioritize the kids comfort, and palate, especially child-friendly focus over the weekends.

Eat Your Heart out

In the midst of all this Kenyans have to contend with the implication of industrial mass food production model of their top food preferences maize, milk, and wheat. Whether out of modern speeds, convenience or prices we’ve come to believe that we can feed our bodies industrial, processed foods in perpetuity.

It’s this prospect replicated over large swaths across the world that columnist Mark Hyman remarked,

‘In the 21st century our tastes buds, our brain chemistry, our biochemistry, our hormones and our kitchens have been hijacked by the food industry.’

The Kenyan food industry tries to minimise losses even at the expense of consumers even as regulatory systems and institutions mandated to guarantee food safety such as Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (KEPHIS), Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS) have capitulated to the tyranny of the rogue market. A core issue many Kenyans have to grapple with is the institutions mandated to monitor and ensure food safety understand that food systems are a national security issue.

Written and published with the support of the Route to Food Initiative (RTFI) (www.routetofood.org). 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.

One (Private) Ring to Rule Them All: A Case Study of One Acre Fund

By Christine Mungai The last time I heard from Ali Zaidi was May 22nd this year in a message that blipped out from a long stretch of silence.

I sent an email in reply, I texted, I called. There was no response.

I had spent nearly a week in northern Kenya, and the poor connections prevented me from checking my mail. The events of 21st May had passed me by. A source I was due to interview in Turkana had abruptly travelled to Uganda and so in a hurry, I had caught a plane from Lodwar and flown to Eldoret to cut the 6 to 7 hour journey down to 30 minutes so that I could arrive overland in Soroti in Uganda, where he was, before nightfall. Right on the tarmac of Eldoret airport, with reliable connection back on, the news jolted me.

I went numb. I tried calling several people. The messages kept rushing in. The drive from the airport to Eldoret town itself seemed surreal.

An email sent the day before popped up. It read:

“David, sorry to have missed you. Listen, we want to put together a tribute next week. Care to do something?

He was so much fun.”

The emailer was Ali Zaidi. And that email was the first communication we had had in ages. It was also the last time I heard from him. His “sorry to have missed you” was from the fact that the week before, I had passed by the Nation Centre, where Ali worked, and been told that he had stepped out briefly. The “tribute” that Ali was referring to was what he was putting together for The EastAfrican following the untimely death of Kenyan writer BinyavangaWainaina, with whom he had a long and close connection.

Circumstances play a sadistic hand. The next email I got from Nairobi was nearly four months later. It was a request to write about my memories of Ali Zaidi, who had passed away a few days earlier. Two obituaries in a year of people I knew left me crushed. I had written for The EastAfrican newspaper since 1999 but I only got to know Ali Zaidi in 2008. I had spent that decade in Kampala, so the occasional walk-ins into the Nation Centre were hurried, impersonal, encounters. But in 2008, my life had changed. Constant conflict with the Ugandan government over my writing made my career at the paper untenable. So I became a full-time writer, something I had always wanted. And in 2008, Nairobi was where actual writing was taking place. After I met Binyavanga and Billy Kahora in Kampala in March of that year, I moved to Nairobi in August.

Quite incredibly, having quit The EastAfrican where he was editor, here I was, landing in a circle at the centre of which Ali Zaidi played a critical role. There was no escaping the man – not that you really wanted to. This time, the formality of him being my boss was gone, and we could talk openly.

The 18th birthday of his son Hassan provided the occasion at which I formally met Ali Zaidi’s circle. It was a Saturday, a day that also coincided with the opening of the KwaniLitfest of that year. New and a guest of Kwani, I spent that weekend driving around Nairobi in cabs with Binyavanga Wainaina, the founder of the literary journal.

Kwani had organised a discussion on writing for magazines, which was being held at the Karen Blixen Museum in Karen, with Binyavanga and Yvonne Owuor sharing the stage. It was an interesting, writerly talk, but Ali had personally called and invited me to his house and I was getting anxious to leave.

Quite incredibly, having quit The EastAfrican where he was an editor, here I was, landing in a circle at the centre of which Ali Zaidi played a critical role. There was no escaping the man – not that you really wanted to.

We arrived at Ali’s well after 2 o’clock that afternoon. New in Nairobi, I could not believe how cold it was at that hour, right on the equator! But that had been my experience during my early days in Nairobi; cold all the time, and because of cold, also constantly hungry. My hosts did not seem too keen on food themselves, and I wondered about their lives, and just what it was I had stepped into.

Ali’s house in Loresho was not what I had expected it to be. It was also unsurprising that it was what it was. Informal, comfortably disarrayed, welcoming, unintimidating. Loresho was a gated estate far from the centre of the city, nestled in a thickly wooded “leafy” suburb.

It seemed that everybody was there. I recognised Lynn MuthoniWanyeki from her mugshot in The EastAfrican. A young, energetically bouncing writer (he wore his credentials too well) introduced himself as Parselelo Ole Kantai. Ali emerged from his house, and amidst the crowd (for it was a packed compound, very wide, with wood and stone sculptures all over), he spotted me and Binyavanga coming in. He stood waiting for us to approach. “David,” he said, smiling, warmly. He took my hand and led me indoors. “Let me feed you.” At last. Someone in Nairobi understood that people needed to eat.

But it was the sheer number of people in Ali Zaidi’s house that occupied my mind. From the sound of them (all eloquent), and the look of them (the tasteful but crumpled look of arty sorts) you could tell who the writer was, the filmmaker, the musician, the activist. Had he taken each one of them by the hand and said “let me feed you”?

Ali’s warmth spoke volumes about who he was. Firstly, his was a house full of children. And then books, and artwork enough to qualify as a museum. We went past the living room, and inside the kitchen, he introduced his children. There, where I was to often find him, was Hassan, marinating piles of meat. We went past him to more introductions – Franco, Emma, Tara (Ali’s children) to the backyard so I could see his wife Irene’s big marble sculpture, a work in progress.

Back to the front garden, which was enormous and punctuated with Irene’s sculptures, there were more introductions, hands to grip, names to exchange: Betty Muragori (soon to be Sitawa Namwalie who invited me to the opening of her poetry show, CutoffMyTongue), Wanyeki, Rasna Warah, Shalini Gidoomal. I forget the rest. The talk was a high, theory-studded tenor. You turned here and caught a whiff of postmodernist extrapolations that side someone in deconstructionist pique, and over there, postcolonial postulation. People held court, drew a circle, talked, then dispersed, sat by the fire, re- congregated around another forth-holder, filled glasses, opened another bottle.

As I was quickly learning, in that circle, you did not simply say things. There had to be an intellectual filter, an optic, a politics via which you saw the world. It was like living inside the pages of The New Yorker, or the Times Literary Supplement, or the London Review of Books. Books, titles, verses, quotes and much else flew about to emphasise a point, a name invoked to shore up a position, wedge in a definition.

And there was Ali Zaidi, walking in, resting on an elbow, listening, gathering a line, looking over shoulders, recharging an empty glass, then pulling over someone who might inject a new idea, an anecdote, drawing the embers out of an overcharged guest, keeping the fires burning. I thought of Anna Scherer in the opening scenes of War and Peace. Had the Tolstoyan character been less pushy and read Marx (a century before her time, admittedly but it might have saved the characters in that book!), her name would have been Ali Zaidi.

What he might have meant when he took my hand, might as well have been “let me seed you”.

As I was to learn over the next few years, this was Ali’s element. It was what he lived for. It was how, five years before that day, Kwani?, the literary magazine, had been born in that very garden. From Ali’s garden, the writers who created Kwani? went out with valuable tools to examine the society they wrote about and did it without asking permission from established hegemonies.

I don’t remember at what point Binyavanga left the party (he forgot his jacket there that evening, I recollect), so I caught a ride back to where I was staying with Parselelo well after 1 on Sunday morning.

To start life in Nairobi, I had to get pragmatic. I had shut down my workshop in Kampala, so I was not making anything to sell to pay the rent. During the week, I rung Ali up. He suggested lunch at Riviera Bar and Restaurant, a short walk from the Nation Centre. As I was to find out, Ali’s haunts were a circle of restaurants minutes from the Nation Centre, which allowed him to nip out briefly and then return to his desk.

I needed to write more regularly, I told him. Nairobi is expensive, I said. That year, I had also strayed into literary infamy and needed to explain myself.

As I was to learn over the next few years, this was Ali’s element. It was what he lived for. It was how, five years before that day, Kwani?, the literary magazine, had been born in that very garden. From Ali’s garden, the writers who created Kwani?went out with valuable tools to examine the society they wrote about and did it without asking permission from established hegemonies.

He chuckled. He may have intuited that already. It was lunch but all he had was a Spanish omelette. I told him I had some ideas about art and literary criticism. “Send in some stuff and let’s see,” he said, instantly looking worried. Perennial bet-hedgers, editors, I always found, reacted to writing proposals with alarm where writers expect gushing enthusiasm.

The closing months of 2008 were fascinating. What started as a weekly comment on this and that literary tradition and heritage turned into a ping-pong exchange of comments and counter- arguments with other literary commentators in Nairobi. We had a lovely debate about literature and history in the pages of The East African. It was the most engrossing bout of newspapering I can recollect.

Over the next few years, I was to see Ali in a way that had not been possible from a distance.

There was his personal/intellectual background and also the context in which it fit. For decades, to be an editor in Nairobi was to have occupied a serious position via which power and public life were mediated. From descriptions, one could hazard that the template may have been set as far back as 1902 when A.M. Jeevanjee hired the British editor W.H Tiller to man the African Standard (later bought by British interest and renamed East African Standard) as founding editor.

By many accounts a grasping man, W.H. Tiller was said to have run the place in the pugnacious mould that was to characterise the job thereafter. Post-independence Kenya was enlivened by a procession of print media editors whose reputations remain in the same ring as generals, CEOs and politicians: John Bierman, Hillary Ng’weno, Boaz Omari, George Githii, John McHaffie, Philip Ochieng, Joe Rodriguez, Gerry Loughran, Joseph Odindo, Peter Mwaura, George Mbugguss, Joe Kadhi. Dramas and epochs attach to each with the swing of Kenyan and East African politics.

Ali Zaidi brought his intellect and social gift to the role. He ran a newspaper whose reputation was without equal in East Africa and beyond. By convening and hosting a circle of writers who would have an impact on the arts and culture on the continent, Ali Zaidi was also outdoing his predecessors. As with all editors of note, you wrote primarily for Ali Zaidi, and only secondarily for the paper.

***

Ali Zaidi was born Aligarh in India and came to Kenya in the early years of President Daniel arap Moi’s rule. He did some teaching before finding his calling as an editor. He told me he could no longer live in India after witnessing the massacre of Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. He had read economics at Master’s degree level at Delhi University.

I first heard the name Ali Zaidi when I joined The EastAfrican newspaper in 1999, still only 23 and not yet graduated from university. Ali likes this. Ali does not like that. He was not the managing editor. That was Joseph Odindo. But he was that éminence grise that all newspapers must have – that one in-house intellectual and grammarian commanding a battery of section editors. I saw him once in those early years, when I visited Nairobi in 2002, and not again till 2008.

Given its structure, and as a weekly, TheEastAfrican’s reporters were required to do hard news. What I really paid attention to was art and literature. It was how I came to the attention of Ali Zaidi.

By convening and hosting a circle of writers who would have an impact on the arts and culture on the continent, Ali Zaidi was also outdoing his predecessors. As with all editors of note, you wrote primarily for Ali Zaidi, and only secondarily for the paper. He was not too enthusiastic about what I had to say about art and books. He must have thought me a novice all over the place with ideas. Whatever reviews I wrote were whittled down to reporterial bare bones. He also thought I wrote with too much flourish. “Just go down to town,” was his way of saying write simply. I was not too enamoured by him either. I had called him a philistine – not directly, but in words that amounted to the same. It took me a while to understand that the arts section mattered a lot to Ali.

Once settled in Nairobi, the bulk of my meetings with Ali consisted of the lunches at restaurants within walking distance of the Nation Centre. These provided a chance to talk. 2008 was the year of financial collapse. Capitalism, as we had come to know it, had ended. People were starting to talk about Marx again.

“You have not read Marx,” he stated.

I protested.

“You have read of Marx,” he modulated the charge.

I detailed to him what I had read of Marx. When I mentioned that I planned to tackle the Grundrisse, he scowled.

“Stop telling lies. Read Marx.”

His vehemence gave me pause to reflect. It was not like Ali to insist so harshly. But it was then that I began to sense where his intellectual locus sat. I understood that when he said “you have not read Marx,” he meant I was not hewing to the Marxist school he was beholden to, the very typically Marxist internecine conflict to have. But what might that be? The answer was not a difficult one. He was a Walter Benjamin Marxist. (To boot, he was even a spitting image of the great German philosopher-martyr.)

I was hence starting from the beginning, fleshing out what it was that propelled the man. To begin with, the thorough-going, intellectual coherence of historical materialism always provided penetrative insight. It provided a structure of not only thought but also action that could have tremendous impact. Because it was critical, being as it were, on the offensive against an exploitative class, Marxism did not have to play hide-and-seek with history. Coming up with dodgy arguments to support personal wealth was the territory of liberal and neoliberal apologists, such as Maynard Keynes and his successors, Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek.

I got it that Ali understood the world in certain ways. Marxism provided him not only with a view into politics and economics, but also a view of society that was basically humane. For him, people were not for sale. The wealthy in Kenya, he insisted to their face, had profited from a fundamentally unjust system.

But what was it about Walter Benjamin that appealed to Ali and how might it have shaped how he saw the world?

The Jewish philosopher, whose death on the Spanish border when he was fleeing Nazis in 1939 remains a mystery and continues to divide Spain, had gone longer distances than most Marxists of his times in postulating a critical theory. Walter Benjamin’s idea of history, his “angel of history” (after buying the painting by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus) is his most powerful idea. The eponymous angel in the painting, Walter Benjamin wrote, “would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed”. This insight into history was, to say the least, ultra-revolutionary. What it said, and how it has variously been interpreted, is that the past (lost causes) is not dead (defeated) as long as there are people still willing to fight for it. It is the closest one can come to resurrecting the dead, this idea of picking up the cause they died for and then refighting it. The catchy formulation being that the fate of the past lies in the hands of the present. In other words, the past is not dead as long as the living continue to believe in its ideas.

There was also his critical art theory: Walter Benjamin’s was a fundamental questioning of the concept of art, stripping it down to a matter of aesthetic, from which point open-ended questions become possible: as “Art”, it is an absolute in itself; but as “aesthetic”, it is the territory of the subjective, a thing you can negotiate with. An immensely liberating direction to take, for then, totalities, or what Ali liked to term “absolutes”, rapidly came unstuck. For the work of art, as Walter Benjamin argued, is tied to the question of tradition, what a people think of the object. What had been pure creativity in one epoch had in another age been an object of veneration, of spiritual significance; what had for one people been just a utilitarian, functional object becomes for another a work of art. Created objects are armed and disarmed as art, depending on the politics of a time. For instance, graffiti would in the 1990s be a nuisance scarring cityscapes. In a period of insurrection against the “one percent”, Banksy would be viewed as a great artist.

