Not African Enough: Fashioning Africaness and Documenting The

Binyavanga Wainaina: The Writer Who Democratised Kenya’s Literary Space

By Rasna Warah

“Some birds should never be caged, their feathers are too bright. But when one such is finally set free, something inside of you sings that knows it was wrong to cage it in the first place.” – Red in Shawshank Redemption

I first met Binyavanga Wainana in 2002 – an election year in Kenya when a hopeful country was looking forward to removing an authoritarian regime and ushering in a brave new world. He had just returned from South Africa and was scouting around for ideas for a literary journal that he hoped to establish to revive the dying (if not dead) literary scene in Kenya.

It was during these heady days—when it seemed that anything was possible – that Binya, as he was fondly called, came back home like a gust of fresh air that sweeps through a damp, mouldy room and changes the atmosphere. His enthusiasm was infectious. He could mesmerise an audience so much so that many aspiring writers, including myself, who never imagined having a literary career, began writing their own stories, in their own voices, with no apologies.

With the launch of his brainchild, the literary journal Kwani?, in 2003, he unveiled talented and previously closeted writers who had been silenced not just by a government afraid of creatives, but by a stodgy old school literary fraternity that saw no value or merit in the writings of those they deemed to be too unschooled or undisciplined. As the blogger and academic Wandia Njoya stated in a tweet shortly after his death, Binyavanga “liberated our art from the literature police in Kenyan universities”.

Indeed, Binyavanga democratised the literary space in Kenya, especially for young writers. He entered the Kenyan literary scene at precisely the time when the country was undergoing a major transition – a “second liberation” brought about by a group of anti-establishment politicians and activists and a population hungry for change, which led to the election of Mwai Kibaki and an end to Daniel arap Moi’s 24-year reign.

It is difficult to write about someone you have known, especially someone who was as charismatic and controversial as Binya, whose short life as a literary icon generated as much admiration as it did indignation. He was not without flaws. Loud, sharp, witty, and even rude at times, he dared to question the status quo that reduced Kenyans, and Africans in general, to mere spectators in their own lives – people who saw themselves through other (mainly white) people’s eyes. Binya opened up literary spaces that had remained closed for many Kenyan writers. He gave us permission to write. This, I believe, was his greatest gift to young Kenyan writers, many of whom ventured out on their own and became literary warriors in their own right.

A polarising influence

Binyavanga will be remembered for many things, among them his seminal satirical essay, “How to Write about Africa”, in which he lampooned Western journalists and so-called Africa experts for their negative, stereotypical and ignorant depictions of the continent (starving Africans, naked dead bodies, celebrity activists and aid workers trying to save the continent etc.). This essay not only made many Western journalists cringe, but was also a call to African writers to write about their lives and their continent in an authentic voice without worrying too much about how they would be perceived by non-African readers. In his essays, writings and speeches, he represented a new generation of Kenyan writers who, as Nigerian novelist Helon Habila commented, attempt to explain Kenya and Africa but do so “without a knee-jerk resort to colonial woes”.

Wandia Njoya stated in a tweet shortly after his death, Binyavanga “liberated our art from the literature police in Kenyan universities

But the very Westerners that Binya criticised in his writings were quick to adopt him and give him a platform where he could thrive. In a sense, they co-opted him, made him one of their own, thereby taking some of the sting out of his critique. Although often vilified – or perhaps misunderstood – at home, Binya was lauded abroad for his genius and writing acumen. He won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002, which catapulted his career as a writer and earned him a directorship at the Chinua Achebe Centre at Bard College in the United States. Thereafter, he was wined and dined by publishers, agents and philanthropists eager for a fresh new African voice.

The Nigerian blogger and columnist Ikhide R. Ikheloa, in an essay titled “Our World According to Binyavanga Wainaina”, called Binya “a brilliant lunatic” who writes about darkness with “startling clarity and casualness”. However, Ikheloa also censured the Kenyan writer for being one among many African writers who are rescued by the West “like abused puppies”. He was particularly harsh when commenting on the author’s memoir, One Day I Will Write about This Place:

“Wainaina’s book brings to full convergence the anxieties and tensions around the tortured relationship between the West and African writers. On the one hand, Wainaina acknowledges openly and graciously in that book that it was published thanks to generous funding from a long list of Western donors and corporations…On the other hand, Wainaina is almost contemptuous of the interventions of the West in his fortunes; sometimes he gives the impression that he suffers from a culture on entitlement. Indeed if I was to offer any criticism of this lush narrative it is that Wainaina’s analysis conveniently excluded the role of the African writer in fomenting (for profit) the stereotyping of Africa in the enthusiastic hawking of the single story.”

The Economist, in a review of the book, was equally scathing: “Too many African writers are co- opted by the American creative-writing scene only to be reduced by prevailing navel-gazing. Separately, much of the African writing culture that remains on the continent, including Kwani?, is propped up with cash from the Western donors that African writers purport to excoriate.”

However, both Ikheloa and the Economist failed to acknowledge that for any African writer to be taken seriously, he has to first go through an assembly line of agents, editors, publishers and distributors based in Europe or North America. African governments rarely support the arts, writers in particular, and the publishers on the continent are more interested in publishing textbooks (that bring in more profits) than publishing an author who is little known outside his country.

In 2007, perhaps in reaction to these criticisms, Binyavanga rejected an invitation by the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s nominating committee to be named as one among 250 Young Global Leaders. In an email to the chair of the committee, Queen Rania of Jordan, he wrote:

“I assume that most, like me, are tempted to go [to China where the WEF was being held] anyway because we will get to be ‘validated’ and glow with the kind of self-congratulation that can only be bestowed by very globally visible and significant people…The problem here is that I am a writer. And although, like many, I go to sleep at night fantasizing about fame, fortune and credibility, the thing that is most valuable in my trade is to try, all the time, to keep myself loose, independent and creative. It would be an act of great fraudulence for me to accept the trite idea that I am ‘going to significantly impact world affairs’.”

Coming out

However, Binyavanga would go on have a significant impact on the LGBTQ community in the last few years of his life when he stoked (some might even say welcomed) controversy, particularly after he came out as a gay man in 2014 and published what he called his book’s “lost chapter”. The coming-out essay, “I am a Homosexual, Mum”, enraged the conservative Christian evangelical moral police (who he loathed and who he blamed for turning many Kenyans into zombie religious fanatics), who dismissed the author as the devil’s work. But the gay community both at home and abroad congratulated him for coming out, especially at a time when many African countries were targeting and criminalising homosexuals.

But not everyone was convinced that this Kenyan writer had the intellectual mettle to liberate Kenyan minds. In a critique of his six-part self-made video, “We Must Free Our Imaginations” (or what Binya referred to as “What I Have to Say About Being Gay”) published in the Saturday Nation, the Kenyan social scientist and academic, Joyce Nyairo, described his arguments as “scattered, off- hand generalities” and accused him of having a limited understanding of Kenya’s history. “His knowledge of homosexuality in colonial and post-colonial Kenya is either non-existent or it has been unwisely excluded,” she wrote.

Many also accused him of being deliberately apolitical or politically naïve. His quest to show Kenyan urban middle class lives (like his own family’s in Nakuru) as normal – without sufficiently explaining the abnormality that produced this class – earned him a few barbs. However, when the circumstances demanded, Binya could take on the role of political activist. In January 2008, for instance, at the height of the post-election violence in Kenya, when churches were being torched and women were being gang-raped for being “the wrong tribe”, he mobilised a group of writers to explain to the world what was going on in the country. He believed then that through the power of the pen, Kenya could be prevented from descending into a Rwanda-like genocide.

But while campaigning for a peaceful Kenya, he aligned himself with the very forces that had catapulted the country to the brink of a dangerous precipice. In 2013, when Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto were declared the winners of the presidential election, Binyavanga viewed their victory as a victory against the imperialist West and its so-called lackey, the International Criminal Court, which had indicted the duo for crimes against humanity committed after the 2007 election. “Gone are the days when a bunch of European ambassadors speak in confident voices to the Kenyan public about what we should do, why we should do it,” he wrote in the Guardian newspaper. “The west should expect more defiance from an Uhuru government – and more muscular engagement.”

Read series: Binyavanga Wainaina

Though he admitted later that he had perhaps declared victory too soon, he failed to understand that the problem afflicting Kenya was not that Western governments were imposing their will on the Kenyan people, but that Kenya was sliding back to the bad old days of the Moi era, when dissent was not tolerated and when a culture of mediocrity and corruption pervaded all arms of government.

In a letter published in Brittle Paper in October 2017, when Kenya was about to go through another election, he stated: “I would like to apologise to all the people of Kenya for not seeing through the attempts to rig the election in 2013. I believe that going to the polls on 26 October with the same IEBC [Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission] is a mistake.” Like many others who view Kenya’s democracy purely through the lens of free and fair elections, he failed to see that the main problem in Kenya is not that we consistently have rigged elections; the problem is more systemic – we refuse to acknowledge that the rain started beating us at independence, when the first wave of leaders decided that the spoils of a post-colonial state should be distributed among a tiny elite and that ethnic identity should determine the nature and scale of that distribution.

The change that never came

“I want to live a life of free imagination,” Binya stated. “I want to see this continent change.”

Sadly, the change that he envisioned in Kenya did not come during his lifetime. By the time he died last week, at the age of 48, the same reactionary, anti-change forces were back in power – forces that are taking Kenya back to those dark days when creative minds and imaginations were considered a threat to national security (or rather, to the security of the president) and when artistic spirits were crushed. We no longer have the torture chambers that sent writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o into exile four decades ago, but Binya’s untimely death has reminded us that the struggle for a new way of thinking and bold ideas is still not over; on the contrary, the old guard is firmly back in the saddle.

However, there is no doubt that Binyavanga Wainaina forever changed the literary landscape in Kenya, opening it up to a new generation of Kenyans who are no longer afraid to experiment or innovate. He never managed to finish the novel he said he was writing when he fell ill a few years ago, but he did leave behind an indelible body of work that challenged his generation to take charge of their own narratives.

I think Binya would have agreed with the Italian writer, Oriana Fallaci, who said, “To write is to die a little less when I die, to leave the children I did not have, to make people think a little more.”

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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

By Rasna Warah

Governmental policies in Africa have laboured towards elevating their countries from poverty, ignorance and disease, legacies of colonial rule. This value system is based on needing the industrial revolution to come of age as it did in the rest of the world, creating employment and wealth for citizens on the national scale. Severe resource limits curtail easy achievement of this aim, preventing even delivery of essential public goods like water, sanitation, literacy or security.

Due to macroeconomic opportunity cost, conversations about culture, aesthetics, beauty and particularly fashion are left behind as luxuries in favour of basic amenities and universal development goals. Any data collected and research done is mostly in a small cluster of prioritized fields, with very little in the areas of arts and culture. Investment in the development of cultural knowledge is unfortunate to remain on the outer margins of the Continent’s priorities.

It is essential to remember that the colonial enterprise succeeded in devaluing native cultural presence and knowledge in order to assert full dominion. As such, indigenous aesthetics and beauty were not considered serious or important in the face of any continental plan for overall advancement.

Gathering, presentation and analysis of information about and around these subjects, and presentation of the same, continues to be viewed as frivolous. Research into these ephemera is left to those who can spare the time, intellectual labour and resources. These often tend to be Western researchers familiar with structures for archiving characteristics and evolutions of their own cultures. Western knowledges continue to be analysed with patriotic fervour and full cognisance of historical worthiness and future aspirations. These archives retain a dynamism and emotional connection with their curators, keepers and publics, characterised by open and often re-animated exhibition, and endless possibilities for re-imagination. In search of Africanness

When research is done on African cultures, however, the weights of old histories and power dynamics continue to play a significant role, whether consciously or unconsciously. These philosophies place African bodies lowest on a hierarchy of disadvantage, meaning that the lens of a Western researcher into African cultures is often that of a curious onlooker fascinated by the exotic. This viewpoint also leans heavily towards the perception of the pristine African, undamaged by Western interaction, perhaps in a bid to cover the violence of colonial reality. When information on contemporary aesthetic practices or cultural products is collected, it is mainly for niche media archives, or to fit neatly into the subset of ‘world art’. These particular subsectors find themselves separated from mainstream art history and the classifications that centre Western artistic practice. The definition of what differentiates African Art from antiquity, with attendant declaration of value, is often the province of Western curators, dealers, gallerists, collectors and auctioneers. The Western academy polished numerous perspectives as professional outsiders and gradually became the definitive voice on African art, gaining increasing access to institutions that stored indigenous African knowledges. These archives of artefacts and information were collected for examination, classification and preservation by others, adding to a vast compendium of knowledge to be referenced, often without a right of reply or even invitation to dialogue.

For a long time in the eyes of the world, the idea of Africaness has remained static. The focus on heritage as defining for this geography has overshadowed wider shifts into a globalised, more equal understanding of Africaness. It was essential to present Africans primarily in this revisionist way, so that the moral complexities of how particular elements of contemporary modernity reached African shores could continue to be avoided. Honest explorations into culture cannot evade these holistic reflections, but hyperconcentrated jaunts into antiquity and technicalities can. Regardless of focus, the net result remains that more people from the West publish and own far more functional knowledge about African cultural aesthetics—whether historical or modern—than indigenous Africans do.

The Western researcher and curator cannot be painted as the solitary villain here, though: this story is much more complex and layered. Modern iterations of the Western gaze are continuations of centuries of anthropologist-explorer histories, of people excited to discover new things, who took on the exclusive ability to name these into existence, and who eventually developed a widening catalogue similar to those developed by other civilisations. The problems began when one voice generated the power to establish and maintain itself as the sole objective standard, and made countless political and other decisions to eliminate other voices and frames.

In a changing world, where conversations in the post-colonial space among Africans on the Continent and people of African descent in the diaspora are gaining traction and value, difficult questions are being asked about the place and authority of the universal white gaze. Ethical demands also arise to counter the hoarding of African artefacts and knowledge by Western museums, libraries and galleries, which aside from being archives and centres for education have served as temples to Hegelian ideologies on race and blackness.

Is it possible to have African worldviews when wide swathes of African history are locked away, displayed and contextualised by others? By positioning itself at the top of the ivory tower, has the Western worldview also held itself captive?

