Remembering Toni Morrison

By Rasna Warah

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” – Toni Morrison

A writer who had a significant impact on how I viewed the African-American experience has died. Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate and author of The Bluest Eye, Sulu, and Beloved, among many other books, has passed on at the age of 88.

I read Beloved – a novel that explores the brutality of slavery in America – on the insistence of my friend Betty Wamalwa (also known as Sitawa Namwalie), who thrust the book in my hand when we were both in our 20s and demanded that I read it. The book shook me to the core. It is remarkable in that while it exposes the powerlessness and pain of generations of slaves, it also portrays slaves as deeply human, capable of love, hate, anger and empathy. But this love had to be measured, and taken in small sips, because slaves were even denied this right. So slaves learnt to “love small”, which was both a survival instinct and a form of self-preservation. However, while slavery emasculated slaves, it did not take away their humanity.

There are many passages in Beloved that left me speechless. Like the one of Paul D, a character in Beloved, describing what loving means to a slave who is denied the right and the permission to love by “men who knew their manhood lay in their guns”:

“And these men who made even vixen laugh, could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother – a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred Georgia.”

Morrison defined freedom as “a place where you could love anything you chose, not need permission for desire”.

Throughout her body of work, you could feel the rhythms of her slave ancestors. Morrison lifted the English language into a world that had its roots in her African heritage. Quite often the rhythmic music of her words would break into a wail, as in this haunting passage from Beloved:

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

Loneliness is a common theme in her female-centric books – the loneliness of slavery and bondage, the loneliness of not being understood, the loneliness that comes with being a writer, especially a female writer of colour who has to maneuver a white literary establishment that is generally hostile to black authors.

Born to a father who worked as a welder and a mother who was a domestic worker, Chloe Anthony Wofford, who would later be known as Toni Morrison, like her contemporary, James Baldwin (whose collected essays she edited for the Library of America), was the embodiment of a black American writer who dissects society with the stealth and precision of surgeon. She laid bare all the sicknesses of her society, especially racism, then proceeded to cut them up into pieces through words and language.

She was particularly disturbed by racism, which she described as “a social construct” and an “insult”. She believed that the main function of racism was distraction – to keep black people so busy explaining themselves to white people that they would not have time for anything else:

“It [racism] keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary.”

Early in her career, Morrison taught at Howard University, where she met her husband, Harold Morrison, a Jamaican, with whom she had two sons. She later became a professor at Princeton University and then worked as an editor at Random House.

For her literary efforts and achievements, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1988, amid much controversy. Her detractors and critics claimed that the Swedish Academy was trying to be politically correct by awarding the prize to a black woman, and that her work did not merit such an award. Her response to accusations of political correctness was: “What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.”

One of the criticisms levelled against Morrison was that you had to be black to understand her novels, hence they lacked universal appeal. Often she was asked when she would write a novel where the main characters were ordinary white people, which she usually dismissed as a racist question because no one asks white authors why they do not write about black or non-white people. She also viewed such questions as a form of censorship because they assumed that writers seek the approval and permission of readers before they embark on writing a book.

However, she was also aware that her books would appeal to people like her who do not see characters like themselves reflected in novels.“I’m writing for black people, in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio,” she said.“I don’t have to apologise or consider myself limited because I don’t write about white people – which is not absolutely true, there are lots of white people in my books. The point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it.”

The question about who a writer writes for also becomes irrelevant at some point. Most writers don’t write with a particular reader in mind, just as an orchestra recording classical music doesn’t think about who will buy its album when it is eventually released.J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter series could as easily appeal to a child growing up in the British countryside as it could to a child living in a city in Bangladesh. If Morrison wrote only for black men and women living in America, then how is it that her books resonated with a woman of Indian heritage living in Kenya? Surely, her books’ appeal was universal.

Yet, it is ironic that nearly thirty years after Morrison won the Nobel Prize, racism has remained stronger than ever in the United States. Donald Trump would agree with Morrison, who once said that “American means white” (though he probably wouldn’t notice the cynicism in her comment).

The literary world has lost yet another icon. Another healer of wounds is no longer with us. But Morrison’s language and words will always comfort us, especially in these trying times when extremism, hate and paranoia are fragmenting societies and spreading fear. As Morrison noted, language has the power to heal. “Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names,” she said. “Language alone is meditation.”

Morrison believed that something beautiful can emerge even out of pain. “I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore the pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge – even wisdom. Like art.”

Born: 1931 – Died:2019

Rest In Peace

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By Rasna Warah

If you are ever walking or caught in traffic in Nairobi’s central business district, you might notice the yellow school buses. Many of the schools are not based in Nairobi some traveling a fair distance to get to the city. Having attended schools with limited resources for travel, these sightings always remind me about the excitement I felt every time I got to be part of a student group travelling anywhere. These trips made for some of my best school memories. That children from all over Kenya travel to Nairobi, to see monumental places like the National Assembly, the Nairobi Stock Exchange, the Supreme Court, the Nairobi National Park, museums, universities, and historical sites such as Uhuru Park might be a small thing, or it might be significant.

I wonder what the teachers in Uhuru Park, walking alongside their students, say about this place. What makes this park significant enough to warrant these daily visits? Have you ever been to Uhuru Park? People I have asked this question tell me that they’ve only ever been there for organised events – walks, runs, or public protest.

Last year, in 2018, while attending the NaiNiWho tour organised by The Godown Arts Centre, I learnt that this space was at first a waste disposal site for the predecessor of Kenya Railways Corporation. The 12.9-hectares was designated as a recreational park in 1969 and launched by Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta. Uhuru Park is one of few free access recreational green spaces in Nairobi. It has a small and thriving pond with lilies, and a vast manmade lake, where people can enjoy boat rides. The park has a few monuments, the Pope’s pyramid slab installed in 1985, the Nyayo Fountain, one of many monuments Moi monuments installed across the country during President Moi’s 24-year rule. There is plenty of open space to do nothing. It is a place where people could enjoy picnics, take long walks, sleep, play, dance, pray, and rest. Every day there might be approximately 5000 or more people just walking through or relaxing in Uhuru Park.

Nairobi’s other free- green public spaces are Jeevanjee Gardens created by Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee in 1906, Nairobi City Park declared a public park in 1925, Central Park where a monument to President Moi’s Nyayo era stands out prominently.

Green spaces in Nairobi’s colonial physical design were markers of the colour barrier and they continue to serve as indicators of how Nairobi’s physical space – housing, schools and other social amenities, remains segregated along racial and class lines. Uhuru Park borders Kipande House. During colonial times, this building was the place where Africans had to stop and their much-loathed passbooks verified before entering the town. It also borders Nairobi hill, Valley road and Statehouse road which were the locations of the more affluent residential neighbourhoods of Nairobi. Though many of these homes have now been converted into nonresidential commercial buildings, the churches these residents founded and used among them, All Saints Cathedral, Nairobi Central SDA Church, The Holy Family Basilica, St. Paul’s University Chapel, St. Andrews, The First Church of Christ, Scientist and the Lutheran Church close to University of Nairobi continue exist.

Nairobi’s public parks largely stem from Kenya’s colonial legacy before evolving into spaces held for the public in trust post-independence. The John Michuki Memorial Park (named after the late John Michuki) in contrast has a different history. This park was created in 2008 after the state violently evicted mechanics along the Nairobi River adjacent to Kipande Road, and cleared what was an enormous dumpsite behind the buildings on Kijabe Street, away from the view of the uptown publics. This insistence on creating a thing of beauty while simultaneously disenfranchising its purported beneficiaries is best exemplified by this park. The tiny forest with footpaths might have been an attempt to increase access to green spaces for all Nairobi residents. The Michuki Park project was part of a larger goal to rehabilitate the Nairobi River basin. The awful stench from the polluted river remains a major feature of this park. Even here, people find relief resting under the shade of growing trees. Still, Michuki Park – without benches, without public toilets, is far from being whatever ideal recreation space, that was so aggressively restored.

Public Green spaces in Nairobi have a littered history of contestation from the state or government agents intent on hiving off chunks and converting them into private and commercial properties. As a result, there is an ever-present paranoia around the threat to civic space alongside the demand for prime real estate. So significant is the threat that a common response to any significant maintenance is viewed with skepticism. For example, at Jeevanjee Gardens, the loud resistance witnessed in 2015 when Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero launched a project to rehabilitate the park can be traced back to the memory of the government’s 1991 and 2007 attempts to convert Jeevanjee Gardens prime green space into commercial property.

For some Nairobi residents and visitors, recreation happens at Uhuru Park despite the present-day deficiencies. There is drinking water close to the lily pond, there’s a foot bridge that looks good in photographs. A section of the park has amusement rides including merry-go-rounds, trains and bouncing castles for those desiring more activity. Though the park’s newest memorial monument has cracked and missing tiles, you’ll see people walking past Greenbelt’s rusty Freedom Corner proclamation sign, straight to this monument dedicated to Kenya’s Mau Mau heroes, to take pictures. Maybe to learn about and to honour Kenya’s freedom fighters. Perhaps to just sit on the benches provided and stare into space, read newspapers, or wait for friends.

If your walk into the park starts at the top of the hill from Cathedral Road, at the flagpole and flag erected to commemorate the Constitution of Kenya 2010, you might wonder about the heaped uncollected rubbish and old tyres at the Ministry of Agriculture offices, so close to the Ministry of Health offices, so close to this flag. Marabou storks. You can’t miss the flag though, you might even dream. Remember where you were, if you existed, when Kenya got this Constitution, and what your part in it was. How you were dreaming. Looking down from the viewing deck that is adjacent to the flag, beyond the terraced field facing the raised podium and the lake reflecting the city’s skyline, Nairobi is tranquil.

I associate Uhuru Park with Wangari Maathai and Greenbelt’s work in securing the park in 1989 against the force of the state, the Release Political Prisoners campaign by the mothers of political prisoners jailed by the Moi government who subsequently staged a mothers’ hunger-strike in 1992. This place is also evangelist Reinhard Bonnke and many more preachers after him always so loud. It holds the memory of my classmates at University of Nairobi escaping dreary study to attend that historical Rainbow Alliance Rally and the free of charge Kool and the Gang concert.

In 1996, during a ceremony at Uhuru Park, the Catholic Church in Kenya presided over the burning of condoms and AIDS-awareness material.

For me, it is a place where teargas has been used in response to peaceful processions. After the General Elections of December 2007 elections, and the disputed presidential election results, there was violence across the country. For a while in 2008, it was an eerie empty inaccessible place guarded by GSU officers. Uhuru Park is a symbolic space, a National centre, with a podium where presidents are sworn in Along with restricting free movement the State did not want to risk ceding control of this space to the opposition movement. Following the 2017 General Elections, in 2018, the same tension was witnessed in the park prior to Opposition leader Raila Odinga’s controversial swearing in ceremony. This time though, security forces stayed away.

It is much easier to associate this park named freedom, with rage, insecurity, tear gas and physical harm. Just recently, in June this year, protesters gathered here in solidarity with the people of Sudan, had their protest disrupted with teargas. In July, the SwitchOffKPLC (Kenya Power and Lighting Company) march was also disrupted with teargas. At the end of July, more people held a memorial for the late Kibra MP, Ken Okoth.

A recreational park is a place we visit when we have free time, or a place we might go to get temporary relief from our immediate troubles. Gabriel Omollo’s song Lunch time chronicles the struggles of Nairobi’s workers including not having enough money to buy good food or any food at all…

“wengine wanakwenda kulala uwanjani kumbe ni shida ndugu njaa inamwumiza”

The song refers to workers going to sleep in the park when they have no food to deal with their hunger pangs. Even when one cannot improve a situation, going to a green space can be cathartic. More than any other green space in Kenya, Uhuru Park is a place Kenyans return to, to assert and proclaim freedom whenever it threatened. Uhuru means freedom.

Not just for Kenyans. In July 2011, some of South Sudan’s citizens living in Nairobi, congregated at Uhuru Park to celebrate their independence.

That this park remains open and fairly easy to access suggests that even the most cynical among us agree that everyone, no matter their station in life, deserves to have a beautiful and peaceful place to relax. How is it that many of us, in middle class Kenya, are grateful and even proud to have it at the centre of our city, willing to celebrate it, defend it, but unable to imagine ourselves relaxing here, ever? Who is it for, and why is it not for us? Are free-of-charge places only for people without money?

The sorts of things we do for rest and relaxation often look like crimes in a city that enforces bylaws that punish people for being present in public spaces. A leisurely walk looks a lot like loitering and vagrancy when the walker mets the stereotype of the undesirables. A person using a camera is so easily assumed to be a terrorist. A bulky bag filled with food always looks suspicious. A person standing still for too long can be confused for a hawker. Those who have regular jobs often grapple with the guilt and the discomfort around taking necessary breaks or using up designated breaks to rest. To be seen to be resting in an unmeaningful way can be a problem. To be visible, and to be seen resting in certain places, another problem. We have a situation where it is acceptable only to have our bodies visible during particular respectable or performative acts of civic duty while simultaneously accepting the invisibility of other types of bodies, often the bodies of disenfranchised people, who make full use of Uhuru Park.

Visiting Uhuru Park in its present state means resting with homelessness and destitution, deciding what to feel or not feel about people cleaning themselves and washing their clothes at that stream so close to the big All Saints Cathedral and the Serena Hotel. It is coming to terms with the fact that there are people for whom the minimum charge for a public toilet is too much. You could argue that more ought to be done to make this park friendlier or safer for those who do not feel welcome here. Then you might have to consider what to do about not excluding those whose bodies are presently considered undesirable or even threatening.

There may be comfort in imagining and defending Uhuru Park as a particular type of civic space. For many Uhuru Park is reduced to Freedom Corner and all its accumulated symbolisms and not the rest of the park. Even when we by right occupy these spaces, do we stop to think about those we displace with our proclamations? What use are our victories for those who have to stay behind, make themselves comfortable with the residue of whatever good or bad we leave? Claiming all the things Uhuru Park could be to Nairobi and Kenya by extension would require constant presence. This could ignite the public participation we desire. We would have to imagine that many of the destitute people who use public spaces also need private spaces, roofs over their heads and shelter.

It is better if you have a little money, you can go to Nairobi Arboretum or Karura Forest. Take pictures. It is less work.

I think about the imperative Tembea Kenya which is often interpreted to mean tourism and spending money. Does going or not going to Uhuru Park then signal one’s position in whatever hierarchies we imagine for ourselves?

It forces one to consider again, the students from all over the country stopping at Uhuru Park. What freedom dreams do these visits ignite? What dreams do they transport back to friends and family? What must we do to make Uhuru Park a place where all of us, in our different bodies, Nairobi residents and Nairobi’s visitors, are free.

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Remembering Toni Morrison

By Rasna Warah

“Ken Okoth did more for Kibra than any other M.P. We are losing young people who care, while old people who robbed this country, and continue to do so are living long lives.”

This was an impassioned tweet from Rasna Warah, a seasoned writer and social commentator upon the demise of Ken Okoth, M.P for Kibra who had been battling colorectal cancer. Rasna spoke my thoughts and that of many people who saw his death coming but continued to live in denial.

Her lament, reminded me of a sigiiya – dirge I had heard in Luo land many years ago. It went thus: “Jo”mabeyo tho rumo, jo richo ema odong…jo richo ema dong’” (While the good and noble people die and heading to extinction, the evil ones remain and live long).

The lamenters since Ken Okoth passed away, have mourned the untimeliness of his passing. This is not only because he died prematurely, it is clear that there was a sense that the youthful MP’s work was not yet done. Ken was doing and saying all the right things and demonstrating what real leadership is and can do. Prior to his elevation to the seat of MP for Kibra, Ken Okoth was not a household name. All he was publicly known for, was his service as a legislator and representative par excellence to the people of Kibra and Kenya. It is my feeling that the gravity of the loss to the Kenyan nation, is yet to be comprehended.

Ken Okoth was several great people rolled into one: he was an eloquent pacifist in a midst of a volatile place like Kibra much like Martin Luther King. He was a compassionate and dedicated humanist with a caring heart for the poor much like J.M. Kariuki. He was a revolutionary feminist in the midst of a patriarchal and at time misogynistic polity that has refused to implement the 1/3 gender rule in parliament, like Thomas Sankara. He was an intelligent, inspirational visionary servant leader like Tom Mboya. The irony, and indeed the thrust of Rasna’s cry of anguish, and which resonates with the Luo dirge, is that all these luminaries died young. Sankara at 38, Martin Luther King and T.J.Mboya at 39, J.M.Kariuki at 46 and Ken Okoth at 41 years.

Odhiambo Okoth: From the pits of Kibra to the streets of excellence.

Ken’s rise from abject poverty has been told and re-told many times. He himself lost no opportunity to speak about it. He was a child of Kibra, born and bred in the slum, he endured a childhood of extreme want, hunger, vulnerability and humiliation. Admission to secondary school, afforded him his first-ever bed and the experience of a three square meal life. He underwent the trauma of seeing the family house built precariously beside the Kenya Uganda railway line in Kibra flattened by bulldozers and his family rendered homeless and destitute, as a child. He attended Olympic Primary school in bum-bare tattered clothes, and it is only his brilliance in school where he scored 613 out of a possible 700 that secured him a place at Starehe Boys Centre and technically out of the ghetto. Even then, Save the Children Fund had to intervene with a full four-year scholarship to enable Ken join high school. He went on to excel and qualify for a Law degree at the University of Nairobi, but poverty came knocking again. He missed that opportunity, because he could not raise the requisite monies to top up what Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) offered students in education loans.

The system had failed Ken Odhiambo Okoth once again. Undeterred, Okoth went to the Nation newspapers where he had once volunteered and got a gig selling newspapers to survive. He also did a two-year stint as a security guard, or plainly put, a watchman at the Goethe Institute where he had been gifted German lessons. Through providence, Ken managed to meet a benefactor as he delivered The East African Newspaper who supported his application to study in the US. Ken continued to excel academically; completed his undergraduate and post-graduate degrees and with these accomplishments, his uniqueness emerged. While in the US, Ken formed an NGO called ‘Children of Kibera Foundation’ (Watoto wa Kibera) in 2006 and began mobilizing resources to support the education of the children he had left back home in Kibra. Through his fundraising and networking efforts, he supported the education of the underprivileged, orphaned children in Kibra. By 2008 his charity had funded the setting up of a computer lab at a local slum school. Since 2006, 10 top needy students from Kibra have benefitted from annual bursary scholarships. Before he was elected M.P, he was already impacting the lives of the children in Kibra.