The work of art becomes tied to other larger aspects external to the object of art, making the metamorphosis from the spiritual stage to the political and the economic. Art in the industrial age hence takes on a new, urgent significance. It becomes the keeper of the forces of a spiritualism exiled from human relationships by the forces of production.

The work of art becomes the only safe place in which freedom, equality, community, and kindness will not jeopardise the profit motive of capitalism. For if these ideas are left within human society, they will inspire resistance against the exploiting class. The work of art begins to command vast sums of money because they are indeed storing the very lifeblood of human society. It might seem as though the capitalist patrons of art are missing the warmth of community they have destroyed. It is telling that global corporations give so much money to museums, not so much as a back-handed apology as ensuring that what is imprisoned in art stays there, to be viewed rather than lived.

According to this line of argument, the work of art is then slightly off-centre to the objet d’art. A sculpted stone is a stone with a shape. It will only become art when we will it to be art. That “will” comes from our political positioning, for it is the belief of our society, as well as the class we belong to, that tells us how to feel. Hence, art is not an intrinsic property of the object. All value is external to the object.

Ali Zaidi spoke often of Walter Benjamin’s examination of the work of art at the dawn of the modern era, the “mechanical reproduction of the work of art”, stating that a photograph of a famous work of art was no less valuable than the original itself. This was Walter Benjamin’s argument. An argument dangerous to a rising age of fascist nativism for which value must be intrinsic and inseparably innate to the volk. (Ali, who moved to Africa and married an African, an act that was anathema within the migrant Asian community, did not see race or tribe or class. His Marxism was a lived idea.) If all interpretations art, history, culture are political, then is it not hogwash to claim any one culture as supreme?

Ali would say things like “the destruction of the material cultures of African societies was central to the colonial enterprise”, a typically Marxist statement to make. But it swept away rhetorical verbiage and overheated, superficialities about identity. It went to the gist of history itself, that the struggle was not of “civilization” but of baser intent, for control of material resources, to put it crudely.

As I saw it, that was the point at which Ali operated his politics, as it were. It also made him a stranger to an age in which identity politics characterised everything. As far as I can remember, he had little to say about post-war philosophical politics and I tried unsuccessfully to get him to discuss Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

The irony was that the intellectual set that gathered around Ali was deeply steeped in the postmodern identity politics spawned by their ideas. Most spouted it second-hand without knowledge of where it emanated from, the free-for-all, anything-goes “deconstruction” tool of reading that Derrida inflicted upon intellect.

I never came to know Ali’s views on postmodernism. Perhaps others did. But it was not a topic he encouraged whenever I brought it up. At any rate, extend the ideas of Walter Benjamin two or three decades into the 21st century and they likely end up there.

He did not set out to influence anyone. That would have been not only crude but disingenuous. They would all have dropped him for that. It is not that he was too clever for that. Rather, Ali was genuine.

He was addicted to people. I could see that. He could not get through an evening without the company of at least half a dozen people. People were his element. He was happiest in large groups.

I’d like to think he found a home in East Africa. He believed in things, and he went out of his way to make it possible for creative, earnest and driven intellectuals to have a say. We appreciated that deeply.

He seemed happy. He often said: “In Africa, people accept you as long as they sense that you are genuine. Elsewhere, they see your face, your religion, and shoo you away.”

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 Christine Mungai

The cremation in August of the body of popular Kibra MP, Kenneth Okoth, who died of cancer, is the latest challenge to Kenyan’s conception of not just death, and the handling and disposal of bodies, but also of the place of tradition and culture in contemporary society.

It came barely a month after controversies surrounding other high profile deaths. In July the passing of Safaricom CEO, Bobby Collymore, attracted unprecedented media coverage and dominated all the front pages, with the country’s biggest newspaper, the Daily Nation, dedicating 24 pages to a special report on his life and achievements. While as head of what is by far the largest company in the region, he was undoubtedly a major figure – dignitaries at his memorial included President Uhuru Kenyatta and former UK premier, Tony Blair- the media-driven public hype around his demise, from stories about his captaincy of the so-called “Boys Club” to his heroic stoicism in the face of cancer, seemed a bit over the top. One struggles to find parallels in Kenya’s past. Few local political or cultural figures have merited similar treatment. It may have been partly paid for by Safaricom, and provided an opportunity for the media to further ingratiate itself to one of its largest advertisers, but regardless of its merits, the episode opened a window into how the Kenyan media, and the society it serves, deal with death.

Around the same time, controversial blogger, Robert Alai, was charged with treason for posting online a picture of the bodies of police officers killed in a terror attack in the remote north east of the country a fortnight prior. For those officers, there was no public mourning. A passing mention in the papers, no names, and a forbidden photograph of their bodies dumped in the back of a pick-up truck was all they would get. This raises questions about which deaths are worth noting, why and how? Which ones should go unmentioned and unmourned? Which bodies are we allowed to see and which ones are to be hidden? How have attitudes to death and bodies evolved?

When, in the second half of the 19th century, the Europeans arrived in what is now Kenya, they did not find “tribes” as we now know them. Some of the ethnicities they found were confusing and fluid. As described by John Lonsdale, no “tribe” had a unified government; none had a unified line of descent or even an agreed upon origin myth; none practised just one form of subsistence; and none had a standard language – just clusters of dialects that shaded into each other. Within we encountered a variety of beliefs and practices governing death. Few of these survived colonialism. “[TheAgikuyu] traditional mode of burial and funeral rites …has disappeared and has been replaced by methods and practices from other cultures, English culture being the largest contributor,” writes Prof Johnson Mbugua in his book Funeral Rites Reformation for Any African Ethnic Community Based on the Proposed New Funeral Practices for the Agikuyu. As described in his Amazon bio, during his PhD research which formed the basis for the book, Prof Mbugua found “that the mode of coping with death of virtually all African ethnic communities has taken propositions and turns that are neither cultural, scriptural nor necessary”.

This raises questions about which deaths are worth noting, why and how? Which ones should go unmentioned and unmourned? Which bodies are we allowed to see and which ones are to be hidden?

In essence, what Prof Mbugua is saying is that much of what passes for “traditional” funeral practice today is anything but. Which should not be surprising given that, as Bruce Berman has noted in his paper, Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Modernity: The Paradox of Mau Mau, many popular ideas of tradition and culture are not based on what actually existed but rather on a combination of the myths of British anthropologists and officials as well as the interests of small African elite. He writes: “It has been clear for many years that the concept of “traditional society,” and its particular expression in Africa, ‘tribal society,’ represent idealized constructs which very imperfectly reflect what is now understood about the character of pre-colonial African societies. In particular, the dominant image of traditional society as highly integrated, stable, relatively unchanging, and largely free of disruptive internal conflict has been challenged by increasing evidence of the fluidity of political boundaries and ethnic identities and the significant levels of internal conflict revealed in contemporary historical research. The concept of traditional society was not in any case based on substantial and systematically collected empirical evidence”.

In short, any appeal to tradition as a justification for particular funeral rites should be taken with a rather large helping of salt. The Kikuyu provide an excellent example. Today, burial of the dead accompanied with elaborate, supposedly traditional, rituals, is the norm.However, these have little resemblance to the burial rituals associated with the societies the Kikuyu of today are supposedly descended from. Prof Mbugua notes that in the time before the colonial upheaval, cultural practices differed considerably between groups as well as social and economic classes of Kikuyu. In some cases, folks of high status had elaborate funeral rites involving burial, beer, ceremonial sexual intercourse between widows and hired men (known asendia-ruhiu or sellers of swords – a reference to penises), as well as the slaughter of livestock. Other less-favored individuals were simply left out in the bush to be devoured by wild animals, at times being led out when sickly to a clearing to die. It would thus be reasonable to surmise, as Dr Yvan Droz of the Graduate Institute, Geneva notes in his chapter on Transformations of Death among the Kikuyu of Kenya: From Hyenas to Tombs in the book FUNERALS IN AFRICA: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon, “Kikuyu people very rarely buried their dead”.In fact, in describing the internment of an elder in the Agikuyu Guild, one of the groups that made up the Kikuyu (the other being the Ukabi Guild), Prof Mbugua notes that “the funeral was not attended by close family members, including wives or even friends. Agikuyu feared and avoided burials”.

Despite their aversion to dead bodies, the Agikuyu viewed death itself with equanimity and fatalistic acceptance. “Though death was never in ordinary circumstances welcomed, the Agikuyu did not have the haunting fear of [it] which grips people of other civilizations,” Prof Mbugua writes.

And just as they accepted death as a necessary transition to the spirit world, they also seem to have been keen to make the most of their time in the flesh. As narrated by Prof Mbugua and suggested by the endia-ruhiu, the Agikuyu of pre-colonial times were not as stuck up on sex as their proclaimed descendants of today would like to believe. In fact, it was remarkably liberal in some aspects. Widows could keep their endia-ruhiu lovers if they wished, even after they were inherited by their dead husbands’ relatives; pre-marital and extra-marital affairs were the norm, including wife-sharing practice of kuhandaitimu, in which a visiting agemate planted a spear outside the hut of one of his host’s wives and got to spend the night with her.

Folks of high status had elaborate funeral rites involving burial, beer, ceremonial sexual intercourse between widows and hired men as well as the slaughter of livestock. Other less-favored individuals were simply left out in the bush to be devoured by wild animals…

Anyway, back to funerals. So why and when did burial become universal? Well, as Dr Droz notes, it all happened in the colonial era and was driven by one event in particular. The British, he says, had been trying to get the Kikuyu to stop tossing bodies into the bush without much success until, in February 1933, Senior Chief Koinange wa Mbiu was able to demonstrate to the Carter Commission, set up a year earlier to investigate African land claims and grievances, that land grabbed by an English settler actually belonged to his family by exhuming the remains of his grandfather. Suddenly bodies were no longer just the unclean detritus from a one-way ticket on the ancestral plane, but were now effectively transformed into a title for land, and burial “into a means of ascertaining control over property…Burial became a means to assert one’s modernity and to mark out inherited property: a new concept of land ownership was born”. Where land was once a communal resource, it now became the basis of private wealth and completely transformed social, economic and class relations within the society with attendant consequences that Kenyans continue to pay for to this day.

An interesting parallel is evident when one looks at the contemporary meaning of graves to the Luo. In his book, Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa, Prof Parker Shipton of Boston University writes that “Luo people, and especially men, have made graves into tools of territoriality, and anchors of being”, meaning that where once it was claimed that “Luo did not look upon particular pieces of land, or ancestral traces on them, with great reverence,” today “graves, ancestral homestead sites, and cleared fields make the focal points for land claims”.

But burials denote not just ownership but also belonging, as highlighted by the famous case of SM Otieno, whose intestate death in December 1986 sparked a huge, bitter and very public 6-month legal battle between his widow, Wambui and the UmiraKager clan over who between them had the right to bury him. As Prof Shipton puts it, “not anyone may be buried anywhere, and contests over the disposition of bodies can become as intense as competition over land”.

In February 1933, Senior Chief Koinange wa Mbiu was able to demonstrate to the Carter Commission, that land grabbed by an English settler actually belonged to his family by exhuming the remains of his grandfather.

Similarly, when it comes to rituals and forms associated with funerals, like with the Kikuyu “traditional” has been a moving target. For example, as Prof Shipton notes that “elders in the mid and late twentieth century spoke of earlier times when Luo buried their dead beneath earthen floors of houses, but by the 1980s, all or nearly all were buried outside.”

In 1903, Charles William Hobley, then a 36-year-old Assistant Deputy Commissioner in the East African Protectorate published a second tranche of results from his research into the habits and beliefs of the people of what became the Protectorate’s Kisumu Province. He took a note of a“curious” customs that one would be hard-pressed to find in today’s “traditional” funerals.

Among the Jo-Luo when a person dies, for days, perhaps months after, the whole village wails with great fervour, and at stated intervals according to the conventions laid down for the case. If however, a barren woman dies, the people of the village at once commence to wail in the usual way, and the brothers and sisters of the deceased proceed as quickly as possible to the village where the death occurred. The first blood-relation of the deceased who arrives on the scene takes a sharp acacia thorn, sticks it into the sole of the foot of the corpse and breaks it off; immediately this is done all wailing ceases at once, nor is it renewed as in the case of an ordinary death.

“Elders in the mid and late twentieth century spoke of earlier times when Luo buried their dead beneath earthen floors of houses, but by the 1980s, all or nearly all were buried outside.”

[A]mong, the Awa-wanga [the Luhya“tribe” hadn’t been invented yet]… if a young girl, a virgin, dies, her female relatives, whose duty it is to bury her, artificially deflower the body before burial; this is always done by the forcible insertion of the pointed bulb of spathes which cover the immature flowers at the lower end of a growing bunch of bananas. If this is omitted, it is believed that the sisters of the deceased will not be found to be virgins on their marriage; this would be considered somewhat of a disgrace.

The point here is not to simply take as gospel truth the observations of a young British official who may or may not have understood what he reported. Rather, it is to underline the fact that what we call “tradition” may not be as clear cut -or even as desirable – as we sometimes like to think it is.

It is thus clear that fulminations, such as those of “Luo elders” against the cremation of Ken Okoth cremation, need to be viewed with a fair degree of skepticism when grounded on the shifting sands of “tradition”. Even if his body were to be transported to Nyanza, any burial he would get would not be “traditional”, if by that we mean it would be carried out in a way the pre-colonial folks of Kavirondo would immediately recognize as upholding a belief system which was undermined and eventually swept away by a perfect storm of Christianization and Kenyanization.

The realization that “tradition” and “culture” have (and have always been) little more than inventions, products of former generations’ struggle to understand and cope with the world and to pass on what they learnt – imperfectly at best – to us, is a freeing thought. We do not need to be defined by what and who came before. We should learn from them but also have the courage to write our own chapters in the book of life, to define, reinterpret and reshape “tradition” as we see fit. And if that means someone prefers to be cremated rather than buried, then that should be fine too. Perhaps decades from now, a new generation will grow up thinking, as we do today, that that is tradition.

It is also clear from the historical record, that even in death there have always been discriminations when it came to the treatment of the high and mighty compared to the hoi polloi. That perhaps is the one true tradition that has survived as evidenced by Alai’s prosecution for showing bodies that should be kept hidden. The same was the case with those accused (however inaccurately) of showing the corpses of Kenyan soldiers at El Adde and Kulbiyow in Somalia. It is borne out in the subsequent government attempts to erase the victims of these attacks from the public memory in a bid to hide its culpability.