What has it failed to hear and see? As Africans embrace the discomfort of a re-emerging self-esteem, new generations of Africans are taking back the ability to name, prioritise and create African spaces beyond developmental lack and industrial aspiration. These generations must assume the power to describe and analyse their worlds relative to their own diverse points of view. Fashion, art and culture are far from the only windows through which African reimaginings and reclamations can take place, but they are a more than worthy arena for essential debates to begin.

Identifiers of Kenyan Identity

There are important conversations between the different tribes and language groups of Kenya that have not been had – conversations about deep post-colonial injustices and inequalities generated and sustained to favour a few select tribes above others, and to locate power with some ethnic groups and not others.

Definite resource advantage accrues in coming from one tribe as opposed to another in this country. Competition for these resources instrumentalises these primary identities. This creates tensions that explode into episodes of physical violence, often catalysed by the electoral process. However, all the conversations about seeking justice have been located exclusively in the political space.

There remains, understandably, a deep and unresolved internal conflict of belongings: between being part of the nation of many and belonging to the community with whom one shares a language and an ethnic origin. A growing number of people prefer to embrace tribeless-ness, and with that, a full release from the problematics of ethnic labeling. Others locate their own tribe as their community of first loyalty, willing to erase others if it means they can reclaim what they view as theirs. Resource advantage links to direct survival ideology and even the possibilities for building wealth, and political and socio-cultural performances of tribe become increasingly valuable in this regard. This is upheld by the convenient narrative of monolith tribal purity, treating tribal origin as immutable even though different ethnic groups have influenced each other via intermarriage and other ways for centuries, over and above the effects of globalization on all Kenyans.

Despite commonly patrilineal naming customs, it is becoming more common to honour multiple heritages symbolically with names from these different groups, creating new groups of people who have multiple and compound ethnic identities. This makes the whole conversation around tribe even more complex. It has been easier for Kenya to claim international languages for her own national expression than have difficult debates around communication in ethnic strongholds and beyond: English, the language of the former British Commonwealth, and Kiswahili, a hybrid of Bantu and Arabic languages spoken widely over the East and Central African region. There are thus legal instruments to avoid directly nationalising tribal performance, but none to counter its unmappable, often toxic, sometimes violent spread into the lived experiences of Kenyans.

When any time is given to exploring indigenous Kenyan dress-practice, it is often as a moral trip into the civics of conscience, to arm-twist citizens into a surface appreciation of diverse ethnic origins in a bid to engender peace despite the screaming inequalities that remain undiscussed.

Kenyans prefer to deal with equalising cultural costumes on stage to feed a benign fantasy of surface nationhood, over delving into the process of national justice, reparations and reconciliation, perhaps because expressed cultural belonging has caused so many wounds for so long. Can it truly matter to Kenyans what tribes A, B, C or D wore centuries ago, if the knowledge of this answers no contemporary questions? In this case, tribal dress practices are used as political instruments, regardless of their potential as symbols of new national narratives. The state-endorsed and published 2009 National Policy on Culture and Heritage* (“Article 2.1.2: Kenya National Dress, and Article 2.1.3: Design, from Chapter 2 – Culture and Heritage, National Policy on Culture and Heritage, 2009, Kenya.) painstakingly points out the government’s duty in creating an enabling environment for inclusive cultural expression, and investment in development and protection of tangible and intangible aspects of Kenyan culture. It clearly maps out the state’s role in defining Kenyan national identity with regard to a national dress (even though the document is curiously silent on the 2004 national multi-stakeholder effort to evolve the same, despite the fact that the state openly encouraged and applauded it at the time). It also notes the importance of exploring diverse national identities in the field of general design, specifically mentioning dress as one of the pertinent arenas. This document, alongside several other international documents referencing culture that the government has ratified, is an important part of Kenyan landscape that forced to remain functionally inert by lack of political will to implement it.

Beyond its creation of room for potential legislative intention in an indeterminate future, little can be said about the effect of its existence on Kenyan cultural theory and practice. Individual tribes may derive power in identifying what makes them unique to strengthen negotiations for dignity and selfhood. However, many of the costumes showcased as the sole bearers of heritage are often those of influence and prestige: kings, warriors, elders and the like. There is, indeed, a manner of healing and restoration in the nostalgia of power, and there are also similar leanings in Egyptophilic attitudes towards ancient Africa in significant parts of the black diaspora. Everyone knows how to value the trappings of monarchy and aristocracy. We do not, however, lean towards recognition of the garments and implements of the everyday person, beyond hierarchies of affluence and occupation. Modern day iterations or reconstructions of the clothes that leaders used to wear may be wonderful to behold, but difficult to embody as more than symbolic in the real lives of contemporary people.

An exception to this idea, however, is the way in which Kenyans travelling beyond borders become oddly apolitical by way of wearing pieces exclusively associated with the Maasai tribe as markers of corporate Kenyan identity, whether they associate in any way with Maasai people at home or not. The hypervisibility of the Maasai may have originated from colonial fascination with and significant documentation of their way of life, becoming exclusively associated with Kenya despite a significant Maasai population in Tanzania. The Maasai shield retains a place of honour in the national coat of arms. Citizens, to display Kenyanness, select and wear pieces that speak to them of strength, courage and beauty – layers of intricately wired bead jewellery and leather belts, highly polished hardwood knobkerries, or the ubiquitous, multi-use, multicoloured checked blanket. These are part of the daily lives of the Maasai, communicating the dignity, oneness and belonging that is so elusive elsewhere.

Within contemporary fashion dialogues, Kenya has been anecdotally known as a net consumer of all kinds of cultural content from all over the world, and this cosmopolitan litany of influences—including those from the diversity of ethnicities in our geography—has lent to our artistic practices an eclectic quality that is difficult to pin down or describe holistically under one label. Fashion has not been left behind in this conversation: no one aesthetic has been able to be described as uncompromisingly Kenyan. A description of the term ‘Kenyan fashion’ has therefore not been easy to find, whether from the perspective of the Kenyan designer, the international fashion market, or even the local consumer, who may have different ideas about being and looking Kenyan than they do around the practice of the same.

Not African Enough

Constructions of urban Kenyan contemporary culture continue to take many shapes and forms, with few more interesting than the area of fashion and apparel. The self-rule of the new post-colony engendered an exploration of universal equality – if a Kenyan was able to shop for and buy the same garment as anyone else in the Commonwealth, it was a celebration of the access that had not been available before, and the ability of the newly free young people to define what was then possible for their own lives. A push began to promote and stabilise cotton production in Kenya, though it failed under subsequent political regimes*. (Alila Patrick O. and Atieno, Rosemary, Agricultural Policy in Kenya: Issues and Processes, 2006, Institute for Development Studies, Nairobi, Kenya)

This economic failure, which also occurred in other agricultural spheres, was followed by structural adjustment programs by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank looking to open out the previously protected infant industries to free market trade opportunities and global supply chains.

To combat sticky colonial legacies despite these challenges, a desire for more conscious expressions of blackness began taking root in a new generation on the Continent, with people beginning to demand certain levels of ‘Africanness’ from their clothes to link more strongly with their cultural origins and heritage. With this came the culture and politics of wearing so-called African fabrics, the most ubiquitous of which is Ankara (the origin of the name ‘ankara’ is unclear, as is when it came into common use).

The origin of wax print in Africa is commentary on the power imbalances within international supply chains. It was created by the Dutch* (* Akinwumi, Tunde M., The African Print Hoax: Machine- Produced Textiles Jeopardize African Print Authenticity, 2008, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, California, USA) in a failed bid to mass-produce Indonesian batik fabric that was usually handmade, to gain a market by the ability to offer it to consumers cheaply. When an African market was found for the rejected cloth in the 19th century, the original Indonesian designs were replaced by local ideas and motifs, to increase their relevance to their new clientele.

China then joined the industrialization race, manufacturing wax print at cheaper rates and successfully overturning the Dutch monopoly. Regardless of the producer, a critical mass in West Africa had used this fabric almost exclusively for a long time. As hunger and effective market demand grew across the Continent for identifiers of Africanness, wax print was easily taken on in other regions as a pan-African symbol, despite the fact that its symbols and patterns were specifically designed to have special meaning for communities in West African countries. Copying any garment in wax print became the singular textile representation of the Continent, an idea given legs when black diaspora celebrities in the global North gave it visibility and a seal of approval by wearing it proudly. It became easier to design with wax print than anything else, leading to a dearth of actual design—pushing the marriage of colour, cut, theme, drape, texture and fabric in order to explore new volumes and silhouettes.

The true essence of the term ‘fashion’—to make—became less valuable. This identity conversation became part of the ‘Africa Rising’ story, a problematic, composite sub-Saharan identity that has significantly limited many other African possibilities, far beyond fashion and expression. The ankara debates, therefore, are a serious conversation about the politics of origin, assimilation and belonging. The fabric clearly does not pass basic global standards for rules of origin*, (World Trade Organization, Technical Information on Rules of Origin, Geneva, Switzerland) to rightfully earn the label ‘African’, based on the location of the last substantial transformation before it arrived on our shores for our use.

However, does calling it African for centuries actually make it so? Does being its majority users and manipulating it in increasingly innovative ways make it irretrievably ours? Is it odd that fabrics that have been made by others and travelled so far have a belonging to our sense of self that supersedes that of textiles actually woven or fabricated on our shores? It can seem strange that we consider a pattern on a piece of cloth as such a site for cultural contest. For us, this hyper-analysis of ankara is underpinned by the Western looting of the tangible artefacts to which cultural meaning is assigned. Having artefacts taken away during colonialism deeply and irreversibly interrupted our senses of origin and belonging. Subsequently, Kenyan culture has appropriated the remaining symbols— such as Maasai cultural goods and experiences—to serve the need and desire for both nation-building and belonging. Conversely, the currencies of identity in the North not only include a vast archive of tangibles, but are also anchored in the assumption of wealth and plenty (without questioning their histories of plunder and conquest), as well as the value of cultural intangibles. ‘Frenchness’, for example, is globally associated with luxury, and the magic of the words ‘chic’ or ‘couture’. Scandinavians are known for placing a high premium on futuristic, minimalist design, with Italy remaining famous for giving the richness of their past a place of honour in modern cultural conversation. New African worldviews—around value, culture, significance, and the potential for futures beyond colonial crippling—are essential for Africa to begin to generate and evolve its own autonomous agenda.

This thinking forms, for us, part of that wider aspiration. Within these frames of thought, we aim to dismantle this heavy super-concept ‘African’; the assembly of words, images, sounds, ideas, weaknesses, histories and failings associated with the entire Continent. This is our way to say that we are more than kitenge, khanga, kikoi and ankara. We are not West African—we are East African, Kenyan, particular and individual.

NOT AFRICAN ENOUGH is a derogatory term routinely lobbed at artists, creators and thinkers who step outside the narrow confines of what the world—and Africans—are told it means to dress, talk, think and be like an African. In response therefore, we endeavour to unapologetically contextualize and position black African bodies as beautiful renderings of humanity, in resistance to the pervasive tokenism, exotification and fetishization of blackness in global fashion conversations. We simply assert our right to be more than enough.

Excerpt is a foreword from the book, “Not African Enough”(2017) by the Nest Collective.

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.

Binyavanga Wainaina: The Writer Who Democratised Kenya’s Literary Space By Rasna Warah

Are We Here Yet?

The 2011 performance at Nairobi’s The Theatre Company opens with two Mau Mau fighters stuck in Mt. Kenya forest. It is 1983. They are unaware Kenya gained independence 20 years ago. The two fighters, Mahela and Githai, re-enact the Mau Mau oath of allegiance, an annual tradition they have practiced the entire time they lived in the bush. Their enduring memory of life before this moment, is of the night they were dispatched to kill a British settler. They went as far as the white man’s bedroom, but developed cold feet. Now, 20 years later, they believe they are cursed for violating a cardinal Mau Mau oath – to kill the enemy. And are convinced that they can only get atonement by finding and killing an alternative white man.

The sound of an approaching vehicle interrupts the dreadlocked Mau Mau fighters obsessing over the oath. Two African American tourists emerge, accompanied by a white tour guide. Due the colour of his skin, Mahela and Githai decide that the tour guide is a colonialist and the accompanying African Americans his home guards – members of indigenous Kenyan communities who chose to collaborate with the British, branded traitors of the independence struggle. When the African Americans spot Mahela and Githai, they ask the tour guide whether the two-dreadlocked men are cast members for a skit and part of the entertainment package for the tourists seeking a full colonial misadventure experience. The confused tour guide mumbles a response as the two fighters presuming they are under attack, strike and capture the group. With a captive white man in their hands, Mahela and Githai debate on whether to kill him to cleanse themselves of the curse. Moments later, the two African American tourists break loose, make a sprint for the forest, and in the ensuing fracas, Githai accidentally shoots the white captive.

That performance, ‘Are We Here Yet’, marked Kenyan thespian Ogutu Muraya’s debut as a scriptwriter. 2

The Merry Wives of Windsor

In April 2012, a 26 year old, Ogutu woke up in his London hotel to good news. The Guardian newspaper had given the Kiswahili adaptation of William Shakespeare’s ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ translated by Ogutu, a Five Star rating. This was the highest accolade of any of the 37 Shakespeare performances delivered in 37 different languages at the Globe to Globe Festival – the biggest festival on Shakespeare’s works held during London’s Cultural Olympiad. Apart from translating the play, Ogutu was part of the cast and The Guardian singled him out for naughtily embodying his character, Mistress Quickly.

‘‘Such was the power of the performances, the way the cast seemed to live their lines, that the language barrier hardly mattered… the Swahili had an earthy gusto, an air of languor and sunshine that made Shakespeare’s prose seem prissy and verbose,’’ wrote the Guardian’s Andrew Gilchrist.

‘‘It ended, of course, with a dance, the crowd up on their feet clapping along as the company took their bows. A young girl sitting near me, who had been laughing throughout, was almost overcome. “To see Shakespeare in this setting, in Swahili, in England, it’s fabulous,” she said.

Ogutu and the seven cast members, including Tanzanian poet and thespian Mrisho Mpoto, who played the lead character, had left Nairobi for London on a shoe string budget. They had bought an assortment of second hand clothes for their costume, having only been able to afford proper attire for Mrisho. On arrival in London, they attended the technical rehearsal for Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’, performed in Russian. What they saw made them decide they stood little chance at making an impression on the London audience. They had never performed in such a state of the art theatre. The group’s confidence took another hit when they attended the Maori performance of Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’. At the end of the show, the New Zealand cast performed the haka, the war dance popularized by their All Blacks rugby team.