Ken owns the story of his poverty-stricken background, not as a way to earn sympathy, or to justify entitlement. He does not use his deprived background to justify aggrandisement and the amassing of wealth. Ken has avoided the fetishization or romanticization of poverty throughout his public service. He describes poverty and want as ugly things. What Ken learnt from his experience was not to flee from poverty and the poor, but that instead made it his mission as the one who got out to pull up those stuck in that abyss. He once said, “Being poor is just a circumstance where you start in life. It is not your destiny and it can change.” Ken has been a change agent. He offers himself as an example, a challenge and an inspiration to the poor youth. He is evidence that one can transcend poverty and embark onto the road towards leadership while reaching out to rescue others. In the run-up to the 2017 elections he said,

‘We want to encourage more young people, stand up and be counted. You don’t have to be rich to participate. You know I was a young boy born and raised in Kibra, I serve in the National Assembly as a recognised leader in this country with a title. I want that, to be an encouragement to other young people. Stand and be counted. Fight for your country, serve for your country.’

Ken, never did glorify poverty, he questioned its entrenchment and the fact that the governance system did not seem to be able to do anything about it. During one function in Kibra graced by the First Lady, Margaret Kenyatta, he condemned the poverty porn that drives tourists to Kibra.

“Kibra is not a zoo” he said.

Ken disliked the way that the governing elite gave the poor short shrift and in an act of defiance, broke ranks with his ODM (Orange Democratic Movement) party to vote against the 16% VAT bill that he deemed anti-poor.

“My conscience could not allow me to subject the poor to more hardships via my vote. Granted that the price of unga, milk and other select stuff are spared the weight of the bill, other basics like textiles that hide our nudity, shoes, fuel and even mobile phones that are increasingly becoming a necessity will move further from the reach of the majority poor. I feel it as I remember my days at Olympic Primary School in worn out sandak shoes and patched uniform.”

Ken Okoth empathised with the downtrodden, for it was a life that he had experienced. Echoing J,M.Kariuki’s famous “we do not want a Kenya of ten millionaires and ten million beggars” he decried the dichotomization of the Kenyan society into economic class based ghettos. He said,

‘We must make sure that Kenya is not a country of two tribes: the rich who live in exclusion and really, really have it, and the poor who are suffering in indignity. That is a recipe for chaos.”

Champion for Education; Girls emancipation.

Ken Okoth believed that education had enabled him to alter the course of his life. He was passionate about ensuring access to education for the poor in general, but more so in his Kibra backyard. He once challenged the logic of imposing VAT on books, and questioned how any nation with the future of its youth in mind, would deny them, especially youth living in poverty, access to books via taxation? He recognised that education had transformed his life by opening opportunities for him, and this is what he desired to provide his constituents. As soon as he was elected to the National Assembly in 2013, he drew a strategic plan with education emerging as the priority issue, hence the ‘Elimu Kwanza’ – Education First mantra. His strategy revolved around increasing access to secondary education for those average children who scored low marks in primary school because he knew these children were underperforming because of challenges brought about by poverty.

His plans included building three secondary school: Shadrack Kimalel, Mbagathi and Kibera High school. He philosophically stated the empowering impact of education,

“If you give a person a house, you have given them just that house and the dignity that comes from just that house. If you give someone an education, you have given them a skill-set and tools, the freedom and dignity of coming to choose where else they could live. What other career they could pursue.”

He finalised construction of a magnificent school through Constituency Development Funds ( CDF) with a record low budget. This is the loudest testimony of his integrity, and conversely, the depths of misappropriation and mismanagement by other CDF holders. He was particularly passionate about the education of the girls. He declared in an interview, ‘I am a feminist. I support women, and I think that girls and our mothers and our sisters need equal opportunities to get into political leadership.’ Ken Okoth’s vision was consistent with that of a fellow revolutionary and avowed feminist, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso who said,

“In the ministries responsible for education, we should take special care to assure that women’s access to education is a reality, for this reality constitutes a qualitative step towards emancipation. It is an obvious fact that wherever women have had access to education, their march to equality has been accelerated.”

He argued for increased access for women in positions of leadership and governance and was very concerned about opening up the political space so that women could play a bigger and more equitable role.

Courageous, non-conformist and independent-minded to a fault.

Ken Okoth was not one to shy away from controversial issues that other politicians avoided. Indeed, there have been loud murmurs that the big wigs of his sponsoring party were not always happy with his non-partisan approach to politics. Ken Okoth believed in ideology, but not sycophancy. From the onset, he stated that he was influenced politically by Raila Odinga, whom he referred to as his idol, and that he subscribed to the tenets of Social Democracy. However, he was not comfortable with the personality cults entrenched in Kenyan politics and political parties. During his first campaign, he raised the issue of land rights for the Nubian community in Kibra, an explosive issue that even Nubian politicians avoided. He believed that the Nubian community had a human and constitutional right to titles over the land that they occupied in Kibra. He argued that it was only fair that they were issued titles.

The issue of land and injustice and National cohesion and ethnic cohesion, who gets what jobs, what training and things like that. Let’s demystify these things, let’s give people title because land is a very special thing and our history of governance has always been that the governments of Kenya have always been cartels of land grabbers.

Ken was not oblivious of the fears of those who had occupied houses in Kibra of the wrath of new Nubian landlords but he felt that the social and human right outweighed that fear, and that the market could adequately regulate any such practice. ‘The Nubian landlords will need tenants” he retorted.

This notion of social justice was evident in the kind of legislation that he supported in the National Assembly. The Prevention of Torture Bill and the National Coroner’s Service Bill are among those that he eloquently seconded. In both these bills, the interest of the marginalised and poor was top of his mind. He argued that the prevention of torture was an essential safe-guard for human rights that Kenya was a signatory to, but there had been too many instances of breach. He must have had in mind the numerous unexplained cases of individuals who died in police custody. He also brought attention to the Northern parts of the country, where the Kenyan security apparatus was accused of gross human rights abuses during pacification missions. The Coroners Bill was of specific interest to Ken because of the rights to access autopsies by the poor who meet death in unclear circumstances. His concern also extended to the Muslims, whose religious rights are impacted by the manner that mandatory autopsies are carried out.

Ken Okoth also controversially advocated for the legalization of the medicinal use of Cannabis Sativa, a cause for which he was totally misunderstood. The very mention of, marijuana, blinded and deafened all moralists who read mischief in his draft legislation, an attempt at allowing bohemian excesses, or imitation of global movements for the de-criminalization of marijuana. A closer examination of Ken’s proposal reveals that not only was he addressing its therapeutic merits but its economic viability as well. Some later assumed that he was fighting for this legalization for personal reasons as a cancer patient. Ken’s vision was to make medicinal marijuana whose benefits have been clinically proven, accessible as a cheaper alternative for health care. It would be great, if this legislation found a new champion.

In public forums, Ken Okoth was not shy to admit where his sponsoring party, ODM was guilty of draconian tendencies. It is speculated that his open-mindedness did not earn him many friends in the party hierarchy, and that there had been clandestine efforts to replace him as he sought a second term as MP. Despite all these challenges, even the parties’ detractors esteemed Ken Okoth as a model MP and his openness with his Cancer ailment had endeared him across the political divide. Ken repeatedly called for increased internal democracy within ODM. At the height of the infamous ODM elections where the ‘Men in Black’ disrupted the elections leading to the Ababu Namwamba defection, he counselled that ODM needed to be more accommodating, inclusive and tolerant and less of a closed club of entitled hand-picked minions. He also spoke to the need for the party stalwarts to create room for incorporation of the ideals of the younger generation of leaders. When he appeared in discussions on television forums, he was not reluctant to acknowledge the achievements of the ruling Jubilee Coalition, but was equally adept at pointing out and criticizing their failures.

Ken’s biggest sour point with the Jubilee Coalition was the administration’s molly-coddling of corruption and dearth of pro-poor policies. Ken was very optimistic about the potential of Kenya as a nation and its people. He articulated this hope several times bemoaning the fact that economic inclusivity was still a pipe dream. He said,

I really think Kenya is set to go. We have to keep our eyes on the ball. Where do we want to be in 2030? What type of country do we want to be, will we have realised the goals of clean water, access to fair and quality education for all our people, health care and things like that? How do we grow our economy so that everybody benefits?”

If Ken Okoth’s demise offers an opportunity to change the narrative about health care coverage in Kenya, his death will not have been in vain. Ken, has narrated the story of misdiagnosis running for a year and a half before the diagnosis of colorectal cancer was arrived at. By this time the disease had reached stage four and was basically incurable. The case of misdiagnosis also affected Safaricom CEO, Bob Collymore who died of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia a fortnight before Ken. In both cases, the delayed diagnosis – a factor of quality healthcare, is to blame. The current discourse around health, and more so prompted by the increasing visibility of cancer, is calling for the passage of legislation that will ensure every Kenyan has a medical cover.

Ken Okoth has been more pointed and asked that the state needs to remove taxes on cancer drugs as well as cancer diagnostic equipment such as computed tomography scans (CT Scans) and MRI machines so that the services are within reach of the poor. Ken’s concern has always been that cancer diagnosis and treatment cost is prohibitive to the poor. He noted that in his case he was lucky that he could access treatment abroad, but in typical Okoth fashion, he shone the torch back on the poor and questioned the fate facing poor Kenyans? Fundamentally, Ken was advocating for the revolutionary price rationalization of quality health care beginning with diagnosis and drugs.

When Okoth was in Paris undergoing treatment a follower on Twitter asked how he was doing and his reply was poignant, ‘Napambana na hali yangu kabisa’ (I am dealing with my situation). Ken took ownership of his health and situation in a dignified manner. In his absence, he allowed Tim Wanyonyi the MP of Westlands Constituency to hold brief for him. When he returned to Kibera in what was a goodbye event he said how grateful he was for the partnership in the running of Kibra affairs such that even in his absence things continued to run smoothly.

Ken Okoth, was a visionary and inspirational leader. He had faith and hope in Kenya, and especially its youth. In a speech he made as closing remarks during a television discussion, he summarizes his dream and vision for Kenya, her future and her youth. Okoth’s words will undoubtedly continue to ring throughout this country.

I am proud to be a Kenyan, and I am proud of the accomplishments that we have achieved together as a nation, and even despite the challenges we have, I give great thanks to the leaders who fought for the independence of this country, who paid the sacrifices to give us multi-party democracy and our new constitution. And I pledge, and I know many leaders of my generation, I serve [with] in the national assembly, so many of us are there for the first time, we have accomplished something, based on the trust and faith in our people, in [a] peaceful manner to bring a new revolutionary class or leaders that countries like Egypt have not achieved, like Tunisia have not achieved, countries like Libya. So, let no Kenyan think that the way to solve this country’s problems is to go through violence. Let us debate, let us compete on issues, let us trust our people to vote for the right leadership and let that leadership serve, not for their own personal greed, but for improving this nation. Real patriotism without corruption, without tribalism without nepotism; Kenya can take off. We have smartest people; we have the most committed people.

Ken Okoth will be a hard act to follow. Now, just as he has dealt with his situation – we who survive him must, pambana na hali yetu.

Ken Okoth: Born 1978 – Died 2019.

Rest in Peace.

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By Rasna Warah

Berlin. Saturday, May 9th 2019.

The sun’s appearance has given us a brief respite from the spring’s winds. Me, a Kenyan, walks into the ‘exhibition’ of Egyptian artefacts and beings in a European museum! The chief attraction is the bust of Queen Nefertiti (which means the beautiful one has come). Nefertiti was the queen of Egypt and wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten during the 14th century B.C. Today, the beauty of her bust ‘rests’ in Berlin. Such an Ozymandiac tragedy! A great German friend of mine has paid for my ticket, it was his idea that we come here. The Island of Museums is an imposing cultural feature in the geography of Berlin, even Europe. It has six museums, but today I go Egyptian. The Neues Museum houses the archaeological collections of the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection. Berlin City itself has more than 170 museums. The number is higher when you consider the entire German nation which has the Museum of Chocolates and the Museum of Film among others! I cross the Spree River that marks this museum island, past the throngs of tourists. Asian tourists, are quite visible. They seem to be arriving by the busload. In the precincts, I see a man and a girl with Eritrean or Ethiopian features who appears to be young enough to be his daughter. They are the only African visitors that I will meet today. The girl seems incensed by the man’s affinity for selfies. She looks around trying to distance herself from the man and also in order to gain approval from the teeming humanity.

The image of Queen Nefertiti on a huge banner, by the imposing doors, flags in besuchers ever so lightly. The museum edifice is a relic of the second European nihilist war, marketed as second world war to insinuate euro-exceptionalism. I climb up the flight of stairs. There are bullet marks everywhere on the huge columns in the veranda. Parts of the walls have been restored. Others are left charred and black to memorialize the abyss that man is wont to do. This is exactly just like some of the happenings in there. There is a man whose origins I cannot decipher, certainly he is not a typical European, he inspects the validity of our tickets. We then walk past the security barrier at the door. The first man I meet is a security guard with Cushitic physical features, maybe Somali and he tells me to proceed right for an auto-guide radio and drop my windbreaker jacket in the garderobe. I hear alarms ring in my mind. His dark skin contrasts the whiteness of the visitors in the museums. He looks like an oddity here. For now, that black man can pass.

After this, I proceed to the regal and imposing foyer. It immediately reminds me of my insignificance in history. Boy, how small I matter in a museum. Parts of the 18th-century building that were not destroyed by European tribal wars are still standing, majestic in their architecture and colourful paintings. The building is a testament to German pre-war neo-classical architecture.

In the basement erupts the steady action. There are various artefacts. They are merely auxiliary to the lives of the mummies. I meet other nationalities, Africans, Asians, Arabs Indians, not as researchers, visitors or activists but as security workers. The guards are trained to be conscious of what each visitor does. Killmonger in a British museum in “The Black Panther” is echoed in some way deep down here. I get the impression that the angle of any phone camera, and even the swinging of hands is constantly under scrutiny. Any slight deviation invites swift human attention,

“English or German?” English.

“Sir that is not allowed here.”

The museum is designed for a scientific cultural process. But it is implemented in a carefully orchestrated security operation. Unlike the German Technical Museum, the presences of restrictions are tangible here.

Do not touch that! Dear visitor, please don’t photograph this. You are not allowed to photograph beyond this point. You are speaking too loudly, please tone it down…

Several rail guards dot this museum. The uniformed guards are not armed. The new Germany has police always in close proximity to the civilian. After all there is a European golden hut weighing half a kilogramme in the museum’s third floor. No one leaves Gold unattended. The medieval-era gold hat is touted as a toast of the museum, not Queen Nefertiti’s bust. The gold has direct and deep German history, unlike the Egyptian mummies. The Berlin Gold Hat is said to have served astrological functions during the bronze age in Europe.

Finally, I get to the relocated tombstones. And history hits me hard in the face. There are Egyptian mummies bracing the European summers and, winters. This is an interruption of a critical cultural process of a mummy’s afterlife. The mummies have been raised high for a pinning cultural gaze. The mummies fetishized by the white gaze!

Nah. Not my thang baby. Not my thing.

Let the mummies rest in peace, in the soils of Africa. The open-ended postmodernist treatment of difference must be treated with scepticism. Should one accept things to be infinitely relativist? So that, the presence of cultural beings (not heritages) are not imprisoned in a museum but relocated to their domains of existence in the sands of Africa? What about the Man-eaters of Tsavo from Kenya in an American museum in Chicago?

Blackness is a rarity in official mainstream Berlin, coming from a Kenyan! So, you can understand my Kenyan shock at the generosity of black in a museum space. Schwartzfahren is German for travelling in a train without a ticket, it loosely translates into blackriding. A museum! But why are Africans, Asians and the visibility of the other highlighted in the menial labours of the museum such as keeping coats and working security gigs all over the museum? The multicultural nature of junior workers in the museum arena reinforces the idea of Eurocentric appropriation of others’ practices, decontextualising their significance, and then monetising their presence. Especially when one considers how difficult, it is for these economic minorities to enter fortress Europe. Let white Germans adorn the museum instead of risking displaying Africans in a Europolitan spectacle. The rest of the world should not be inserted in Europe and her archives, merely for special effects. If blacks are restricted from entering Europe, then a museum should be the last space to install a black presence. If the conceptual and administrative tasks in the museum are preserved for Germans then Germans should go the entire length and work out everything, to avoid such embarrassing facades.

Nothing is as problematic as an African working in a European museum. What comes to mind then? I am not saying that they should not work in museums, no. I am only asking this, what about Ota Benga, a Mbuti, the Congolese pygmy, who found himself in the same cage with Dohong the orangutan in the Bronx Museum in 1906? Sarah Baartman, who suffered from steatopygia and who was the subject of European fantasies? What about the six pygmies who visited the Natural History Museum, London in 1906? The Mbuti pygmies whose skeletons are still in Britain? And to work unconsciously as a guard in a space of desecration of African existence is the height of paradox. What about the Zulus who sang and courted each other in a London stage in 1853? We, the blacks, have quite a history in European museums. Africans have been on the show business in Europe for far too long. To see another black body embedded problematically in a German museum brings back the difficult past. I feel like telling them to go away.

But what do I know? Some of these African brothers have climbed over barbed wires, crawled through triple concertina wire fence to get to Europe. Some have talked their way through the criminalised immigration to Europe. Some have just socially moved upwards from washing toilets to washing plates in hotels and presently to guarding their ancestors in museums! And the German museum has the perfect job for these upwardly mobile peoples in the search for political correctness.

Life is a hustle; I am also not saying that black is complete and definite. No! But from Spanish southern enclaves in the African waters, via Belgium and France to the islands of Britain, black has had a depressive tinge and history in establishments of memory and being. The African movement to Europe has been criminalised.

Nonetheless, the Somali brother was friendly. We even performed a quick nod. That crucial gesture which acknowledges that life exists out here, and this life is no smooth matatu ride.

The social capital not accessible to Africans due to the securitized cultural and knowledge resources in Europe defines the rest of the slowly-ebbing Eurocentric century. It was interesting to me see what I thought to have been a typical Turkana ekicholong, only to be told that it was an ancient Egyptian tool. And serving almost the same purpose as an Ekicholong. Ancient Egypt was not entirely obliterated among Africans and their migrations southwards. Some of the practices of the ancient Egypt are still evident in a variety of African traditions even today. For example, the Congolese cubist mask, and totemic coiffures of Senegalese girls in colonial Africa. There is such a thing as an honourable exit. This is the time. Repatriation with an apology for the atrocities and errors on ancestors is in order, at least if there is going to be no retributive approaches on this. Ancestors are spiritual beings not scientific specimen!

Kisumu Museum. Thursday 20th December 2018.