The bodies we are allowed to see and grieve have always been hostage to power. Decisions over who is to be feted and buried and who is to be forgotten and tossed to the hyenas (literally and figuratively) are less about tradition and more about control. After all, if you control narratives, you can control society. This is how we end up with a mausoleum for Kenyatta’s dad and an unmarked, forgotten grave for Dedan Kimathi. And why so much attention is lavished on dead MPs and businessmen and relatively little on KDF dead soldiers. It is a marker of whose lives are important and whose are disposable.

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.

One (Private) Ring to Rule Them All: A Case Study of One Acre Fund

By Christine Mungai In February 2018, following a reorganization of the Kenya Government, the conservation and management of wildlife was moved from the Ministry of Natural Resources (MENR) to the Ministry of Tourism. With that move, the statutory wildlife conservation agency, Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) became the major line parastatal under this ministry. I have always felt that the pairing of Tourism and Wildlife is a ridiculous supplication of government structure to the aspirations of foreigners in the management of natural heritage. My skepticism was fueled by the fact that the Cabinet Secretary (CS), Mr. Najib Balala is someone with decades of experience in the tourism sector (even prior to joining politics) but none in the wildlife conservation sector.

In a rare display of honesty from a member of the Kenya Cabinet during his maiden visit to KWS headquarters as CS, he stated that he needed time to fully understand the goings-on in the organization and the sector at large. My skepticism at the initial realignment of wildlife under the tourism ministry quickly turned to consternation when after just one month in charge of the wildlife docket, the minister said that we should revert to serving game meat in high-class restaurants in order to improve the foreign tourists’ experience in Kenya. Many of the conservation fraternity in Kenya reacted to this statement with revulsion at the thought of officially sanctioned ‘bushmeat poaching’, while others were bemused that anyone could suggest something so ludicrous.

I was stunned into silence on the 29th March 2018 when the CS appointed a task force to look into the issue and report back to him, not least, because the power of the conservation elite over Kenya’s conservation policy was shamelessly displayed. The catharsis I had felt after John Mbaria and I published the ‘The Big Conservation Lie’ about a year earlier instantly evaporated. Those who have read the book, or closely monitored the conservation sector in Kenya will know that the sector never responds quickly (if ever) to requests or issues raised by indigenous Africans. Nonetheless, I rapidly got my thoughts in order, with the aim of submitting my negative opinions on this scheme as clearly and forcefully as possible. I was ready to do this, until I saw the mandate of the task force –

“… to assess and advise on the modalities of implementing the provisions of the Wildlife Conservation and Management Act, 2013 (WCMA 2013) on sustainable, consumptive wildlife utilization (CWU). CWU within the WCMA 2013 includes deliberate mechanisms by which wildlife resources in Kenya can be used to provide benefits to wildlife, the national economy, and individuals and communities living with wildlife”. The task therefore, was not to collect any views but to work out ways of implementing a racist and selfish piece of legislation sneaked into place by conservation pirates as a ruse to colonize Kenya’s rangelands. So what’s new or unique about this? Personally, I haven’t in my years experienced any such blatant self-interest pushed through government organs and structures by people who aren’t part of the system. It is important for us to understand that for the past 5 years, Kenya’s conservation sector has been operating within a policy vacuum where conservation decisions and actions are undertaken by KWS based on personal whims of the management, or the personal desires of whoever is funding the process being undertaken.

In light of this, a good place to start the interrogation of this process is to examine and unpack the composition of the task force Itself:

Dr. David Western, Dr. John Waithaka (Chairman), Dr. Benson Okita-Ouma, Ms. Caroline Kariuki, Ms. Gladys Warigia, Dr. Holly Dublin, Ms. Munira Bashir, Dr. Shadrack Ngene, Mr. Stephen Manegene, and Mr. Solomon Kyalo.

To do this, first we must first exclude Dr. Ngene and Mr. Kyalo who are both KWS staff and Mr. Manegene, the Director of Wildlife Conservation in the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife. As I stated earlier, there was no policy decision to be made by this committee, and these gentlemen simply comprise the ‘facade of government’. Whether or not they knew about the nature of their role, is a story for another day. Next, we have Ms Caroline Kariuki, the CEO of Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA). Kenya currently suffers from a case of what education scholar Wandia Njoya refers to as managerialism- that senseless belief that anyone with a knowledge of management and business administration can fit into any position, hence the rampant appointment of business people to provide leadership in any sector, and the feigned surprise at the spectacular failures that ensue.

The task therefore, was not to collect any views but to work out ways of implementing a racist and selfish piece of legislation sneaked into place by conservation pirates as a ruse to colonize Kenya’s rangelands.

A case in point was the appointment and unsuccessful tenure of the banker Kitili Mbathi as Director- General of KWS. Ms. Kariuki presence gives the whole wildlife decimation scheme a ‘business face’, conferring a certain human, yet dispassionate commercial cachet that can be used to portray any opposition to it as ‘emotional’ or ‘unreasonable’. Apart from that, there is nothing in her background that suggests that she could competently discuss the impacts of this decision on our natural heritage. Dr. David Western is a highly experienced wildlife ecologist and a former director of Kenya Wildlife Service. His KWS tenure was curtailed by a bitter war between the old primitive wildlife colonial project, and the new, sophisticated wildlife colonial project, which lost that particular battle, but is now in ascendancy. The wildlife colonial project in Africa is simply the use of wildlife conservation and wildlife-related recreation as a tool to exercise control over the lands inhabited by wildlife. This ‘tool’ is especially effective in the annexation of rangelands shared by wildlife and pastoralist livestock producers. In recent years, Kenyans have become pretty erudite in matters conservation and tourism, so the primitive old project that rode on personalities like George Adamson, Richard Leakey, and other white people with ‘bush experience’ (as opposed to academic qualifications) has become obsolete. The colonial project had to go on, and Dr. Western with his strong academic credentials, Caucasian extraction and Kenyan citizenship fit the bill for this particular assignment.

He was appointed Chairman when the task force was initially constituted, and of all the members, is the one most likely to have mooted the idea to the minister. He immediately opted out of the Chair for unknown reasons. We can only speculate that voicing the arguments would have betrayed his personal role and that of the colonial project in the whole scheme. His next best option was Dr. John Waithaka, a former KWS scientist who Dr. Western had mentored in the past, but had since made his name, working with distinction as a senior biologist at Parks Canada. Many in the know felt reassured that a man of Waithaka’s stature would see the hole in this scheme and advise against it. In light of this, it felt fortuitous, if not deliberate that after a few weeks, he got appointed Chairman of the KWS board, effectively removing him from the position, which was taken over by Dr. Ben Okita, the head of monitoring at Save the Elephants. With Dr. Waithaka’s exit, everyone left in the committee, apart from the ‘government people’ represented the aspirations of different players in conservation colonial project.

…. Kenyans have become pretty erudite in matters conservation and tourism, so the primitive old project that rode on personalities like George Adamson, Richard Leakey, and other white people with ‘bush experience’ (as opposed to academic qualifications) has become obsolete.

Dr. Okita’s role as the third-choice chair of the group does not imply any expectations amongst the powers-that-be that he will do anything other than toe the set line. Dr. Holly Dublin is a representative of the conservation colonial project, working for an amorphous group of international capitalists called the “B-Team” www.bteam.org. Keen observers will notice that the ‘B-Team also included the late Bob Collymore, immediate former CEO of Safaricom, a major “investor” in conservation through various conservancies and NGOs in Kenya. Dr. Dublin works as the B-Team’s ‘sustainability expert’ which basically means she advises on how this capitalist group can commodify natural resources, invest in management structures and exploit it in the long term for their own benefit. She chaired the African Elephant Specialist Group of the IUCN for 25 years and was instrumental in getting Dr. Okita into that position in the same year (2018) that he assumed the chair of the task force. It is important to note that she is a special advisor to the Zeitz Foundation, founded by Mr. Jochen Zeitz, the German millionaire investor, and former CEO of Puma sportswear. Zeitz was also appointed to the KWS board of trustees. A puzzling appointment, until one understands how Kenya’s wildlife is the tool through which global capital has chosen to colonize our lands.

Mr. Peter Hetz is the director of Laikipia Wildlife Forum, which was a grassroots conservation NGO, but now functions as a lobby group for the (white) large scale land owners in Laikipia, Kenya. A prominent member of this group is one Jochen Zeitz, owner of the 55,000-acre Segera Ranch and member of the KWS board of trustees. Next, we have Ms. Munira Bashir, the country director for The Nature Conservancy (TNC), probably the world’s prime example of conservation capitalism. Last but not least, there is Ms. Gladys Warigia, a lawyer and joint secretary of the task force. She works for the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association (KWCA), one of TNC’s proxies in Kenya that is helping them take over and exercise their hold over rangelands through the ‘community conservancy’ model. Through the latter two, TNC will have a finger on the deliberations and the legal ‘pulse’ of the task force and its deliberations in real time.

Peter Hetz is also on the board of KWCA, so this committee that looks diverse to the lay person is actually a complete convergence of the interests of the conservation colonial project, accompanied by a few ‘window dressers’ who have no say in its machinations, but are content to enjoy the largesse that comes with membership of such committees in Kenya. Another perceived advantage is that if the conservation colonial project gains power in Kenya, they will be in pole position for the plum ‘gun-bearer’ jobs as these avaricious foreign elite pillage our natural heritage. I have long lamented the intellectual vacuity that resides in the leadership of our statutory authority, Kenya Wildlife Service. However still, this didn’t mitigate my consternation at seeing its officers willingly participate in a process that is leading their institution to the gallows.

The report itself is a startling collection of contradictions, obfuscations and reference to privileges that are only available to the “conservation 1%”. This is the sector of our society that have own large tracts of land in wildlife habitats, are plugged into international tourism markets, are licensed to hold high-velocity firearms, hold current licenses to capture, kill, or otherwise handle wildlife and lastly, overwhelmingly white.

Environmental journalist and co-author of ‘The Big Conservation Lie’ author Gatu Mbaria says that in Kenya, the truth about conservation (and many other things) lies within what isn’t said or written. A very powerful and dishonest message lies in the photos in the report, starting from the cover, where the collage includes bamboo and aloe, betraying a startling level of hubris and underestimation of Kenyans’ intelligence. The second (dishonest and pretty insulting) picture message is on the title page where there is a headline “Consumptive Wildlife Utilization” and a photo of a Maasai man holding a spear while watching a herd of wildebeest. This is the most important page to the capitalists who will be expected to fund this plan – “Give us money to take ownership of this wildlife and use it before the black savages eat it all”. Forget the fact that the Maasai frown on consumption of meat from wild animals, and are among the best custodians of wildlife in Kenya.

The insults to Kenyans’ collective intelligence begin right from the preamble;

“…. the Task Force’s terms of reference emphasized that trophy hunting in Kenya remained banned and that there are no intentions of re-opening it. Therefore, its further consideration was not taken up by the Task Force”.

Trophy hunting is not defined by regulators, but by the intellectual circumstance of the killing. If I kill a rat, it is the individual, NOT the government that decides whether I am doing pest control, trophy hunting, or consumptive use. The killer is the one who decides whether to throw it out, eat it or mount its head on the wall.

As an instructor, a part of my teaching method has always been to ask students to read and analyze all literature in detail, but this report requires a change of tact, for two reasons; Firstly, one needs to ignore the nonsensical details therein, which are designed to obscure, rather than illuminate the true objectives. Secondly, one needs to pick up on the subtle details which reveal the truth.

The conservation 1% sector own large tracts of land in wildlife habitats, are plugged into international tourism markets, are licensed to hold high-velocity firearms, hold current licenses to capture, kill, or otherwise handle wildlife and lastly, overwhelmingly white.

Here is an example of the latter; The ‘all options considered’ chart purports to propose a framework through which authorities will govern the way we use our wild plants! Is KWS now seeking to even police the way in which we harvest managu (African nightshade) as a vegetable, eat wild fruits, and gather medicines and mushrooms from our environment? This spurious notion is not designed to convey any meaning but as a distraction to the reader. These are some of the sections to ignore. Another part of the flowchart claims that this ‘consumptive wildlife utilization’ will increase “cultural and religious benefits” of living with wildlife, implying the presence of some savage cultural and traditional religious beliefs that demand the killing of wildlife. Racial prejudice has always been par for the course in African conservation practice, but it is seldom expressed so pointedly in official government documents. Racial slurs, however painful it is to black or brown people around the world, should never be ignored in conservation, because it is a reminder of the conservation colonial project’s Achilles heel -hubris.

These distracting details are too many enumerate, so it is more efficient to look at the telling ones. Firstly, there is the oft-quoted research from Dr. Joseph Ogutu (a biostatistician, not a biologist) at the University of Hohenheim which is always a favourite of proponents of sport hunting wanting to hide the ‘whiteness’ of their aspirations behind statistical gymnastics, educational qualifications and an African name.

Quoting from the report:

“Ogutu et al.’s (2016) report shows that the numbers of mammals with an average body weight greater than 3 kg have declined by 68%. More recent data suggest that this trend is continuing and that population growth, habitat loss, bushmeat poaching for subsistence and commercial purposes, inadequate institutional and technical capacities, institutionalized governance challenges, insufficient regulations to devolve user rights to landowners with wildlife, the absence of benefits and incentives for landowners to maintain wildlife, and the general absence of awareness and knowledge of mechanisms and benefits of CWU undermine the potential of CWU in the country”.

Crudely translated, this means ‘There are too much pressure exerted on wildlife from black people. Also note that ‘bushmeat’ is something only eaten by black people -when white people eat wildlife, it is ‘game meat’ or ‘venison’. Secondly, that KWS is useless and unable to fulfill its mandates. Consequently, the only way we can conserve wildlife outside parks is to create instruments that can confer stronger ownership to the white people, so the blacks can conserve it in the service of white people.

This is the much-vaunted ‘job creation’ we are told will accrue from the slaughter of our wildlife. Game scouts, trackers, skinners, meat inspectors, and the like. This is what is seen as a fair exchange in return for our natural heritage. Probably the most insidious recommendation is hidden under the innocuous-sounding sub-title “Innovations”. It states that KWCA should be given the mandate for the following aspects of consumptive wildlife utilization; management planning services, business planning services, Wildlife and biodiversity monitoring efforts and audits for conservancies employing non-consumptive and consumptive wildlife uses.

The hubris raises its ugly head again when the authors disingenuously added the statement “This could complement government efforts in CWU implementation and management”.

This doesn’t complement KWS efforts -This is the total replacement of KWS by The Nature Conservancy through proxy.

Racial slurs, however painful it is to black or brown people around the world, should never be ignored in conservation, because it is a reminder of the conservation colonial project’s Achilles heel -hubris.