It therefore came as a pleasant surprise that the East Africans made a lasting Five Star impression on the London audience.

DAS Graduate School

Fresh off ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ high, Ogutu submitted an application to DAS Graduate School (Academy of Theatre and Dance formerly known as DasArt), the prestigious experimental art institute and appendage of the Amsterdam University of the Arts. The main pitch on Ogutu’s portfolio, beside the Mau Mau piece, was that he had translated Shakespeare’s ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ into Kiswahili, and been part of its cast during London’s Cultural Olympiad. The rejection letter, was accompanied by an email observing that Ogutu had a Shakespearean aesthetic, therefore advised him to instead apply to a British arts school, where he stood a better chance of admission.

Ogutu became aware that translating Shakespeare into Kiswahili and performing the same was not necessarily the most progressive thing for him to do. A member of the London audience observed that he ‘‘understood Shakespeare better in Kiswahili than he ever did in English’’, making the point that by translating Shakespeare, Ogutu had facilitated the export of the Empire’s culture to its former colonies and delivered it in a language and manner that was both agreeable and accessible to the former subjects. The translation had added a cultural richness to Shakespeare and to the validation of English literature in the former colonies.

Fortunately, Ogutu landed a month long residency in the Netherlands in September 2013, where he was to spend time interacting with arts institutions. Before his arrival in the Netherlands, Ogutu announced that DAS rejected his application during the school’s previous intake and he was keen on giving it another shot. The residency granted Ogutu’s wish and he ended up spending two weeks at DAS.

DAS is not your traditional performance school. The conversations dwelled on his future prospects as a performing artist, since DAS mantra was unhinged experimentation and imagination, seeking to break boundaries to produce artists grounded in practice. The more time he spent at DAS, the more Ogutu felt it was where he belonged. DAS admitted between seven and nine students for its two-year graduate program, and Ogutu knew it was not going to be easy gaining admission. He worked on a new application, and in early 2014, received news that he had made the shortlist. He travelled to Amsterdam for a three-day audition, went through a slew of interviews and made the cut second time round, joining DAS in September 2014.

Before admission, Ogutu had to bring a new birth certificate for the process of residency in Amsterdam. The old one was not accepted. He had to pay three times the tuition fees his European classmates paid at DAS, and underwent tests for Tuberculosis every six months. He concluded that for African to gain acceptance in Europe they had to be wealthy, healthy and brainy. The visa application process on its own had become a sort of state sanctioned eugenics, a manmade exercise of natural selection. One of his instructors put it differently. He told Ogutu of the Dutch policy of discouragement – a subtle code for institutional racism – where a myriad roadblocks are placed on the paths of outsiders.

Royal Dutch Shell

Barely a semester into his studies, Ogutu suddenly wanted to abandon his Dutch expedition and opt out of DAS. The reason behind this trepidation was that the school had relocated to a North Amsterdam property, hitherto occupied by the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell. Ogutu noted that the grounds that were previously an industrial part of Amsterdam had now been gentrified, comprising newly minted edgy arts institutions, incubators for start-ups, hotels, hostels, a film museum, an underground nightclub and high end apartments. A consortium of the City of Amsterdam now owned the 100-acre property that once housed the largest Shell laboratories in the world. The consortium donated part of the estate to DAS Graduate School, among other institutions.

In an attempt to speak truth to power, Ogutu’s first school project, ‘A Clarification of My Internal Politics’, sought to question DAS’ relocation Shell’s pseudo museum. He sought to interrogate why DAS would want to go anywhere near an ethically stained multinational like Shell, without critical reflection. Through the performance lecture, Ogutu juxtaposed Shell’s reputation in the Netherlands against its misdeeds in Nigeria, particularly in Ogoniland, where it was accused of gross environmental degradation in a UNEP report. In 1995, Sani Abacha’s regime executed Ken Saro- Wiwa and eight others for agitating against Shell’s activities, resulting in a 2009 out of court settlement with Shell paying $15.5m to the Ogoni nine and one other victim and $5m going into an Ogoni education trust fund. Through act of artistic protest, Ogutu hoped, idealistic, that his project would bring DAS back to its senses.

Ogutu’s art project received a lukewarm reception, critiqued for its artistic merits, shortfalls and belittled. Ogutu wondered whether he was naïve to presume society would sit up whenever he presented what he considered radical thought as his classmates and instructors did not necessarily center their practice on the sociopolitical. Disillusioned, Ogutu slipped into depression. He thereafter wrote to DAS, opting out of his studies, unable to navigate his new realities. DAS offered Ogutu a month during the December 2014 break to reflect on his decision. As if extending an olive branch, DAS bought Ogutu’s ticket to Nairobi, after he applied for an emergency grant.

This feeling of powerlessness was not new. During his undergraduate International Relations studies at Nairobi’s United States International University–Africa, Ogutu felt the program taught everything about what was wrong with the world but never offered solutions. Therefore in the pursuit of meaningful change, he embraced the arts, growing to become The Theater Company’s creative director and later joining DAS, only for him to realize late in the day that ‘‘the complexities of life proved immune to the artistic antidote.’’

James Baldwin

Back in Nairobi, Ogutu sought out three Kenyan artists who had lived overseas, in search of understanding of his artistic struggles. The writer Binyavanga Wainaina told Ogutu his struggle was familiar, that he was going through a formatting process, advising Ogutu to seek sunshine whenever he could, telling him winter messed people up. The performance artist Sitawa Namwalie told Ogutu those Amsterdam years were his induction into the art world, for him to find his place in it. The publisher Muthoni Garland asked Ogutu to read American writer and activist James Baldwin, mainly ‘Notes of a Native Son’, reflections on Baldwin’s days holed up in Paris.

Finding Baldwin was the best thing anyone could have done for Ogutu. Reading Baldwin instantly unlocked Ogutu’s world, and from that point on, his projects at DAS either revolved around the work and person of Baldwin, or the happenings around the Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris in September 1956, that Ogutu gleaned from Baldwin’s works. Ogutu returned to Amsterdam in January 2015, somewhat reenergized. For his second semester project, he produced a short theatre piece titled ‘Nobody Knows My Name’, borrowing explicitly from one of Baldwin’s book titles.

The piece centered around Café Tournon in Paris, a hugely popular meeting spot for African American artists, some of whom were part of the Harlem Renaissance, who had since sought refuge in Paris. The twist in Ogutu’s piece, picked from Baldwin’s writings and of others around the 1956 Congress, was that the CIA, French intelligence and other infiltrators such as the KGB had made inroads within this particular Paris group of Black writers and artists as part of the cultural Warfare. Ogutu’s main character, is a Black writer dealing with writer’s block as he tries to write about his time at Café Tournon. He is unable to make headway because he can no longer tell what was real and what was an enactment of the intelligence agencies, in spite of the glimpses of purity and authenticity at the café.

The idea of a meta-narrative about a Black writer trying to write a story about events of his life in a foreign country where he had sought refuge and escaped his home country’s hounding, reflected Ogutu’s frame of mind. In this case, Café Tournon was the symbol of the physical space abroad and the place where failure lurked, trailed by a mixture of anxiety and paranoia. It had taken Ogutu years of applications and rejections, in the hope of an admission into DAS. Yet at DAS, where he was supposed to thrive, he remained in a state of paralysis.

Fractured Memory

In his final year project at DAS, Ogutu sunk deeper into the happenings at the four day 1956 Black Writers and Artists congress in Paris, in a performance piece he titled ‘Fractured Memory’.

The piece, broken into four parts, each representing a day at the congress, opens with a scene of the reading of an emotive letter sent by WEB Du Bois, who could not travel to Paris because he was denied an American passport. Du Bois warns that part of the American delegation is state sponsored infiltration and that revelation causes tension at the congress. On the second day, Martinique poet and politician Aime Cesaire delivers a rousing speech on the relationship between colonialism and culture, going as far as labeling African Americans as colonised subjects. To counter Cesaire, Ogutu brings in Baldwin, who points out that Cesaire does not own up to his own personal effects of colonialism, seeing that he was addressing a congress of Blacks gathered in Paris speaking in French.

The third serving dwells on confrontations happening at the Congress, ending with the realization that there was no consensus on how to liberate people of African descent from colonialism, apartheid, segregation and exploitation. In the fourth section, Ogutu recites a poem that introspects on the agitations at the Congress. For each of these segments, Ogutu layers them with contemporary and historical issues in Kenya such as mistrust, anger, division – reiterating that the challenges of Paris 1956 still bedevil the Black people in Africa and elsewhere.

In November 2016, Ogutu performed ‘Fractured Memory’ at the Batard Festival in Brussels. After the performance, Tunde Adefioye, an American-Nigerian curator representing Brussel’s Royal Flemish Theatre came looking for him. Tunde was deeply moved by Ogutu’s performance and offered him a performance slot at the Royal Flemish Theatre in March 2018.

On New Year’s Day 2018, aboard a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Nairobi, Ogutu’s state of mind oscillated between elation, anxiety and indecisiveness. Earlier, in September 2017, he was selected as one of 15 artists in residence by the City of Amsterdam. The program, dubbed the Three Package Deal, funded by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, came with a €22,500 stipend that covered living expenses, an artist studio and a research budget for a theatre production, to be showcased after the residency. Upon graduation from DAS the previous year, Ogutu was granted a one year visa, usually provided to graduates from Dutch institutions. That one year in Amsterdam post-graduation became a haunting experience. Despite the relief he had found in James Baldwin and his work, Ogutu still had to put up with a sense of not belonging as he wrestled with questions of race and racism, and how this affected his life and work. The residency came with a two year visa, meaning Ogutu had to decide whether he had the stamina to survive Amsterdam.

Here was a man debating whether to continue with the residency or opt out. It was a huge honour to be selected, and he was cognizant of the fact that benefactors who he did not want to disappoint had put up a strong case for him in the process. Ogutu took the entire month of January 2018 to make the decision to return to Amsterdam and take up the residency, partly prompted by the need to return to Europe anyway since he was already slotted to perform ‘Fractured Memory’ at the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels.

The Life and Works of Leopold II

Ogutu arrived in Brussels on March 8, 2018, a day before his performance of ‘Fractured Memory’ at the Royal Flemish Theatre. Noah Voelker, an American classmate at DAS who was now a collaborator, accompanied him. They checked into two spacious studio apartments, before proceeding to the theatre to check on the technical elements of the performance. The show, performed in English, had French and Dutch surtitles (as subtitles are known in theatre) to attract both the city’s Dutch and French speakers.

As Ogutu and Noah went through the technical motions of the show, a staffer at the theater told them about ‘The Life and Works of Leopold II’, a performance which was being staged on the night of March 8. The show would take place at the main theatre as the anchor performance, followed by Ogutu’s performance on March 9 at an adjoining box theatre. He would later discover that the pairing of the two performances was to ignite a dialogue on colonialism and decolonization. ‘Fractured Memory’ was lined up as a hesitant partner in a weird post-colonial dance with King Leopold II’s misdeeds in the Congo.

Earlier the same day, Ogutu sent Tunde Adefioye – the theater’s curator who had booked Ogutu’s show – a text message requesting tickets for ‘The Life and Works of Leopold II’. Tunde told him the show was sold out, but that he would seek out some connections. He never got back to Ogutu. It later emerged that Tunde preferred Ogutu did not watch the Leopold II show, possibly suspecting the performance’s racist undertones would expectedly elicit an unpleasant reaction. Ogutu reasoned that Tunde meant well and wanted to stick to his institution’s program while shielding Ogutu from triggers that would affect his performance. Unknown to Tunde, the theatre’s staffer went to the box office and worked out two tickets for Ogutu and Noah to watch the Leopold II show.

***

In Ogutu’s narration, the opening scene featured the only black cast member cleaning the front of the theatre using a vacuum cleaner, moving around the stage and into the audience, creating confusion as to whether he was part of the performance. Then the rest of the cast took to the stage, with African characters played by white actors wearing black faces. The King of Congo was depicted as an ape-like creature, and whenever the white actors playing as Africans spoke, their speech was deliberately sluggish and inaudible, as if not representations of actual humans. The actor playing King Leopold II produced a belching sound whenever interacting with Africans, implying that in communication with Africans, one resorted to a range of grunt sounds outside of ordinary speech. In representing African children, their voices became hoarse and croaky.

As the English surtitles streamed past and Ogutu married them to the acts on stage, he got agitated. To Ogutu’s dismay, the worst was yet to come after the performance, when the predominantly white audience gave the cast a standing ovation. The cast moved backstage but as the audience was still clapping, came back on stage to soak in the accolades. Ogutu felt sick to the stomach, not knowing whether to be surprised or disappointed. To this audience in Brussels, the portrayal of Africans as primitive sub-humans passed for art.

From the theatre, Ogutu did not speak to anyone. He went straight to his apartment, and could not sleep that night. The following morning at 9am, Noah was at the theatre, ready to do a test run of ‘Fractured Memory’. He sent Ogutu a text, asking whether he was on his way. Ogutu said he was.

The moment Noah set his eyes on Ogutu he knew something was amiss. Noah also knew it all had to do with what they had watched the previous night. There was no denying that the show was racist. Noah and Ogutu had a little chat, sharing views on the show. Ogutu told Noah he was not sure he wanted to perform ‘Fractured Memory’ in such a racially toxic environment. Noah said he understood, but asked Ogutu to give it further thought. Ogutu walked into the theatre set up for his performance. The moment he walked in, he instinctively knew he would not be performing that night. He told Noah he was going to take a walk back to the apartment, and that by the time he got there, he would relay his final decision.

By the time Ogutu got to the apartment, his mind was made. He was not performing.

***

When Tunde Adefioye heard about Ogutu’s decision, he requested a meeting. Ogutu asked for an hour as he called Amsterdam, where Veem House of Performance was handling his travel and other logistics. He informed them of his decision to pull out, asking for arrangements for the next available train back to Amsterdam. Tunde was devastated, admitting that he too shared in Ogutu’s frustrations of ‘The Life and Times of King Leopold II’ portrayal of Africans. The theatre’s business manager reached out to Noah, asking for a meeting. Ogutu declined.