The sun is hot. I am here with my friends, including a German. He has come to visit me in Kenya. I take him to Kisumu Museum. Google maps show that we are close to the museum, but somehow, we keep missing the inconspicuous entrance. We finally ask for direction from one of the boda-boda guys and he directs us to the right entry point. Google was not so far off the mark. The grass is overgrown and the museum’s hidden signpost does not help either. The feeder road into the museum is practically non-existent. We rock ourselves in. There is no proper signage to the ticket sales office. The retail shop in the museum ground sells oddities, things such as Coca-Cola. This is Africa, so I can overlook that, can I not? Heck! the museum is also an events ground for wedding activities. There are no Kisumu Souvenirs, no curios and other standard tourist take-aways. I do not know whether we need to replicate that here, if we have to build a museum that is also inward-looking. Even though we do not have to exclude any group, we can foreground that this museum exists in a space replete with its own rich history. This history seems to be largely lacking in the museum. This museum does not even say that Kisumu was surrounded by archaeological sites, in its general approach to its craft.

Let me slow down, before I get ahead of myself. We pay for our affordable tickets. The lady selling us the tickets is engrossed in her cell phone. Our presence here is located in her footnotes. She speaks to us with her hand on a cell phone. On the red-painted floor, are airtime cards, which have been scratched and discarded. I cannot tell who owned them. We pay up for our tickets, we request for a guided tour. We wait for a couple of minutes as the cell-phone lady shouts above our heads for an available guide. Finally, they locate a young man, who seems like he is fresh out of high school. I got nothing with age, so long as one is competent in what they do. He starts taking us around the museum ground.

At the stand, we visit the various types of fish in the little aquarium boxes. Some of the fishes are definitely too big for their boxes. I am no biologist, but I could see that. The fish have both local and biological names. The museum’s stand on fish is underwhelming. I expect a lot more varieties, now that several species of fish are on the verge of extinction. It is a pity that the Nile Perch which was introduced in the 1950s by the British colonialists in Nam Lolwe (Lake Victoria) is primarily responsible for the near extinction of hundreds of native species. Nile perch was never a native to the lake and her ecosystem and as a result, the Nile perch has had such a devastating impact and even altered the eating habits of fish around the lake. Many people might not know Okoko, Duri, Seu, Ningu, Suma, Fulu, Osoga and other species that the Nile Perch has nearly obliterated. What our guide does not curate is that two million overseas customers ate Nam Lolwe fish every day in the mid-2000s during the boom of fishing! The amount of the fish that was exported was higher than the amount eaten locally, and the consequent protein deficiency for eastern Africans living around the lake. The predominant fish export was the Nile perch.

He does not say that riparian countries, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania exported approximately 45,000 tons of perch fillets annually with a corresponding value of 170 million Euro in 2003. He probably does not know that when colonialists introduced the Nile perch, Nam Lolwe was abundant with native fish species that were dismissed ‘trash fish’. The British wanted to increase the range of ‘fine sporting and edible white meat with no bones’ in the lake. The communities resisted the adoption of this fish in their culinary cultures. Or that the colonial project would have been incomplete without the accompanying environmental mismanagement. He does not say that the colonial government did an all-out campaign to instil the culture of eating fish, especially Mbuta to all East Africans. The Nile Perch was the ultimate solution to the colonisation of the East African lake cultures.

The Ber Dala refers to Mzee Odero’s home. While I acknowledged that culture is dynamic, I did not see the need of referring to Jaduong (Esteemed elder in Dholuo) Odero’s home as Mzee (old man in Kiswahili) Odero. The difference between Mzee and Jaduong’ is fundamental. Jaduong is the native title that is appropriate in the homestead designed and implemented in the museum at the heart of Kisumu. Mzee would find better context in a contemporary home not exhibited in the museum. Difficult Questions. Feeble answers.

Therefore, I found myself questioning the portrayal of the African in two random museums. In both instances, a lack of attention to details. The German Museum does not see the need to do away with Africans as workers in the museum or to find other alternatives of framing the black presence in a German museum. It is very difficult for an African to get a work permit to work in Germany. The tokenistic employment of the African in the German museum reinforces the idea of African occupying entertainment slots in European circuits. The African security workers in the German museum appeared to me almost like part of the objects of amusement for the German visitors in the museum.

The Kisumu museum has little interest in the animals that it houses. It even has lesser interest in the history of its location. If the crocodile occupies a pool way too small for its comfort then the people that the museum speaks for and from, occupy even a lesser space in the museum. The museum seemed to me more of an underfunded aquarium. Signs of decay are everywhere. The language of silence is spoken loudly in this museum. There is no curation of the place of Kisumu in regional and national politics.

There is need to curate the cultures and histories of the museum’s catchment area. There is need to showcase Luanda Magere. There is need to showcase the history of Koitalel arap Samoei. There is need to show more about the culinary practices of the people. There is need to not only to rewrite but to popularly assert its complexities and multiplicities. What museum will curate the technologies of Africa before the arrival of the Europeans? What museum will curate a typical day in the life, of say a Luo, Teso, Abasuba, Bukusu, Mnyore, Abagusii in pre-colonial Africa? Perhaps the museum bit more than its mouth could hold. The Kisumu Museum has sat pretty for far too long and perhaps there is a valid case for more specialised museums in Kenya, and other eastern African countries.

One more thing, at the Ber Dala stand, our young guide was not aware of the implications of referring to traditional alcohol drinks as illicit brew. I felt the weight of this cultural violence that he was committing on the traditions of the Luo. Never mind that he is a Luo. The museum could do better than this. There is need to have someone. If the museum finds it important that alcohol is an important theme in the museum, then at the very least it could get the traditional implements of this practise and exhibit it alongside the Ber Dala compound.

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

Follow us on Twitter. Remembering Toni Morrison

By Rasna Warah

I

Reading Tom Mboya’s memoir “Freedom and After” (1963) is both depressing and irritating. Mboya was one of Kenya’s nationalists, who through his active role in the trade unions in the 1950s, called for an end to British colonial rule. The depressing nature of his memoir is not just about the lofty ideals he so eloquently talked about that never grew wings in post-independent Kenya, but because he became a principal architect in discarding some of those very same ideals. Maybe some of the ideals have been realized in other forms. One could mention a vibrant and freer media (despite accusations of being too cosy to the state) and a robust democracy where citizens now enjoy various rights and liberties. Unfortunately, citizens are still attracted to the idea of ethnic consciousness that often reaches a crescendo, especially during general elections.

One sunny Saturday afternoon on July 5, 1969, Mboya walked out of a pharmacy on Government Road, now Moi Avenue, probably with the lotion he had gone to buy stuffed in his coat pockets, only to be stopped by two bullets fired at close range sending him slumping on the pavement. By chance, a health ministry official – Dr Mohamed Rafique Chaudhri – happened to be passing by and heard the commotion, and, recognizing Mboya’s car, rushed to the scene.

Images that would later horrify the nation are those of a wounded government minister being wheeled to a waiting ambulance, his left hand slightly hanging on the side, his white shirt spattered with blood and eyes dimmed as Dr Chaudhri raced against time. Outside the Nairobi Hospital casualty department, African police officers in shorts and wielding batons pushed a surging crowd heaving in grief, tears flowing freely. Then a man appeared with a large framed portrait of Mboya clad in a suit and skull cap. Time had stopped. Nyipir in Yvonne Owuor’s novel “Dust” (2013) reminds his daughter, Ajany, that 1969 was a very hard year. Mboya’s assassination from now onwards is transformed into permanent mourning – something like melancholia among his Luo people. It poisons political relations and some even observe, the economic fortunes of his kinsfolk. His death becomes an allegory of national trauma that had started with the ominous signs of authoritarianism, the shift from multiparty to a one-party state, the micro-management of national affairs by a small tribal gang and the cold-blood elimination of political opponents.

The trauma represses what remains of the desires and aspirations of the nation and a new mode of expression is birthed: silence. The 1970s is a decade which nearly everyone burrows their heads below the resounding din of Kenyatta succession politics above. Not that the people condone the climate of fear. There are a number of brave Kenyans who speak out. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, through his theatrical productions, begins to ask difficult questions concerning the state of the decaying nationhood and the dwindling hopes of achieving some of the post-independence dreams. Others such as Meja Mwangi, like a sly hare, manoeuvres his way and slips through the political dragnet that ensnares Ngugi.

Mwangi’s novels: “Kill Me Quick” (1974), “Going Down River Road” (1977), and “The Cockroach Dance” although on the surface pulpy crime fiction, all point to much deeper critiques: the escalating socio-political and economic decay, the marginalization of the poor to the ‘back streets’ of society. The three fictional accounts through their witty titles become stark symbols of the growing disillusionment, cynicism, and dehumanisation seeping into the national psyche. The after-effects of freedom that Mboya had hoped would propel Kenya to the heights of respected nations have turned into a nightmare of chronic unemployment, stiff bureaucracy, cronyism, tribalism, and nepotism. Maina and Meja, the main characters in “Kill Me Quick” cannot secure jobs because nobody knows them. Attempts at freeing themselves from their precarious condition are vigorously thwarted by don’t-care civil servants, and ordinary people survive through trickery and sheer wit. Noticeboards proclaim everywhere: Hakuna kazi!

Mboya’s memoir is a journey of survival and triumph against the colonial enterprise that forced Africans into beasts of burden, a model that the post-independent leaders inherited, and fashioned creatively in the subsequent decades to benefit them. His father is promoted to an overseer (nyapara) after working for fifteen years as a labourer for a white man in a sisal plantation. It is from that crucible of colonial repression mixed with a determined spirit that he decides to “go to a school where I might learn to read and write.” There is palpable excitement in the way he recounts those formative years. For Mboya’s generation, education is not just a ticket to becoming literate, but a means of emancipating oneself and breaking the chains of oppression and bondage.

Early exposure to education in Central Kenya, a land far removed from his family’s ancestral origins in Rusinga Island, affords Mboya the advantage of a multi-ethnic outlook in life. He becomes a polyglot with the ability to speak Kamba and Gikuyu fluently besides Dholuo, English, and Kiswahili. In the conventional sense, from a tender age, he becomes a ‘Kenyan’; that elusive and controversial term that elicits fierce debate. On the one hand, opponents of the idea of ‘Kenyanness’ ask: Why should they identify as Kenyans? Who defines that identity and who benefits (politically and economically) in such an arrangement? Is it the entire nation or just a few communities closer to the centre of power? On the other hand, the proponents counter that ‘Kenyanness’ helps us to rise above ethnic chauvinism. Not that identification with ethnicity is wrong. In fact, Mboya calls it ‘positive tribalism’ – a form of tribalism critical to the formation of national consciousness and is also reflective of African sensibilities and history. He rightly argues that it can be attained through tapping into our respective ethnic cultures and customs, particularly the concept of communality that, despite the onslaught of modernity, and now globalisation, still remains firm among most Kenyan communities. Throughout Owuor’s novel, Mboya’s death is an omnipresent event that constantly directs us to a traumatic period that has not been mourned. His ghost is that of a repressed collective identity submerged into the nation’s unconsciousness. The repression shields the country from confronting its problems of marginalization of minorities, ethnic domination by a few, and state capture by powerful economic interests who continue to build empires on the haggard backs of a majority poor. In death, Mboya magnifies the lost agency for a Kenyan identity as the primitive accumulation of wealth by the political class continues to wreak havoc. The ethos of ujamaa has virtually disappeared in a politics of the belly devoid of ideology and vision that Frantz Fanon so prophetically warned about in “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961). Fanon cautioned that unless post-independence leaders remained steadfast against the temptations of narcissism and mediocrity, nothing substantive in form of development and national unity would come out of such nations.

Later at Ruskin College, Oxford, Mboya experiences an awakening. He writes: “It was my first opportunity to taste something of the atmosphere of an academic institution, to meet intellectuals and to read books.” Knowledge is like food. He finds it delicious and immerses himself into intellectual activity, sharpening his thoughts and ideas. He fosters self-confidence and the ability to articulate his arguments with growing clarity and depth. He even flirts with the polemical when the occasion demands. He is only twenty-six years old and soon will start organising funding for the airlifts of Kenyan students to America with the financial assistance of the future American president John F. Kennedy. He rejects Richard Nixon’s offer from the US State Department to keep “the airlift a private programme, rather than turn it into one sponsored by government.”

In the next few years he addresses a Civil Rights rally in Washington, DC alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And in a future televised interview at the University of California, Berkeley, Malcolm X will shower him with glowing tributes in the same sentence with Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Nnamdi Azikiwe. The stage of resistance like a pendulum will swing from local to international back to local as a number of African countries sprint to independence in the early 1960s, that blood-drenched decade of wanton murder and backstabbing of black visionaries.

Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s “Coming to Birth” (1987) encapsulates that season of bloodletting as characterized by whispers, whispers, whispers. One of her protagonists called Martin Were, slightly younger than Mboya, struggles to have a child with his wife Paulina. However, the desire for an offspring is consistently disrupted by miscarriages. Their life is a trail of one tragedy after another. Like Mboya’s nationalist and pan-Africanist vision that is now clouded in semi-darkness, Macgoye’s fiction could be said to symbolize a nation increasingly finding itself marooned, held captive, and strangulated of its life. Martin finally goes berserk when he learns that Mboya has been slain in broad daylight.

II

Music is a journey into the recovery of lost memories. Listening to music is to be transported into realms of darkness and light. Music is freedom. In the succeeding decades after Mboya’s assassination, his memory started to find its way into popular culture. Benga music which dates back to the 1950s began churning out dirges praising his famed charisma, his political acumen, his naivety, and his subsequent violent obliteration from national memory. Gabriel Omollo’s song “Tom Mboya” while mining the culturally rich Luo folklore and its animal characters, belted out evocative lamentations asking: “what wrong did we the wretched Luo do to deserve the murder of Mboya?”

Like other earlier benga songs that anchor their themes on hero-worship and death, D.O. Misiani’s “Robert Ouko I &II” also followed the same musical trajectory with his sentimental tone also crying: why us? Emma Jalamo’s song titled “Raila”, a masterful fusion of ohangla and rumba, another creative lament with an air of blues, on the other hand, mourns Mboya, not as a national figure, but a martyr of the Luo community. Death assigns Mboya a new identity. An exclusive ethnic identity so that from now onwards, he becomes ours, not yours. Luo music dedicated to him could equally be said to follow a metaphysical bent detached from the material world of political successions and deal-cutting and of modern-day tenderpreneurs with connections to the state. The music struggles with the darkness of forgetting while constantly rallying the community to remember. Benga music reinvents Mboya’s memory giving us the freedom to remember and celebrate him in numerous ways. Music not only surmounts the silence and the amnesia long associated with his mourning at the national level, but it also reminds us to ask for the umpteenth time:

Who is this big man who ordered the hit?

Mboya’s memoir concludes on a hopeful tone, with his emphatic belief that Kenya will ultimately show up for a dance at the world stage and demonstrate to others what Africans can achieve and accomplish. Underlying the optimism and enthusiasm, he does not reveal the simmering undercurrents of succession politics and his hand in manipulating it to his advantage, a machine that would later immolate him. He neither reflects at length on his political naivete, his unbridled ambition to elbow so many others out of the centre, the digging of the grave. But who has the temerity to admit such personal flaws at the age of thirty-three?

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Remembering Toni Morrison

By Rasna Warah Legacy Museum & National Memorial for Peace and Justice Equal Justice Initiative Multimedia: Montgomery, Alabama

Written on the body Stage play: Andia Kisia

Heavy Non-fiction, memoir: Kiese Laymon

Lusala Film: Silas Miami, Wanjeri Gakuru, Oprah Oyugi. Story mentor: Mbithi Masya

The film Lusala (directed by Mugambi Nthiga) begins with a child being woken up by his drunk father, who forces him to dance as the father sings circumcision songs. The child, Lusala, dances grimly as his father sings and berates him for not knowing the song, and strikes the table menacingly with his bakora to keep the beat. The child cannot know the songs that are sung to make boys into men; he is still a boy. But the father sings his surly song and strikes the table again and again; the scene ends the way we know it will – with that bakora being used to strike the child’s body, a painful end to a painful song.

***

A few months ago, I visited the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. It was a beautiful spring day in March. The sun was shining and warm, the air was still. The sky seemed impossibly blue and perfect.

The museum and memorial are two separate but related sites – the former is an indoor museum located in a former warehouse that was used to hold enslaved people; it chronicles the harrowing story of black people in America from slavery, to racial terror, segregation and mass incarceration. The memorial, on an outdoor, six-acre site atop a hill overlooking downtown Montgomery, memorializes more than 4,400 black men, women and children that were shot, hung, burned alive, drowned by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. We — me, and the friend I was with – began by walking through the museum. He is black, American, and grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, about 300km north of Montgomery. We looked at the notices for slave auctions and newspaper advertisements for the sale of human beings. We read the numerous humiliating laws that made blackness a stain on public spaces, and regulated the most mundane things in the Jim Crow Era, from beaches to billiard tables. We saw the soil that had been collected from sites where people had been lynched, displayed in jars on a shelf – red, brown, and black soil, Abel crying out for justice from the ground.

We got to the memorial, where a statue installation of a black family in chains designed by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo is the first thing that confronts you. It had begun to rust, rivulets of bloody-looking ferric oxide running off the statue. We walked through the 800 steel columns hanging from the roof, each representing a county where a lynching had taken place, the names of the lynched engraved on the columns. They were intended to simulate black bodies swinging in the southern breeze – as Billie Holiday would have put it – and by this time I was thankful that this was outdoors or I might not have been able to breathe. The sky was now like a blanket, bright and blue and suffocating. But I knew I had to hold myself back from tears or breaking down, for I was there with a black American from Alabama. If I was shattering inside, how much more painful would it be for him, looking at places and histories he knew much more intimately.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice – Montgomery Alabama. Photo – Flickr/shawncalhoun

At the end of the day, after a dinner of shrimp and grits at a restaurant across the road from the museum, I went to bed at 7.30pm. I was exhausted, a different kind of fatigue, one that both comes from the bones and settles on them, and sleep is a small comfort for 400 years of historical and ongoing terror that has taken hold of the body.

The next morning, we went to visit his family in Huntsville, he joked that this little country town was surely nothing like Nairobi city, and I half-agreed – in my eyes it was far too sprawling and sparsely populated to be a city. We played Cornhole, a kind of beanbag tossing game, with his family – his mother, brother and grandparents – in their backyard as the sun went down, and my embarrassing lack of hand-eye coordination threatened to make my team lose badly.