One of the key lessons from this entire caper is that the conservation colonial project is very calculating, and nothing, even the most minute detail that happens around the wildlife sector in Kenya is random. As is apparent from the composition of the task force, the substantive members all share a connection to capital interest in conservation, and that’s where the danger to our societies lies. The wildlife in question here does not fly in the air, but lives in lands shared by rural indigenous Kenyan communities. If any of this is implemented, they will lose their land, for the simple safety reason that it won’t be possible to graze your animals or go about your livelihoods in the same place where this avaricious global elites will be indulging their bloodlust. It is worth noting that this plan didn’t begin in 2018, it began nearly a decade earlier, and how it was thwarted by the former President Mwai Kibaki is a story for another day.

The lesson here is that the conservation colonial project is committed. They are relentless and well- endowed with resources. That is why for the last few years the office of director-general of KWS has been so thoroughly protected from being occupied by anyone who can intellectually participate in this discourse and fully understand the goings on in the sector.

The late historian Patrick Wolfe wrote in 2006 that settler colonialism is “the process in which the exogenous settlers displace Indigenous peoples for access to their lands and resources”. This is such an elegant definition of the conservation colonial project that he may as well have been writing about the miasma that is Kenya’s conservation sector. The most important part of Wolfe’s findings is that settler colonialism is a structure with ongoing effects rather than a single or past series of events. In this manner, the Wildlife Utilization Task Force Report is simply a proposed structure for conservation colonialism in Kenya.

The members of Wildlife Utilization Task Force have attempted to facilitate the blatant colonization of our lands through wildlife management chicanery. Whether their respective roles were deliberate conspiracy, or unwitting, remains to be seen. However, we will never forget their names. We Kenyans deserve better and should never accept this shame they have visited upon us. Neither intellectual vacuity nor dishonesty are acceptable in the stewardship of our natural heritage. Whatever opprobrium accrues now and in the future to everyone involved in this is richly deserved.

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.

One (Private) Ring to Rule Them All: A Case Study of One Acre Fund

By Christine Mungai The current wave of Kenyan urban music, and by extension, youth culture, has left observers scratching their heads. Where did it come from, how did it travel so quickly, and how has it so completely taken over the airwaves? Researchers Odipo Dev have already given us part of the answer — that the Internet has been very significant in boosting this new genre which is being referred to as Odi-pop or Gengetone. Specifically, it is a question of how online algorithms work to push what is already popular.

As a musician and scholar of music, my own observation of the trends leads me to another conclusion that would enrich Odipo Dev’s findings. In my view, it has been the huge popularity of what I am calling ‘gospel pop’ that cracked the door and held it open for Odi-pop to come through. In fact, the urban gospel scene in the second half of the 2000s was itself already a nascent version of this new sound.

This may seem bit ironical — that gospel music may have paved the way for a genre whose aesthetic that can fairly be described as ratchet. But in my view, this was possible because Kenyan gospel pop of the early 2000s was only faintly related to religious or church music proper. Kenyan gospel pop is popular because it cuts across class, regional, ethnic and especially generational lines. It is loved equally by a four-year-old as it is by her 60-year-old grandmother, which is important to consider when pop music is usually so strictly demarcated along generational lines. With this generation of gospel pop, the message was stripped down almost to its bones. It was simply music anyone could dance to. I see the new wave of ratchet Odi-pop as an extension of that philosophy of living one’s best life as loudly as possible and wearing your politics/religion with pride.

For the sake of definitional simplicity, I am proposing the collective term “Odi-pop” to refer to all the sub styles of this new sound. I am aware of each group having named their style separately e.g Gengetone, Dabonge style and so on and my definition is not trying to replace that. For me this musical style is basically pop but with a common sound (hip-hop rap influence blended with Carribean phrase and rhyme schemes, all constructed on an African rhythm base and performed in sing-along rap with heavy Kiswahili/Sheng inflections). My naming structure is borrowed from K- Pop.

Music or any kind of art, really, travels on a nonlinear path. This is why the conventional strategy for music marketers has been simple: spam the audience until they like it. It also means that the person with the loudest microphone controls content discovery as a whole. This is the reason why record labels would even go as far as to lock down distribution rights that were defined by geography, in effect controlling what an entire region would hear, and therefore effectively grow and maintain a market.

The Internet brought a disruption to this model, as Odipo Dev’s article illuminated, and broke down the power of traditional gatekeepers. And in the Kenyan context the traditional gatekeepers have been: media, politicians and the church — pop culture’s own axis of evil, you might say. The media with its own interests and relationships has for the longest time dictated what could be played, when it could be played. But these days there is so much Kenyan music on Youtube and Soundcloud for anyone who is looking for a different kind of sound.

Then there are the political elite. Politicians have always been alive to the power of music and have gone to great lengths to use it in their battle for hearts and minds. There’s also an uncanny relationship between dictatorships and thriving musicians. It isn’t always censorship — very often dictators encourage praise music, or at least uncontroversial music, frequently throwing money at anything that they believe will entrench love and adulation for them.

And finally the church, which was where these other two amplified their formal and informal censorship.

And so this explains the list of pop songs that did well in Kenya prior to the year 2000. They were all driven by a heavy dose of “message’’ and “meaning”, and Kenya’s politicians had managed, through the single broadcaster, to effectively limit the music to a specific list of themes. They replaced any local material that espoused other themes with foreign content. This explains why even today a song about sex written and performed by a Kenyan will struggle for airplay but one of the same theme by a foreigner will get tons of airplay with no questions asked.

It also fuels my claim about the effect of church music on Kenya’s pop scene. You see the only popular music that was exempt from the informal censorship from above was church music. In church, musicians could basically do whatever they wanted provided that they had the support of their pastor. However, outside of Kenya, the pop industries were not shackled in this way and so were growing in diverse ways. The result was that there was a huge demand for pop culture in Kenya that was raw and sincere. This demand was first met by the revolutionary Ogopa deejays and stars who made hit songs that were not carrying any cultural messaging. It was music for the sake of music. It was pure pop. Tumekuja kuwashika!

Pop music is a lot more anthropological than people like to give credit for. And the effect of the Ogopa Deejays was jarring to the sociopolitical system not because it was new but because it was visible. In the preceding decades, the despotic nature of the state, the arrests, detentions and summons to State House during the period between the late 60s and early 90s had effectively killed multiple waves of pop music. It also materially altered the expression of pop music by determining what would end up on radio.

Critically, it also effectively created multiple markets in the running of the broadcast industry. “Authorised” pop culture would rule the airwaves while “restricted” pop culture was confined to stage performances. This is what led to what we have now: two separate pop worlds. One visible one (with chart toppers) and other with popular live performers whose exploits are largely off the record and invisible.

And so what was achieved by Gidi Gidi Maji Maji and their lexicon-altering smash hit Unbwogable in 2002, which in turn was being amplified in the mainstream by Ogopa deejays and FM radio stations, was effectively a cultural earthquake. For the first time, politicians and the church had lost control of pop culture and it was now running wild. The opinion of a guy called Nameless became a factor in households that were previously relying on the cultural reality provided by the likes of Archbishop Ndingi Mwana a’Nzeki. Radio presenters of the era, Caroline Mutoko, Eve D’ Souza and Tina Ogal were now defining a new feminism and urban identity. Atoti ( Wicky Mosh featuring GidiGidi Majimaji) was now a term of endearment. Newspapers introduced urban pop culture magazine pullouts and this new wave captured the attention of the whole country. It was deliberately visible and extremely loud.

In the mid-2000s the system fought back vigorously. In a bid to take back some control, the corporate budgets were opened for what was defined at the time as “family and wholesome” content and closed for any other content. Any music not categorized as “Christian” was shunned. All major events were headlined by gospel music stars, and they hoarded media coverage.

Non-Christian ( secular) music almost disappeared from view. It was a silent put down. You may not have been aware of it, but at this time there was a very deliberate push to replace Kenyan urban pop music with foreign content. Nigerians, Tanzanians, Ugandans, Namibians, anybody but Kenyans. Nonini and Calif records were villains where P-square from Nigeria and Mr Nice from Tanzania were darlings. The playlists were altered and the videos removed.

However, in an interesting twist of fate, the aftershocks of Ogopa’s cultural earthquake were beginning to be felt in the gospel scene. The gospel stars were unwittingly amplifying the effect of the Ogopa Revolution. These band of artistes were more cool than they were Christian. Their themes were less theological and more existential. There was much less “come to Jesus” and a lot more “live happy and be free” – but within the confines of church. Importantly, this was the same area that non- Christian pop music had been focused on: the idea of gratification and happiness for today. And for me, it’s a very short hop from the secular musician DNA:

“Tunaweka shida zetu chini tunaweka mikono juu, banjuka tu”

(We put down our problems and raise our hands, let loose)

To gospel musician Daddy Owen:

“Mi napenda watoto, Mi napenda kuimba, Mi napenda kuenda church na kuomba, Mimi nitakata kata, Maboko likolo.”

I love children, I love to sing, I love going to church and prayer, I will dance, Maboko likolo.

In my mind, these two songs are almost identical philosophically. They are both pop songs but for different audiences, espousing a centrist view which made them accessible to both conservative and liberal audiences.

This is, in my view, the beginning of the sound that I have collectively called Odi-pop. It is a contemporary genre that is marked by urban, ahistorical, and accessible philosophy and idiom. It is a sound that is fundamentally localised hip hop, but draws from reggae and Caribbean music to build on its African rhythm base. The music is here to make you feel good. Right here right now. It rides on the language of now. It is very Michael Jackson-esque. These pop stars have more stage names and fewer actual names. They go out of their way to brand themselves as having no tribe, no politics and no history. It was just E-Sir. Or Nameless. And Now it’s Willy Paul, Bahati, Miracle Baby, and Reckless. In this way there isn’t an ownership that could be linked to just one tribe, language or culture. For the first time in Kenya’s pop culture we can, all of us, own a pop star in the exact same way. Ethic is for all of us. So is Khaligraph and so is the idea of Wamlambez. Even the meaning is open to interpretation. You are allowed to translate it however you please. It can be a warm greeting, a chant at a sports event or it can be vulgar depending on your own politics.

The culture, as a product, is accessible to anyone. Any Kenyan could love Timeless Noel, Konkodi, Bruz Newton, or P-Unit because, after all, they represent an imaginary aspirational Kenyan that is free to love without encumbrance and in a language everybody can speak.

However, the most important part of the Odi-pop sound for me is that for the first time in my lifetime at least the pop scene is not referencing another context. It’s 100% trying to create its own identity. The new guys are not trying to recreate or localize anymore. They are not interested in that. They are interested in making something new. They are as sincere as they could be. It’s unapologetic.

To be honest I don’t know how long the current acts will stay relevant. That’s up to them and how they invest in the next few years. What I know is that the sound, Odi-pop and its philosophy has already endured a decade and there is no turning back. If we mark Banjuka by DNA as maybe the first track of this new philosophy and Figa by Ethic as the most recent then we can for the first time map a line between the pop releases across a decade. Figa is amplifying the wave created by Vimbada by Moji shortbabaa and Jabidii which amplified Bazokizo by Collo Majale which amplified the wave created by Odi Dance which amplified Kamua leo by Kidis, which amplified You Guy( P- Unit), which amplified Toklezea (Abbas) which amplified Tichi (Kenrazy)which amplified Banjuka (DNA). The artists are different. Their spaces are different but the philosophy is the same and their work is, for the first time in Kenya’s history, all on record.

And this is important. Because what the Odi-pop has done, by amplifying each other, is they are slowly bringing the scene back to the path that leads to freedom. And if you add the influence of the Internet and how content discovery is happening today, then you can see another important effect of this cultural moment. The big microphone is now being held by the pop stars. It’s the kind of dictatorship that thrust Bob Marley and reggae into world domination. It is a special kind of big voice that centers makers and doers, and people who imagine themselves to be more than they are, and who try to declare that as loudly as possible. Without apology.

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 Christine Mungai

Before the chang’aa fields of Mathare, you would get your “kill me quick” in Kibra. Distilled under the cover of night by sugarcane-lined banks of the river, Nubian gin—arak in Kinubi—would gain strength in underground pipas, or hidden inside someone’s home. It would travel, hidden beneath women’s clothes, around the young city of Nairobi, where it would be sold to drinkers or wholesalers. Or it would stay right there in Kibra, poured out only for a man who approached the door and signaled with a finger slicing across his throat.

All of this was illegal. In 1897, before Nairobi was even formally a city, the British colonial administration prohibited “natives” from drinking any form of distilled liquor, let alone brew it. It happened nonetheless in Kibra. Originally a 4,000-acre swath of land that stretched from present- day Lang’ata to Golf Course, Kibra was given to Nubian ex-soldiers of the King’s Army Rifles as pension for their military service. Before Kibra—which means “forest” in Kinubi—eventually swelled into the densely populated slum we know today as Kibera, it was home to these Nubian ex-soldiers and their families, as well as the city’s first “migrant” workers.

Although Nubians enjoyed considerable privileges over other Africans—not least land, at a time when “natives” were not even allowed to enter Nairobi without documents showing that they were at work—Kibra was in at least some sense the first “black settlement” in Nairobi. The first true black settlement was Pumwani, established in 1922. Others, like Kileleshwa, were destroyed and its African residents evicted. Kibra survived, through military patronage—and the administration’s failure to resettle the Nubian community elsewhere—and was “tolerated.” It became home to many African men who migrated to the city looking for wage labor and created a unique environment of transience and dislocation for the city’s “ethnics.” As an Asian-American, I was struck with a sense of familiarity when reading about Kibra’s early days, particularly the language of administrators and how differently these places were governed. To me, Kibra sounded a lot like the first Chinatowns in North America. (I’m referring specifically to the first Chinatowns to exist around the turn of the 20th century, and not “Chinatown” as shorthand used today for commercial-residential clusters of Chinese diaspora throughout the world.)

Like Kibra, Chinatowns were enclaves of racial Others at the frontiers of Othering, designed into cities that were young and growing, having just been established by white European settlers. Chinatowns were seen as “vice-towns,” diametrically opposed to other parts of the “good city,” which were clean, orderly, white, and Christian. The problematic conditions of these districts were ascribed, through essentialist ideas, to the race of their residents. What this means is that, while a certain street or block can be home to members of the Chinese diaspora, what makes a Chinatown a Chinatown—to paraphrase K.J. Anderson—is a story about the place that tells us more about the Insiders who make the rules than the Outsiders who live there.

Of course, the verminization of marginalized people in cities—whether sex workers, ethnic Others, or the poor—is hardly the exception and more often the rule. Ghettoes have always been governed differently. If you cannot keep “undesirables” out of the city, because you need cheap labor, then make sure they are concentrated and unable to move freely. Nairobi’s high-rent, poorly serviced slums are the extension of a colonial policy that demanded cheap labor but wanted to keep the laborers at a distance. This is, unfortunately, nothing new.