By the time Noah and Ogutu arrived in Amsterdam, the main newspapers in Brussels had picked up the story, as a cancelation message had to be sent out by the theater. Journalists wanted a comment from Ogutu, for the next day’s papers. Feeling under weather, Ogutu took his medication and passed out. By the time he woke up, the journalists’ 5pm deadline had lapsed. They went to print without his comment. Phone calls and solidarity messages from friends and industry players started streaming in. By the evening of March 9, Ogutu had to release a statement. He consulted the team at Veem, before making a stinging, succinct Facebook post. The Royal Flemish Theatre on its part issued a defensive counter statement, citing artistic freedom. Tunde wrote a conciliatory piece, hoping Ogutu would have an opportunity to perform at the theatre sometime in future and to contribute to the decolonization discourse. The theatre’s artistic director tried reaching Ogutu through Veem, intending to issue a personal apology.

In his statement, Ogutu bitterly protested the placement of ‘Fractured Memory’ next to a hyper- problematic piece framed as part of an exercise in the critical reflection on colonialism. The use of racist slurs such as nigger, the apish characterization and imbecilic mannerisms attributed to Africans, the racialized costumes and sexualization of the black body, and the use of the black face – all in Ogutu’s words – were some of the unacceptable devices deployed to demean the dignity of black people.

It was as if Ogutu was having an artistic epiphany. All his readings of Baldwin crystallized before his eyes. There he was, a Black artist in Brussels, encountering blatant racism within the very artistic spaces he had hoped to find elevated discourses on culture, race and race relations. Like Baldwin, he now had to react directly to these acts by carving out his own responses. Ogutu had to now live his politics, and mature as a protégé of Baldwin’s work.

Three days later, on March 12 2018, Ogutu boarded a Nairobi bound KLM flight, booked a month earlier. Unlike during his New Year’s Amsterdam to Nairobi flight when he was torn between moving back home or taking up the City of Amsterdam residency, he now felt a sense of artistic purpose. He had taken up the residency and premiered his next show, ‘Because I Always Feel Like Running’, that aptly captured his nomadic tendencies. Brussels may have devastated Ogutu, but it simultaneously awoke the urgency within him.

Because I Always Feel Like Running

The person who helped Ogutu clarify his thoughts was Anne Breure, the director at Amsterdam’s Veem House of Performance. Breure forwarded Ogutu’s name to her coalition of arts organizations back in 2017, proposing him as a potential artist in residency. With his nomination under consideration, Ogutu retreated to his little Amsterdam studio for two months, July and August 2017, where he conceptualized his next performance project, dedicated to the residency. The piece, titled ‘Because I Always Feel Like Running’, investigated the building blocks in the lives of East African long distance runners. Ogutu’s research narrowed down to Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikile, Kenya’s Kipchoge Keino and Tanzania’s John Stephen Akwari.

By looking at the lives of these three at their height on the track, Ogutu intended to develop a piece exhibiting the spirit of sacrifice, excellence and resilience. He might as well have been projecting his own life. At the end of 2017, Ogutu had already done dummy performances of the show at the Veem House of Performance in Amsterdam, the Spielarts Festival in Munich and a follow up show in February 2018 in the city of Gronigen.

By this time, Leila Anderson, a South African artist who was a year ahead of Ogutu at DAS, became one of his closest collaborators, urging him on whenever Ogutu encountered performance-related anxiety.

Previously, like when he performed at the Batard Festival in Brussels in 2016, Ogutu would lock himself up the entire time, only leaving his room to do his show then retreat, never wanting to interact with the outside world. He was now less reclusive thanks to Leila. When Ogutu returned to Amsterdam at the end of January 2018 after taking a break in Nairobi to contemplate whether to carry on with the residency or not – and to spend time with his ailing mother, his only surviving parent for a long time – he pinned six A3 spreadsheets on the wall of his bedroom. He stuck six yellow sticky notes on each of the spreadsheets, and in each sticky note, he chronologically listed the events that had shaped his life for the last decade.

He started out with the 2007/2008 Kenyan post election violence, which inspired his Mau Mau piece, but which had directly affected his family. His name, Ogutu Muruya – with Ogutu coming from his Luo ancestry and Muraya coming from his Kikuyu lineage – was seen as an oxymoron since it collapsed the two politically antagonistic communities into one entity. He was neither Luo enough nor Kikuyu enough for as long as he could remember, and the 2007/2008 ethnic violence put his family on the spot including from neighbours who debated whether they were Luos or Kikuyus. Depending on where one was, being either Luo or Kikuyu could mean life or death. He listed migration, in relation to his move to DAS, and listed his time at DAS under studies. The list kept growing as Ogutu applied specificity.

From each sticky note Ogutu originated a web of arrows pointed into the A3 spreadsheets, where he wrote detailed notes on what ramifications each of the items listed on the sticky notes had brought into his life. By the time he was done, the white A3 surfaces were filled with acres of hardly legible text. Looking at whatever he had written, Ogutu concluded that there was nothing more to be squeezed out of that decade. He had come full circle. He took photos of the spreadsheets and saved them on his phone, before picking his bags and heading to Brussels on March 8 2018. Brussels through ‘The Life and Works of Leopold II’ had already set the mission on how to jumpstart his next ten year cycle, confronting him with the question of race and racism afresh. It was now all up to him.

As Franz Fanon said, Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it in relative opacity.

*The End*

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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

Binyavanga Wainaina: The Writer Who Democratised Kenya’s Literary Space

By Rasna Warah On March 12th, 2019, former Kenyan Prime Minister, Raila Odinga declared that the River Jordan had crocodiles, and that he and Uhuru Kenyatta, the president, were building bridges for Kenyans to cross the river safely into Canaan. Raila Odinga, who was a presidential candidate in the Kenyan general elections in 2017 against Kenyatta had, almost exactly a year earlier, on March 9th, 2018, buried the hatchet with his rival and so he felt the need to defend the coalition. By using Canaan as a metaphor, Raila had brought his hitherto rival into the inner sanctum of the religious metaphor he had used to campaign for office.

Metaphors are powerful. Metaphors make us believe in an analogy that is better than reality. American poet Robert Frost declared that “an idea is a feat of association, and that the height of it is a good metaphor.” Raila understands the power of a good metaphor, the power of association that a metaphor conjures, and the power of his metaphor of Canaan in a predominantly Christian country.

In the month of May, in the lead-up to the August 2017 presidential elections, Raila travelled to Israel where he visited the Western wall in the Old City of Jerusalem and posted photos of himself praying on his social media pages. The Western wall better known as the Wailing Wall is a place of prayer and pilgrimage sacred to the Jewish people. Raila talked about how praying on the wall reminded him of his days in detention. He said, “The story goes that you write your wish on a piece of paper, stick it on the wall and say a prayer and the message goes directly to God.” By referring to his stint in detention during his prayer, he was, in one fell swoop, establishing his credibility as both a reformer and a man of God.

Upon his return to Kenya from Jerusalem, Raila proclaimed himself as Joshua and that he would lead Kenyans to the Promised Land. In Christian theology, Joshua led the Israelites to Canaan, after fleeing from slavery in Egypt. Raila hoped to project the reign of Uhuru as one of hardship and suffering, akin to the biblical Egypt, and that Raila as Joshua, would lead them out of their suffering into the Promised Land, Canaan, the land of milk and honey. By caricaturing himself in this way, Raila intended to tap into Kenyans’ religious bent and influence them into voting for him in the August elections.

His opponents recognized the danger his methods held for them, and moved in to squash the idea of Raila’s personified as a Joshua. The Deputy President, William Ruto, who was Kenyatta’s running mate dismissed him as a fake Joshua, belittling Raila’s quest as taking Kenyans to a land of chang’aa and busaa, unlike the biblical Canaan, the land of milk and honey. This was snide reference to Raila’s proposal to legalize the sale of chang’aa when elected. Chang’aa is a traditional home brewed spirit popular among working class Kenyans. Mutahi Ngunyi, a political analyst and one of Kenyatta’s parrot men, also rejected Raila’s ability to be Joshua, arguing that Raila was full of “acidic pessimism” and negative energy.

Undeterred, Raila pushed on with his vision of Canaan. During his campaign, rallies he promised his supporters that he would take them to the land of milk and honey upon his ascension to the presidency. The more he invoked his utopia of Canaan, the more Kenyans from all walks of life, started talking about it. On social media, people shared creative memes about their aspirations once they got to the Canaan. Whether accidentally or by design, Raila was copying a script successfully used by Kenyatta and Ruto as running mates in 2013 election.

As part of their rhetoric during the campaigns, Ruto and Kenyatta alluded that Raila, had ‘fixed’ the charges at the Hague, and that, together, they would defeat the devil that was the ICC. The representation of the devil as the buzzword for one’s political enemy did not start with Ruto and Kenyatta.

In January 2012, William Ruto and Uhuru Kenyatta had been among the six Kenyans indicted by the ICC to stand trial over the 2008 Post Election Violence in Kenya. While many observers expected that the trial would lead to an end of their respective presidential bids, it did not. Rather, the two of them united in the face of a common enemy, the ICC. When they announced their coalition and joint presidential bid with Kenyatta vying for the presidency and Ruto as his running mate, they declared that it would be good for national reconciliation. Despite the irony that the two of them were once fierce rivals, they became the most serious threat to Raila’s bid for the presidency.

In her book, The Origin of Satan, the religious historian Elaine Pagels tracks the origins of the ‘devil’ as a symbol for demonizing one’s opponents. In the book, which came on the back of her elegant analysis of the Nag Hammadi Library, Pagels reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the Christian religion was never homogeneous, even in its nascent days. While there were agents of malice in such Judeo-Christian texts as Numbers and Job, these were not what we now know as the devil. The figure of the Devil (also known as Satan or Belial or Beelzebub) first appears in the first century AD, particularly with two radical Jewish sects — one called the Essenes, and another that coalesced around Jesus of Nazareth. These two sects painted themselves as embroiled in a cosmic war, and the Devil-figure was cast as the great enemy who wanted to see their destruction.

Kenyan politics is intrinsically ethno-nationalist, and deeply patriarchal, as Nanjala Nyabola observes, but it also has a very spiritualist bent. This spiritualist bent has led to national obsession with the cult of ‘holy men’ such as Pius Miuru, Prophet David Owuor, and Ambilikile Masapila, otherwise known as Babu wa Loliondo, and his ‘wonder drug’.

However, as Pagels informs us, the members of these sects used the term Devil (and its variations), more often than not, to refer to their political enemies. For instance, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth used the term to refer to mainstream Jews (this Satanification of mainstream Judaism becomes the foundation of anti-semitism), to political parties such as the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and to the Roman Empire which was colonizing Palestine. In fact, when Jesus was executed he was killed for a political crime — that he claimed that he was going to establish a kingdom, and not because he claimed to be the son of God which the Romans did not care about — and he was given the punishment given to political criminals/insurrectionists — death by crucifixion.

Kenyan politics is by design ethno-nationalist, and deeply patriarchal, as Nanjala Nyabola observes, but it also has a very spiritualist bent. This spiritualist bent has led to national obsession with the cult of ‘holy men’ such as Pius Miuru, Prophet David Owuor, and Ambilikile Masapila, otherwise known as Babu wa Loliondo, and his ‘wonder drug’. The March 2013 elections presented the opportunity for Kenyatta and Ruto cling to the image of the ICC as the Devil and they as God’s persecuted followers. After they won the presidential election, Ruto broke down in tears during a church service proclaiming himself to ‘surged over by the grace and favor of God.’ It was a complete performance. The godly references did not end there.

In a political rally in September 2013, Kenyatta declared, in reference to the ICC charges, “We will defend ourselves and we will make sure that we have cleared our names and that of Kenya. We know that with God on our side and the devil will be ashamed.”

At the same rally, Kenyatta added, “God will clear us of the false accusations that have been leveled against us. We therefore humbly request that you pray for us. I believe that when we go before the court and speak the truth, we shall shame the devil.”

Two years later, in September 2015, the two, together with their political allies, held what they described as the “mother of all prayer rallies” aimed at “keeping the evil spirits of the International Criminal Court at bay.” Critics were quick to dismiss the rally as nothing more than a poorly- disguised political rally. Writing in the aftermath of the rally, Ishmael Bundi, a Nairobi-based journalist, argued, “Kenyans have become very sensitive to naked displays of tribalism, hence the reason to call Sunday’s rally a ‘prayer meeting’ and not what it was: a transparent ploy to drum up ethnic paranoia against the ICC.“

Naturally, Uhuru and Ruto were quick to recognize the danger of Raila declaring himself a Joshua. In the months both preceding and following the election, they went on the offensive, and turned the devil jibe on him. In statements that were transmitted in vernacular Gikuyu and Kalenjin radio stations, Raila was likened to the devil. This would become the pattern of their diatribes against Raila, as they went on to accuse him of being a mganga (a witchdoctor) who couldn’t compete with the people of God, and bewitching his followers into boycotting the farce that was the repeat election.

In The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels explores the politics of the early Christian church, or the hodgepodge of believers each of whom claimed to be the true believers. While the term “the devil” was applied as a slur against one’s opponents, there also existed a space for healthy intellectual thought. For instance, in the group of believers who had coalesced around the disciples, there was a rift in how true faith ought to be practised. While most of the disciples agreed that the established way was through a strong church structure (a strong political church structure), Thomas (or the writer of The Gospel of Thomas), who was the first to have the authorship of a gospel attributed to him, argued that true faith was best practised individually. Rather than becoming a follower of Christ in a strong church structure, one ought to live individually and “become a Christ.” This was anathema to the other disciples, and John (or the writer of The Gospel of John) would come up with a story that established Thomas as a doubter, and thus sully his credentials as a true man of the faith. Kenyan politics is not as subtle. In Kenyan politics, accusing political opponents of being The Devil is as strong as it gets. The devil jibe is not reserved for Raila. The list of people referred to as the devil by Uhuru, Ruto and their allies would make for interesting reading. In 2012, after his attempts at a coalition with Musalia Mudavadi floundered, Uhuru talked about “dark forces” that had forced him to join hands with Mudavadi. In March 2017, Uhuru referred to Josephat Nanok, the Governor of Turkana, as shetani mshenzi (a madman and a devil/ a stupid devil). In August 2018, Ruto referred to his detractors as “injili ya shetani” (the devil’s gospel). On March 14th, 2019, Oscar Sudi, a Ruto ally, declared, in the wake of the Uhuru-Raila handshake, “Since Raila Odinga ‘mganga’ joined government, there has been wrangles, gossip and sorcery. You greeted him, he has come to Jubilee with a magic spell and I see, he has bewitched you.” The list goes on. They have even turned the devil jibe on themselves, as seen when Moses Kuria blamed “shetani za kutangatanga”, a sly reference to Ruto, for his criticism of Uhuru. Just as Pagels writes about the Essenes and the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, referring to one’s political opponents as the devil, wild religious analogies such as the figure of the devil have come to dictate political discourse in the country. It was not always so.