***

Oppression is written on the body. Just like those three hours in Montgomery made me feel like I had run a marathon, every act of political exclusion, judicial injustice, and intentional impoverishment leaves its mark on the body. Some marks are visible, like Lusala’s as a child at the hands of his violent father. Some are invisible, like later in Lusala’s life when physical scars have healed, but the fear has found a permanent place to live in his mind, until he eventually has a mental breakdown. Even so, the line between his mental state and his body are not clear-cut: Lusala’s terrors live in his body, manifested in frequent bed-wetting. By the end of the film, one realizes that his experiences cannot simply be described as “hallucinations” – they are real, at least as real as the violence and trauma he has suffered in his life. And Brian Ogola, who plays Lusala as an adult, inhabits these tragedies with devastating clarity – even the most fleeting look on his face speaks to so much that cannot bear to be spoken aloud.

Andia Kisia’s stage play Written On The Body, a collection of vignettes uncovering Kenya’s national traumas from the colonial moment to the present day, then turns our attention to the way these terrors can live in a body politic, the brutalization of an entire nation. In this way, Lusala and Written On The Body are in conversation – and coincidentally (or not), both directed by Mugambi Nthiga – speaking to each other and both exploring, in their own particular ways, Francis Imbuga’s famous quote, “When the madness of an entire nation disturbs a solitary mind, it is not enough to say the man is mad.”

It is not enough to say that Lusala is mentally ill, that he has anxiety or paranoia or psychosis. He is, instead, the solitary mind that the madness of this entire nation has taken residence. Lusala is all of us – all our pain, trauma, and catastrophe – which Written On The Body forces us to look at ourselves, and trace the outlines of this collective brokenness.

Written On The Body tells us that Kenya is an on-going war zone, with bodies, minds and spirits of its people the daily casualties. Still, in Kisia’s subtle rendering, Kenyan-ness is something tart rather than bitter, a junction where bleak nihilism sometimes takes a turn into dark humour. In one memorable scene, Kisia places a pair of pathologists – they might be medical examiners or mortuary attendants – at City Mortuary in the days and nights following the attempted coup in 1982. Bodies are coming in faster than the two (exceptionally played by Elsaphan Njora and Charity Nyambura) can process them, and they devise a way to quickly figure out some identifying characteristics for these anonymous cadavers.

It goes exactly where you think it’s going, for we are a country where tribal stereotypes are an instant shorthand for reading bodies – this one is too dark to be a Kamba, and this one is too well- dressed to be a Kisii – but by the time the scene ends in a phallic joke, circumcision making its grim return, the audience’s laughter had turned into embarrassment, even shame – is this what we have become?

*** Like Written On The Body, Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy traces these same threads, of what happens to bodies when violence becomes the air we breathe. It is set in the Deep South, the place of strange fruit swinging in the southern breeze, whose painful story is ground zero for the memorial atop that hill in Montgomery.

Laymon, today a professor of creative writing at the University of Mississippi, tells the story of growing up in Jackson, Mississippi at the hands of a loving and complicated family, where love hurts and also heals, and it is difficult to see where one scar ends and the other begins.

But Laymon’s book goes further than I’ve seen a memoir go, especially one that inhabits and explores black masculinity. In the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak—a hard man.”

Laymon is not a hard man. His vulnerability, his fear and weakness are real in Heavy, they are literally written on his body – the scars on his body from childhood beatings, in the stress eating, in the 300lbs (135kg) he carries on his body while still a teenager, in the starvation he forces himself to undergo until he faints from lack of food, in the obsessive running that shatters his joints. The body is the site, the agent and the victim.

Still, what we may call vices, addictions or traumas – sexual violence, gambling, alcohol and drug addictions, eating disorders, broken relationships – are, in Laymon’s telling, scenes of tenderness. And by this I mean that he renders the story of black existence tenderly, with sensitivity and kindness, and that the stories themselves are tender – they are raw, inflamed, bruised, still bleeding.

Ultimately, the story in Heavy is that life is complicated, that it is a combination of multiple entanglements “that are so interwoven that it is easier to discard the entire box of tangled threads than to spend the time untangling them,” as C. Leigh McInnis, author and instructor of English at Jackson State University, described Heavy in this review. “[Laymon] provides a process of healing by showing that the first thing that people must do is realize just how multifactorial their hellish lives are and, then, realize that those multifactorial elements can be separated and analyzed even if the process is laborious.”

And so, Laymon gives us a scalpel to do this necessary, heavy work, which, although is inevitably painful, it can at the very least be precise.

***

What can one do with the anguish of these truths? With the knowledge that one cannot escape one’s body, no matter how hard one tries? That the past will always find you, in fact it is never past – the present is, in fact, the past in present-time? With the knowledge that if you are caught on the underside of power, your body will become a site of the accumulation of various strikes, until the last chapter of any successful genocide, where the oppressor can remove their hands and say, “My god – what are these people doing to themselves? They’re killing each other.”

These are the questions that Lusala, Written on the Body, Heavy and the Legacy Museum & National Memorial for Peace and Justice are asking us to confront, in their own particular yet related ways. Together, they present blackness, black corporeality, black existence – both in Africa and in the African Diaspora – as a site of great struggle, with some victories, but the struggle is ubiquitous, it is continuous, it is cosmic, it is seemingly eternal.

Over the three months that I watched, read and experienced the four works cited in this essay, I also listened to theologian and writer J. Kameron Carter present blackness as something else – a site of true spirituality. In a podcast recorded at Fuller Theological Seminary, Carter presents blackness as a kind of spiritual practice, the forms of life together created at the bottom of slave ships where black bodies are forced to be in contact, in the fields where a “violent arithmetic” reduces them to items on a balance sheet. Yet it is these spaces that are the possibility for alternative practices of the sacred.

In Carter’s reading, blackness as practiced in community always open, always accommodating, there’s always room for one more at the table, and this is how black communities survive – before Dylan Roof shot and killed nine worshipers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, they welcomed him to join them for bible study, and later he said that the warm welcome he received almost made him not go through with the shooting.

This openness makes black communities vulnerable to infiltration, sabotage and attack, but also, paradoxically, makes them impossible to eliminate completely, because they are always renewing themselves in community, together, even through the forced intimacies enforced upon black bodies. “It is a kind of sociality that presumes embrace, not protection,” says Carter, “If there’s any self- defence for blackness is that it keeps on loving, which is why it can’t be killed… which is, in some curious way, a kind of self-defence.”

In other words, the vulnerability and finitude of individual bodies (in Greek, soma), is transfigured in and through community into the messy, unbounded, resilience of the flesh (in Greek, sarx). Blackness is more like flesh than it is like body, as Carter sees it, where flesh is a mode of material life where we are composed in relationship to each other, like compost. “Compost is a number of things put together. You can’t say compost is this, and not that – compost is compositional, it is many things put together…Blackness is like flesh in that way, it is always in touch with everything else, it is unbordered and non-exclusionary.”

This, as painful as it is, is true spiritual practice – a possibility of life together that makes something beautiful from the rubble, from the disaster around us. I was thinking about this on that perfect day in March as I laughed and played Cornhole in the embrace of a family I had just met in Alabama, until my wrist, in fact, my body, gave out.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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

Follow us on Twitter. Remembering Toni Morrison

By Rasna Warah

A friend, Evelyne Ongogo, a budding poet who had an anthology of her poems titled, ‘Dichol and Other Poems’ and ‘Breaking the Burdens’ published by non-mainstream publishers a few years back, sent me two of her latest anthologies titled, ‘The eye of the smiling sun’ and ‘Beautiful shards of the maiden pot’. Both these collections are published by what we would call fringe publishers – this could be a euphemism for self-publishing. I read the three collections and was struck by the quality of the writing. However, a nagging thought refused to melt away; the fringe publishing company. I wondered about poetry; the creation, writing, publishing and marketing. I stopped to reflect on the last time a major publishing house operating in Kenya had released an anthology of poetry.

A few weeks later, I attended a function where two poets, Adipo Sidang’ the author of Parliament of Owls an eclectic collection of poems shared the stage with the most amazing Ugandan writer, Mugabi Byenkya, author of Dear Philomena, a novel compiled from a series of social media messages, phone conversations and thoughts. It is as radical as they come. Both these artists read from their works and performed from the corpus of their work. Adipo’s declamatory performance contrasted Mugabi’s sombre reflections, yet both were powerful rendition of poems. This awakened nagging thoughts on poetry; the creation, writing, publishing and marketing.

Speaking to Adipo after the conclusion of the event, he referenced his own experience and let out a tirade about the difficulty of publishing poetry in Kenya. His frustration was obvious as he described the encounter with the mainstream publishers who flatly refused to even consider his work. Having faced so much rejection, he had virtually given up on the idea of publishing, yet when his work found a sympathetic eye to read even he was surprised that the verdict was that it was extraordinary. His collection was published through an initiative supported by the Goethe Institute – not a mainstream publisher. These tribulations reminded me of Okot p’Bitek’s frustrations when he first tried to get Song of Lawino and Song of Ochol published. After many rejections, he eventually published the collection in 1966. The collection of ‘songs’ was a resounding artistic and commercial success and it has been said that many publishers who rejected the manuscripts regretted their poor judgement. Okot’s encounter with the publishers was over fifty years ago, but it seemed that the script remains. The poetry publishing terrain has not changed? “Poetry and Drama” Adipo Sidang’ declared, “occupy the bottom of the priority pile of the overly commercial minded Kenyan publishers. Unless a book is likely to end up among the set-books recommended by Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development that will result in huge sales , they will not publish it”.

Death of Language

Publishers, have over the years been accused of focusing on profit and sacrificing the artistic and cultural importance of creative expression. Poetry seems to have suffered more than all the other literary genres. In the foreword of Dichol, the late Professor Christopher Lukorito Wanjala, the renown literary critic who taught in Kenyan Universities for over forty years, wrote his reflection on poetry: ‘We wondered whether poetry was still read, enjoyed and appreciated, by secondary school students. We concluded that poetry is too important a literary genre to be oversimplified in the social media by the young generation.”

Why would the late literature don doubt the position occupied by poetry in the secondary school language and literature syllabus? This is especially intriguing, because he reiterates the essential position poetry occupies among the corpus of literature genres in the learning of language. Professor Wanjala must have been alluding to a past era when secondary students read and enjoyed poetry as an integral part of learning of English language. Literature, is creative expression of a language, and as such, is a product of mastery and competence in that language. Literature is to language what algebra is to numbers. Whereas one can speak a language enough to get away with it, consuming, appreciating and enjoying (and creating) the literature created in a language is akin to the numeric ability and competence used in solving algebraic equations. It goes beyond simple addition, subtraction and multiplication. It follows, that if secondary school students are not reading, enjoying and appreciating literature and poetry, their mastery of the language, any language, is stunted at its most will remain at the rudimentary level.

If there was recognition of the primacy of literature in the teaching of language, and poetry being among the genres of literature, why would it be that the production of material for the learning and enjoyment of poetry be considered a non-commercially viable enterprise? Could it be that the importance attached to linguistic dexterity that the good professor alluded to, is lost on us?

Recently, a letter purportedly written by a University student leader went viral on social media. Though the subject of the memo was tragic, a student at that university had been shot dead by thugs during a robbery, what caused consternation was the poor language and paucity of grammar sense in the memo. Many commentators were left wondering how a university-level student could write such an incomprehensible memo. To be fair to the student, there were some who did not understand what the fuss was all about!!

The tragic inability of this student to express himself raised questions surrounding standards of English in our education system. The fact that English is the only language of instruction in our education system elevated this concern to crisis level. Was this student able to understand what was being taught and how would he respond to his examiners. Returning to poetry one could ask, with this kind of limited language could this student actually read, enjoy and appreciate poetry?

The crafting of a memo might not be considered a literary exercise, but it calls for one to utilise language creatively in order to communicate a message. In that process of communication, an individual uses a distinct style and voice, they chose their words carefully to create the desired impact. The tone of the memo, in this case announcing the demise of a fellow student, should have conveyed the solemnity of the message. The gravity of the student leader’s appeal to the institution’s administration to do something to ensure the security of the student body should have been contained in the choice of words. Stylistics, is the study of distinctive styles found in literary expression and even a memo such as the one referenced here, was roundly criticised because it was subjected to a stylistic analysis. Herein lies the reason for Professor Wanjala’s lament. The skill to read, enjoy and appreciate writing is taught through literature and more so in poetry. Neglect of poetry in particular, and literature in general, is likely to result in the production of a generation that is ‘word deaf’ or those who cannot understand nuance and word-play. They will not ‘get it’ and what happens to one who goes through life totally at sea regarding things around them?

Poetry taught one to understand meaning that is stated and implied, it taught one to be a ‘wordsmith’ to know when irony, satire, hyperbole and sarcasm are in use. Figurative and colourful language, including proverbs are used in poetry and, as Chinua Achebe taught us, proverbs (and indeed other figurative language) are the palm-oil with which words are eaten! Will this generation not suffer from communication indigestion?

The Hollywood movie titled, Green Book bagged several awards at this year’s Oscar awards. The anti-racism storyline carries a powerful message about intrinsic human nature, and the power of friendship. It tells the story of an unemployed working class Italian-American bouncer who, out of desperation, takes up a job as a driver/bodyguard to a brilliant African American classical pianist traversing the American South in the 60s. This is at the height of the American Civil rights campaigns and racial segregation and lynching was rife. The reversed race roles of Black master and White subordinate ignite the initial spark in a movie that is loaded with nuances. The race stereotype-based assumptions in the movie abound, as expected, but the most fascinating interaction between Merhashala Ali and Viggo Mortensen, playing Don Shirley and Tony Lip respectively, happens when Shirley, the African American, coaches the barely literate clueless white driver how to compose a love letter. Tony’s vocabulary bank is totally overdrawn, he being a man accustomed to using his fist. His distressed attempts at communicating his feelings and emotions to his wife are salvaged by Shirley who injects linguistic flair and poetry into the letters. After much coaching, Tony eventually, catches on and is able to express his feelings and emotions to his wife in poetic language. His letters cause a sensation back at home among the womenfolk unused to such elevated highfalutin expression. When Tony returns from his work-trip, he is welcomed by an extremely elated and charmed spouse, totally enamoured by his communication. Without the benefit of a formal poetry lesson, Tony is walked through a stylistic course at the end of which he is able to read, enjoy, appreciate and create poetry and when he does he is the better for it. Tony’s poetry results in a revolution within and without.

Complexity

Poetry has had the reputation of being ‘hard’ and in his allusion to the threat of ‘oversimplification’ Professor Wanjala acknowledges that poetry has by nature to be complex. At the same time, he applauds the late poet Okot p’Bitek for simplifying poetry and making it more accessible. Wanjala, must have been making a distinction between simplification in terms of form, but not the complexity of the thoughts and feelings expressed via poetry. Many who went through poetry lessons were scarred to the bone, especially by the likes of poets like the late Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka who took pride in writing esoteric poetry that was supposedly for the initiated and select few and not the masses. Deciphering their works was like solving algebraic problem. One could argue that complicated language used just for its own sake, does not support the need for communication. However, there are critics like Horace Goddard in a review of Interpreters, considered to be among the most obscure of Soyinka’s work in prose, who assert that the complexity in Soyinka’s language was reflective of the complicated issues bedevilling Nigeria. In order to express these issues, he had to coin a language that could capture the complexity. He also argues that when a non-native speaker is using an adopted language there is the challenge of appropriating a language enough to give it a distinct identity other than the original. In this case Soyinka’s English must be distinct from that of any other native English speaker. Could the ‘difficultness’ of poetry be the reason that it has repelled secondary school readers and hence it’s a case of the enemy within?

Many who studied language and literature in the days that Prof Wanjala nostalgically refers to, will recall that the literary genres were handled separately: prose – usually represented by the novels or short stories, drama and poetry. Poetry stood out and retained a certain alien quality, even though there were African and Kenyan poets writing. Whereas the novel was domesticated early, and publishers embraced African novelists and provided them a publishing platform, the same opportunity was not accorded poetry and drama. Poetry actually fared less favourably among the neglected siblings. A casual look at the published works under the African Writers Series set up by Heinemann Educational Books Limited the leading publishers of literary work by Africans at that time, demonstrates the bias. For every poetry collection published, there are twenty extended prose works. Drama does not fare any better. Could this bias have originated from the colonial hangover that concluded that the extended prose form was easily identifiable as an African art and literary form more akin to African storytelling – with a higher chance of commercial success – as compared to poetry and drama? Would it be plausible to speculate that this racist notion actually informed the commercial decision that saw publishing opening up for novelist and not poets? Could the bias against poetry that Adipo Sidang’ recounted a few weeks ago actually have begun well in the sixties? When we reflect on the ground-breaking work by Okot p’Bitek this speculation gains some traction.

Quality versus Quantity

Okot’s attempts to get published by the mainstream publishers faced headwinds. It was difficult to convince publishing houses that Song of Lawino fitted the narrow definition a poem, especially because Okot had called it ‘Wer pa Lawino’ and ‘song’ was not considered a literary genre. This was even though there were western ‘songs’ like Odyssey and Iliad by Homer. Wer, was maybe considered too simple in form. What Wanjala considered its strength, was probably seen as the one feature that excluded it from consideration. Okot’s poem has been hailed as among the most lucid discourses on the process of deculturalisation of the African by western education and religion. Professor Andrew Gurr, who served as head of the Department of English at the University of Nairobi and Okot p’Bitek’s colleague in an inaugural lecture, analysed Song of Lawino and Song of Ochol and explained how they articulated the theme of cultural conflict with deep insight. He went on to compare Okot’s poem to other post-colonial writing and accorded it plaudits as high as other celebrated works. Wanjala recognises Okot for having launched an African poetry tradition in print with his Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol. He recognises Evelyne Ongogo, among others, for keeping aflame the song tradition, and he celebrates her for demystifying poetry as an art form and rekindling the interest in African poetry. Professor Wanjala draws a line between oversimplification and demystification and identifies the former as a threat. He says, ‘We concluded that poetry was too important a literary genre to be oversimplified in the social media by the young generation’.

My discussion with Adipo Sidang’ explored the role played by social media in the ‘publication’ of poetry. He acknowledged that because publishers had shunned poetry, poets retreated to the blogosphere. This alternative platform is wonderful for poets to share their work, but Sidang’, like Professor Wanjala, acknowledged that this free forum poses a serious challenge of quality. While the great thing is that there is an outlet for free expression, there are many blogs where what passes as poetry would not pass the test of quality. There is a notion that poetry can exist devoid of any standards of quality. Austin Bukenya, among the foremost poets and teachers avers that, ‘a good poem is made up of a competent fusion of strong feelings and well-structured expression’. The latter part of this definition is most important, ‘well-structured expression’ especially in the face of the proliferation of ‘free verse’ on the social media platforms. Experimentation is fine, but anything done for its own sake defeats the purpose. Free verse is not formless verse; it endeavours to creatively establish its own patterns that best suits what the poet is trying to communicate. When words are thrown together helter-skelter simply to achieve a rhyming or rhythmical effect it results in the oversimplification that Professor Wanjala lamented. Poems, are not simply about rhyme and rhythm, though these elements are crucial for performance poetry.