But one aspect that Chinatowns and Kibra share is that they both formed in “new” cities where the influx, movement, and distribution of ethnic Others was an immediate design challenge for early urban planners. Vancouver and San Francisco had barely been cities for a few years when Chinatowns were formed; most Chinese migrants to Vancouver, for example, flooded in as “coolies” for the Pacific Railway. Nairobi, originally a supply depot along the railway route from Mombasa to Kampala, was established in 1899 and, in 1906, made the capital of British East Africa. The city was racially segregated from the very beginning, and until 1922, Africans were not permitted to build or live within city limits, only to pass through to work. They were required to wear a kipande, an identity document worn in a metal box around the neck, that allowed them access only to sites and times of employment. Thus, whether as migrants from another continent or indigenous people made strangers in their own land through coercion and the rupture of the existing economy, both Africans and Chinese found themselves unwelcome in a nascent city created by and for Europeans.

There are two narratives about Chinatown that we can use to understand the similarities between Kibra and Chinatowns in North America. The first is sanitation, and the second is morality.

The linking of sanitation and race is hardly unique to either Nairobi or early North American Chinatowns; “verminizing” language is commonly used to, first, explain significant differences between the races, and second, justify policies that separate them or account for unequal conditions. Put another way, depending on who you are and where people like you sit in hierarchy, “public health” is either a service or a weapon wielded against you. K. Scott Wong writes that images of the Chinese in Chinatown often played a role in a “larger racial and political agenda of promoting segregation and exclusion,” citing the 1876 Senate Hearings on Chinese immigration, in which John Durkee, the San Francisco Fire Marshal, lamented that property adjacent to Chinese was constantly depreciating in value because “houses occupied by Chinese are not fit for white occupation, because of the filth and stench.”

Durkee goes on to say that “the only way I can account for our not having a great fire in the Chinese quarter is that the wood is too filthy and too moist from nastiness to burn.” In Vancouver, a separate health and safety category was set aside for Chinatown, with its own inspectors, alongside other categories like sewage, pigsties, infectious disease, and slaughterhouses.It is clear that the goals of the fire marshal and his agency, or with health inspectors who covered Chinatown, were less maintaining safety for all residents than cordoning off of problematic people into their own quarters.

This “evidence” of the dirtiness of Chinese was cited in a hearing discussing the future of Chinese immigration to the United States. The logic—of using the conditions of physical quarters where Chinese live to inform a decision about other Chinese who may potentially immigrate—is that something inherently unsanitary or uncouth is embedded in essential race characteristics. That this race, and cultural behaviors associated with it, are total, immutable realities that cannot be influenced by policy (or connected more with, say, poverty).

Early Nairobi planners, which included South Africans who drew from urban planning practices implemented in southern Africa at the time, also separated Europeans, Indians (“Asiatics”), and “natives” to keep diseases that were prevalent in poor, working-class districts from spreading to areas inhabited by Europeans. Fears of non-European districts as an “unsanitary and as a serious public health menace” were exacerbated after bubonic plague outbreaks in Nairobi’s lower-class railway housing and the Indian Bazaar in 1900, 1902, and 1904. In the eyes of the administration, this epidemiological problem had an ethnicized solution: enforcing strict racial residential segregation. The legacy of colonial, racially segregated urban design in Nairobi still lives on.

The strictures placed around these “migrants” were meant not only to keep the city clean in terms of public health but also morally. Kibra and Chinatowns were seen as breeding grounds for prostitution, theft, and other crimes (and sins) that, if not contained or eliminated, would contaminate other parts of the city. By 1897, the Native Liquor Ordinance criminalized the consumption of distilled alcohol by Africans, an effort meant to curb “disruptive drunken behavior.” In 1921, the Nairobi Municipal Council established a “native brewery,” which served a beer that was “pure and of low alcoholic content” to African men over the age of eighteen. Of course, men still drank; they were just getting it in Kibra.

At a time when Africans’ wages ranged from 50 to 500 shillings per month, Nubian women were making 6,000-20,000 shillings per month. Police often raided Kibra and even arrested distillers, but even after paying bribes and bail, the profit margins were comfortable. At the peak of these police raids and patrols, gin production was driven underground—quite literally, as some distilling pipas were dug into the ground. In 1936, a special police post was established in Kibra to focus specifically on “suppressing drunkenness and crime.”

Chinatowns also were associated with prostitution, a vice (or tolerance thereof) attributed to cultural differences. Although in Vancouver, sex work was hardly limited to Chinatown, its presence Chinatown drew the ire of Europeans, who criticized the practice in terms of women’s welfare: “The Chinese are the most persistent criminals against the person of any woman of any class in this country.” Perhaps the substance that came to be associated most with “Chinamen” was opium. According to Anderson, by the 1920s in Vancouver, when racist narratives were being used in British Columbia, “the old opium image fed and was assimilated into an image of Chinatown as a narcotics base and ‘Chinese’as dangerous distributors.”

“Oriental” proclivities towards these vices—whether sex, opium, gambling—were rendered not only as “un-Christian” but also polluting, with the potential to travel and surpass the necessary boundaries, threatening white neighborhoods with their proximity. As with Kibra, from the perspectives of municipalities, managing these vices was a matter of separating away “amoral” elements and preventing spillover to “decent” districts, which was achieved through regular campaigns of raids. As mentioned earlier, there is nothing novel about certain quarters of a city being governed differently to others. In fact, this was a natural solution for a colonial city that faced the dilemma of needing laborers, not wanting to raise wages and quality of living, and also not wanting the laborers (and their “problems”) to sit too close for comfort. Comparing Kibra and Chinatowns, though perhaps at the cost of being too neat, does reveal basic similarities in how this problem was “solved.”

For some Chinatowns, even though discriminatory, racist practices and, more recently, gentrification form a looming threat. For the most part, they have survived and remained important cultural centers and symbolic spaces for diverse Asian immigrant communities in North America—especially when “multi-culturalism” became cool, and cities realized they could capitalize on “culture” for tourism. On the other hand, Kibera today still plays a similar role as a hub for the poorest of the working class in the city. The process by which Kibra turned into the Kibera we know it to be today, during which Nubians were pushed into shrinking corners of their land (and into statelessness), uses similar mechanisms to those in the colonial era.

Going into the archives and studying the way in which bureaucrats regarded and crafted policies for certain groups of people can help us understand some of the legacies of this type of urban design today. It can help us identify what has not changed at all, and understanding root problems, in turn, can help us develop better solutions, which is all useful.

However, there is one very significant thing this cannot do. Examining policies and discourse from the perspective of those in power through documents, as I have, is fundamentally incomplete because it excludes the voices of any of those who ever lived there. If Chinatown is a story that tells us more about the Insiders who make the rules than the Outsiders who live there, then it is certainly also true that it is not the only story—or even the most important one.

Though they fade from memory with each generation, the complicated, mundane, diverse experiences of the people who lived in these districts of exclusion should form the centre of any inquiry into oppression. Some of these stories will, of course, refer to or react to the structures that constrained their existence—how Nubian women changed their brewing practices to avoid arrest, for example. But others will have had nothing to do with their oppressors;they are stories of people who lived in a certain place at a certain time, who chose to do it in their way. The sounds, sights, patterns, and ways of living that only they could know. Which, for people living in a place for which everything seems ascribed to a single and questionable aspect of their humanity—race—is a most supreme form of resistance.

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 Christine Mungai

In April 2018, a video of what seemed to be a pair of teenagers having, or simulating, sex at the back of a car – maybe an Uber? – went viral under the hashtag #IfikieWazazi. The girl is sitting on the boy’s lap, the boy is holding a phone in front of them, recording video, selfie-style. The moral panic was swift and shrill – the head-shaking and finger-wagging, the familiar lament watoto wa siku hizi (kids these days), plus the rather grand where are we heading as a society. But what stood out the most for me was the expression on their faces. They – the girl especially – were smiling through it all, looking straight into the camera as they had sex in the back of a moving car in broad daylight. Their joy was both disturbing and complicated: a combination of ordinary teenage mischief and something else, something deeper and more transgressive.

It was play and defiance, an outrageous commandeering of a quasi-public space with lewd behaviour, recorded for posterity and then dispatched directly to parents – ‘ifikiewazazi’ means ‘let this get to [the] parents’. Or maybe, make sure this gets to the parents.

Ratchet: noun, verb, adjective 1. To be ghetto, real, gutter, nasty 2. It’s whatever, bout it, etc [As defined by producer PhunkDawg on the liner notes of the CD “Do The Ratchet”, featuring rapper Lil Boosie, 2004. Shreveport, Louisiana].

#IfikieWazazi went viral; by now it was not just the video, but also a barrage of images of teenagers posing in highly suggestive positions, arched backs, pouty lips and all. In the chaos of virality, it was difficult to discern whether #ifikiewazazi was to be read as warning (to the kids by the parents and parental figures) and a taunt (to the parents, by the kids), or both.

Soon after, the song ‘Lamba Lolo’ by the rap group Ethic was released. None of them seemed a day over 21. They were (obviously) singing about fellatio, over a poorly produced track. The music video, especially, is of the aesthetic that I call Nairobi Grime – dusty streets, mabati shops and unfinished buildings in the background.

In the chaos of virality, it was difficult to discern whether #ifikiewazazi was to be read as warning (to the kids by the parents and parental figures) and a taunt (to the parents, by the kids), or both.

They seemed like they just walked out of their houses on an errand to buy milk and a matchbox. It was, in short, scruffy and unpretentious. In the next few months, catching many off guard, came this new wave of Kenyan music, in which the ratchetry was turned all the way up. In most of these videos, it was just a catchy hook, the mtaa backdrop, and lots and lots of twerking. The rest, as they say, is history, but a living kind of history.

In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the city of Atlanta would come to a standstill once a year with what came to be known as Freaknik. It begun as an event for students from the prestigious, historically Black colleges of Morehouse and Spelman to come together and network during spring break; the suffix “nik” hints it was envisioned that the networking would take place in a picnic-like setting.

But quickly, the “freak” part would eclipse any corporate or straight-laced intentions that the event might originally have had. It evolved into a prolific cultural and sexual celebration, that brought in Black students from all over the country, as well as artists, musicians, and residents of Atlanta from all socio-economic classes, to party hard. Atlanta’s city official government pushed back against the festival with violence, intimidation, and attempts at co-optation until Freaknik was ultimately banned.

That this was happening in the city of Atlanta was highly disruptive to the sensibilities of a city that was known as America’s “Black Mecca”, where a wealthy Black middle-class had emerged as far back as the 1940s. The street where Martin Luther King Jr. had grown up – Auburn Avenue – was called “the richest Negro street in the world.”

King himself was born into a respectable middle-class family that did not struggle materially, unlike the majority of Black families in the US at the time, as James Baldwin wrote in his 1961 profile of King in Harper’s Magazine. The Black bourgeoisie of Atlanta were proper, they esteemed certain ways of dressing and speaking; they were respectable folk and believed that this would allow them to live a life of dignity in the segregated South.

This worked, to some extent – Atlanta was one of the few cities in the South that seemingly “peacefully” transitioned out of segregation, the Black elite had already built substantial wealth and were on hand to integrate into the city structure. Most of all, the Black bourgeoisie cautioned against disrupting day-to-day business even as the Black community pressed for civil rights, writes Sarah Abdelaziz in her thesis Ratcheting a Way Out of the Respectable: Genealogical Interventions Into Atlanta’s Respectability Politics. “They believed that through negotiations, business deals, and moral pleas, they could advance political progress.”

Two decades later, a new generation of young Atlantans began enthusiastically inhabit a form of Black sexual leisure Abdelaziz calls a “mass rupture in respectability politics”, a kind of “undomesticated Black communal eroticism.” In her words:

Cars littered the streets, blocking intersections and highways, as people recreated a city center wherever it suited them. Black women danced on top of cars with or without clothes on and became a central spectacle of the event, defying sexual and racial mores (Thompson, 2007). To the white fear of a singular Black body, Freaknik answered with thousands, not only in numbers, but with a loudness. Freaknikers literally ratcheted up all that capitalism and the project of whiteness fear: the unabashed engagement in sexual leisure at the direct cost of circuits of capital.

Freaknik, in her analysis, was a pushback against the surveillance that is demanded by respectability politics that characterised Atlanta, by enlisting in the tactics of “evasion, subversion, play and exhibitionism.” It was an attempt to snatch some joy in a context where neoliberal policies had left the class oppressions intact even as Black people had been granted civil rights, and where mass incarceration was ensnaring more and more Black people in its grim dragnet. And although most Freaknikers may not have been able articulate what they were doing in such elegant political terms, that doesn’t mean it was any less so.

A new generation of young Atlantans began enthusiastically inhabit a form of Black sexual leisure Abdelaziz calls a “mass rupture in respectability politics”, a kind of “undomesticated Black communal eroticism.”

The personal is political, especially if your existence has already been politicized. Sexual energy is life energy, my friend Ciru Ngigi reminds me, and Audre Lorde understood the erotic as not only a sexual pleasure, but as a way to “deeply connect with the self and with others radically, so as to empower the ability to fight for and manifest liberation.”

In moments like this, one escapes, even temporarily, the constraining norms of a society where your worth is determined by how much labour can be extracted out of you, and where existing as Black means that true social worth is always tantalizingly out of your reach. In so doing, there is an insurgent possibility that there can be life after social death, that there can be life beyond nihilism.

It is, the Black Ratchet Imagination – a form of redemption can be grasped as one inhabits one’s body fully and unashamedly, not easily reducible to mere “acting out”, the ratchet is an attempt to “to reclaim space, refuse binary identities, subvert language [and] create economic opportunities with new economies.”

Six months ago, economist and public intellectual David Ndii revisited the Kenya at the Crossroads: Scenarios for our Future report that had been written in 1998, when the Kenyan economy was in free fall. At that time, President Daniel arap Moi was clocking two decades in power, there was public dilapidation everywhere you looked.

Darius Okolla captures the mood of despondency in his article exploring the 1990s deterioration of his hometown Kitale– “it was subtle, gradual, almost imperceptible, and forever disguised as the typical wear and tear of urban spaces – but it was more than that. It was thievery, corruption, and disenfranchisement, shoving it down the path of visible decline; a depreciative spectacle masked by rural docility and the often-accepted rural poverty.”

The premise of the Scenarios project was that “Kenya had reached the limits of its chosen political and economic models”, that is, what Ndii calls an “enclave economy” as set in place during British colonialism – a small corporatized economy of formal enterprises, good schools and prim urban neighbourhoods (it is telling that we call our neighbourhoods ‘estates’, as if in our imagination they are, in fact, country manors ruled over by lords and barons). On the outside of this small elite and privileged core is the “native sector” of the excluded African masses.

After independence in 1963, the privileged core was vacated by the British, and an African elite moved in to replace them. If you had a university education, you went straight to the top of the public or corporate sector and your future was pretty much secured; even with a secondary education you could live comfortably.

However by the end of the 1980s, the formal sector had stagnated and was struggling to absorb the ever-increasing numbers of university graduates. Catastrophe was only averted when the economy was liberalised in the early 1990s, leading to the explosion in the informal sector. The jua kali and mitumba businesses, the second-hand cars from Dubai, the stalls and ‘exhibitions’ were like opening a safety valve on a pressure cooker – they staved off social unrest and bought Kenya a few more years of stability.