At independence, there was a strong bias towards intellectual thought running in the country. The first president of the country, Jomo Kenyatta, authored the book “ Facing Mt. Kenya” exploring Gikuyu religion and the first cabinet was full of people who relished intellectual inquiry. Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga, both members of the founding cabinet, differed bitterly and publicly on matters of ideology. A few years after independence, when the first vice president’s relationship with the government imploded, he, Oginga Odinga, wrote a book “ Not Yet Uhuru” detailing everything that he felt was wrong with the Kenyan state. Joseph Murumbi, Oginga’s replacement as vice president, was also a man of intellectual rigour, described by veteran journalist Joe Kadhi as ‘highly respected by journalists and regarded as far brighter than most of his peers’ and, after his resignation from government, he became a figure of importance in Kenya’s cultural history. Then came Daniel Moi, first as vice-president, then as president in 1978.

Facing mounting pressure from critics and dissidents, Moi turned his focus towards the Christian church as a way to stifle the growing opposition towards him. Mungai writes, “The position taken by the EFK (Evangelical Fellowship of Kenya) during that time was one of consoling the State rather than confronting it; the image of the President as “God’s anointed” became a frequent one.”

In thinking about how religion was first used as a soporific by Kenyan politicians, we must examine Daniel Moi’s use of religion to lull the masses. Christine Mungai has written about how, during Moi’s reign as president, religion became the primary focus of political discourse. While the war against intellectual thought in politics had started during Kenyatta’s reign, it blossomed into a full frontal assault under Moi. Facing mounting pressure from critics and dissidents, Moi turned his focus towards the Christian church as a way to stifle the growing opposition towards him. Mungai writes, “The position taken by the EFK (Evangelical Fellowship of Kenya) during that time was one of consoling the State rather than confronting it; the image of the President as “God’s anointed” became a frequent one.”

The Argentines defeated the Dutch in the final to claim the World Cup and General Videla milked the moment of national solidarity and international fame for all it was worth. Gustavo Campana, in Stands Without People, argues that football was used by Videla to polish his image in the face of accusations of torture, disappearances and murder that had started to appear in the global press.

A similar, more widely studied pattern emerges with the South American dictatorships of the 20th Century. Uruguayan novelist Mario Benedetti was the first to write about how South American dictators used football as political soporific. Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas (1930-1945) for one recognized the duality of the sport in helping strengthen his reign. With the press censored, political parties banned, civil rights curtailed and restraints on the police lifted, Vargas exploited the value of football to establish commonality with the masses and as a tool of distraction from the violence of his tyrannical rule. In Italy, Mussolini’s fascist regime was the first to use football as an integral part of government. In Argentina, Juan Domingo Perón (1946-1955) had slogans such as “Peron, the first sportsman,” and “Perón sponsors sports,” to turn the country’s eye to the role of sports in the making of the new Argentina “which we all desire.” Later, in 1978, two years after a junta led by General Jorge Videla had overthrown Peron government, Argentina would host the World Cup. While hosting a World Cup made little sense for a country grappling with a mountain of debt, the junta declared the World Cup a matter of national interest as justification for the hosting.

“Religion is the opium of the masses,” Karl Marx quipped, famously, in the introduction to a book of political criticism he never finished. While Marx was not entirely against religion, he dismissed it as a useful tool that the ruling class used to keep the masses sated, a source of phoney happiness to which the masses turned to numb the pain of reality. Marx’s argument of mass distraction can apply to such things as sports and celebrity gossip, used by the ruling class to keep the masses sated. The South American dictators recognized the ability of football to do this, the same way Mobutu did with music in the DRC, and Daniel Moi with religion in Kenya.

Other writers have echoed Marx’s argument in their writing. “Spirituality doesn’t protest injustice, it just bears it,” a character in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House declares. Closer home, prominent Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in his excellently-named 1977 play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), co-written with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii explores a similar theme. The two central characters, Kiguunda and Wangechi, convert to Christianity with the desire to see their daughter, Gathoni, marry right and be acceptable to their prospective in-laws, the Kios, Ahab and Jezebel. However, the financial burden of a Christian wedding proves too heavy for Kiguunda and Wangechi and the two of them resort to taking a loan from the bank to fund their Christianity, going against their better judgement and the advice of their neighbors, Gicaamba and Njooki. The play ends with Kiguunda and Wangechi in destitution after losing ownership of their land to the Kios.

Ironically, Christianity, the religion to which approximately 84.8% of the Kenyan population claim allegiance, was founded on the prism of political rebellion, but then repackaged into a faith of subservience and piety.

Just as the Kios used Christianity to blind Kiguunda and Wangechi from the brazen theft of their land, Moi used the same religion to get away with his kleptocratic excesses for twenty-four years as do Kenyan politicians use religious metaphors, particularly Christian ones, to attempt to veer Kenyan from the moral ineptitudes of those in power. Ironically, Christianity, the religion to which approximately 84.8% of the Kenyan population claim allegiance, was founded on the prism of political rebellion, but then repackaged into a faith of subservience and piety. It is this subservience that the political class continues to rely on as they talk about devils, raid churches and offer cash donation as they proclaim themselves God’s chosen leaders and their enemies the Devil. There is real power in these metaphors.

In The Democratic Republic of Congo, the knowledge that Mobutu was using music to construct a veneer of respectability did not stop people from listening, dancing and worshipping Lingala music. The writer Alain Mabanckou, from the neighbouring Republic of Congo, pokes fun at “the country across the river”, saying that Mobutu gave the people music so that he could have the power.

One would imagine for the millennial generation, the tricks that Moi used to stay in power for twenty-four years, the same tricks that Uhuru and Ruto are using, would not work in this era. Yet, it is apparent that history keeps repeating itself. From the dawn of independence, the same old script of religious manipulation has thrived. In a quote attributed to Jomo Kenyatta we first learnt, “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”

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.

Binyavanga Wainaina: The Writer Who Democratised Kenya’s Literary Space

By Rasna Warah Anyone with a fleeting interest in the arts in Kenya, not familiar with the name, Akothee and does not have an opinion about her, may have missed the subtle manner Akothee is influencing gender and feminism discourse in Kenya. Akothee is no stranger to controversy, and easily qualifies as the Kenyan une femme terrible or a typical bad girl.

Akothee has cultivated a risqué reputation. In African entertainment circles, she compares to Brenda Fassie, the South African Afro-pop star. Brenda Fassie’s raunchy performances, her political commitment to the poor, her open lesbian relationship after marriage and having a son, made her stand out as an outlier. Akothee’s fame, or notoriety has been buoyed by two recent highly publicised occurrences: her public spat with Ezekiel Mutua, the Chief Executive Officer of the Kenya Film Classification Board (KFCB), censor-in-chief of creative expression in Kenya, and her hugely successful relief food and water mobilization efforts aimed at assisting the famine-ravaged communities in Turkana in Northern Kenya. Akothee’s public performances offers us an interesting re-reading and re-writing of the perception of not just a creative female performer and the performance arts, but the public image of a modern African woman challenging patriarchal projection of power in all its manifestations.

We might pose to dissect what Mutua represents; he is a staunch defender of, and flaunts the ignominious Films and Stage Plays Licensing Act that was used in the late eighties and nineties to stifle political and creative expression in Kenya.

To locate the issues of feminism that Akothee brings to the fore, our discussions must move beyond the image broadcast by Mutua, that of a scantily clad atrocious artist, promoting vulgarity and pornography, morally bankrupt, an embarrassment and anathema to African values (whatever those are). We might pose to dissect what Mutua represents; he is a staunch defender of, and flaunts the ignominious Films and Stage Plays Licensing Act that was used in the late eighties and nineties to stifle political and creative expression in Kenya.

Today, few people will recall that this law was used to shut down Ngugi wa Thiongó’s Kamirithu Arts Centre, ban performances of Maitu Njugira (Mother Sing for me), Ngahiika Ndeenda (I will marry when I Want) and Trial of Dedan Kimathi. The same law was used to stop performances of: The Fate of a Cockroach by Tewfik el Hakim, Shamba la Wanyama, and adaptation of Animal Farm by George Orwell, Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay by Dario Fo and Drumbeats on Kerenyaga by yours truly ( Oby Obyerodhyambo). This law was vigorously fought by artists and civil society just as much as the Chief’s Act and Preservation of Security Act (Detention Act). Mutua has been at the forefront of supporting increasingly draconian censorship legislation to give power to the Film Classification Board so that free expression is curtailed.

Mutua also fashions himself as a moral crusader allegedly protecting Kenyans from decadence supposedly promoted largely through creative expression; film and music. On the basis of protecting morality and curtailing obscenity, he banned the public viewing of the award winning film, Rafiki (until the courts intervened) and playing of Diamond Platinum’s song Kwangaru. Mutua’s hard-line position ruled illegal by the court as contradictory to the constitutionally protected rights and freedoms of expression, association and conscience leads us to question the platform upon which he pontificates. One could argue that his actions smack of male chauvinism, misogyny, sexism and patriarchy and that his conflict with Akothee manifests the deep desire and attempt by patriarchal, sexist, misogynistic and chauvinistic systems to maintain control over women; their bodies and intellect. Akothee’s push back represents a refusal to take such patronization lying down.

Ideas of how women should behave, present and conduct themselves in public, interact and relate to others and respond to issues are defined by culture, tradition and religion. Akothee’s response to attempts to control and define how she should carry herself is deliberate. Akothee has been confronting patriarchal systemic sexism all her life. The scale of her philanthropic engagement, her use of personal resources to mobilize the public has earned her more credibility than local leaders and traditional disaster relief organizations forming a foreground to reflect on her life.

Akothee stayed in this household for seven years and bore children in annual cycles: her first born at age fourteen, the second at fifteen, the third at sixteen and the fourth at age seventeen! She lost her second child in infancy due to lack of resources to secure health care for the child.

Esther Akoth Kokeyo was born thirty-six years ago. While in Form 2, aged fourteen, she eloped with a lover and got married. Akothee does not speak about this episode in her life as a victim. Instead, she extols the romantic nature of the misadventure, even though the lover in question committed a crime of marrying an underage girl. After eloping with this man, Akothee moved in with her mother- in-law in Awendo town and in her own words, was reduced to a house-girl. Akothee states this matter-of-fact even though she was a sexually exploited fourteen-year-old girl and a child labourer. Akothee stayed in this household for seven years and bore children in annual cycles: her first born at age fourteen, the second at fifteen, the third at sixteen and the fourth at age seventeen! She lost her second child in infancy due to lack of resources to secure health care for the child. Yet she does not speak about this with any trace of bitterness or anger.

The father of her children proceeded to finish high school and university while she bore him babies. Eventually, he graduated in 2003, and they began a modest life as a married couple. A year after her husband graduated, and at 21 years old with three children, she left her mother-in-law’s place and moved to Kanga shopping centre, in Migori County to set up a business selling omena (Dagaa) to fund her return to school and cater for the upkeep of her family. In an interview, she says, “I decided to go clear my fourth form at Kanyasrega secondary school. I would drop the kids at kindergarten before proceeding to school. In the evening I would pick them up from the teacher’s house, take them home and go sell my omena for one hour.” Akothee, made a conscious decision to educate herself probably seeking to liberate herself from the control of her educated husband and his mother.

Her husband’s fortunes began to change for the better, but by age twenty three the mother of three was kicked out of her marriage for being “too boring, too hard-headed and un-romantic”. Her pursuit of academic and financial betterment meant that she no longer fitted within her former husband’s traditional ideal or stereotype of a wife; submissive, helpless and non-opinionated.

Not to be deterred, the penniless Akothee moved on to Mombasa to join her brother in running his taxi business after a stint as a matatu driver. The transport business in Kenya remains the preserve of men because the jobs therein are characterized as rowdy, risky, crude and would expose women to intrusive attention from men or even sexual abuse. Akothee went against the gendered grain by taking on this career.

While working as a taxi driver, Akothee began investing the little savings that she had. It was here that she met a man with whom she began a relationship. This relationship led to her relocation to Zurich, Switzerland with this partner and ended up with her fifth conception. The relationship did not last long, and Akothee reveals that contrary to her expectations, the man was only interested in her bearing children and not in marriage. So she left him, and flew back to Kenya. This move marks an interesting transition in Akothee’s life. She walked out of a relationship that did not guarantee her marriage – which is what she wanted, but which sought to confine her to a reproductive role. Her act of defiance to being confined to a procreative role, marked a turning point.

After returning to Kenya, Akothee launched her musical career and started making money performing music and dancing. She also began to invest in different sectors. She expanded the taxi business, ventured into tours and safaris, real estate, hotel industry and entertainment. The multiple enterprises that would see her fortunes rise dramatically had begun. Gradually, Akothee gained financial independence and autonomy challenging the notion that women only attain financial independence through affiliation to men, either by marriage or inheritance from fathers and never through hard work and investment.

Not Playing Victim

Akothee consistently refuses to depict herself as a victim of circumstances beyond her control. She reminisces her seduction and elopement at age 14 with a romanticism that could be labelled as naiveté were it not such a regular trait in her character. She does not blame her then husband for luring her into elopement. In fact, she nostalgically recalls how seductive his letters were; written on blue coloured foolscap paper. Even with hindsight, Akothee does not vilify the man. Instead, she accepts that she was going through a rebellious phase in her life taking full ownership for her decisions and the consequences of her choices. Akothee got repeatedly pregnant, but she blames neither her mother-in-law nor her husband. She has repeatedly warned her daughters against falling for similar tricks from men. “Men don’t really mean what they whisper in your ears when they need sex, that time they are lost. Let them do the theory, practicals is in your hands”.

Akothee has been categorical that what she did was stupid and by taking ownership of her mistakes, she empowers herself to use her error of judgment as lessons. She does not privilege her husband and give him power over her. About her husband having ‘abandoned’ his role she says, “Okello is my sweetheart. He was my first boyfriend. Wherever you are, daddy, we are proud of you. You see, your daughter is at Strathmore…You must come and pat me on the back”. Her ex-husband is irrelevant as she tells her own story of folly.