Performance and Poetic Roots

Performance poetry has a long tradition in Africa, and indeed Okot’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ochol actually are, or are crafted on the template of traditional Acoli song performance. The Spoken word has emerged as a unique genre within poetry and its growth has been fuelled by the ‘open mic’ tradition that allowed poets to present their poems to a live audience. In the 80s the universities popularised ‘Poetry Nite’ where any poet was free to present their poems to the student body. This is the period of state paranoia and being found with ‘subversive literature’ was the easiest way of ending up as a state guest. Oral performance of political protest poetry caught on as an unintended consequence. Thankfully, it was before the days of mobile phones with video recording capability with which evidence of subversion’ could have been captured. Bold original poems were recited, enjoyed and appreciated.

The ‘open mic’ sessions were highly influenced by the African American and Jamaican spoken word artist like Mutaburuka, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Gill Scott Heron and others. These spoken word traditions were heavily influenced by the musical tradition – mainly reggae, soul, blues and jazz and used word play, intonation and voice inflection to communicate. The soul of performance poetry, and spoken word, lies in the musical and lyrical poetic tradition. In our case it seems like many of the artists performing poetry and spoken word have tried to borrow these ‘foreign’ traditions hence are unable to adequately manipulate them. The result is the free verse that Bukenya describes as a travesty.

The Swahili language ‘Ngonjera’ poetic tradition provides a model upon which Kenyan performance poetry can be authentically modelled. Ngonjera is a call-response poetic performance with two opposing sides of a group, or single performers engaging in a battle of wits and rhyme tackling any emerging issue. One performer poses a question or challenge and the other answers as much wit as possible. However, to date the tradition has not evolved, remaining relatively monotonous, but offers great potential for evolving into a rich form of poetry presentation. A more complicated oral poetic form is the Gichaandi – a traditional Gikuyu oral poetry recitation that uses proverbs and riddles and can be performed by one or by two contesting Gichaandi performers in ‘burn out’ format. The loser among the duo is the one who faces a challenge that they are unable to respond to, or respond in manner that is deemed to be inarticulate. The Gichaandi art form is among those that can be described as dying and so is Khuswala Kumuse performed among the Bukusu.

Khuswala is recited as part of the funeral rites of a great departed individual. The recitation details the lineage and history of the departed individual and his history with time, the experts in oral history are dying off and the art form is becoming rarer even as western tradition slowly edge out the traditional Bukusu culture. Among the Luo funeral dirges, sigiiya are among the most resilient. These are usually individual performances unaccompanied by instruments and poetically express the relationship between the mourner and the deceased and also encapsulates the loss experienced by their departure.

This sample of oral poetry traditions is by no means exhaustive. The young generation of poets that Professor Wanjala is afraid might end up oversimplifying poetry could do well to research into these forms and use them as a model. Building a critical mass of consumers of poetry, will convince publishers that a market could be cultivated for poetry. The responsibility of convincing publishers, who are investors like any other and would like to put their investment where there is return, lies with the current crop of poets. The challenge that social media poses is that of ensuring that quality prevails. There are those who would argue that the market forces will determine high quality because it will rise to the top. However, the challenge remains, that if literature is not being taught, and especially stylistics, then the consumer will be unable to read, enjoy and appreciate poetry and that way the vicious cycle that has condemned poetry to the bottom of the literary pile will prevail and so will the quality of language.

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Remembering Toni Morrison

By Rasna Warah I was among the small number of people fortunate enough to attend the meeting of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) in New York City in April. I approached it with an open mind eager to learn all sorts of new lessons from the proceedings and realized that the most valuable lessons I learned were actually outside the packed meeting agenda.

A typical encounter on my first day at the UN Headquarters often followed these lines – “Hello, where are you from?”

“ I’m from Kenya”.

“Really? What community? Maasai? Ogiek? Sengwer?”

I hasten to remind my compatriots at this point that the ethnic origins of the name ‘Ogada’ aren’t as obvious to someone from Russia or the Far East as they are to us! For an ‘outsider’, the UNPFII meeting is like a trip back to elementary school, where the first step in everything you do is to establish your identity. On that score, we need to understand who the ‘insiders’ are:- They are representatives of indigenous (by UN definition) people from all over the world who have been involved in this meeting and its processes for a few years. They are distinguished by their colourful attire and adornments, the familiar banter with other delegates and for the confident manner in which they move around the extraordinarily complicated layout of the UN conference building. As an African attending this meeting in a technical capacity, I was a member of a very small minority

I was invited to this meeting in New York by the UN rapporteur on indigenous issues to give a technical assessment of the negative impacts of conservation on the rights and livelihoods of indigenous peoples. This invitation was extended after I gave a harsh indictment of conservation organizations working in Kenya and the scant attention they pay to the rights of local communities in the areas where they work during the EGM (experts’ group meeting) on these issues held in Nairobi in January 2019. This initial invitation was a pleasant surprise to me, and I felt like an outsider in the rarefied atmosphere of the UN offices in Nairobi, and approached my presentation in the same uninhibited manner in which uninvited guests approach food at a banquet, not expecting a repeat invitation.

It is sad that in 2019, speaking out against injustices and corruption perpetrated by conservation interests is still anathema in Kenya and many parts of Africa. Whereas indigenous African people have taken their rightful place in all fields of human endeavor, conservation is still the one arena where we still consider ourselves subservient to any outsider and get treated accordingly. A search for experts and world authorities on any species or issues on African wildlife will invariably yield the name of a person of Caucasian extraction. A number of these ‘Africa experts’ were seated in the room as I spoke in Nairobi, and judging from the audience reactions, some of them did appreciate my candour although I admit that some looked like they were suffering aneurysms. The depth of our problem as a country was revealed when an indigenous Kenyan participant (dressed in traditional regalia to boot) referred to my presentation as ‘controversial and racist’.

Indigenous People’ Rights

Three months later in April, I was a participant at the UN headquarters New York. Overall, the meeting of the UN Permanent Forum on indigenous issues is an eye-opener to anyone who isn’t part of the ‘system’ and wonders why peoples’ resource rights are flouted with such ease in our country and other parts of Africa. I noticed that the presence of affected nations/societies is in the form of ‘indigenous people’- This is a term loosely applied to many peoples who are marginalized or oppressed in one way or another all over the world. In Africa, and Kenya in particular, this term refers to some ethnic groups and not others, despite the fact that (in my view) all locals are indigenous to this country and are affected by resource injustices. The upshot of this is that many countries (Kenya included) end up represented by individuals chosen because of who they are or where they come from, rather than how well they can address the issues at hand.

Appearances are emphasised, and an outsider can see the weight placed on presence and attire rather than substance. As a Kenyan, I see the most harmful impact of this approach as the marginalization of views coming from people who are perceived as coming from ethnic communities who do not ‘live with wildlife’. This fits perfectly into the ‘divide and rule’ colonial narrative that pervades our entire conservation sector. Indeed, we have foreign agents and agencies in conservation trying to categorize our citizenry into groups that should or should not have opinions on conservation practice, regardless of their technical expertise (or lack thereof). From my personal experience, the only people in Kenya who have directly opposed my views about conservation practice from this ethnic perspective have been those of foreign extraction and their acolytes.

Conservation challenges vis-à-vis the rights of indigenous peoples is an exceedingly complex arena where success will most likely visit those who are best able to ‘step back’ and put the entire picture into perspective. It is not immediately apparent to the layperson why this is important, given that our media is awash with captivating stories of how millions of dollars, tens of years, indeed entire lives have been ‘dedicated’ or ‘given’ to saving a particular species in a given place. We are in a place where myths and legends sell, since the truth tends to be intellectually burdensome.

Reclaiming Indigenous Knowledge

I was however gratified to see that the UNPFII has a specific session on indigenous languages, and present at this session was a delegation from Kajiado county in Kenya discussing preservation and documentation of Maa language. There were the typical thoughts about the need to document traditions and culture. I raised a query; how are we going to preserve Maasai culture and language while as a country we are fighting pastoralism incessantly. We are killing Kenya Meat Commission, we are blocking stock routes, we are annexing and privatizing rangelands for tourism. Is there a part of Maa language or heritage that is separate from livestock rearing? Is there a part of any vernacular language that can live when separated from the homeland that gave life to it? I am glad to report that those queries changed their line of thought.

Herein lies a solution to the seemingly intractable conservation challenges we in Kenya face every day. Our system is designed to perpetuate the primitive, militarized western ‘fortress conservation’ approach that defines local people as enemies. This system was developed in the West nearly 200 years ago, and we in Kenya still follow it slavishly, down to the recent appointment of a senior military officer to head the state wildlife authority KWS (Kenya Wildlife Service). Our best option is to urgently institute a sophisticated approach that taps into indigenous African knowledge(s) of the environment on which their lives and livelihoods depended on. This is an approach that requires inputs from sociologists, economists, historians, artists, traditional leaders, amongst others. Most importantly, it requires the investment of time chiefly because the intellectual resources required to take this approach are finite, old, and battered from generations of physical and psychological neglect and suppression. How many of us in Kenya, or the rest of Africa today have the courage take this up?

Time is also the reason why this option becomes difficult for a country like Kenya to pursue. If we are honest, we will know that there is a limit to how long African peoples’ connection to their homelands can survive the relentless denigration, violence, miseducation and geographical displacement therefrom. When allowed to fester for long enough, these factors result in a culture in which self-loathing cloaks itself with puny short-term gains and masquerades as ‘success’. Anyone who doubts the potency of this violent displacement and continuous mis-education can examine its effect on recent immigrants to the West from Africa, who in a few short years, lose complete touch with the realities they grew up in. This mis-education has everything to do with conservation.

The Myth of Conservation

The perpetual colonial project has miseducated us that conservation is about wildlife, while it is actually about our land, our heritage, our culture, our languages, our beliefs…it is about US. The colonial project has taught us that conservation is about the protection of a few larger species that the foreign tourists regard as beautiful, ‘cute’, majestic, or otherwise charismatic. We (the miseducated) then take up arms and kill our brethren to ‘protect’ the beautiful places the colonists chose as venues for land and resource grabbing. I must grudgingly acknowledge the success of the perpetual colonial project, because in 2019, the Kenya Government still believes that the objective of their conservation agenda is to satisfy the needs of tourists. We still have a Ministry of ‘Tourism and Wildlife’ (headed by a minister with a tourism background) and Kenya Wildlife Service has a tourism department that dwarfs its education department because it is more important to please visitors than to educate Kenyan citizens about our heritage.

The colonial project has moved out of the formally protected areas and created new monsters called ‘wildlife conservancies’, where success is measured by the number of locals who can be persuaded, coerced or bribed with donor subsidies to give up their livelihoods, birthrights, and other forms of identity. This miasma of disenfranchisement around conservancies can be seen in a thousand tourism brochures; The picture of a moran from any of the Maa-speaking communities clad in full traditional regalia (sword included) serving drinks to scantily-clad foreign tourists lounging in a pool set in splendid isolation in the middle of his (arid) homeland against a backdrop of a conservancy from which his people and their livestock have been removed.

Let’s get back to Kajiado for a moment- One of the key issues that the Kajiado delegation had brought to the table at the UNPFII is the matter of the land occupied by Tata Chemicals Factory (otherwise known to most Kenyans as Magadi Soda Company). Since 1924, this factory was established to mine trona (soda ash) as a result of a clause in the 1911 Anglo-Maasai agreement between representatives of the two parties. I won’t get into the details of those colonial agreements, but the crux of the matter here is that trona is mined from Lake Magadi (which has an area approximately 35,000 acres), but the agreement granted these charlatans exclusive use of 225,000 acres. This basically means that they are only using 15.5% of the land they annexed from the Kajiado Maasai nearly a century ago, and there is no visible utilization of the other 84.5%. In practical terms, this means that the local population must seek permission from a foreign company to graze their animals on a vast area of their ancestral land.

The Land Question

Can the preservation of the Maasai cultural identity and indigenous language be done without restitution of the lands from which they were uprooted? Indeed, this question can be applied to any other ethnic group in the world living on indigenous land. From my experience, language (and to some extent culture) is a living medium of communication that draws from shared experiences and resources amongst a people. In Africa, we use a lot of natural resources in situ and many aspects of idioms and nuances in our vernacular languages were drawn from particular features, resources and even geographical locations. When I impressed upon my compatriots from Kajiado in New York that matters of culture, natural resources and heritage should not be pursued separately but as a whole, I was deeply gratified when they embraced this line of thought. It therefore is a far-fetched thought that one can presume to celebrate, conserve, and value any culture or heritage while uprooting or otherwise dislodging people from their ancestral origins. It is a patent lie that these strange externally-funded and conceived creatures called ‘wildlife conservancies’ can claim to be celebrating Maa culture in the form of beadwork (which they never stop crowing about being some form of ‘empowerment’) while actively suppressing the pastoralist livestock production system in every way they can, including by force of arms. They are strangling livelihood, identity, and dignity and replacing it with penury and indentured labour. They are creating arbitrary borders across landscapes and between communities, instantly creating ‘others’ where there were none. These sorts of actions are well-documented, not in conservation literature, but in the history of Africa’s colonisation in the 19th Century.

Observers who don’t understand the complex social systems in Kenya’s rangelands will only fathom the removal of livestock in the context of intellectually and morally bankrupt tourism interests that deem these animals somehow ‘unsightly’ to tourists. This is a serious problem but let’s stick with land, which the more astute observers will realize is the issue. Resource use patterns and associated skill sets are the glue that hold African societies to their ancestral lands. For instance, as a Kenyan of Luo heritage let us for a moment imagine that our ancestral lands bordering Lake Victoria, Homa Bay, Mbita, Kisumu, Karachuonyo, Asembo, Uyoma were turned into a conservancy ‘core area’ for exclusive use by a tourism lessee. The society would face imminent collapse economically, culturally, and socially if the locals would be prohibited from exploiting the waters of Lake Victoria through fishing or sailing. In a similar vein, the rangelands are places where livestock production is not a mere livelihood that can be replaced with serving drinks at a lodge.

It is a form of identity, dignity and most of all these animals are the glue that holds pastoralist societies together and binds them to their homelands. If he didn’t have any livestock there, what would a Samburu man be doing in Kalama or Sere Olipi? What would a Maasai man be doing in Naikarra or Narosura, or Nguruman? What would a Borana man be doing in Logologo or Karare if he didn’t have any animals grazing there? The contemporary colonial project knows this, and that is why they will invest millions of dollars to dupe, threaten, coerce or otherwise convince pastoralists to give up livestock.

There is historical precedent to this strategy. I refer to one of the greatest recorded genocides that befell the Native American Nations with the arrival of the European immigrants. A crucial cog in the wheels of that machine was the complete destruction of the millions-strong herds of bison that roamed the plains. These were the Native Americans’ “livestock” on which they depended for food, clothing, fuel (from the fat) and building materials (housing units built from hides) to survive the harsh temperate winters. With the bison gone, they didn’t stand a chance. Those who survived the bullets remained in penury, stripped of their identity, power, and dignity. It isn’t vastly different in Africa today, where we face assault from heavily funded foreign pirates ‘in love’ with our country and wildlife, guns placed in the hands of our foolish brethren called ‘game scouts’ and local law enforcers being trained by foreign special forces on how best to kill us.

Conservancy Pirates

For the privateers who have the funding but cannot access sovereign state militaries, this dubious service is also offered by mercenary groups like 51 degrees, VETPAW and Trojan Group based in Kenya, the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively. Most of all, the loss of our dignity and heritage is driven by the numerous local people, conservation officers, government officials and local leaders who see these problems, but still collaborate so as to enjoy some morsels from the table of donor largesse.

I have often been asked to propose ways in which we can address these ethical and existential challenges we face from this monster of prejudice and colonialism hiding under the hallowed cloak of conservation. There are a wide variety of workable approaches depending on circumstances but there are a few absolutes; Firstly, it must involve every single one of us, because it is about us, the people, not about animals, or parks, but our heritage so we must reject any labels (especially the ethnic ones) that seek to divide us for ease of control by the pirates. These labels also dehumanize our communities and reduce their rights to levels below universally accepted human rights. The State also has a part to play here- we should immediately put a stop to all armed wildlife law enforcement activities outside the structure of the two statutory organs KWS and KFS (Kenya Forest Service). These extraneous operatives are inhabiting a legal twilight zone where nothing is what it seems, or should be. The ethical and legal pitfalls are so stark and numerous, that if the State cannot see them, one would question the thinking behind defining Kenya as a sovereign state. Grant funding for wildlife law enforcement should go to KWS and anyone unwilling to channel such funding to the state agency should keep their money.

A Case for Policy Change

Next is the hardest pill to swallow. We must dismantle and discard the model of conservation developed in the West, and funded by the west to conserve for the West. This requires a radical shift from where we are. KWS at present has no policy department, cultural liaison department, no anthropologists, and sociologists- basically has no tools to deal with humans, except guns and bullets. Whenever they need to deal with the human dimensions detailed above, they have to run to the NGO pirates to lead them down the garden path. This is the door through which the colonial project is taking our homelands. The colonists driving this project are hidden in plain sight. They call themselves the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation (http://cpicfinance.com) take time to learn the names of your interlopers. The first step in this policy direction for Kenya would be to totally and permanently remove any tourism interests from the table at which conservation policy is being discussed. They should come in and sell the products of that finished policy with the firm knowledge that it was made to serve the Kenyan people, not the tourists.

Finally, we must stop this runaway train called ‘conservancies’ until we can legally and logically define it and define its direction. Currently, it is just a well-funded train hurtling at high speed down a railway that is being built as it moves. I am calling for definition, because I know for sure that there are good ones, and the ecological, social, cultural, economic and edaphic factors surrounding these conservancies vary greatly. The NGO pirate conservancies hide behind the good ones like the fabled dog with wooden horns at the meeting of antelopes.

I’ll conclude with an update on the Magadi Soda story. The local Maasai community led by the Kajiado County Governor are aggressively demanding the restitution of their birthright and payment of outstanding land rates. Meanwhile, the pastoralist development network (PDNK) led by Michael Tiampati have petitioned the UN rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people about it. The lessees are looking increasingly cornered, so in order to escape returning the land to its original owners, they are now frantically trying to turn it into wildlife conservancies. I rest my case.