Fast-forward three decades, and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics shows that the economically active population (age 15-64) are 25 million, a five-fold increase from 1990. Yet, as Ndii writes, the formal wage employment is estimated at just 2.7 million, and its contribution to total employment is down to 8.5 percent, from 25 percent in 1990.

Meanwhile, 125,000 students graduate from university every year – an astonishing 63 times the rate three decades ago, yet the formal sector is absorbing less than 100,000 a year. Once again, Kenya is balancing on a delicate precipice, a society of rising tensions where upward social mobility is becoming more and more of a mirage.

Today’s 18-year-olds are coming of age in a society with bizarre and normalized dysfunction. They watched as the country ushered in a new constitution only to eviscerate it. They live in a city presided over by a governor whose rise to power is only comparable to the plot in a crime fiction novel.

The formal wage employment is estimated at just 2.7 million, and its contribution to total employment is down to 8.5 percent, from 25 percent in 1990.

These teenagers watched as a country celebrated students’ mass failure in national examinations, starting in 2016 when tough-talking Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i defeated the so-called cartels and their shadowy, dormitory-burning ways, and delivered a ‘clean’ examination – just 141 A grades, compared to over 2,000 the previous year. In 2018, more students — 30,840 of them — only managed a grade E (a flat failure) than those who scored a combined A, A-, B+ and B, who total 28,403. This is not a normal distribution – the bell curve of grading would predict that the majority should get an average, C grade. The sharp skew at the lower end is not how normal classrooms perform.

In any sane country, this would prompt a somber reflection, maybe even a day of national mourning. At the very least, any teacher whose class failed her exam en masse would at least have to re- evaluate either the content or her teaching methods. And, if the scripts were being marked by external examiners, it would not be unreasonable to suspect that one’s students are being deliberately made to fail.

These 18-year-olds instead saw the country cheer as some subjects record a failure rate of 90 percent and higher. They have been watching as a hairdresser carted away millions of shillings of public funds in sacks, and as reports of poisonous (poisoned?) sugar, maize, milk and meat flood TV headlines and nothing substantial happens. They have been watching as political leaders shift alliances without batting an eyelid, and with such speed that it can give you whiplash, where someone condemned as the devil and an ogre today can be described as “my friend” and “a safe pair of hands” tomorrow.

Today’s 18-year-olds are coming of age in a society with bizarre and normalized dysfunction. They watched as the country ushered in a new constitution only to eviscerate it.

It is a bleak new dispensation. We have been telling them to work hard, be God-fearing, modest, respectful and focus on their education, but kwa ground vitu ni different.

It is against this backdrop that we now must consider the chants of wamlambez, wamnyonyez. If we steady our gaze on the nihilism and purposelessness that our young people have been forced – by the older generation – to inhabit, then their lewd chants and booty-shaking becomes less an indictment on their morals and more on our own. It is, in fact, appropriate to regretfully mutter wazazi wa siku hizi ( Today’s parents). And it is not like every generation doesn’t have its own lustful excesses – many of today’s horrified parents did the same, or worse, at Jam Sessions or Safari Sevens. They sang along to Nampenda John and Manyake, all sizes. The only difference is that there were no camera phones then.

As one 23-year-old told me, the only morality our society cares about is the sexual one, yet the rest of our existence is incredibly immoral. The young people of today are gleefully forcing that hypocrisy to collapse on itself, by intentionally being as ratchet as possible – so over-the-top and outrageous that they becomes impossible to ignore. Because really, what’s the worst that could happen? “Shame and embarrassment is not the worst thing. We’ve experienced worse. What is there to protect?” she said to me. It is, as Kalundi Serumaga once wrote, that poverty is the worst violence, the greatest shame and the constant embarrassment.

Like Freaknik in Atlanta a generation ago, the wamlambez wave – by this I mean the wave of this extremely ratchet music – is a pushback against the bleak logics of a society that defiles in so many other ways, a society that ruthlessly forecloses on opportunities for the young and poor in particular. Kwa ground ni different: social amenities like public parks, playgrounds and social halls have grabbed or left to decay, jobs and opportunities are hoarded for the politically connected, and there is the constant exhortation to entrepreneur oneself out of structural poverty.

It leaves one, then with only the Internet and one’s body as the last arenas that one can live, not just exist, but really live, with the all the thrill and joy that capitalism, classism and racism tells us will never be ours. This is the possibility of alternative life that the ratchet offers — a way of being in the world that seeks to live in pleasure, purpose and joy – full humanity, and that above all refuses to participate in the fraudulent prescription that in Kenya, of all places, personal comportment and sexual restraintwill define one’s life chances and opportunities. Anyone who went to an upmarket private school in Nairobi knows how ratchet wealthy children can be, with no lasting consequences. As one 23-year-old told me, the only morality our society cares about is the sexual one, yet the rest of our existence is incredibly immoral.

In the end, however, the ratchet in isolation will not save us either. The personal transgression of mores governing dress, speech, sexuality and decorum do not make a revolution – the oppressive structures that corral black life into nihilistic corners are a product of laws, politics, the justice system, theology and economics, all of which should be engaged with, for the purposes of expanding freedom. And although Freaknik was banned by the city of Atlanta, that was not before it started losing its own appeal because of increasing incidents of sexual harassment and even assault during the festival, in contrast to its playful and liberating beginnings.

In the end, the ratchet cannot be an end in itself. It is only a means of carving out new ways of relating to ourselves, and each other. The ratchet only offers possibilities, as Abdelaziz concluded, “we would be mistaken to not pay attention to these gasps of alternative life in our present predicament.” The emphasis is mine.

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.

One (Private) Ring to Rule Them All: A Case Study of One Acre Fund

By Christine Mungai If you are a Kenyan with some form of regular access to the Internet, chances are that you’ve heard the chant “Wamlambez!” and the equally loud response “Wamnyonyez!”. This now-ubiquitous chant is derived from a hit song by a group of five high-spirited youngsters called Sailors.

The music industry in Kenya right now seems to be caught in a philosophical daze about what this new wave of music means to Kenyan culture and musical evolution. Ezekiel Mutua, CEO of the Kenya Film and Classification Board this week forbade the song “Wamlambez”, as well as the song “Tetema” by Tanzanian musicians Diamond Platnumz and Rayvanny, outside of clubs and bars. It is unclear whether this move is in his mandate, a man who is perceived to frequently overstep his boundaries and bestrides Kenya’s entertainment scene as a kind of moral policeman.

It is also unclear whether this forbidding is indeed enforceable, seeing that so much popular music is accessed on personal smartphones. In any case, Kenyan clubs and airwaves have been taken over by a new organic sound and we are all paying attention. Music is very much an anthropological tool, and we see these eccentric hits as a window into culture; more specifically how the music industry in Kenya is changing and how the making of hit songs is being reorganized, both from an artist and audience perspective.

How the Internet has changed audience composition

Despite Internet penetration growing rapidly in Kenya in the early 2010s, it was still not yet a viable platform for mainstream musical success. This is partly because the audience that was considered to be the “mainstream” wasn’t yet accessing the Internet as regularly or as easily. The demographic that was accessing the Internet at this point was the educated, middle to high-income earner and there still existed a lot of privilege for Internet access. As such, we believe a large number of Internet successes around reflected the tastes of this privileged group.

However, at around the halfway point of the decade, smartphone penetration reached a tipping point and Internet access became highly democratized. And herein began the true unspoken shift in power. The beauty of the Internet and the algorithms that operate it, mean that the demand side of the equation has a great influence on what surfaces to the top of search results.

One just needs to take a look at how much YouTube’s Kenya home page has changed over the years. The collective action of the majority tends to push certain pieces of content to the top, hence the word “trending”. As more and more of the mainstream audience began to access the Internet, they changed the entire fabric of what was popular or trending based on their own interests. It is in the midst of all this change that new genres like this so-called ‘Odi pop’ have emerged. The new sound has a very grassroots feel to it that is resonant with a large majority of Kenyans, especially the youth.

The medium is the message

One of the most common sayings in media theory is “The medium is the message”. The basic idea behind this theory is that the medium through which we consume a specific piece of content affects how we receive the message that is presented to us. The medium is the message, the content is only incidental. The evolution of the media landscape in Kenya has definitely affected the Kenyan message across various realms and music is no exception.

Before the advent of the Internet, mainstream media acted as a gatekeeper comprising traditional media owners and editors of radio and TV stations. This small group created all sorts of creative restrictions as to what the audience would and wouldn’t consume. The standard of what was considered acceptable for public consumption was sieved through the lens of these gatekeepers.

For music, this meant that certain genres or lyrics of a certain kind were promoted, while others were frowned upon. With the Internet however, music now has a chance to develop freely with no interference from the corporate or politicized media interests. As a result, this allows for very high depth and width of musical styles to come to the fore. It also means that what becomes a hit can end up being something very different from what we are used to seeing in the mainstream.

If you go down the rabbit hole that is YouTube’s recommendation engine based on Odi pop, an interesting trend begins to emerge. You get a front seat to a certain type of raw authenticity that brings out the real context of the lived experiences Kenyan urban youth. You get to witness a different perception of aspiration, lifestyles, hair and dressing from what you would expect from the mainstream media. Typically, most of these songs and their videos would never make it to radio or TV.

However, when we look at how audiences consume media on the Internet and especially social media and YouTube, it is often the case that grimy production of this kind of music has more appeal than the glitzy, overproduced nature of mainstream TV and radio content, music videos in particular. The amateur aesthetic is definitely important to content creation on the web. The songs don’t have the best beats out there, the artists don’t have makeup or extensive wardrobes nor do the video vixens necessarily appeal to the beauty ideal. They are just normal people, who are easily relatable, and this might be one of the reasons why a lot of these songs are raking in tons of views online. The fact that YouTube is the main medium from which this music has arisen has completely changed the way the message we’re getting is delivered.

The second part of the how the medium has affected this message is something that comes to mind specifically when you observe the two current champions of this sound, the groups Sailors and Ethic. The fact that the rise of the Internet in Kenya has been driven by the smartphone has meant that the power of publishing is not just with the creator but with the creator’s audience as well. Every single person today who consumes content online also has the potential to create something new from the content they’ve just consumed. In the case of ‘Odi pop’, the songs seem to come with a long tail of user-generated content for the artist’s audiences to snack on – that is, commentary, reactions, reviews or simply clipping highlights from the content piece, created by the audience themselves. The technical term for this kind of audience member is the ‘prosumer’, and they are redefining the dynamics of how we think about popular culture. Their preferred tool of choice is the meme. Memes have been instrumental to the success and accessibility of this genre of music, and have spiked its visibility on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Songs like “Wamlambez” can be consumed multiple times a day outside the context of the full song itself. The meme has become a democratized art form that Kenyans in many ways (as with all art) have used to collectively express their traumas and interpret their culture. However, unlike almost everything else in entertainment, they are rarely made for the purpose of making money; they are simply here to make us laugh. They are an authentic intervention in our consumption of culture and we use them to evoke powerful shared moments of our collective cultural identity.

Songs have a way of capturing the national imagination, reaching moments where you almost can’t seem to escape the song with it playing everywhere and being sang by everyone. Something similar happens on the Internet when things go viral – seeming to follow no rhyme or reason, people are compelled to like, share, retweet or participate in things online. In the case of Sailors, Ethic, the Boondocks Gang, Ochungulo Family, Zzero Sufuri, and the rest, the manner in which their songs have captured the national imagination is telling of how much the audience has changed. The songs are a different kind of entertainment product. They rely on the contagious nature of humor on the Internet and the sense of belonging that challenges such as the #wamlambezchallenge provides. This in many ways is evident when you look at the mentions for the term “Wamlambez” on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Odi pop in some ways isn’t about the mastery of sound, it is a feel good type of music that also pays attention to the intimate ways in which we cultivate communities online. In short, we are enjoying music together in a different way, and our position in the food chain of media has changed. Again, the medium has fundamentally reorganized the way we receive this message. The way songs become hits in Kenya has changed and so has the relationship between the artist and the audience.

Still, the Internet also presents a new set of challenges, particularly with regards to issues of copyright, as Ethic came up against when their song “Figa” was pulled off YouTube and Apple Music for copyright infringement of the beats sampled in their song. The main issue here has to do with sample clearance for beats in Kenya. It is entirely possible that Ethic may have bought the beats for the song without knowledge that the beat was sampling someone else and hence infringing on their copyright.

As Kenyans begin to use more and more global music platforms to try and reach audiences, there will probably be lot more sample clearance issues popping up. Copyright enforcement becomes more and more of a global issue so you can get caught literally anywhere.

Previously Kenyans could get away with such issues, as enforcement was close to impossible when the songs were confined to analogue TV and radio. Who in the US would ever find out that one had a random Diana Ross sample in your song in Kenya?But the digital age means that local producers are not going to be able to do this anymore; the song’s virality on the Internet means that they will effectively run into copyright issues.

In short, the success of the song and the way it travels ends up snitching on you. In this way, the medium is influencing the way hit music is being made because originality of the sound is going to be paramount in how the song becomes a hit, unless artists can afford to pay for the sample.

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.

One (Private) Ring to Rule Them All: A Case Study of One Acre Fund

By Christine Mungai

The cremation of the remains of Kibra MP Hon. Ken Odhiambo Okoth contrary to the Luo culture elicited public debate reminiscent of the S.M Otieno case in the late 80s, where the widow, Wambui Otieno battled in court with Umira Kager clan over where to bury the body of the then renowned lawyer. Wambui had wanted to bury her husband at their Upper Matasia home while the lawyer’s clan insisted he had to be buried in his ancestral home in accordance with Luo culture. The wishes of the clan carried the day.

Whereas the cremation of the Hon. Okoth’s remains was contested, it is the pronouncement by a splinter group of the Luo Council of Elders led by Nyandigo Ongadi that drew public opprobrium and approbation almost in equal measure. These elders demanded the inheritance of Okoth’s widow, Monica Okoth, by one of the late legislator’s brothers in line with Luo culture. Social media went ablaze with mixed reactions; those that opposed it caricatured wife inheritance as primitive, immoral and irreligious while those who supported the call felt the practice is an important component of Luo culture to be preserved. Mainstream media joined the bandwagon with sensationalized reporting of the matter that bordered on a mischaracterization of the practice of wife inheritance.

For starters, wife inheritance – also known as levirate marriage, is a customary practice that entails that upon the death of a husband, his brother or a male relative equivalent to a paternal cousin assumes the role of the deceased man by stepping in as the new head of the deceased’s home. The term “levirate” comes from Latin word “levir” which means a husband’s brother. The brother or the paternal cousin of the deceased thus becomes a wife inheritor; the two cohabit and culturally validate the arrangement through consummation which usually happens in the widow’s house. In some situations, the widow has the liberty to identify the man to inherit her from within the clan, while in other cases the widow has little or no power to decide who inherits her thus must remain acquiescent to the voice of the wise elders who make the decision. It is assumed the directive is in the interest of the common good and therefore has a utilitarian function of preserving the name of the deceased, especially if he died without having children. This explains why the Luo elders demanded ex cathedra that Hon. Okoth’s widow must be inherited. Whether this demand was justifiable in the prevailing context is a totally different matter.