The modern African feminist discourse around sexuality decries the power and control that customs and traditions had over the woman’s body, social and sexual norms. In the traditional African reading, there was a high value placed on ‘real womanhood’ (read: motherhood) and sexual purity. This led to a high level of policing of a woman’s sexuality by her parents, society and religious institutions. The woman’s reproductive role was privileged above all else. The ability to conceive and bear a child was critical to assuming the status of ‘mother of’ which is the preferred term of respect for a mother. Many traditional societies revered virginity and the loss of virginity on the first night of marriage was apparently a great honour to the bride’s family.

Conversely, if a woman had lost her virginity beforehand, the act brought shame and stigma. A woman’s sexual and reproductive rights are controlled by patriarchal cultural norms and while extramarital sexual relationships are considered normal for men the idea of a woman’s ‘infidelity’ is remains a major infraction. These rights are controlled and negotiated through their relationships with her male relations and her in-laws. Women, thus have very little power to decide and fully express their sexual rights and sexuality.

Modern African feminism has correctly called out this enforced powerlessness as an element of domination, and decried acquiescence to this domination as an implicit acceptance of this power over the women’s body. In the prevalent patriarchal cultures and religions, the sexual and reproductive rights of a women is highly regulated. The issue of abortion for instance is not in women’s hands. The whole question of access to FP (Family Planning) is another illustrative point. Poverty compounds female sexuality and there is a greater loss of control because money is used as a means to control female sexuality. Thus the manner of her dressing, her presentation and how she expresses sexuality and sensuality must fit within these confines or she is deemed to have crossed the line. This privileging of tradition and culture as well as its agents, parents, fathers, brothers, husbands, in-laws, patriarchal leaders would keep a woman forever in chains fashioned by the perception of what is right, decent and allowed by tradition and culture.

At the height of the brouhaha over a controversial performance, and before the revelation that her parents were indeed present at the show, critics questioned whether she would mount such a ‘shameful’ performance in front of her father. After it emerged that her father actually supports her art in totality, he received backlash for ‘condoning such immorality’.

Akothee’s reluctance to accept or blame cultural and traditional institutions for her multiple pregnancies and births, her images of sexuality and her redefining how she relates to her father (who would represent traditional cultural authority) for instance, is a push back to traditionally defined identities for women. Akothee asserts that her father supports her full heartedly. At the height of the brouhaha over a controversial performance, and before the revelation that her parents were indeed present at the show, critics questioned whether she would mount such a ‘shameful’ performance in front of her father. After it emerged that her father actually supports her art in totality, he received backlash for ‘condoning such immorality’. Here again, sexual and body taboo associated with the female body comes up. The argument being that it is inconceivable that a ‘decent daughter’ could perform in a sexually provocative outfit in the presence of her father.

Akothee relationship with her father serves to re-define cultural norms in a radical way; her interaction with her father clearly re-demarcates the daughter/father and performer/audience dichotomy.

Multiple pregnancies and births resulting from the lack of choice is usually framed as arising from powerlessness, but not in Akothee’s case. She has controversially stated that making babies is her hobby, and at one point tweeted that she wanted to ‘give her lover’ triplets. Akothee’s attitude towards child-bearing runs counter intuitive to the idea that by giving birth multiple times a woman’s body is exploited. Akothee extends this re-definition to single-motherhood. Akothee has fashioned herself as a proud single parent calls herself, ‘President of Single mothers’ re-calibrating the public perception of single motherhood hitherto filled with stigma. Akothee makes no apology for having had children with three different men. The reality is that men who have children with multiple women ado not suffer stigma, while women do.

Single mothers have fought for official recognition of their children by the biological fathers, in the case of inheritance and the provision of child support. In March 2019, the High Court ruled that Kenyan children ‘born out of wedlock’ can now inherit a father’s property. This marks a major victory for those who have been seeking equal rights for children of single mothers in a case filed by the Federation of Women Lawyers in Kenya (FIDA) and a single mother of two. In Akothee’s case, this seems to be the least of her priorities. Akothee’s crusade seems to gravitate around normalizing the role of single motherhood and proving that children of single mothers are in no way disadvantaged.

Her unapologetic expression of agency, independence, and self-control of her life as well as her destiny might be the reason that Akothee raises so much opprobrium. The cause of disagreement between her and the archconservatives is her resistance to the ideals of Victorian ethics. The state embodies a subjective cultural norm premised on the idea of a ‘decent ‘and ‘moral’ woman who behaves and dresses in a prescribed manner. Mutua’s expressed discomfiture with Akothee’s dressing is probably informed by the idea that a woman, mother of grown up girls to wit, should not wear revealing clothes.

The inordinate sexualisation of the female body even when she is a performer as Akothee is, betrays a lopsided sense of morality that reveals gender bias and sexism. It is interesting that even the woman who were defending Akothee’s right to dress as she pleased, could only reference non- African music icons as comparisons. Akothee’s defenders challenged Mutua to take note of the mode of dressing by performers like Beyoncé, Rihanna, Lady Gaga or Aguilera. There were no African performers mentioned. Globalised culture has not embraced African aesthetics and as a result, the African female performer is inclined to imitate standards set by western cultural icons.

Gender and feminism discourse critique exposes the flaws of the notion held that women sabotage their own upward mobility. The predominant social script states that female envy and jealousy is responsible for women’s lot in life, and that cat-fights are second nature. The unspoken logic therefore, is that keeping women from advancing is actually good for them, it is self-preserving because it prevents them from cannibalizing each other. Akothee challenges this stereotype in her description of her relationship with her mother-in-law. She has described living under trying circumstances with her mother-in-law for seven years, during which time she even lost a child. However, she does not have a negative word for her mother-in-law.

Akothee’s quest for self-identity and freedom from being seen as an appendage of a man, or a culturally defined female identity – a wife, mother, daughter – is at the core of her conflict with those who abrogate to themselves the role of defining the role and place of women. Akothee argues that she is nobody’s role model and this can only be read as a rejection of the patriarchal definition of roles for the ‘decent’and perfect woman and mother. Since she is the mother of post-teenage daughters she is traditionally supposed to behave as a ‘mother-in-law’ and set an example to her daughters of how decent women are supposed to behave. This value system is biased against women. Fathers of sons of similar age are not expected to serve as role models to male children who are socially sanctioned to be unruly and mischievous.

Akothee demands freedom that will liberate women from oppressive culturally defined roles. Akothee rejects the sexist desire to control women through the sanction of shame. In 2012 during a performance in Istanbul, Madonna pulled down her bra and revealed a nipple and flashed her butt. Previously during the 2003 VMAs she had kissed pop stars Britney Spears and Christine Aguilera. Madonna performed using Christian and Hindu religious iconography while simulating sex and masturbation on stage. She even got the Vatican threaten to boycott Pepsi products after her highly controversial performance in the soft-drinks ad. Yet Madonna has argued that her performances are actually challenges against male domination. In her own words she says, “It just fits right in with my own personal zeitgeist of standing up to male authorities’. It is hard to miss the parallels between Akothee and Madonna. Madonna has rallied against sexism while still proving to be highly successful as a performer and financial success.

Akothee has had to deal with those who delegitimize her wealth by attributing the source of her wealth to a male partner – stopping short of declaring her a commercial sex-worker.

At the height of media attention over her net worth, Akothee’s manager clarified that contrary to media reports that she was worth 600 million, the figure was actually 6.2 Billion Kenya Shillings. The attainment of financial independence by a woman, is yet another element that puts a woman at odds with sexist ideology. Such a woman has power that challenges patriarchal power structures. In the wake of the recent famine and food shortage in Turkana, Akothee who revealed that she had spent some of her early years in that region and therefore considers it ‘home’ mobilized resources and delivered emergency food relief to the starving residents while the government dithered and denied the obvious. In typical Akothee fashion, she showed up in Turkana dressed in traditional garb women as if to dare those who have criticised her adornments as non-African and disrespectful. Her image, juxtaposed to that of Nairobi Governor Mike “Sonko” Mbuvi trailed by a commando styled body guard, spoke volumes in regards to empathy and appropriateness. Many on social media posed the rhetorical question whether her philanthropic gesture did not indeed tally with that of a perfect role model.

Akothee has had to deal with those who delegitimize her wealth by attributing the source of her wealth to a male partner – stopping short of declaring her a commercial sex-worker. Akothee herself says, “I have had to struggle for everything: it’s not easy. I get so many burnouts. I didn’t just wake up from a sponsors bed with millions of shillings in my bank account. You really have to grab every opportunity with both hands, whether it’s an interview, your job or a business.”

The image of helplessness and dependence is so ingrained that any woman showing financial capacity, and as in the case of Akothee and flaunting her wealth is deemed to be un-womanly. A man can flaunt his wealth (as Sonko does) but a woman who has wealth should be humble and at best invisible. Akothee goes against the script because she displays her wealth.

Akothee is not your typical proponent from the mainstream African feminist movement. She does not have has middle class background. She is not an intellectual, nor does she possess academic pedigree. She is not a political figure, neither does she belong to civil society, but if we are to use Naomi Nkealah’s definition of African Feminism, Akothee has sought to create a new liberal productive and self-reliant African woman within the heterogeneous cultures of Africa. Her struggle against entrenched sexism, patriarchy, misogyny, male chauvinism and moral correctness challenges culture as it affects the perception of woman in Africa. In this regard, Akothee is indeed a role model. 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.

Binyavanga Wainaina: The Writer Who Democratised Kenya’s Literary Space

By Rasna Warah

Since human beings are elephants’ only serious predator, the creatures must be controlled if the herds are to remain healthy, however unsavory that may sound to animal lovers and however much the public face of conservation hides it. An elephant consumes about 350 pounds of vegetation daily (the average American human takes over two and a half years to eat that weight in potatoes). Like many other plant-eaters, if left unchecked elephants will destroy their own environment. They kill the trees, especially the larger and older canopy cover on which many other species depend. When tribal hunters, like the Waliangulu, and others (pejoratively) known as “Dorobo,” an ethnic categorization that comprises several hunting and gathering groups in the East Africa region, were thrown out and largely eradicated by European colonists stealing their land for game parks in East Africa, savannah elephant numbers grew rapidly to the point where they began destroying the ecosystem. Massive culls had to be arranged by conservationists – and kept quiet from their donors.

Like many other plant-eaters, if left unchecked elephants will destroy their own environment. They kill the trees, especially the larger and older canopy cover on which many other species depend.

In one park in South Africa, for example, nearly 600 elephants on average were culled every year from 1967 to 1996. In eastern Kenya, a few hundred tribal hunters had kept the huge herds largely in check, killing perhaps up to 1,500 elephants annually, but after they were banned, subjected to a war on “poaching” and other restraints designed to promote tourism, the herds grew to the point where tens of thousands died of starvation when drought periods arrived.

Conservationists are now divided between those who think other methods, such as contraception, should replace culling and those who believe killing remains the only practical solution. What is certain is that there are some areas in Africa today where there are too many elephants for the environment to support. This is in spite of the effects of real poaching which has brought forest (though not savannah) elephants to critically low numbers.

African elephant poaching in general– as professional conservationists well know – is largely facilitated by money-grabbing officials, who remain untouched by the current militarization and extreme violence of “fortress conservation.” More than fifty years of public harangues for money to stop the magnificent creature’s supposed “extinction” continue to divert attention away from the real criminals.

The supposed imminent extinction of elephants has been predicted for over a century. According to Somerville, in 1908 the head of the Kenyan Game Department warned of it, and in 1935, Major Hingston of the Fauna Preservation Society called for special measures to save elephants “from extinction.”More recently, a 2008 report claims “most large groups could be extinct by 2020.”

The popular, but deeply flawed, Kathryn Bigelow cartoon, “Last Days of Ivory,” and several other reports, puts extinction year at 2025 and the film, “The Ivory Game,” makes a pitch for 2031. Extinction would of course be a great crime and tragedy if it ever happened, but the Kenyan conservationist, Mordecai Ogada, challenges, rather scathingly, “Who’s willing to bet with me that there’ll be elephants in 2025?” Big conservation organizations seem to keep the date for supposed elephant extinction always about 10-20 years ahead of their respective fundraising campaign. Patrick Marnham says the U.S. government was preparing to declare elephants an endangered species at the same time in 1978 when elephant meat, from organized culls, was widely and openly on sale in Tanzania.

One might speculate how tourists in the Chobe National Park in Botswana, for example, would react on learning that the vast elephant herds they were paying equally vast sums to see were actually environmental wreckers, destroying the “Wild Africa” Western myth.

Aside from humans, there are in fact few creatures which have a bigger environmental impact than elephants which, without controls, double their numbers on average every ten or eleven years. One might speculate how tourists in the Chobe National Park in Botswana, for example, would react on learning that the vast elephant herds they were paying equally vast sums to see were actually environmental wreckers, destroying the “Wild Africa” Western myth. They are now reckoned to number no less than seven times the land’s capacity.

The United Nations Environment Program calls Maasai pastoralists “low-cost guardians,” and reports that their eviction – by conservationists – from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania led to “an increase of poaching and the subsequent near extinction of the rhinoceros population.

Tribal elephant hunters, like the Baka “Pygmies” in the Congo Basin, are not only good for biodiversity, they were once vital for the health of elephants and they could still be key in stopping their poaching by outsiders. Tribal hunting more widely is internally controlled, largely through the idea that spiritual or physical retribution will fall on any who transgress accepted etiquette. The unwritten rules often include: accepting some delicate zones, such as river headwaters, to be strictly off-limits; not killing female or young animals, or during mating seasons; not hunting near water holes which would frighten animals into not drinking; not killing when game numbers are depleted; and, broadly and simply, not taking more than is needed.

It is not only tribal hunters who bring a positive environmental impact. The United Nations Environment Program calls Maasai pastoralists “low-cost guardians,” and reports that their eviction – by conservationists – from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania led to “an increase of poaching and the subsequent near extinction of the rhinoceros population.”

Satellite imagery of the Amazon now reveals, beyond any doubt, that the forest remains largely intact where indigenous people retain control. In fact, the most biodiverse areas on Earth are indigenous territories, and it’s reckoned that today they incorporate an astonishing eighty per cent of all floral and faunal diversity on the planet

Although it seems obvious to many that tribal peoples are the best conservationists, when I was a youthful volunteer for tribal peoples’ rights and was passing on Robert Goodland’s warnings about climate change, I was careful to downplay this notion. The slightest nod in that direction would be met by jeers and sneers, not only from environmentalists but also from some anthropologists who I assumed knew more than it turned out they did. “Noble savage!” and “Rousseau!” would be disdainfully disgorged, intended as insults which were supposed to end all debate, “Give the Indians chainsaws and they’ll cut the forest down as fast as anyone!”