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By Rasna Warah

In January 2008, I was seated in a police station in Kisumu watching a rerun of a Cameroon game at the 2008 African Cup of Nations. Kisumu was engulfed in the flames of the post-election violence, and I was an eleven-year-old sheltered in a police station, but I was not thinking about that. Instead, I was thinking about Cameroon and Ghana, my AFCoN teams. Alex Song was playing in midfield for Cameroon that year, and his talents, together with those of legendary striker Samuel Eto’o, buttressed the Indomitable Lions’ charge to the final of the competition, where they lost to Hosni Abd Rabou’s Egypt.

Before Eto’o was the legendary Cameroonian hitman, Roger Milla. Milla came out of retirement to lead Cameroon into the quarterfinals of the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. Thirty-eight years-old at the time, he netted four goals in the competition. The highlight of his tally was his double against the Colombian goalkeeper Rene Higuita in the second round. In that game, Milla received the ball from François Omam-Biyik and, in one fluid movement, flicked the ball towards and away from his body, and slalomed through two Colombian defenders with ease. Later in the match, he dispossessed the maverick keeper sometimes known as El Loco, and a madcap race to the goal-line ensued. Four years later, Milla would reappear at the World Cup again, and score a goal against Russia to become the oldest goal scorer in the history of the World Cup. He was forty-two years old. In the four years between his World Cup heroics, Roger Milla’s football had taken a more salacious turn. In the cellars of Yaounde’s national stadium, Milla had locked over a hundred pygmies who he had originally assembled to be part of charity football tournament to raise money to promote the wellbeing of Cameroonian pygmies. In his book, Football Against the Enemy, Simon Kuper writes that, “Milla had invited pygmies to play a few games, to raise money for their health and education, but he imprisoned them there, issued them with guards and seldom fed them.” The lack of food was fuelled by the belief that “they play better if they don’t eat too much.”

On FIFA’s official website, Roger Milla is described as, “Modest and committed to a fault, this giant of world football devotes whatever spare time he has time to helping others less fortunate than himself.”

Roger Milla. Football legend. FIFA’s symbol of altruism.

Let the games begin

The 2019 African Cup of Nations kicks off on Friday, 21st June in Egypt. The competition is officially known as The Total 2019 African Cup of Nations. The competition was initially supposed to be hosted by Cameroon, but the Confederation of African Football (CAF) stripped them of hosting rights citing, among other things, the Anglophone crisis, delays in the delivery of infrastructure, and the threat of the Boko Haram. This is the second time in recent years that the venue of the competition is being changed at, relatively, the last-minute. In 2015, Equatorial Guinea was awarded the hosting rights after Morocco, which had been slated to host the competition, pulled out, citing the looming threat of Ebola. CAF moved to sanction Morocco, throwing it out of the 2015 AFCoN, banning it from the 2017 and 2019 editions, and ordering it to pay one million dollars in fines to CAF, and eight million dollars as compensation for losses sustained by CAF and stakeholders after the pull-out. The Moroccans argued that Ebola was a risk they could not afford to take, given the swathe of fans expected to attend the tournament, despite the fact that home fans predominantly attend AFCoN competitions. The Ebola strain had at that point only appeared in three countries, none of which were likely to be at the competition, and the curious coincidence that Morocco would play host to the World Club Cup barely a month before AFCoN, a competition that would draw in significantly more spectators from outside the country.

Writing for The Guardian, Sean Jacobs argued that the pullout was a microcosm of North African countries’ difficult relationship with countries South of the Sahara. To make the hosting roulette more interesting, CAF would award Cote d’Ivoire the hosting rights of the 2021 competition, but after stripping Cameroon of 2019 hosting rights, they would renege on Cote d’Ivoire’s 2021 hosting rights and award them to Cameroon. The latest CAF report stated that Cote d’Ivoire had accepted an offer to host the 2023 AFCoN edition in place of the 2021 finals. Five years ago the 2019, 2021 and 2023 editions were awarded to Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire and Guinea respectively and now Guinea has to wait until 2025.

Morocco is one of the favourites of the The Total 2019 African Cup of Nations, the same competition that they were banned from before the success of their appeal against it. In mercurial Ajax Amsterdam playmaker, Hakim Ziyech, the Moroccans possess one of the flair players of the continent, and are packed with quality across the board: Mehdi Benatia, previously of Juventus, Bayern Munich and AS Roma, patrols the backline, flanked by Achraf Hakimi and Noussair Mazraou, who are the finest fullback pairing at the tournament. Morocco, alongside Egypt and Senegal, start as heavy favourites, Egypt because they are hosts and because Mo’ Salah la la la la la la, and Senegal because jogo oyierore. Growing up in Kisumu, when we played football as kids, we would split into two teams randomly, and when it happened that the random selection had led to the skilled players all being on one team, we would complain that jogo oyierore. They have chosen each other. This is what a friend messages when Senegal announces their final squad for the tournament. They have chosen each other. The Sengalese squad is a ridiculous exercise in name-dropping. Kalibou Koulibaly is one of the three finest central defenders in world football. His centre back partner, Salif Sane, who despite a difficult season with Schalke 04 in Germany’s Bundesliga, shone at last year’s World Cup, as did Moussa Wague at right back. Idrissa Gana Gueye in midfield is the best tackler in the English Premier League. Ismailla Sarr and Keita Balde are threatening to become world class forwards, while Sadio Mane, the figurehead of the attack, is a genuine world class forward, one of the premier players in his position in world football. Jogo oyierore.

Then there are the other bigwigs, the shadow favourites: Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Tunisia, Algeria. Cameroon, by virtue of being defending champions. Kenya has the unfortunate luck of being drawn in the same group with Senegal and Algeria who in Yacine Brahimi, Islam Slimani and Riyad Mahrez have an attack not to be sneered upon. One would expect Senegal to top the group, and Algeria to finish runners-up, but the Kenyans could surprise, having qualified for the group stage on the back of rugged rearguard displays. The Tanzanians complete this group.

Kenya is back after 15 years

Naturally (or as naturally as the politics of geopolitics can be), Kenya interests me. Harambee Stars has not qualified for Africa’s premier footballing competition since 2004, when a Jacob ‘Ghost’ Mulee coached side was drawn in a tough group with Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso, where the side lost to both Senegal and Mali, but salvaged some pride when teenage striker Dennis Oliech inspired them to a 3-0 win against Burkina Faso. Now, fifteen years later, Mulee, for one, is optimistic about Kenya’s chances of making the knockout stages of the 2019 African Cup of Nations. Mulee says, “I think we will beat Algeria and draw with Tanzania and qualify for the round of sixteen (as best losers) even before our final match against Senegal.”

Harambee Stars coach Sebastien Migne, however, is keeping himself grounded. Kenya, he argues, has only one player (Victor Wanyama) playing in a top league in the world, and so expectations have to be lowered. He adds, “For this reason, we must be realistic about our expectations and I believe what we achieved was something to be celebrated instead of the negative criticism.”

Migne is right to keep the expectations low. Senegal is the highest ranked team in the continent, after all, while the Algerians have appeared in two World Cups on the trot. Furthermore, questions have been asked about Migne’s own squad selection for the continental showcase. Sports reporter Celestine Olilo writing in The Daily Nation, raises doubts about the depth of the Harambee Stars squad. Masoud Juma, she notes, has spent the last six months without a football club, yet he has been picked as back-up to the main striker Michael Olunga at the expense of Allan Wanga who netted eighteen goals in the just-concluded KPL season. There is also Jesse Were who has scored freely for the last three seasons in the Zambian Super league with Zesco United leaving some to feel that he is being punished for leading the line for struggling Harambee Stars teams in the past. Furthermore, as Olilo notes, the goalkeeper situation is not the best. First-choice keeper Patrick Matasi has made several high-profile blunders while playing for the national team, most recently in the friendly against the Democratic Republic of Congo, while back-up keepers Farouk Shikhalo and John Oyiemba have zero international caps for Kenya.

While Kenya’s defensive displays gained the plaudits during qualification, conceding only one goal, the attack has flattered to deceive. A trio of Michael Olunga, Ayub Timbe and Francis Kahata will be the main men in the final third of the pitch, but beyond them there are concerns about the rest of the attack. Ovella Ochieng who is expected to push Kahata for a place in the team was gravely disappointing in the buildup friendlies in Paris, and should he continue his dour displays at the tournament, then fingers will be wagged at Migne’s decision to leave Cliff Nyakeya out of the squad, despite the Mathare United dynamo having scored thirty-two goals in the last two seasons.

Still, hope never dies. The main men for the team are captain Victor Wanyama, Japan-based centre forward Michael Olunga, and wing wizard Ayub Timbe. The latter two were responsible for Kenya’s goal against the DRC, Olunga curling the ball into the net after a jinxing run from the left wing by Timbe. Timbe, who one hopes will not succumb to the myriad of injuries he tends to pick up when playing for Kenya, is bullish about the team’s chances of progressing in Egypt. He says, “Our team is good when it comes to defending and even attacking. I will try to score as many goals as I can, but the most important thing here is teamwork.”

Then there are the other teams too, the other groups. Egypt are in a tricky looking Group A with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Devotees of the Kenyan Premier League would be interested in Uganda, not least because of vague regional loyalties, but specifically because Khalid Aucho, who is maybe the best midfielder to play in the KPL in recent years, is in the squad. However, this is not the group of death. For the group of death, we jump to Group D, where Morocco, Cote d’Ivoire and South Africa will eyeball each other, and take turns at eyeballing Namibia.

Dirty Football

The African Cup of Nations kicks off while African, and world, football is caught in the eye of a storm. On June 6th, Ahmad Ahmad, the Confederation of African football president, was arrested in Paris. Ahmad is accused of corruption and harassment by Amr Fahmy who was fired as CAF general secretary in April. Fahmy accuses Ahmad of, among other things, paying $20,000 in bribes into the accounts of African football association presidents such as those of Tanzania and Cape Verde, and harassing four female CAF employees. The arrest of Ahmad is only part of the chain of arrests of current and former world football leaders for corruption. Issa Hayatou, who Ahmad replaced as president of CAF in 2017, was accused of accepting a $1.5 million bribe from Qatar to secure his support for their bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and in 2018 was fined $27.9 million by the Egyptian Economic Court for flouting the Monopolistic Practices Act when signing a billion-dollar deal between CAF and French company Lagardère in 2015.

However, we think not of these things. Instead, we think about Ghana. Ghana is in Group F, alongside Cameroon, Benin and Guinea-Bissau. The fifteen-year absence of Kenya from continental and world football meant that I supported Ghana resolutely. In the 2006 World Cup, I cheered on Sammy Kuffuor, Richard Kingston, Asamoah Gyan & co. as they reached the second round, while in AFCON 2008, Junior Agogo charmed me with his goals and his celebrations (and the news of his inability to write as a result of his stroke broke my heart). Then in World Cup 2010 in South Africa, Gyan, and that penalty against Uruguay that I will never get over. The Ghanaians have floundered since then, not getting past the group stage of the World Cup four years later (despite John Boye and Jonathan Mensah’s heroic defending) and not qualifying for Russia 2018. Their preparations were mired in drama when Gyan was stripped of the captaincy, subsequently declared his retirement from international football, but twenty-four hours later rescinded his decision to retire following a call from his country’s president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. He is now stressing Ghana’s readiness for the tournament despite a goalless draw with South Africa, and a loss to Namibia in the buildup to AFCoN.

What’s In A Name?

Here is an interesting twist to the power of naming in African football. Roger Milla was The Old Man, and he made a mockery of those who had dismissed him because of his age. A joke made is that the national team’s nickname has a direct effect on their ability to win the tournament. Thus, Cameroon’s Indomitable Lions were victorious in 2017. Les Éléphants (Cote d’Ivoire) in 2015. The Super Eagles (Nigeria) won it in 2013. Chris Katongo’s goals fired Zambia’s Chipolopolo (The Copper Bullets) to the title in 2012, while Egypt’s The Pharaohs claimed the throne for three editions straight from 2006-2010. The Atlas Lions (Morocco) should consider themselves de facto contenders, as should The Lions of Teranga (Senegal). Ethiopia (the Walias) won the first edition of the tournament in 1962, but as the Walias ibex has become endangered, so too has the country’s football.

South Africa’s Bafana Bafana (The Boys, The Boys) won it in 1996, but since then lions, elephants, eagles, pharaohs and copper bullets have won it. Watch out for DRC’s The Leopards, Mali’s The Eagles, and Guinea’s National Elephants while The Warriors (Zimbabwe) and The Brave Warriors (Namibia) could just do it. Kenya (Harambee Stars) will gather hope from Ghana’s Black Stars having won in the 80s, but Uganda’s The Cranes, Burundi’s The Swallows, Angola’s Palancas Negras (Giant sable antelopes), Benin’s The Squirrels and Madagascar’s Barea (named after a species of Zebu) should, perhaps, temper their expectations.

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Remembering Toni Morrison

By Rasna Warah Who is Uganda’s enigmatic leader Yoweri Museveni? Since seizing power 33 years ago, his army has profoundly reshaped the politics of central and eastern Africa, and yet few outside of this region have even heard of him.

To some, Museveni is a visionary strategist who helped topple three brutal dictators, revived Uganda’s economy, fought the AIDS epidemic and played a steady-handed diplomatic role in a volatile region. But for others, Museveni is himself a brutal dictator, who deliberately provokes conflicts within Uganda and in neighboring countries, brutalizes Uganda’s political opposition and feasts on money stolen from Ugandan taxpayers and foreign aid programs, all the while beguiling naïve Western journalists and diplomats with his signature charm.

I’ve been reporting on Uganda for almost 25 years, and I still find Museveni fascinating. As a rebel leader during the early 1980s, his shape-shifting exploits were legendary. Again and again, his small band of rebels would menace and outwit Uganda’s much larger national army and then melt away into the bush. Ugandans joke that Museveni could turn into a cat and walk through roadblocks.

William Pike, who served as editor of Uganda’s government-owned New Vision newspaper from 1986-2006 has almost certainly had more contact with Museveni than any other non-Ugandan writer. Pike’s gripping new book Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda provides an insider’s view of the Ugandan leader and his movement.

By all accounts, Pike is a highly effective editor and manager. Former employees have described him to me as a gentle boss who ran a productive, disciplined newsroom. He wasn’t afraid to go after cases of corruption involving senior cabinet ministers and even sporadic cases of torture and extra- judicial killings carried out by Museveni’s security forces. Under his leadership, the New Vision soon became Uganda’s most popular publication. I’m personally acquainted with Pike and have always found him kind, intelligent and extremely likeable. His book is also very well-written.

Unfortunately however, Combatants presents an overly flattering image of Museveni’s regime that belies reality, overlooks recent scholarship that challenges Pike’s version of events and sometimes contradicts the findings of Pike’s own New Vision reporters.

*** Pike first met Museveni in 1984, when the young reporter snuck behind enemy lines during the so- called “bush war” against Uganda’s then-president Milton Obote. By then, Museveni’s rebels known as the National Resistance Army, or NRA– controlled a significant part of the Luwero Triangle, an 8000 square mile area northwest of Kampala that had been the site of intense fighting. Until then, the bush war was viewed internationally as a minor skirmish, but Pike’s articles for the UK Observer and Guardian newspapers helped bring Museveni’s struggle to the attention of western policymakers.

The Luwero Triangle is the rural homeland of the Baganda people—Uganda’s largest ethnic group. Soon after launching his rebellion, Museveni, a Munyankole from western Uganda, promised Baganda leaders that if he managed to take power, he’d restore their traditional kingdom, which Obote had violently crushed in 1966. In return, the Baganda allowed Museveni to base his forces in their villages. When Museveni’s men attacked army and police posts, Obote’s undisciplined and brutal soldiers responded with disproportionate force, killing anyone, including innocent villagers whom they suspected of supporting the rebels. During his visit, Pike was shown areas littered with human skulls. Quoting Museveni, he estimated that Obote’s forces had killed some 300,000 people—roughly half the population of the Luwero Triangle at the time.

The UK government, which supported Obote, was claiming that some 12,000 people had been killed on all sides of the fighting. If Pike was correct, Obote was responsible for genocide, and Britain’s support was unconscionable. By then, the Reagan administration was already distancing itself from Obote. While Pike was in Luwero, then Assistant Secretary of State Eliot Abrams told a congressional hearing that Obote’s regime had killed an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people.

Normally such a huge figure would be referenced by a reputable source, ideally a forensic investigation, but like Pike, Abrams cited no independent source for those figures. When asked by Congressman Don Bonker where his source for the Luwero death toll came from, Abrams equivocated. “You wouldn’t be able to document those numbers,” he said. “There is no way of measuring directly, but there seems to be some kind of consensus that that is the order of magnitude.” Around the same time, the Washington Post also published a brief article on Uganda. Citing unnamed refugee monitoring groups and “official US sources” the author, who had not visited Uganda, also wrote that Obote’s forces had killed 100,000 to 200,000 people.

Since then, a more complex narrative about the Luwero skulls has emerged which Pike does not explore in Combatants. Not only is there no evidence that the death toll was as high as Pike and Reagan Administration officials claimed, Obote’s army, though undisciplined and brutal, may not have been responsible for all the casualties that did occur. Most deaths probably resulted from disease and hunger as a result of mass displacement. In 1983, the government launched a counter offensive against the NRA, and in the process rounded up more than 100,000 villagers into squalid camps without adequate food, water and medicine. The NRA then ordered the evacuation of those who remained in the area. As thousands of peasants trudged north with the NRA, more reportedly died. When the NRA retook those areas, the bones of the casualties of these operations could have been among those shown to Pike.

Former NRA soldiers have told me personally that they witnessed and even participated in such “false flag” killings, as have former NRA Kadogos—child soldiers–speaking with other reporters.

The NRA was also probably not blameless. Shortly after Pike’s visit, a journalist for the London Daily Telegraph visited one of the villages where the army was alleged to have massacred hundreds of people a year earlier. He found “nothing to support [these] claims.” The army had withdrawn to allow the Telegraph reporter to freely interview the chief and villagers. “The surprise these people showed when asked about a massacre could not have been an act,” he wrote. However, they did mention that Museveni’s rebels had recently killed three men and four children. Some of the rebels came from the area and locals recognized them, even though they were partially disguised in army uniforms. “They were dressed halfway,” the chief said. “I mean they were in army and civilian clothes, all mixed up.”

Former NRA soldiers have told me personally that they witnessed and even participated in such “false flag” killings, as have former NRA Kadogos—child soldiers–speaking with other reporters. In his 2011 memoir Betrayed By My Leader, former NRA Major John Kazoora describes an NRA massacre of Obote-loyalists belonging to the Alur tribe. “They would dig a shallow grave,” he writes, “tie you [up] and lie you facing the ground and crack your skull using an old hoe called Kafuni.”