The social media reactions relayed the disturbing misrepresentation that has for long perpetuated the narrative that African cultures were or are in some way defective and backward and many Africans have obsequiously submitted to a superior foreign culture. Australian social critic A.A. Philips coined a term for it – cultural cringe, the collective inferiority complex that makes the natives of a country dismiss their culture as inferior to other cultures. The West has largely become the source of our cultural validation. Cultural cringe impairs our ability to question, without feeling inferior, some of our practices, including wife inheritance, from a lived experience that is only unique to ourselves.

It is this inferiority that somehow makes a society peddle falsehoods, fallacies and exaggerations about aspects of its own culture. Therefore, when the debate on wife inheritance heightened on social media, it wasn’t surprising that some views were outrageous and bordered on bastardization of the cultural practice in question. These views are representational of the effects of the cultural servitude we were conscripted to by the West.

Wife Inheritance in the Bible

Wife inheritance, like any other “controversial” aspects of African cultures, is characterised as non- religious and satanic. However, wife inheritance is not exclusive to African traditional or non- religious for that matter. It escapes the critics that the practice is recorded in the Christian bible existing among Hebrews and Jews. Religion was and still is a function of the culture that creates it.

Deuteronomy 25:5-10, for instance, commands a brother to marry the widow of his childless brother to perpetuate the name of the deceased brother. Some of the examples from the Bible are the marriage of Boaz to the Moabite widow Ruth (Ruth 4:9) and the marriage of Onan to Tamar, Er’s widow (Genesis 38:6-10).

The West has largely become the source of our cultural validation. Cultural cringe impairs our ability to question, without feeling inferior, some of our practices, including wife inheritance, from a lived experience that is only unique to ourselves.

Wife inheritance was for centuries practiced among the Nilotic Luo peoples of Western Kenya, Northern Uganda and the Mara region of Tanzania as part of the metaphysics of their cultures. Like other practices, it echoed the unwritten laws of the ancestors who acted as the interceders to the gods. The Luo of Kenya for a long time termed the practice “tero” or “lako” to mean the rite of inheriting a widow. Wife inheritance also obtains among other Nilotic groups such as the Dinka, Nuer, Atuot and Anywaak of South Sudan and Ethiopia.

The practice was also common among Bantu tribes of East Africa such as the Abaluhya (Maragoli, Bukusu and Samia) and Abagusii of Kenya and the Bagwere people of Uganda. It was strongly present among Southern Bantus of Zimbabwe and Mozambique and South Eastern Bantus of Malawi. All these tribes in their separate ways regarded wife inheritance as an institution of widow care chiefly established to protect the widow and children of the deceased.

In Malawi, for instance, the Sena people practise kulowa kufa in which a widow is married to another man or brother of the deceased husband to protect the name of the deceased and care for the widow and children.

In West Africa, wife inheritance was practised by the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani of Nigeria and the practice is still common in rural areas. Customary laws of the three tribes require that upon the death of her husband, a widow must be inherited by a male relative of the late husband. In Yoruba culture, if a polygamous man died, his youngest wife would be inherited by the eldest son of the deceased man. This arrangement was also common among the Luhya of Kenya even though the practice has principally been abandoned, unlike among Yoruba people where it is supposedly still in force. To a non-Yoruba, this would look like institutionalized incest, a practice that was fairly common among European royal blood lines only that in the latter, marriages happened between first cousins.

An article appearing in National Geographic magazine in 2010 titled “The Risks and Rewards of Royal Incest” delved into the reality of inbreeding among royals like the Bourbons of France, Hawaiian royals, Hohenzollerns of Prussia and the British royal family. In the British royal family, Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha married her maternal first cousin Duke Kirill Vladimirovich of Russia then later married her paternal first cousin Duke of Hesse, in line with the wishes of her grandmother Queen Victoria who happens to be a great-great grandmother to Queen Elizabeth II. Incestuous marriages led to the end of the Spanish Hapsburg royal family with the death of King Charles II in 1700. King Charles II, popularly known as El Hechizado or the Hexed (Bewitched), was practically a sickly king with serious mental and physical health disabilities as a result of centuries of inbreeding.

Ironically, while the colonialists were quick to label African practices and tribes as retrogressive, inbreeding among European royals was labeled more as a health risk than as a retrogressive practice.

Communalism or Patriarchy

It is pure ignorance to claim that wife inheritance as culturally practised by various African and even Asian tribes, like Hunnish tribes of Central Asia and Pashtuns of Afghanistan, was retrogression. Just as inbreeding sought to keep the royalty within families, wife inheritance sought continuity of one’s bloodline. The caring for widows and continuation of the bloodline of a deceased man is guided by an underlying philosophy and is part of a governance structure of a society.

In the Luo community, two things stand out which are common in most communities that practised wife inheritance and African communities in general; the first is patriarchy. The directive by the Luo Council of Elders to Hon. Okoth’s family demonstrated the extent to which elders created social and political order and defined the economic structures including control of property. Among the Luo community, elders were revered as the decision makers on most cultural affairs; they monopolized wisdom and guided their people and protected the interests of their people first. Whereas the community was patriarchal, widows (and married women) inherit land rights by virtue of marriage and farm land nearly in the same manner as matriarchal African societies like the Owambo people of Namibia or the Serer people of Senegal.

Just as inbreeding sought to keep the royalty within families, wife inheritance sought continuity of one’s bloodline. The caring for widows and continuation of the bloodline of a deceased man is guided by an underlying philosophy and is part of a governance structure of a society.

With the corruption of the institution of wife inheritance, there has been increased hostility towards widows. In the 90s, wife inheritors among the Luo of Kenya became popularly known as “terrorists” – a pun curved out of the word “tero” (the practise of wife inheritance), and which symbolized a casual bravado by male relations who had abused and corrupted the hitherto cultural institution of caring for the widow’s welfare and the family of the deceased.

As a result of this, wife inheritance has been treated as one of the legacies of patriarchal dictatorship among the Luo community and feminist scholars have launched their campaigns against the practice from that viewpoint.

Secondly, the Luo community – like most African communities, had very strong clan structures that influenced how communalism was interpreted. For Luos, communalism inspired a unique social welfare system that transcended the living world to the ancestral. Communalism not only guided kinship and relations but also how the living viewed and related to the “living dead” and the ancestors. Life was a shared experience driven by cultural truths that inspired collective consciousness for the other. It is this cultural organization that partly inspired the institution of widow care among Luos. When you married a woman, she became a daughter of the community in the same way her husband was a son of the community.

Racism the Root of Cultural Colonialism

While advancing their Western patriarchal values, the West significantly disrupted African communal systems. This agenda was driven by the patronizing colonial view of Africa, as a cultural space inferior to Western culture. Western scholars went to the great extent of intellectualizing this racist ideology. German scholar GWF Hegel (1770-1831) without ever traveling to Africa, fascinatingly described that Africa (South of Sahara) was “Africa proper”, “a land of childhood…enveloped in the dark mantle of night”, and without any relevance to world history because Sub-Saharan Africa was characterized as having neither a history nor civilization. According to Hegel, Africa had no history because to have history is to have reason – a capacity deficient among Africans. These radical views influenced the growth of the racial ideology that bedeviled Africa and Africans across continents and devalued the significance of our cultures in the eyes of the world.

Through deliberate restructuring of African cultures to adhere to the modern (read European/American) dictates of civilization, some African cultural practices like wife inheritance were declared immoral, and as a result have been targeted on the grounds that they are immoral and backward. Thanks to neo-liberalism – the “new world order”, the rise of secular democracy has significantly re-organized the socio-political and economic structures of African societies as it tramples upon any cultural considerations. Religion and colonialism enhanced the slavery narrative that Africans were inferior. Religion, particularly the Judeo-Christian religion, established an anti- culture evangelization project to overthrow cultural practices conveniently labeled Satanic. More specifically the Christian ethics of Protestant tradition is partly responsible for the capitalist economic (dis)order due to its emphasis on individual achievement and the religious adulation of the same; Max Weber extensively speaks about this in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Colonialism, on the other hand, reinvented African societies by dismantling and destroying the existing socio-cultural structures then supplanted them with a new set of cultural ideologies. The result was a disintegration of communal structures which has contributed to abandonment of our communal values. The individualistic-cum-capitalist Western culture invaded our communalism and consequently post-independent African societies have since been atomized as people seek individual survival and happiness over communal welfare and social values. This atomization was enhanced in the 1960s and 1970s with the abandonment of the idea of common land ownership, among other things, and later in the 1980s and 1990s people began to migrate, like everywhere else, from rural to urban centres away from their communities.

Cultural Gigolos and HIV Prevalence

Social critics have portrayed wife inheritance as a form of subjugation of women but this must be viewed within the context of wife inheritance as practised today which continues to defy the relevant cultural expectations of the community. In fact, it is contested that what is practised today cannot pass for wife inheritance as it is contrary to the very idea of widow care. This is because the corrupted version has become synonymous with plundering of the wealth and property of the widows.

Under this corrupt regime of wife inheritance, in place of responsible brothers-in-law are “professional” wife inheritors who gallivant from one funeral to the next in search of bereaved and vulnerable widows. This crop of men mostly are opportunistic individuals not only without the means to take care of themselves let alone the widows they intend to inherit but also devoid of a reasonable sense of direction that adulthood affords normal human beings. They abandon their marriages – if they have any, to become “cultural gigolos”. In the process, they infect or re-infect the widows with HIV, or get infected or re-infected, before they move on to their next victim.

Colonialism, on the other hand, reinvented African societies by dismantling and destroying the existing socio-cultural structures then supplanted them with a new set of cultural ideologies.

This cultural sleaze can be attributed to weak communal structures, coupled with poverty and ignorance, which have enabled people to exploit cultural loopholes to their own immoral benefit. A clan like Uyoma along the shores of Lake Victoria, Siaya County, has witnessed all sorts of “terrorists”; most if not all cases do not meet the widow care threshold. Men come from across the lake as far as Uganda in search of greener pasture only to retire as serial wife inheritors in this or that village.

Studies show that societies where wife inheritance is practised have recorded high HIV prevalence, whether or not practices align with cultural requirements. A 2018 Government of Kenya HIV/AIDS prevalence report showed that counties in Nyanza region of Kenya where wife inheritance (safe to say the corrupted version since the institution of widow care has since died) is still rife recorded a prevalence rate ranging from 7.7% to 21.7% which was way above the national prevalence rate of 4.9%. In 2004, a UNDP report dubbed “Human Development Report for Nigeria. HIV and AIDS: A Challenge to Sustainable Human Development” found that the practice of wife inheritance was one of the leading causes of HIV in Nigeria. In 2006, Women UN Report Network observed there was high HIV rates in Mzimba District, Malawi North due to chokolo (wife inheritance). HIV/AIDS prevalence rates are high in other cultures where this practice is still rife including the Congo, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda and Tanzania.

The only thing that these studies don’t tell us is that the institution of widow inheritance has since been overthrown and what reigns is the corrupted version of wife inheritance. Whereas some stakeholders have registered reservations about the veracity of statistics, it is vital that we assess from a cultural point of the utilitarian value of widow care from a health risk perspective now that what is left of it is an imitation of the institution.

In my view, the health risk arising from the corruption of the practice would be the only sound argument against the traditional institution of widow care; and we lose nothing really because the institution has largely been abandoned and, in its place, an unfortunate debauched practice installed. I would, and actually have advocated the end to wife inheritance on grounds that as it is practised today, it has increased HIV prevalence; but I wouldn’t push for its ban on the flimsy premise that it is antithetical to Western cultures and the Judeo-Christian omni-God, or because it doesn’t fit within the philosophy of radical feminists.

On utilitarian grounds therefore, the Luo community and other communities that practised wife inheritance, should assess the challenges the institution has gone through in light of the needs, safety and security of widows at a time where HIV prevalence is growing. It is my proposition that our communities can replace widow care with widow empowerment initiated by a communal support system that involves the support of government under a National Safety Net Program which I believe would go a long way in enabling young widows with little or no income to become independent. Both county and national governments can work with clan elders to build priorities around supporting poor and uneducated widows as a strategy of combating HIV prevalence. Widows should then be free to choose to whom they get remarried to without being victimized or discriminated by the late husband’s relatives or even by fellow women. It must not be lost on us that a majority of widows in our communities are semi-literate and struggle to eke out a living increasing their sense of vulnerability and unlike Monica Okoth, their individual plight may never generate social media debate in their defense and or in defense of culture. 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.

One (Private) Ring to Rule Them All: A Case Study of One Acre Fund

By Christine Mungai

Between 2006 and 2010, the Egyptian national men’s football team proved to be a resolute force at the African Cup of Nations (AFCON), winning the continental trophy three times. Fans of this all- conquering Egyptian side remember such names as Essam El-Hadary, Hosni Abd Rabou, Mohamed Zidan, and Amr Zaki. For many, the qualities of marauding midfielder Mohamed Aboutrika, exemplified the spirit of the team. Aboutrika, also known as “El Magico”, “Amir El Qolob” (prince of hearts), or, simply, “Arab’s Zidane”, won the CAF ( Confederation of African Football) Africa Best Player of the Year a record four times and scored the sole goal in the final in AFCON 2008 as The Pharaohs edged out the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon at the Ohene Djan Stadium in Accra. With his status as a legend of Egyptian football, one would have expected that at the concluded 2019 Total African Cup of Nations hosted by Egypt, Aboutrika would have been the face of the tournament, his image emblazoned across the country’s stadia. However, Aboutrika was absent from the tournament, and from the country entirely. Aboutrika has been in exile in Qatar since 2017 and on the country’s terror watch list because of his links with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Aboutrika established a reputation for voicing strong political views. In 2008, in a national team game against Sudan, Aboutrika celebrated a goal by removing his jersey to reveal a T-shirt underneath with a message reading “Sympathize with Gaza”, written in both Arabic and English, in protest of Israel’s ten-day blockade of Gaza. In Port Said, Ultras Ahlawy a fan group founded in 2007 that supported the Cairo-based football club Al Ahly, that Aboutrika represented for ten years gained prominence for its pyros, songs and chants during football games, of which the most prominent was one that went “We Are Egypt.” Ultras Ahlawy had several violent clashes with Egyptian police through to 2011 as the Egyptians took to the streets to end Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorial rule. After the overthrow of Mubarak’s democratically elected successor, Mohammed Morsi, by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) the Ultras Ahlway took to singing mocking songs about SCAF and the police.