That was two generations ago, and time has proved how wrong they were. Satellite imagery of the Amazon now reveals, beyond any doubt, that the forest remains largely intact where indigenous people retain control. In fact, the most biodiverse areas on Earth are indigenous territories, and it’s reckoned that today they incorporate an astonishing eighty per cent of all floral and faunal diversity on the planet. SomeAmazon Indians do have chainsaws and could have felled everything, as those anthropologists used to howl (and big conservation organizations still do – at the same time as they partner with logging companies!), and some Indian peoples do sell their timber. But they certainly didn’t destroy the forest, as predicted: In fact, if you now take an aerial picture of Amazonia and draw a line around the areas of visibly intact forest, you’ll likely be tracing the exact outlines of indigenous peoples’ territories. Tribal peoples in India hold particular forest areas especially sacred; they are now recognized by scientists as “biodiversity hotspots.” The Loita hills and forests in Kenya remain largely intact because the local Maasai council of elders banned tree felling without its explicit permission.

That is confirmed by the data newly available through satellite and GPS technology: Deforestation on land managed by agribusiness, around the Pimental Barbosa Indigenous Reserve in Brazil for example, leapt from 1.5 per cent in 2000 to twenty six per cent ten years later. In the same period, deforestation inside the reserve, managed by the Xavante Indians,was reduced from 1.9 to 0.6 per cent. Similar figures can be seen throughout the region, where deforestation outside indigenous areas is up to twenty times higher than inside. Areas managed by indigenous people in the Amazon have even lower deforestation rates than protected areas such as national parks.

We find the same story elsewhere. Tribal peoples in India hold particular forest areas especially sacred; they are now recognized by scientists as “biodiversity hotspots.” The Loita hills and forests in Kenya remain largely intact because the local Maasai council of elders banned tree felling without its explicit permission. The Karura forest, well inside the city of Nairobi, also owes its preservation originally to the traditional owners, and a belief in the curses they placed on anyone who might allow in settlers.

Data comparing dozens of state contrasted against indigenous-owned forests over three continents found unequivocally that communities really do protect their lands and preserve forests, even if that means taking less for their own livelihoods. Of course, it’s also important they have confidence in the future security of their land rights.

Impressive and moving stories are growing about how indigenous communities are making their own new rules for conserving their lands and then policing them, imposing fines, arresting loggers, and even stopping government departments from imposing their irresponsibly harmful policies.

This is happening from Brazil, where it is exemplified by the “Guajajara Guardians” protecting the lands of Awá Indians, to India. In the latter country, home to more tribal people than any other nation, government policy calls for more teak and eucalyptus plantations, and cynically trumpets this as increasing “green cover.” But these trees don’t provide forage for elephants, which are forced to look for food in villagers’ fields, and inevitably turn dangerous. Community run projects are retaliating by establishing forest corridors both to reinforce tribal self-sufficiency and to provide elephant habitat. Time and again, governments and their advisors prove inept at conservation when local people have long known what actually works, but are often forbidden from doing it.

It is not just in forests and savannahs where indigenous peoples can lay convincing claim to being the best conservationists. The Lax Kw’alaams people on Canada’s Pacific coast turned down the equivalent of over a quarter of a million U.S. dollars for every man, woman and child when they refused to allow a gas terminal on their land. As artist Lianna Spence said, “We already have a lot of benefits around us – we have… salmon. We have halibut, crab and eulachon. Those are our benefits.”

***

Around the world –though only where they are politically strong and numerous enough –indigenous peoples are now blocking proposed “development” sites and tourist roads, rejecting financial compensation, filing legal complaints, and fighting to stop the environments they depend on – which, remember, they have created themselves –from being torn from their stewardship. Their role in the vanguard of true conservation is slowly beginning to be acknowledged. Unfortunately, this is almost always with little more than hot air – grand declarations not reflected in action. Worse, it remains the norm for conservation projects to encourage the eviction of indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands, which usually destroys them. The major conservation organizations remain guilty of this illegal and counterproductive measure, notwithstanding their public relations departments’ pretense that they changed years ago.

Vithal Rajan, an Indian former head of the World Wildlife Fund’s “ethics department” told me that he left the job (which paid more in a year than he had previously earned in ten) because WWF promised him they would start treating tribal peoples as environmental guardians, “but then went on with their élite strategies.” He described his role as a “brown man who could talk English, wear a dinner jacket, stand with Prince Philip, and be nice while the audience of multimillionaires wrote cheques.”

The truth is that indigenous peoples were practicing sensible and balanced resource management long before the invasion and takeover of their territories, and long before the colonial conservation organizations appeared, convinced that only they knew best.

In summary, tribal peoples managed their environment: by undergrowth burning; by changing and moving plants and animals; by opening clearings; and by controlled hunting and fishing. The result was an environment heavily modified to create a better space for people to live their lives, and one that brought a vastly enhanced biodiversity.

The opposing idea, still believed by many, that the most intelligent animal on our planet for several million years had only a nominal impact on the environment, is actually very strange if you think about it. It turns out to be just a romantic, and recent, Western belief. It gained traction in the nineteenth century, influenced by Romanticism, scientific racism, and the aspect of Reformation theology that emphasizes a separation between corrupt humankind and God’s supposedly untrammeled Nature.

The Industrial Revolution, beginning in Europe and spread through conquest, of course changed the planet in new and alarming ways. Amassing more and more things and power were its tenets; the provincial dogma that everything must become uniform and simplified, that there was only one correct way of looking at the world, was trumpeted with a ferocity that has endured, and it remains the prevailing faith today.

In spite of waves of doubt, including both the hippy and green movements, it’s the belief that now governs many Westerners, especially those with power and privilege. It also motivates non- Westerners who are, perfectly understandably, taught to aspire to the same way of life, though only a tiny number will ever be allowed to approach, let alone attain, it.

Where does this leave the “noble savage” jeer, flung at those who support tribal peoples? The truth is that we can now unequivocally declare Rousseau’s allegory to be both right and wrong! Tribal peoples don’t just live “in nature,” or, if they do, it’s a nature that they themselves have created. On the other hand, they do live in a way that is broadly and sensibly balanced with an environment that they depend on for their livelihoods, and they really do make the best conservationists. They are not all perfect, but they certainly do a far better job of it than the bloated, big, colonial conservation organizations, which are usually deeply embedded in a wider government-industrial complex serving primarily itself and rich tourists.

Some conservationists blame humans for some prehistoric megafauna extinction, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that people lived alongside big animals for thousands of years, and still do in some places. (A recent theory from Madagascar is that – paradoxically – it was not hunting societies but farmers who brought about the end of the megafauna there.) Other conservationists defend their elitism by admitting that tribal peoples might have once been good conservationists, but claim the original balance between tribes and nature has been irredeemably upset since indigenous people have become “tainted,” seduced by consumerism and are now “just as bad as the rest of us.”

In some places this may ring true. However, if we stick to known facts, and most importantly if we really do value biodiversity, then the evidence is clear that we have to stop alienating contemporary tribal peoples by throwing them off their land. It harms wildlife protection because it turns them into enemies of conservation and means we can never learn from their environmental knowledge and expertise. For their sake, for that of the environment, and indeed for all humanity, we have to start valuing them as the best experts. We need to start realizing that we’re no more than junior partners in this vital quest to save “nature” from ourselves.

***

There’s nothing “romantic” about this, it’s common sense supported by myriad, growing, and provable facts. If we accept it, it could lead industrialized society towards new and better relationships between the vast diversity of peoples, animals and plants of our planet – and their very deep interconnectedness about which our knowledge remains scanty and shallow. It would be a gamechanger for all our futures.

That obviously means shifting our attitudes and revising the know-it-all mentality that the West has become addicted to over recent generations. However, it does not imply a complete abandonment of industrialization, or any requirement that “we” live like we once did. A few may think these desirable goals, but they simply won’t come about to any significant extent – which is fortunate because if they did they would harm millions. So, incidentally, would the dream of those like E.O. Wilson who wants to put half the world off limits to everyone but conservationists –thankfully, there’s little chance of that nightmare ever happening either (though they’re having a good go at imposing it on Africa).

Perhaps it would also be helpful if conservationists stopped complaining about “overpopulation” –all too often meaning there are too many black and brown people. Women’s empowerment and access to contraception are vital and must be supported, but the fact is that the population density in Africa remains low. South of the Sahara it’s just ten per cent that of England, and less than half that of the United States. It takes about forty Africans to consume the same as a single American. Environmentalists wanting to reduce the population to ease the pressure on resources might find it most efficient to focus first on wealthy Americans and Europeans (and remain childless themselves of course!).

Nostalgia might be hard to shake off, but it’s not a useful recipe for living tomorrow. At the same time, the current drive to consume more and more should be recognized for what it is, an unhinged gateway which leads inexorably towards a real wilderness, one so barren and hostile that only the most powerful are likely to have much chance living in it.

That may suit some of them just fine, but whether or not they are allowed to get away with it may well end up being a question of how much fight there is in the rest of us.

Stephen Corry has worked with Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples, since 1972. The not-for-profit was instrumental in stopping the Botswana government evicting the Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana. It works in partnership with tribal people to help them prevent their land being stolen, including for conservation. Survival has an office in the San Francisco Bay area. Its public campaign to change conservation can be joined at https://www.survivalinternational.org/conservation. This is one of a series of articles on the problem.

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.

Binyavanga Wainaina: The Writer Who Democratised Kenya’s Literary Space

By Rasna Warah

Our human ancestors were using stone tools well before Homo sapiens evolved three hundred thousand or more years ago. Tools have been discovered dating back three million years, no less than ten times older than our species. Considering that some birds and fish use –and even fashion– tools (watch crows making hooks), and that any implements made of wood or other organic material will not show in early fossil records, it would be astonishing if our hominid ancestors weren’t using them well before the earliest stone ones we’ve so far found.

The most important tool of all was fire. Like much in archaeology nowadays, where microscopic analysis is changing earlier guesswork, the first known date for cooking is being pushed ever further into our deepest past. It is hotly debated issue, but some now put it at around a million years ago. Again, that is long before our species evolved – though of course some of those earlier, now extinct, hominid species are our direct ancestors.

In the ancient Greek myth, Prometheus creates men but can’t endow them with any real strengths – all those have already been given to the animals – so he hands them fire, stolen from the gods, so they can thrive.

Many scientists believe that our very evolution could never have happened without cooking. It massively enhanced our calorie and nutrient intake, so enabling our teeth and guts to grow smaller and our brains, which need huge amounts of energy, to grow bigger. Brain size is a tradeoff between enabling women to walk upright (a wider pelvis needed to have even bigger-headed babies would make that impossible),and the inordinately large number of years we have to care for our helpless young, longer than any other species. That both engendered and depended on our enormous capacity for social cohesion, empathy and self-sacrifice. In brief, we made fire and cooked our food and that turned us into people, generally more virtuous than vicious –in spite of our striking inhumanities, and the religious dogmatists and “evolutionary psychologists” preaching otherwise.

This all started happening hundreds of thousands of years ago. Fire, manipulated by our ancestors, changed the world, and cooking was just one part: Regular undergrowth burning had the other big impact. It’s enormously beneficial: It prevents scorching wildfire conflagrations (look at California or Australia today), and also massively increases biodiversity, however counter-intuitive that may sound to urbanites. It enriches the soil, encourages fresh plant growth, enables wind-blown seeds to germinate in the nutrient-rich ash rather than wither in the undergrowth, and so favors some species over others. All this attracts herbivores, which are followed by predators.

When the incoming British colonists in the early twentieth century forbade the Martu Aboriginal people’s custom of controlled burning, the number of kangaroos and lizards in their part of the Australian Western Desert shrank. Aboriginal burning was far from destructive as the Europeans thought. It actually enhanced biodiversity and the food supply.

Several key principles have been noted for Aboriginal burning. Neighbors were always forewarned and agricultural lands were fired in rotation at specific times of year when the bush was in the right state and the weather favorable. This limited the fire’s intensity, allowed animals to move out of the way, avoided particular growing seasons, and stimulated particular seeds to germinate under the resulting hot ash. Needless to say, the British banned the practice in many parts of its empire, teaching that undergrowth firing was a destructive and primitive local custom. Some scientists remain schooled in such colonialist prejudice today. The ban on undergrowth burning is still in force in much of India and continues damaging the environment. The Soliga people in India, for example, say that the recent massive rise in forest fires in Karnataka would not have happened if they had been advising on forest management and allowed to continue their traditional burning.

People deliberately start fires in many environments and have done so for a very long time. For example, there is evidence that it’s gone on in Southeast Asia for at least forty-five thousand years.

Today, the Xavante in Brazil take careful note of wind and rain before setting their ceremonial fires to assist hunting. The fires remain low and not overly hot because they are lit so regularly that undergrowth is not allowed to grow up year after year. Fire-resistant plants can easily regenerate, and animals have plenty of time to move away. Fire can obviously be destructive, but that includes getting rid of species no one wants, such as deadly disease-bearing insects like the tsetse fly in Africa and the Loranthus tree-killing parasite in India. It also brings new plants and animals in its wake.

Regular burning is key in the various “slash-and-burn” methods of farming tropical forests. It is also called “swidden,” but journalists unfortunately favor the more dramatic name, which has become pejorative. Whatever one calls it, the practice is still widely denigrated and even criminalized by some conservationists, who could not be more wrong. Other scientists, sticking to the evidence, now see it as, “an integral part of many, if not most, tropical forest landscapes that are crucial to biodiversity conservation in all the remaining large tropical forests: Amazonia, Borneo, Central Africa.” The Hanunoo people in the Philippines grow over 280 types of food with swidden, and an even greater variety can be found elsewhere.

If undergrowth burning led to cooking, which seems logical, then it dates back over a million years. Considering that some birds not only make tools, but also actually manipulate bushfires by dropping burning twigs to help their hunting – something Australian Aboriginal people have long known – then it’s likely that our ancestors were changing the world with fire more than a million years ago. Science is unlikely ever to be precise about the timing, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the ancient world has long been shaped by women and men.