In some cases, the NRA may even have killed its own. At first, Museveni mainly recruited from his own Banyankole tribe and Buganda, but after Obote brutally forced Uganda-based Rwandan Tutsi refugees into camps where many starved and died, some of them joined the rebellion as well. They grew close to Museveni, whose Hima people are closely related to the Tutsis, and soon began to dominate the force. Toward the end of the war, Baganda NRA soldiers began dying mysteriously and some suspected foul play. “We were fighting tribalism,” one Muganda NRA veteran told The Monitor newspaper, “but it was growing in the bush.” In 1983, Museveni warned all Westerners, including aid workers and diplomats, to leave Uganda at once. “We don’t possess the power to prevent accidents,” he wrote in a signed letter issued by his representatives in Kenya. Three weeks later, a Canadian engineer was gunned down on his doorstep in Kampala; four other European aid workers were killed a few months later. While the killers were never definitively identified, the NRA had kidnapped and released four other Swiss hostages and a French doctor around the same time.

***

In July 1985, Obote was toppled by his own army. The NRA continued to battle for power as desultory peace talks dragged on in Nairobi. Eventually, the NRA took Kampala from the disorganized, weak Ugandan government forces, and Museveni was sworn in in January 1986.

Back in London, a series of glowing tributes to Museveni appeared in the Observer and Guardian newspapers, many of them written by Pike. “Polite Guerrillas End Fourteen Years of Torture and Killing,” read one headline; “The Pearl of Africa Shines Again,” read another. According to his admirers, Museveni was Robin Hood, Che Guevara, and Field Marshal Montgomery all rolled into one.

As the war was winding down, Pike and Times of London journalist Richard Dowden toured NRA held areas, where villagers unanimously told them that all the atrocities were the fault of Obote’s forces; none were committed by the NRA, they said. However, both journalists were being escorted by NRA officers. Under the circumstances, it’s conceivable that villagers might have been afraid to report NRA atrocities, if they knew of any.

In recent years, opposition politicians including Kizza Besigye who served as Museveni’s doctor during the bush war, have called for a forensic investigation of the Luwero killings. Museveni has refused. Such an investigation would be very difficult in any case, since the NRA ordered locals to rebury the bones or gather them in memorial sites after the war.

Whatever the reality, the Luwero skulls provided Museveni with political capital early on. Shortly after coming to power, he escorted diplomats around the Luwero Triangle, pointing out the scattered remains and mass graves that Pike had seen. This helped bolster international support for Museveni, who came to be seen as Uganda’s best hope for a way out of the quagmire of its bloody history. Billions of foreign aid dollars would soon flow into his treasury.

According to historian Pauline Bernard, Pike claims credit for the article and the ad. But the inspiration for the skull propaganda may actually have come from highly controversial Museveni stalwart Roland Kakooza-Mutale, whose state-backed militia known as the Kalangala Action Plan attacks and terrorizes opposition supporters during political campaigns

During the 1996 presidential campaigns, the New Vision reported that Museveni’s main challenger, Paul Ssemogerere was planning to invite Milton Obote back from exile and appoint him to his cabinet. Ssemogerere vigorously denied this, but Pike insisted it was true. The article was published alongside a Museveni campaign ad with images of Luwero skulls heaped up in a pyramid and the following slogan:

“Don’t forget the past. Over one million Ugandans, our brothers, sisters, family and friends, lost their lives. YOUR VOTE COULD BRING IT BACK.”

According to historian Pauline Bernard, Pike claims credit for the article and the ad. But the inspiration for the skull propaganda may actually have come from highly controversial Museveni stalwart Roland Kakooza-Mutale, whose state-backed militia known as the Kalangala Action Plan attacks and terrorizes opposition supporters during political campaigns. After the fall of Amin in 1979, Kakooza-Mutale ran a pro-Museveni newspaper known as Economy. Shortly before the 1980 election, he published an anti-Obote editorial illustrated with drawings of skulls and the headline, “PEOPLE ADVISED TO VOTE AGAINST DEATH.”

More recently, Uganda’s tourism board has proposed creating a museum to commemorate those killed by previous regimes, including the Luwero dead.

***

Combatants also covers the early years of the war in northern Uganda that would give rise to the terrifying warlord Joseph Kony. But here, again, Pike paints an overly rosy picture of the NRA’s role. After Museveni was sworn in, his troops continued to pursue soldiers of the former Ugandan army, most of whom came from northern and eastern Uganda. In March 1986, former government soldiers in Acholiland—comprising the northern districts of Gulu and Kitgum—finally put down their guns. When the NRA arrived in Gulu they were “disciplined, friendly and respectful,” according to New Vision journalist Caroline Lamwaka. They requested the former army soldiers to surrender their weapons and some did so. Then in late April, the NRA began conducting raids on villages where they suspected guns were still being hidden. Property was looted, women were raped and unarmed people were shot and killed. Some Acholi ex-soldiers who surrendered were taken to Western Uganda and never seen again. As political scientist Adam Branch puts it, the NRA appeared to be launching “a counter-insurgency without an insurgency.” In August 1986, a few thousand former members of Obote’s army who had escaped over the border to Sudan invaded and attacked the NRA. In turn, NRA attacks against Acholi civilians escalated, and more rebel groups, including Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army soon emerged. Uganda’s twenty-year northern war was soon underway.

After the fall of Amin in 1979, Kakooza-Mutale ran a pro-Museveni newspaper known as Economy. Shortly before the 1980 election, he published an anti-Obote editorial illustrated with drawings of skulls and the headline, “PEOPLE ADVISED TO VOTE AGAINST DEATH.”

In Combatants, Pike attributes the NRA atrocities to a few bad apples in the ranks or to poorly integrated former rebel groups, including one named FEDEMU, that weren’t mainstream NRA. But the New Vision’s Caroline Lamwaka disputes this. “I do not agree with the common argument advanced by some NRM officials, as well as some Acholi,” she writes in her posthumously published memoir,

“that it was the actions of FEDEMU soldiers that caused the rebellion….the NRA proper is equally to blame for the mess. If it were only FEDEMU, war would not have broken out in Teso and Lango, or in the whole of Acholi. The government’s argument that the war was due to former [government] soldiers fighting to recover “lost glory” or the “soft and easy life” or that they were “criminals” who feared to face the law, also misrepresents and oversimplifies the complex causes of the conflict.”

Throughout Combatants, Pike emphasizes how Museveni’s government respected media freedom, and insists that he was never prevented from printing stories critical of the government. However, he does not mention that many journalists have received bribes and death threats from the regime, and some have been tortured, including his own employee Lamwaka, quoted above. In 1988, she was assaulted by a Ugandan army officer after reporting on cattle thefts by government forces. In her memoir, she writes that what she experienced was so humiliating she could not describe it in print.

Pike also downplays NRA abuses in eastern Uganda, where another rebel group emerged after the NRA, which was at first welcomed by locals, committed atrocities similar to those in Acholiland. He downplays Museveni’s involvement in arming the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, setting the stage for the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis. Pike also downplays Museveni’s responsibility for the Congo war which claimed over five million lives. According to Pike, Museveni ordered his troops not to engage in business on Congolese soil. He nevertheless fails to explain how Museveni’s own brother and son came to be linked to a company that traded in smuggled Congolese diamonds during this time.

***

During the 1990s, Pike and other western journalists helped create a new narrative about central Africa. By then, many of Africa’s independence movements were a mess–in part because of western Cold War meddling, but also because of the limited capabilities of some African leaders. But Museveni, along with Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, would be celebrated in the Western media as Africa’s great new hope. All had come to power by the gun and distained democracy, but made well-spoken promises to keep their countries in order and concentrate on development.

Western leaders from Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to the President of the World Bank quickly bought into the idea that Africa needed “strong leadership” –a wiggle phrase which could mean anything from a firm stance on corruption to outright tyranny. Foreign aid and military hardware flowed into the coffers of the “new leaders”. But even as the chorus of praise was rising around them, they were using Western largesse to escalate wars with their neighbors, giving rise to an orgy of violence that would claim millions of lives from Eritrea to Uganda to Congo and southern Sudan.

***

In the end, Pike blames democracy for Uganda’s problems. After Uganda’s first presidential election in 1996, he writes, “The politicians triumphed over the technocrats,”; “loyalty had become more important than principle”; “incompetent or corrupt ministers were retained in office to cater to their constituents….”

Pike never questions whether Museveni’s harsh repression, not democracy, might have been the source of these problems; nor does he ask himself whether this repression might help explain why Uganda was so riddled with rebel groups in the first place. There is something tragic about Pike’s Combatants, which could have been a much more powerful book. Where it falls short is in the matter of empathy, like the half-hearted white religious leaders who supported civil rights in the southern United States in principle, but chastised Martin Luther King for what they considered his “unwise and untimely” civil rights activism.

In the end, Pike blames democracy for Uganda’s problems. After Uganda’s first presidential election in 1996, he writes, “The politicians triumphed over the technocrats,”; “loyalty had become more important than principle”; “incompetent or corrupt ministers were retained in office to cater to their constituents.

“The Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner,” wrote King in frustration,“but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice…who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom….Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

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Remembering Toni Morrison

By Rasna Warah Ken Odhiambo Okoth, Member of Parliament (MP) for Kibra Constituency in Nairobi, has been in the news a lot over the last few years, mainly because of his stellar performance in his role. From late last year, however, he was ‘trending’ in the mainstream and social media not because of building a Girls’ High school at a cost that fellow MPs claim to use to put up pit latrines in their constituencies, but because he came out and disclosed that he was battling cancer. Granted, Ken is not the first Kenyan politician to disclose affliction by cancer. A few years back, Senator, Beth Mugo boldly disclosed that she had breast cancer and spoke encouragingly of her treatment journey and ‘victory’. Kisumu Governor Professor Anyang’ Nyong’o, has also been public about his prostate cancer illness and treatment. Recently while breaking ground of a Cancer Diagnostic and treatment centre in Kisumu, he self-referenced as among the ‘growing cancer statistics’. Yet what makes Ken Okoth’s disclosure more significant is its gravity.

Ken Okoth, at forty-one, is among the younger crop of legislators in Kenya. He is not your typical cancer patient since many people still associate cancer with old age. When one is diagnosed with cancer at such a ‘young’ age, this apparent anomaly becomes the starting point of the conversation. Ken Okoth publicly disclosed that his colorectal cancer had progressed to stage four; meaning that he had no chance of a reversal, or treatment, only clinical management. Okoth was basically announcing that his disease was terminal and that his demise from this disease is imminent. This announcement is unprecedented in two ways: Okoth is a Kenyan politician and admitting mortality and terminality is a complete no-no among Kenya’s and indeed Africa’s political class. Secondly, as an African, dalliance with death is totally anathema. Denial of the eventuality of death, is deeply wired in our African DNA and psyche, more so in the mental constitution of the African political class.

The ‘Houdini’ Syndrome

Non-disclosure and denial of ill-health status reaches comic proportions in Africa. In the last thirty years, out of the twenty-one heads of state who have died of illness, eleven died in hospitals abroad. Usually in Europe. One assumes that an individual seeking medical care when and where they can find it is normal. However, the lengths that state machinery goes into denying, lying or explaining the ‘disappearance’ of politicians when unwell, seeking treatment, or at times has even passed away is simply bizarre. There was the case of Togolese president, Gnassingbe Eyadama whose office strenuously denied he was ailing until he died in an airplane overflying Tunisian airspace while being rushed abroad for treatment. Then there was Chadian leader, Pascal Yoadimnadji who died of diabetes related illnesses in Paris as his office was reassuring the public that he was improving and would soon return home. Ghanaian head of state, John Atta Mills’ ill-heath was a loudly murmured topic. He was ‘rumoured’ to be suffering from throat cancer. When he died in 2012, he had previously had to deny rumours of his death twice! Even after he died, there were conflicting reports on the cause of his death. Gabonese President, Omar Bongo was reportedly in Barcelona, Spain for a whole month supposedly resting after the “intense emotional shock” of losing his wife. Despite stories circulating that he was at an advanced stage of cancer, his office denied and underplayed his illness. Eventually, pressure mounted because the host country media did not play along. His office admitted he was seeking ‘routine’ medical tests. After two days of denials of leaked information that the leader had died, his office announced his ‘sudden death’. Then there was the president of Nigeria, Umar Musa Yar’Adua, who was reportedly unwell and sought treatment in Saudi Arabia. He disappeared from the public for four months before ‘sneaking’ back into the nation’s capital under cover of darkness, retreated from public eyes until his death three months later. His illness and cause of death remains a topic for conjecture to date.

In Guinea, President, Lanasana Conte had been ailing and going in and out of the country for medical treatment. At one point the editor of a paper printed an unflattering picture of him looking frail. He was promptly arrested and forced to publish an earlier picture showing the leader looking better. Eventually, when he died of ‘long illness’, it was announced that he had ‘hid his physical suffering’ from the nation for years because of his dedication to duty’. There was the case of the Ethiopian leader, Meles Zanawi who was supposedly in a health facility in Belgium for two months during which time rumours of the seriousness of his health, and even death, were stringently denied. When eventually his demise was announced, it was said that he had suddenly contracted an infection. Among the most morbidly hilarious case was of Bingu Wa Mutharika who suffered a massive heart attack at home. The rumour mills were busy churning out stories that he had died, but even as this was happening, he was flown off to a hospital in South Africa where after a few days his death (second death) was announced. Zambian head of state, Levy Mwanawasa suffered a stroke and was hospitalised in Paris. His office denied for almost two months that his condition was grave. Unconfirmed rumours of his death led to the South African parliament observing a minute of silence that was later retracted after much embarrassment. Back at home, there were demands that the state of the leader’s health and fitness to continue holding the office be confirmed by independent clinicians. After much prevarication his demise was announced. Ironically, Micheal Sata one among those who had demanded the leader’s health be confirmed, would a few years later be in the same predicament and he himself passed away in a London hospital after the standard denials of ill-health. There is a pathological obsession with secrecy and an official playing of smoke and mirrors game with health of African political leaders as a strategy to subvert democracy by undermining accountability and staving off opposition

God Syndrome: Mortality Versus Immortality

Opacity, in matters health among politicians, even when there are tell-tale signs of frailty is intriguing. The kind of photographs Ken Okoth recently released, shows the image of an individual ravaged by chemotherapy. This reveal, by a Kenyan politician and a sitting MP, viewed together with the self-disclosure of his diagnosis brings onto the public space the issue of mortality and immortality of an African politician. In that respect Ken Okoth’s gesture is a first.

Physical infirmity, illness, and death are ultimate equalizers of all mankind. Illness shears away all the pomp and grandeur. Gone are the wailing sirens of chase cars, the coterie of hangers-on and saluting body-guards bullying all and sundry. Illness takes away the guard of honour, the decorated podium and customised lectern. Illness brings a different type of media attention. That which was craved for and adored is avoided and shunned. Politicians instead plead that their privacy be respected. Only sneaked pictures will be seen and not the ‘selfies’ Ken Okoth provided. The image of an ailing African politician underscores his or her humanity. While this should be obvious, the African politician strives to maintain a demi-god status. Note the names that they have given themselves: Osagyefo, Ngwazi, Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga, ‘Mtukufu’; the glorious,adored and venerated ones.

This self-deification is by design and a carefully choreographed strategy. Approximation to immortality suggests infallibility, indispensability, omnipotence and omniscience. There is political capital and entitlement in omnipotence because it scares away any opposition or contestation. During the late 1970s, President Kenyatta, old and ailing, began to appear less and less in public. Some politicians around him, began to plot his succession, or rather manipulate his succession to deny his Vice President a direct line to the coveted seat. The Attorney General, Charles Njonjo, who had his own ideas of how the succession should play out, declared that it was treasonous to imagine, think, encompass or utter thoughts surrounding the death of the President. Njonjo, cobbled up some constitutional interpretation that made imagination treasonous and by so doing rendered the ailing Kenyatta immortal. It was not only that one could not voice thoughts about his demise, it was treachery to even think he could die!

A few years before this, the renowned South African cardiologist, Dr. Christian Barnard had visited the country and though the state sought to treat his visit as some innocuous touristic event with no significance, rumours went around that he was in Kenya to examine Mzee’s heart. At no point was the public briefed on the prognosis of their president’s health. The culture of mystique and secrecy surrounding the life and health of the leader was carefully orchestrated to stave off any opposition. If a leader is deemed to be mortal, then it is fair game to challenge them. Njonjo was able to use this interpretation of the constitution to effectively scuttle Moi’s opponents and when Mzee died in 1978 he comfortably rose to presidency.

It is no wonder that during Moi’s twenty-four-year tenure he never ‘fell ill’. The health of the president never came into the public domain. As Moi’s reign rolled out, and multi-party politics was re-introduced, he faced more challenges than his predecessor, but his health remained a well- managed secret. The deification continued with ‘praise songs’ such as ‘Tawala Kenya Tawala’ and ‘Fimbo ya Nyayo’ composed and sung to serenade him. Today, retired President Moi is nearing a century, he is not in the best of health. Retired President Kibaki is 87 years old, and after his well- documented accident, his health status is left to speculation and rumours. Once in a while there will be unconfirmed reports of sightings of these elder statesmen at hospitals, but no official mention. Even in retirement, the myth of immortality prevails.

In America and UK in contrast the nation is kept very informed about the health of former leaders. When Ronald Reagan was stricken by Alzheimer’s disease the public were duly informed, the media gave regular updates on his progress right to the point they broke the news of his demise. George W. Bush battled Parkinson’s disease while former President Jimmy Carter managed brain cancer under full public glare. In the UK, Margaret Thatcher’s health was widely reported as she battled dementia.

The Passing Cloud Syndrome: Indispensability Versus Ephemerality

Illness is nature’s way of reminding us of the transitory, ephemeral nature of life, and with it, the reality that none of us is indispensable. When a bout of illness takes one away from the regular cycle of things, it creates a vacuum, albeit temporary, that must get filled. It matters not how long one is indisposed, but ‘life goes on’ and the gap is filled. The constant turning of the wheels of life is a lesson that African politicians loath. The desire to shroud instances when one is indisposed yet systems continue to run stems from the desire to maintain control. The fear of ‘looming shadows’ is among the African politician’s biggest fear. This is why it is common to hear politicians complaining about ‘political tourists’, a euphemism for potential opponents.

During a presidential campaign speech, President Moi corrupted the Kiswahili proverb, stating that “Paka akiondoka…atarudi tena”. Convoluting it to suggest that, when the cats away …it will surely return. In his utterance he was negating the wisdom that when gaps are created, others fill them up and even thrive. Moi was referring to a period he had travelled out of the country, at a time he had refused to appoint a substantive deputy. There had been questions posed on who was in charge in his absence. Moi, effectively rubbished the idea that anyone was good enough to deputize or replace him.