On 1st February 2012, Al Ahly travelled to Port Said to face Al-Masry in a national league game. After the match, Al-Masry supporters attacked Al-Ahly supporters with stones, knives and bottles, leading to a massacre that left 74 Al-Ahly supporters dead, and hundreds injured. The Al-Ahly players were also attacked by the Al-Masry supporters, and fled the pitch to the dressing rooms under police cover. One boy who had followed the players in an attempt to flee the violence, succumbed to his injuries, and died in Aboutrika’s arms. Aboutrika, together with two of his teammates, promptly announced his retirement from the game. “This is not football. This is a war and people are dying in front of us,” he cried.

Immediately, people began to question the incident, saying that it could not have been simply fan violence. Why were the Al-Masry fans so heavily armed? Why had the police stood by and done nothing as the Al-Ahly fans were being killed? Why had the escape doors been locked? Who had turned off the lights so soon after the violence started? Some people began to allude a link to the violence to Ultras Ahlawy opposition to SCAF. It was alleged that the Port Said attack was retribution, and police and military officers had facilitated the attack.

The national league was suspended, and no matches played for seven months. Later that year, it was announced that first match would be played on 9th September 2012, and would pit Al Ahly against ENPPI in the Egypt Super Cup final. Ultras Ahlawy protested this decision, and called for a boycott of all football matches until there was justice for the seventy-four people who had been murdered in Port Said. Aboutrika, who had rescinded with his retirement, supported the Ultras, and announced that he would not play any game until the seventy four had received their justice. By siding with a fan group known for its anti-SCAF position, Aboutrika, who a year earlier had publicly campaigned for Morsi, seemed to seal his fate with the ruling military junta.

On July 19th, 2019, The Desert Foxes of Algeria lifted the 2019 Total African Cup of Nations, beating Senegal’s Lions of Teranga via an early goal from Baghdad Bounedjah. I spent a huge chunk of the tournament on the road, and watched matches from Kisumu, Marsabit, Moyale, and Nairobi. In a matatu in Kisumu just before Kenya’s first match in the competition, the driver and his mate were talking about the 2019 Total African Cup of Nations. The friend asked the driver what he thought of Kenya’s chances of progressing in the competition. The driver said, in Dholuo, “I must support our home team, even if they are beaten”.

A few days later, I was in Marsabit. Seated in a kinyozi (a barbershop) in town, I listened to men talk about AFCON. Kenya had just beaten Tanzania, coming from behind to win off two magical goals by Michael Olunga, and there was a euphoric sense of belief coursing through the room. Up next was Senegal, and there was a sense that, though a difficult ask, beating them was not impossible.

Kenya’s match against Tanzania, which was one of the most exciting games of the group stages, was played under a maelstrom caused by Starehe MP Charles Njagua’s xenophobic remarks about Tanzanians, and other foreign workers in the country. In a video that was shared widely across social media, the first-time legislator accuses foreign nationals, notably Chinese, Tanzanians and Ugandans traders of dominating trade in Gikomba and Nyamkima markets in Nairobi at the expense of Kenyan traders and threatens them with eviction.

As we watched the Kenya-Tanzania game, my host and I talked about Mr. Njagua’s comments, and we wondered whether the match had gained added importance because of them. We were both supporting Kenya. His wife, N, however, was not. Kenya, she said, had harmed people from Northern Kenya, and she did not see why she should support a country that had harmed her. The matatu driver in Kisumu had said that he had to support the home team irrespective of the results. But, what happens when the state itself is oppressive and the force behind personal harm?

A few weeks earlier, I had been in Kisumu watching an Elgon Cup rugby match between Kenya and Uganda, and I had remained seated while Kenya’s national anthem was being played, in a silent protest to the injustices committed by the Kenyan state. Yet there I was, having bought a ticket, supporting Kenya. N didn’t know any of this, didn’t know that I had been thinking about this for weeks, didn’t know that when she said that she would rather support Algeria and Senegal and Tanzania and whoever else Kenya was playing against, I felt her frustration.

I wonder what it feels like to be a football fan in Egypt, to be a fan of the Egyptian national team. A major talking point from the African Cup of Nations is how empty the stadiums were. One would have expected more fans in the stadiums, since part of CAF’s reason for changing the dates of the competition from the traditional January to June had been to draw in more fans. In January, the European football leagues occupy attention. However, a combination of high ticket prices and the complicated process of getting fan IDs meant that a lot of fans were locked out. To get a fan ID, one has to supply all manner of personal details to the government, and the risks of doing this in a country with minimal data privacy laws outweigh their interests in watching the game.

The militarization of Egyptian football has played a part in keeping fans away from the stadiums. Writing in African Arguments, a researcher, says, “It is also seen – albeit less obviously – in the securitisation of the sport’s superstructure and infrastructure by the army and security apparatus. Among other things, security forces have been acquiring sports media, specifically TV channels, in the past few years. Through this, they have been influencing the discourse around football by vilifying organised fans groups known as The Ultras and glorifying the regime.”

The military junta in Egypt changed the law making stadiums, in effect, military establishments, and any fans arrested in a stadium would be subject to military trials. The regime’s fear of organized protest has led to the crackdown of fan groups as a political threat. Speaking to Ruth Michaelson of The Guardian, Ziad Akl, an analyst with the Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies said, “The state is trying to teach you how to cheer…It’s not that the state has an issue with you cheering, it’s that it has an issue with how you’re cheering.”

After the Port Said disaster, the government banned fans from the stadia. This had a knock-on effect on the national team, as, without any fans to roar them on, and national league matches most of the players lacked match practice, The Pharaohs sank to hitherto unimaginable lows. Former Egyptian national team coach, Bob Bradley, describes this difficult period. “Playing games in empty stadiums is not what football’s about—a game without fans has no soul,” he says. “And yet when we prepare for the games, we say we can’t expect our energy to come from our supporters. We have to do it ourselves.”

Later, the national government realized that rather than keeping fans out of stadia, they could instead seek ways to control them. As Michaelson writes, “After years of repeated crackdowns on the extreme fans known as ultras, seen as an insurgent group due to their involvement in the 2011 protests that overthrew the former autocrat Hosni Mubarak, the government now views football as a boon to the economy and to its nationalist project.”

On February 8, 2015, fans were allowed back into the stadia for the national team games. The first match, slated to take place at the 30 June Stadium was between Zamalek and ENPPI. Whatever security provisions the authorities had in place for the match proved insufficient, as, before the match, as fans jostled at the entrance, police fired tear gas at them, and in the ensuing stampede, twenty eight people were killed. Even as the police force issued a defense, claiming that the use of tear gas had been to control unruly fans, a video circulated online, showed hundreds of fans hemmed in by barbed wire and police firing straight into the crowd. Zamalek supporters alleged that, like with Ultras Ahlawy in 2012, the violence had been deliberate, intended to punish the Zamalek fans for their perceived revolutionary expression.

Militant football fans were a huge part of the protests, during the 2011 revolution that toppled then strongman Hosni Mubarak, and the subsequent protests against Mohamed Morsi. On the brief occasions when fans are allowed relatively unfettered access into stadia, such as during national team games, fans have been banned from making political chants, and waving political slogans. One of the things that has been interpreted as political slogans is the waving of Aboutreika’s old national team jersey.

During Algeria’s semi-final match against the Ivory Coast on their way to the trophy, Algerian fans were observed chanting Aboutrika’s name. In the 22nd minute of the match, a reference to Aboutrika’s old jersey number, the fans were heard chanting, “Allah Almighty, Aboutrika!” That the Algerian fans were the ones to flagrantly break the ban on political slogans in the stadia is noteworthy. On 16th February 2019, ten days after the Algerian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, announced his intention to vie for a fifth term in office, the Smile Revolution, or Hirak, began. Two months later, Bouteflika was out of office, and in May, his younger brother, Saïd Bouteflika, together with the former head of the secret service, General Mohamed Mediene, and intelligence chief Athmane Tartag were arrested

Some of the anti-government protests took place abroad, especially in France, where, on 8th March, 10,000 people demonstrated in Paris. During the Desert Foxes run to the final of the continental showpiece, occasions of celebrating the teams win turned into episodes of anti-government protest. For instance, after celebrating the team’s defeat of Cote d’Ivoire to reach the semi finals, thousands of protesters flocked the streets of Algiers to demand a civilian government. In France, after the team’s victory over Nigeria in the semi-finals, thousands of Algerian fans descended the streets of Paris, Marseille, and Lyon, and after clashes with French police, 282 people were arrested across the country.

Algeria has a particularly complicated relationship with France. The French colonized Algeria for 132 years until a very bloody independence war earned the Algerians their freedom. The far-right in France has taken advantage of the raucous celebrations by Algerian supporters to stoke anti- immigrant rhetoric. Marine Le Pen’s The National Rally issued a statement where it said, “Far from being only manifestations of joy of simple football amateurs as the majority of commentators have described, they are real demonstrations of force in which the objective is to ostensibly signify a massive presence and a rejection of France.” Far-right politician Nicolas Dupont-Aignan was stark, echoing Donald Trump by declaring that Algeria supporters should return to Algeria.

Ever since Algeria’s independence, Algerians have migrated to France, and millions now, by some estimates, live in France. In 2005, the number of people of Algerian descent living in France was put at 1.9 million people, which was 3.5% of the total population. This dual identity held by these immigrants is seen in the setup of the Desert Foxes. Riyad Mahrez, the national team captain and star player, was born in Sarcelles in France, while Ismaël Bennacer, who was voted player of the tournament, was born in Arles in the south of France.

Marine Le Pen’s The National Rally issued a statement where it said, “Far from being only manifestations of joy of simple football amateurs as the majority of commentators have described, they are real demonstrations of force in which the objective is to ostensibly signify a massive presence and a rejection of France.”

No French-Algerian footballer, however, is as famous as Zinedine Zidane, who was born in Marseille. Zidane, or Zizou as he is affectionately known, played his last match as a professional footballer during the 2006 World Cup final where he was red-carded for a headbutt on Italian defender, Marco Materazzi. Zizou was a stalwart of the team that was dismissed by French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen as not being a team of Frenchmen. Writing about Zidane for Chimurenga in 2006, Grant Farred observes that Zidane, “cannot escape his own public naming: the meaning of his name, “Zinedine Yazid Zidane,” self-proclaimed “non-practicing Muslim” married to a Catholic Spanish-French wife Véronique Zidane (née Lentisco) and the father of four sons, three of whom have obviously Christian names, of which two are distinctly Italian in their flavour – Enzo, Luca, Théo and Elyaz.”

Thus, he, Zidane, “stands as the time before which is, because of history, the time of another violence: colonialism, and the event, the headbutt, “was a space into which the world was inserted, a space and a time into which Africa (an Africa far removed from Zidane’s Maghreb and Algeria, but an Africa familiar to his colleagues Thuram and the Senegalese-born Patrick Vieira), and South Africa in particular, was thrust, with a full and rare historical force.”

For Farred, the headbutt was not just a headbutt. Rather, it was an entry into the racism the French national team players had faced in the course of their careers, and an entry into the colonial history between France and its former colonial subjects. The symbolism of Aboutrika’s jersey and the chanting Algerian fans went beyond Aboutrika’s legendary status. It served as a metaphor for how the Egyptian revolution had failed, and how Hirak movement would not, could not fail. It has been expressed, that sports fosters unity between participants, that sporting events between nations lead to greater relationships between the countries involved in the said competitions. George Orwell, for one, disagreed with this premise. In his essay, “The Sporting Spirit”, he posits that, rather than fostering healthier relationships between the participants, sports is an unfailing cause of ill-will. He says, “I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.”

Furthermore, it is easy for one to observe, just from watching sports casually, how the entire enterprise came to replace war in our psyches. In football parlance, for instance, one team attacks, while another defends, a player may shoot, volley, or take aim at goal, and there is a tactician who plans the tactics on the (battle) field. The Zimbabwean academic Evans Chapanga has an interesting analysis of the war metaphors that are used by commentators in Premier Soccer League (PSL) matches in Zimbabwe. He writes:

“Metaphors of war conceptualise most kinds of sport. War metaphors are not only used as far as description of players, their emotions and the actions on the football pitch are concerned although, these are, of course, the dominant image recipient fields. It can be argued that the whole tournament, footballers, their emotions, their characteristic traits, actions on the pitch and activities of spectators are transformed into a war scenario through the commentary.”

Still, it is isn’t quite war, for as Chapanga observes, “In reality, it was observed that while the proliferation of war metaphors in soccer heightened the electric atmosphere in particularly high profile matches, they tended to gloss over complexities and largely exaggerated the social contests. Frankly, in soccer there are no combatants and no massacres as dramatised eloquently by the professional commentators. War metaphors in football tend to go overboard in terms of their description.”

It can be argued that the whole tournament, footballers, their emotions, their characteristic traits, actions on the pitch and activities of spectators are transformed into a war scenario through the commentary.”

It is not possible, nor completely moral, to view Egypt hosting the 2019 Total African Cup of Nations without thinking about the ways in which football and politics intersect. Port Said in 2011, Aboutrika’s jersey, Zidane’s headbutt, Algeria’s AFCON win, all these things, despite starting out as footballing actions, transcended the game. That Egypt hosted the 2019 competition, even while taking into account all of CAF’s gimmicks with AFCON hosting rights is in itself an event. Egypt’s military regime motivation for hosting the African Cup of Nations, was described by Amnesty International as “sports washing”, a script that has been performed elsewhere in the world. The term first cropped up in media parlance when Amnesty International accused Abu Dhabi of trying to sportswash their “deeply-tarnished image” by pouring money into English club, Manchester City. This all came in the wake of an expose by German publication Der Spiegel about the subterfuge and lack of transparency in City’s financial dealings. Later, the same charge would be levied against UEFA, and Azerbaijan, with critics questioning why the European football body granted the hosting rights of one of its most prestigious events to the autocratic petrostate. In the same spell, we think about Qatar hosting the 2022 World Cup, and, more directly, Egypt hosting the African Cup of Nations. Questions about the intersection between nationalism and football were not raised only by AFCON. At the Women’s World Cup, American stalwart Megan Rapinoe voiced her opposition to Donald Trump by saying she would not honor an invitation to the White House if the team won, which they ended up doing. In Brazil, during the trophy ceremony for the Copa America which had been won by the hosts, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro was roundly jeered by the 70,000 fans at the Maracana. The national team coach Tite adeptly rejected a hug by the president, midfield playmaker Philippe Coutinho squirmed in his presence, and defender Marquinhos openly ignored the president.

After the conclusion of AFCON in Egypt, Samir Sardouk, an Algerian fan was sentenced to one year in jail and fined 50,000 dinars for raising “papers that could harm national interests in front of the public.” Sardouk raised a banner during a group stage match at that read: “There is no God but Allah, and they will come down.” The rulers had come down in Algeria, and perhaps in Egypt too. Football remains as an arena for political expression for a long time to come.

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