The notion of indispensability and irreplaceability stems from the merging of an individual’s ego and the office they occupy; they conflate themselves and the office and develop a sense of entitlement to it. Colin Powell, the first African American Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in his most illuminating primer on leadership, gives tips that African leaders should take to heart. He poignantly says, ‘Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it”. Equating oneself to an office is the height of megalomania a problem that has afflicted African politics for ages. Individuals feel entitled to hold offices and take any form of contest personally and not as expression of democratic processes. In Africa, challenging an incumbent is treated as a personal affront not only by the individual but also by the people and the system. The way that opposition politicians are persecuted in almost every corner of Africa is indicative of this. The feeling of personal ownership of political office, is among the biggest challenge to the entrenchment of democracy in Africa. Acknowledgement of mortality as Ken Okoth has done would separate the individual from an office. Only when politicians, eschew personality cults, and accept that offices they occupy are not personal fiefdoms, will they allow the evolution and strengthening of democratic systems and institutions.

Mystique Versus Ordinary: The Lwanda Magere Complex

There is a well-known legend of Lwanda Magere, the mythical Luo warrior. The story goes that the indomitable warrior’s body was stone-solid, and during battle enemy spears would simply glance off him. His invincibility in mystical power rendered his body as hard as a rock. The secret of his super-human exploit was a closely guarded secret, but once it was revealed to his enemies by a bride he married from the rival tribe, he was soon vanquished. African politicians have delusions of invincibility upon attainment of the status of ‘mheshimiwa’. In this delusion of super-human status and invincibility falling ill, admitting to being ill and being in need of medical attention would be akin to conceding that they are indeed human and can be vanquished.

Maintaining this image of invincibility is a strategy to stave off any opposition to their elective positions. To maintain this image, any sign of illness is managed confidentially and an alternative narrative is woven to explain any physical changes or absence. Ken Okoth has provided a very different narrative. He has shown a human side of a politician and everyone is now lining up to secure a selfie with him. In the recent past, there is a tragi-comic case where an ailing politician in London was visited by his family who went on to report that they had even eaten a meal of ‘ugali’ with the patient only for the man to die even before the ink had dried on their statement. There was a Governor who was terminally ill and would ‘disappear’ from his County for extended periods, yet his office would issue official denials that he was ill until he unfortunately passed away.

African politicians understand the art and benefit of mystique well. The African politician does not do ordinary; all efforts are made to demonstrate that they are extra ordinary. Alternatively, America’s first black President Obama was the high-priest of ordinary with several every day Joe instances of going about life. African politicians once elected into office, lose even the capability to carry their own cell-phone. They lose the motor-skill ability of opening car-doors or even pulling a seat for themselves. Nothing demonstrates African leader’s sense of the mystique than their motorcades. The sheer power-show, in face of the poor citizenry, is supposed to demonstrate the leader’s power and invincibility. Ironically, the more the display of power, the more it demonstrates fear and vulnerability. In some countries, the leader’s motorcade includes a phalanx of horses and armoured vehicles. The large motor-cades and the heavily armed coterie of bodyguards are a modern day version of the fetishes worn by a ‘mganga’ – witch-doctor. The mganga wore a human skull, bird feathers, talons and beaks, snake skins and genitalia of reptiles. The African leader uses the same shock-and-awe tactics.

Now picture this politician, once surrounded by all these talismans and paraphernalia of power getting a bout of diarrhoea, syphilis, cholera, shingles, dementia or even diseases more ‘prestigious’ as Parkinson’s, Diabetes or Hypertension. The body ends up racked by aches, coughs and blisters and the management of health results in an emaciated image of their former selves. The myth would be shattered forever; he would be Lwanda Magere whose secret is out and the enemy soldiers would be creeping to spear his shadow. Kenyan politicians are now trooping to be seen paying homage to Ken Okoth whose ordinariness and non-mystique humanity has resonated so powerfully with the public. The writing is out there on the wall for them to read as found in the Book of Daniel: mene, mene, tekel, Upharsin. Ken Okoth’s celebrity status and popularity is not derived from flaunting of power, portrayed invincibility and omniscience, but from his exemplary service, accountability and honesty.

Omniscience Versus Vulnerability

At that point when illness strips the politician of all semblance of power, their biggest fear comes to the fore; that of placing themselves in the hands of others, admitting that there are others more capable than themselves.

There is nothing as humbling as being asked to strip and step behind an examination curtain, lie down and be subjected to examination. This feeling of vulnerability and helplessness is probably what leads many African political leaders to seek medical treatment abroad – where they are unrecognisable, basically nobody. The thought of being reduced to a normal human being with ailments is probably too much to bear. Some politicians might believe they are not safe being in such a vulnerable condition in a place where they have done so much harm.

There is also the fear that the doctor examining them might be one whose upward mobility has been affected by the poor policies they have passed or failed to pass. It could be a clinician whose working conditions have been compromised by the pilferage of the health budget. The facility could be one whose equipment are sub-standard and supplied with fake drugs because of the corrupt deal they cut during procurement.

This alone justifies running away to seek treatment elsewhere. During his presidency, the deposed Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, would reportedly seek medical treatment in Singapore. He would travel to the South Asian nation to go under the radar for weeks before returning home. In Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari has spent long periods in Europe seeking medical treatment for an undisclosed illness. Every time he does so, the trips are shrouded in secrecy even as they are funded by the Nigerian taxpayer.

Frail health or illness is not the kind of thing that one would wish another, but there is no other experience that underscores equality, humanity, vulnerability and ephemerality. The problems of democracy in Africa stem from a failure to recognise these basic principles of good governance. An appreciation of equality and fraternity of all humanity would ensure equal treatment. Recognition of the non-permanence of life or situations would ensure the development of systems and institutions and not personality cults and encourage transitional politics.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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

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Remembering Toni Morrison

By Rasna Warah

An Interview with Joy Mboya

Joy Mboya is the Director of the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi—a nonprofit institution for the convergence of the arts in Nairobi and East Africa. Between 2003 and 2005, the GoDown Arts Centre hosted the Sunlight Quest for Kenya’s National Dress; an interactive process that was designed to generate concepts for Kenya’s national attire. This project definitely advanced conversation but was not publicly adopted by a critical mass, with many Kenyans saying that the outfits were not practical or suitable for daily use. There has been little reflection on the objectives and scope of the project, the extent of its public engagement strategies, and its successes and failures. Joy spoke with us about her experiences with the project and her thoughts on Kenyan national identity.

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Back when I was in my 20s, there were very few spaces that had been fleshed out to support the newly minted fashion designer. So for the longest time, if you wanted to get anywhere, the Smirnoff Fashion Awards were huge. At this level it was quite your run-of-the-mill show; maybe somebody bought a piece or two but not too much else happened there. However, it was still exciting, and in the event that you won the local award, you qualified to compete for the global award at a ceremony attended by huge international designers and fashion houses, and maybe somebody important would notice you and something might happen.

Now, more and more, I think corporates do better in the arts when they form foundations that have a separate plan for their engagements from their general business agenda. This way, their support can be more deliberate and long-term, aside from having one moment in the light. But the Smirnoff Fashion Awards, other early fashion shows, and all the beauty pageants were real opportunities back then. Corporates were growing and solidifying their brands by linking up with fashion, glamour, contemporary style, you name it.

Patricia Ithau was a former Miss Kenya and had been a model for a long time, remaining very interested in fashion even after she left the scene.

So it was no surprise that when she had the opportunity to spearhead the idea of a national dress, she really ran with it. It would not have happened without her interest and her push at Unilever, without her saying “Here’s an opportunity, Sunlight,( a Unilever detergent brand) let’s do something”. She had a big connection with fashion designers because of her history in the industry, so she begun to seek out people she knew to see how they could be involved. She is the one who brought in the government through the Ministry of Culture, to ensure it was something the state bought into, to make everything national and formal.

The GoDown was still fairly new then—that was around 2003—and we said we would be happy to host the tangible parts of the process and coordinate whatever meetings they needed. Unilever would put out the call and then we would receive the submissions, exhibit them publicly, assist them in identifying teams of cultural experts for follow-up, that kind of stuff.

Ideating a National Dress

Early on in the process, our priority was moderating the designers to make sure they kept an open mind, that they did not get bogged down with individual perspectives but remained aware of the wider space. The first thing they did was gather all the ideas that had been submitted, pin them on the walls and stand back and ask themselves, “What’s happening here?” I think they recognized early—and this was of course rather difficult to relay—that the notion of a national dress, especially in Kenya, was going to be influenced by too many different things, and that they were never going to actually create a national dress, by themselves, from scratch. What the designers could truly offer was an informed way to see how we as Kenyans clothed ourselves, how we worked with the body and what parts of the body we emphasized, combined with what was happening in the contemporary space, and what elements of all this were worth carrying forward.

It was tough. The designers would make presentations during the earlier focus group meetings, and many people would come in actually expecting a final dress. But the designers would still be talking about concepts that were showing up in a lot of traditional dress: the cape representing a moment of ceremony or status for men; some kind of adornment across the chest; the loincloth with optional cover of the behind for women (this was where the notion of the apron came from); headdresses to make the face an obvious focal point and such. Everybody was hanging something around their ears, piercing their lips, or even wearing mud caps that they could stick feathers into, to give some examples.

The designers were wondering how to begin working with all these interesting sensibilities to create a final product. Just before they began, they wanted the public to participate in the process, so that there could be buy-in from the very beginning. Having them choose a dress at that stage was going to be impossible, so they thought through what would be a more realistic set of options. They decided that perhaps the public could choose the colours they would most prefer on a Kenyan national dress. Sunlight tied it in with a marketing gimmick about washing clothes that wouldn’t fade, which I think was a bit myopic. Marketing is fine, but not if it is going to interrupt an intricate, important process.

The ideas that the designers actually put forward were just concepts. They never, ever, described them as dresses. They wanted to put these out so that Kenyan fashion designers would begin to design original pieces interpreting them, which they would then sell to the people, also hoping that some members of the public would be a bit adventurous and absolutely do their own thing. Building familiarity with and acceptance of these would need a huge marketing push, obviously. Fifty million shillings had already been spent mobilizing ideas from the nation, taking the designers to visit different places to learn about different cultures, putting together focus groups, having presentations, and all.

So How Did You Sustain That Kind of Momentum and Energy?

This was where Patricia was really clever and strategic—she knew that once the brand was done making their statement, they weren’t going to throw any more millions into the project. That was her main reason for bringing in the Kenya Government, through the Ministry, because hopefully they would become excited enough to kind of keep this thing going.

That was the grand hope, that these things would find their own legs. Some of the designers who were not part of the original process began to pick it up. Wambui of Moo Cow* (*Wambui Njogu, one of the two founders of the Kenyan fashion label Moo Cow, which was established in 2002.) did some funky leather aprons that could be worn over denim jeans. People got excited about making their own extended aprons from the neck all the way down. Even the government picked up some elements of it. One of our sports teams actually made some of the concepts into the team costume, of course in the Kenya colours. The ladies had a red skirt, with black trim, embroidered on, which suggested the apron—I don’t think there was a separate flap. The men in that particular group had the three-notch treatment at their necklines.

Ideally, we would be seeing pieces evolved from the national dress concepts all the time, not just for special occasions or trips abroad, until it was no longer new or weird and it became part of how we saw ourselves. We would be feeling like we needed these pieces for our full identity, and starting to buy them. We didn’t have that opportunity to make a lasting presence, however. One thing that ended up happening was that designers made items that the public considered overpriced and were labelled as luxury items when the designers didn’t intend them to be seen that way. They were just trying to make back their money and make a decent profit. Nobody quite picked up the cape. I wonder whether it was too expensive or if they just were wondering, “How am I going to pull this off?” But we almost introduced it again when Willy Mutunga was Chief Justice. We said we would be happy to pull together a team of designers to really think about the Supreme Court judges’ dress. He was excited about that*.

*Kenyan judges eventually opted to retain their existing robes, but made the donning of the whitish- grey horsehair wigs optional. Mutunga, Hon. Justice Dr Willy, S.C., Dressing and Addressing the Kenyan Judiciary, 2011, Kenya Law Journal, Nairobi, Kenya

One of the designers said, “Hang on, what if we revive the cape from the national dress? We could rethink it for the Chief Justice, maybe for the big ceremonies so he doesn’t have to wear it all the time?”

That idea was taken to the judges and some of them thought it was a bit too much. I remember meeting one of them in the corridor and he asked, “Joy, what are you guys about to dress us in? Taking us back to hides and skins?*”

*Kenyan Judges Change Titles, Dress Code, 2011, The Daily Monitor, Kampala, Uganda

People always come back to me and to the Godown, trying to find out what happened to the national dress, and why it just vanished into the ether. University students especially have come by to investigate this as part of their Master’s Degree, so all their theses must be sitting around somewhere*.

Misati, Beatrice N., Kenya National Attire: Factors Influencing adoption, 2008, School of Arts and Design, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya

Imo, Beatrice Elung’ata, Adoption of the Kenya National Dress as a Basis for Developing a Decision- Making Model for the Local Industry, 2013, Department of Fashion Design and Marketing, Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya

Many of them were a lot more interested in the process of the design. But most feedback from the general public was asking the question, “Why did you think that you could prescribe a dress for us that was not the dress we wanted?”

We’d all conveniently forgotten the extensive public participation and iteration. But I also think that some things just take time, and perhaps people only really get into a thing like this when given a certain amount of time. Perhaps the national dress needed that kind of continuous engagement so that ten years on we would consider saying, “Actually, what happened to the apron? What happened to the shirt?” People needed to interpret their own nationhood through growing familiarity with the national dress concepts. They needed to be reassured that these concepts had actually come from long deliberations over our diverse origins and cultural heritage, and that the concepts were open for all kinds of interesting interpretations as time passed, not just what the designers had put together back then.

We needed exhibitions and discussions over a much longer period than we imagined, to get a project of this weight to stick and gain traction with the people. The Sunlight process with the public and the designers provided the opportunity to say, “If you create something that doesn’t reference heritage or doesn’t pay attention to culture, Kenyans will reject it.” Coming To Terms with the Rejection

But diverse cultural references were there, and yet there was still rejection.

So was it that it was not pretty enough, and if so, what could people have wanted ‘pretty’ to be? I don’t know. The most interesting question now, for me, is how to get to the root of what Kenyans are actually complaining about, because it wasn’t clear then and in many ways it still isn’t. None of the shirts ever took off in any way so the men did not really have anything, but there had been a few ideas here and there that the women had found interesting. There was even a concept of the dress for women who wore hijab. I think there was also a real missed opportunity in the Minister for Culture—that was Balala*, then.

* Hon. Najib Balala, who served as Minister for Gender, Sports, Culture and Social Services between 2003 and 2004.

He would seize on anything that would amplify his ministry and his role. He could have said, “For as long as I’m the Minister for Culture let me just keep this thing alive.” I think that perhaps the urgency was just not seen at that time. Perhaps the designers didn’t succeed in communicating that the concepts they saw were prototypical aesthetics, if they can be called that. That the way that women in one community would cover themselves across the front was by using a loin cloth, certainly, but that loin cloth was not exactly the same from one community to another. Everybody did it in whichever material was locally available, for their local climate and regional sensibilities. So, again, there was never going to be a national dress in that immediately formulaic sense of, “Ah, that’s a Kenyan dress. Are you Kenyan?” “ Yes.” “ I see you’ve got an apron, and the other Kenyan’s got a different apron.”

How Do We Just Accept That We’re so Incredibly Diverse and Different?

It was not going to be like that for a long time, at least, not without continuity, public education and sustained visibility. It was always going to be a difficult project. It would have been progressive to keep it alive for a decade or two and see what would we would have had in the end. I think Kenyans are beginning to accept is that one of the things that stands out about us is our diversity. We haven’t reduced that diversity yet into a single thing or a few core things in the same way that the West Africans seem to have done. I do not know how they did it. Perhaps their kingdoms and organizational structures were much more visible, and therefore notions of kings, chiefs and ceremonial dress were much more immediate in their minds than in ours? I have no idea. But more and more now I wonder, “How do we first of all just accept that we’re so incredibly diverse and different?”

How can we become excited about that, and then allow it to organically find the things that will coalesce into the cores, into the singles? Everything else that remains can just be allowed to stay different, you know? Maybe trying to look at these things in only one way is a reason we will continue going astray, or asking ourselves questions that have no answers.

In terms of diversity, one of the people who has a wonderful story around that is Tabu Osusa of Ketebul*, who says that when Kenya did a showcase at the 2014 Folklife Festival at the Smithsonian Institution, our musical presentation was called exceptional because it was so diverse.

*Ketebul Music, a Kenyan record label and studio founded in 2007.

People already knew the South African sound, or the West African kora which was lovely and beautiful but nothing was really changing. It was just the same kinds of sounds all the way through. But when they saw the Kenyan spread, they began to pay attention because it couldn’t be defined by one thing or a few things. So my thought now is to interrogate that and figure it out, instead of panicking and seeing it as a problem.

It is not clear whether the failure of this project to gain traction with the Kenyan public was due to the communication and marketing, the underestimation of the work and time needed by the parties involved, or a combination of these and other factors. Several things have happened in the thirteen years since this process, with regard to urban national conversations on identity and fashion.

The Africa Rising narrative, with increased optimism about Africa’s future and greater continental esteem, has led to the opening up of cultural borders to new generations of young Kenyans. This has had a wider audience because of access to tech, information and social media, with more of them finding ways to integrate cultural pieces not just into ceremonial or occasion clothing, but also into practical, everyday garb. The 2009 publication of a national culture and heritage policy* openly declared state interest in development of national attire. (National Policy on Culture and Heritage, 2009.)

There is also a greater desire for and consumption of clothing designed by Kenyans and inspired by Kenyan cultures. It is possible that this set of brewing cultural conditions could better demonstrate the importance of a national dress, beyond an abstract need to stand out from other Africans in international fora. Perhaps wider cultural dialogue must occur before a national dress can truly evolve from our shared, diverse ethnic experiences in a way that will be more widely acceptable to citizens. It is also possible that national dresses evolve organically from cultures only when they are ready to do so, and that it is not a shortcoming to lack one.

Endnote

The 2004 Sunlight Quest for a National Dress remains a critical attempt to create recognizable national symbols through attire, beyond the flag, the national anthem, the coat of arms and the public seal*.

(Article 9: National Symbols and National Days, from Chapter 2 – The Republic, The Constitution of Kenya, 2010, Kenya.)

This interview was originally published in the fashion book Not African Enough ( 2017) by the Nest Collective and republished with their permission.

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