Human-made clearings, whether opened up with fire, axe, or both, modified the local fauna by changing animals’ food and distribution. There’s evidence from the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple reserve in India that tiger numbers increase in areas where tribal people still live –if, that is, they’re not threatened with eviction and so retain an incentive to maintain their environment. When the people move their fields to leave some dormant, they also abandon the ponds they made for drinking water. The clearings, remnant crops and water attract boar, deer, and other creatures. The big cats then thrive on the easy hunting found in the open spaces. When tribes are evicted “for tiger conservation” the authorities know they have to keep similar clearings open. As a Baiga man told Survival International, “If you remove us, the tiger will disappear as well.”

An increase in tiger numbers clearly impacts the cats’ prey. Deer are less plentiful, but they are healthier than they would be were they never hunted: Sick animals soon become tigers’ lunch. The smaller deer population in turn brings more tree growth which encourages different insect and bird life, and so on and on. It is all a shifting, interconnected balance that has included human beings as a key environmental shaper for many thousands of years.

When scientists asked them about beluga whale loss in the Arctic, the Inuit explained that warmer temperatures had brought an increase in the beaver population. The beavers took more of the fish, which the whales depended on, and so whale numbers had diminished. It simply hadn’t occurred to the whale experts to include beavers in their research, but the Inuit had observed and interpreted these connections as and when they were developing.

Western science has only begun to describe the depth and complexity of such associations over recent centuries, but other “non-scientific” ways of looking at our surroundings have been articulating it for a very long time.

Among the best known is the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime in which every geographical feature, every river, rock, plant, animal, even celestial bodies, and of course all the different tribes of humans, are descended from ancestors who emerged from the earth, and travelled around it in a series of adventures which are remembered and reenacted – and actively “re-created” through such reenactment– today. They capture an essential view of the world and our place in it which science seems to have largely bypassed in making its own invaluable discoveries.

Everything really is connected but, needless to say, the Dreamtime version was derided as primitive superstition by the European invaders who brought very different priorities from the British Isles. As well as massacring the native people, they infamously imported rabbits to shoot for sport. The creature immediately spread faster than any other mammal monitored anywhere and is now thought to have caused more species and habitat loss than anything else throughout the continent.

In brief, humans have been an integral part of the jigsaw of the planet’s ecosystem for thousands, even millions, of years. It is true we did eliminate some species, including the huge and dangerous auroch, bred by our ancestors into docile domestic cattle. However, prior to industrialization, it seems to be the case that we enhanced biodiversity rather than reduced it, at least in many places. Moreover, humans are much more than just a small player in the constantly shifting picture of life on Earth. Together with atmospheric change, we have been one of the controlling hands of nature for a very long time, including – and this is a vital point – when our population was far smaller than it is today. Whether it fits in with one’s beliefs or not, humans have always been changing the environment, for better or for worse.

The worse part is obvious, and is not confined to rabbits destroying Australian biodiversity. Massive urbanization and industrialization have made life easier for some over recent centuries, but have also created rampant environmental degradation, with escalating –in some cases permanent – damage to the health of significant flora and fauna, including humans. There is no shortage of warnings, studies, and prophets sounding that alarm. We can only pray it starts being properly heeded.

But what of the other side, how have people since antiquity made the world “better?” I’ve described the increased biodiversity, and that tigers seem to prefer it when they are around tribal people; it turns out that forest elephants do too. Baka “Pygmies” in the Congo Basin, for example, are characterized as “hunter-gatherers” but they also spread food plants around the forest, which attract animals. That is not just good for elephants: abandoned camps, fertilized with ash and waste, make good habitat for primates. In the Salonga National Park researchers think there may be up to five times more bonobo where the Iyaelima tribe live than where they don’t. The people were unusually allowed to remain inside the park because they too were classified as “wildlife”!

Reverence for elephants is widespread in Africa. The Baka, for example, think they have an intimate spiritual connection with the animals – which includes sustainably hunting them for food and ritual. This can seem anathema to those urban Europeans and North Americans for whom wild animals (big ones at least), are anthropomorphized and considered nicer than us, untrammeled by our supposedly unique sin and guilt. If anyone doubts the level of misanthropy to which such “Disneyfication” of nature can sink, they might read the comments accompanying internet stories about poaching. Extremist animal rights advocates repeatedly put animal life far above that of their fellow humans, particularly when the victims are African or Asian.

Unfortunately, this often goes unchallenged by those moderates who also value people. Extrajudicial killing, so-called “shoot on sight” is routinely applauded, even if some of the wounded and dead “poachers” include children, and were never criminals but simply poor people looking for food or even firewood or medicinal plants on what was once their land. Those accepting this as mere “collateral damage” in a righteous war against poaching are rejecting human rights, often gleefully.

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.

Binyavanga Wainaina: The Writer Who Democratised Kenya’s Literary Space

By Rasna Warah “If we were to leave this jungle, then it would be difficult for it to survive. There is forest and water because we are here. If we were to leave, then come back in a while and look, there will be nothing left.” ~ Baiga tribesman, India

The noted environmentalist, Robert Goodland, was an early torchbearer of the warning that if you cut down a lot of Amazonia, it is destroyed forever. He explained that the rainforest lies on extremely poor soil and grows largely off its own detritus. When very large areas are felled, the trees aren’t able to grow back as they can’t produce the wet and rotting vegetation needed for the forest to regenerate.

When I started working for tribal peoples’ rights nearly fifty years ago, I often referred to Goodland’s work:

“RaceAmazonia, and it’s gone, destroying not only its indigenous inhabitants but much of the rest of the world besides, because the resultant increase in carbon in the atmosphere would accelerate climate change (as it would eventually come to be called), raise sea levels and drown cities like London, New York and San Francisco”

Goodland was broadly right, but he omitted one aspect of a vital thread in the complex web connecting all life – prehistoric humans. Mysteriously, Amazonia has some zones of rich humus called “dark earth”. Although Western scientists have only started studying it fairly recently, dark earth has been known about for at least a couple of centuries. After the Civil War, it was even cited as enticement for American Confederates to emigrate to Brazil, where slavery was still legal.

Science has now figured out that this highly fertile soil is not a “natural” phenomenon. It was made by people – the result of countless generations of indigenous women and men discarding food and waste and enriching the soil in other ways. It’s come as a surprise to many that the pre-Columbian inhabitants of Amazonia had such an impact on their environment.

The first European explorers reported seeing cities of thousands and “fine highways” along the rivers they descended. This used to be dismissed as a sixteenth-century invention, but scientists are finally recognising that human habitation of Amazonia was so extensive, starting ten thousand years ago or more and rising to a population of perhaps five or six million. When the Spanish arrived, most areas had been cleared at least once, while leaving the surrounding forest intact and so avoiding Goodland’s total collapse prediction. It wasn’t just along the big rivers either; satellite imagery, backed by traditional archeology, is now revealing extensive prehistoric habitation in the forest interior as well.

It turns out that Amazonia doesn’t match at all with the image Europeans have projected on it in recent centuries. It was never a “wilderness” inhabited only by a few people leaving little impression on the landscape, at least not for thousands of years. On the contrary, the ecosystem has been shaped – actually created – by communities who adapted their surroundings to suit their taste.

These early “Indians” hunted hundreds of animals and birds and doubtless made pets of others. They used thousands of different plants for food, medicine, ritual, religion, hunting and fishing tools and poisons, decoration, clothing, building, and so on. They cultivated some close to their dwellings, and planted others along distant hunting and fishing trails. They spread seeds and cuttings, carrying them from place to place.

They significantly altered the flora, not only by moving plants around – their ancestors, for example, may well have carried the calabash, or bottle gourd, all the way from Africa – but also by changing them through selective breeding. Science has, so far, counted 83 distinct plant species that were altered by people in Amazonia, and the region is now recognised as a major world centre of prehistoric crop domestication.

An easy and obvious way to improve plants is to use only seeds from trees producing the biggest fruits and always to leave someone the tree to reproduce, but other modifications went much further. For example, manioc, the most common foodstuff, barely survives without human intervention. A typical Amazon tribe recognises well over a hundred distinct varieties of this single species (and doesn’t need writing to remember them). Now it’s one of the world’s main staples, sustaining half a billion people throughout the tropics and beyond, yet it produces very few viable seeds. Manioc generally survives and spreads only if people plant its cuttings. Like other fully domesticated plants, it’s a human “invention”.

Europeans brought catastrophe to the Amazon rainforest in the sixteenth century. Within just two or three generations of first contact, probably more than ninety per cent of the indigenous population was dead from violence and new diseases against which they had no immunity. Proportionally, it was one of the biggest known wipeouts of the last thousand years, though most people have never heard of it. It wasn’t total though: Some Indians survived both the epidemics and the subsequent, and still ongoing, colonial genocide.

Others avoided both disease and killing and retreated away from the big rivers. Well over a hundred such “uncontacted tribes” have survived. Where their land hasn’t been stolen, Amazon Indians – now totaling over a million – are still enjoying their own, human-made environment, and not any invented “wilderness”. They don’t live like their ancestors did (no one does, not even the uncontacted tribes) but many seem to have kept some of the same values.

Research is revealing that practically everywhere you look, the solid ground on our planet has been changed by humans for thousands of years, if not longer. Although this isn’t what is generally taught, it’s really little more than common sense. As in the Amazon Basin, prehistoric people would obviously have favoured food plants with the best yields wherever they could, and would have carried them from place to place. The “pristine” hunter-gatherer who has practically no impact on the environment is as much a myth as any “untrammeled wilderness.”

***

Nowhere is the prehistoric shaping of landscape clearer than in Australia, where the long-accepted narrative is now being turned on its head. Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for at least 65,000 years, or perhaps up to twice as long (which would upset current “out of Africa” theories). They were there well before our species turned up in either the Americas or Europe. Like Amazon Indians, they too have long been described as small bands of “hunter-gatherers” having practically no impact on the “wilderness”.

It turns out that, as in Amazonia, this isn’t true in Australia either. The early British explorers reported seeing vast areas that reminded them of English estates. There were cultivated grasslands, cleared of scrubby undergrowth but scattered with stands of trees giving edible fruits and shade. It’s now thought that some 140 different grasses were harvested. One surveyor noted, “The desert was softened into the agreeable semblance of a hay-field…we found the ricks or hay-cocks extending for miles.” He recorded how the Aboriginal people made “a kind of paste or bread” and grindstones some 30,000 years old have been found. That’s well over twice as old as humankind’s supposed “discovery of agriculture” in Mesopotamia.

Aboriginal people preserved and stored food, including tubers, grains, fish, game, fruits, caterpillars, insects, and much else. Harvests of both grain and edible insects brought together large congregations, doubtless to trade, to perform ceremonies and rituals, and to forge new liaisons and alliances.

The Europeans also reported finding quarries near villages, and towns of numerous stone-built houses. One is reckoned to have provided housing for 10,000 people. They also came across dams, irrigation systems, wells, artificial waterholes – stocked by carrying fish from one to the other – and fish traps, which might well be the first human structures so far found on Earth. One archaeological team thinks they are at least 40,000 years old.

The world’s oldest edge-ground axe found so far comes from Australia and dates back to at least 46,000 years, but irrespective of whether they had such tools or “discovered” agriculture before others, it now seems clear that the Aboriginal people of Australia were changing the landscape at least as much as anyone else around the world. Just as in Amazonia, the European newcomers quickly destroyed all this. In many areas, their imported sheep destroyed the ground cover within just a few years. Overnight dews became less humid; the earth hardened, less rain was absorbed and so flowed into the rivers which then flooded, washing away topsoil. It was all completely contrary to the settlers’ conviction that they were introducing sensible and productive land use. Rather, the earth’s fertility, which had been carefully husbanded over countless generations, was eroded in a single short human lifespan. The colonists understood nothing of what they found in Australia.

An extraordinary map showing how much of the continent was once covered within the Aboriginal grain belt, as compared to how little is nowadays, should surely feature in every Australian school. It shows the quite extraordinary degree of ecological loss that the attempted destruction of Aboriginal Australia brought in its wake.

In some Australian coastal areas, killer whales and dolphins were observed, apparently working in tandem with people. They drove other whales and fish towards the shore where they could be easily harvested, with both people and dolphins taking their share. This astonishing partnership was noted by several early explorers but doesn’t seem to have been recorded elsewhere in the world as far as I know.

It’s certainly likely, however, that our ancestors in many places have long lived in a beneficial symbiosis with animals, including “wild” ones, just as tribal peoples do today. For example, the Hadza in Tanzania have long located honey though a whistled exchange with a species of bird which, though wild, has learned to lead the hunter to the right tree. It’s certainly likely, however, that our ancestors in many places have long lived in a beneficial symbiosis with animals, including “wild” ones, just as tribal peoples do today. For example, the Hadza in Tanzania have long located honey though a whistled exchange with a species of bird which, though wild, has learned to lead the hunter to the right tree. The man climbs to the hive and smokes out the bees. The groggy insects focus on rescuing enough honey to move elsewhere, and so don’t attack. The hunter collects the honeycomb, while the bird, smaller than a blackbird, waits patiently to claim its share. Both its common and scientific name acknowledges its job – greater honeyguide (indicator indicator).

No one can ever know how long ago this sublime relationship first developed. We are certain, however, that other animals have not only been deliberately moved long distances but also, like plants, turned from one species into another. For example, European ancestors were breeding dogs from wolves at least 15,000 years ago, and likely more than twice that (though today’s dogs don’t seem to be directly descended from the earliest examples so far found).

Dogs extend a human’s hunting range and ability, inevitably altering the balance of predators and so modifying other fauna and flora in turn. It’s simple: If people hunt more wild pigs, say, as a result of having dogs, then more plants which the pigs eat will grow to fruition. This alone will change the flora – though it won’t be noticed by Europeans, who imagine all landscapes are “wild” unless they’re farmed European-style.

Their error is partly rooted in the enduring, though entirely mistaken, belief in the so-called discovery of agriculture. However, much it is repeated as an article of faith. This didn’t take place in the Middle East around 12,000 years ago, and didn’t result in a leap forward in the quality of life. (In fact, it’s now thought that the resultant increase in sedentarism and animal-to-human disease transmission initiated a great increase in human suffering. The fictions first emerged in the early twentieth century at a time when “scientific racism” was widely accepted in Northern Europe and America.

The myths are intertwined: The archeologists saw themselves as descendants of the first agriculturalists, and were convinced they were responsible for the most advanced civilisation on Earth. Europe, they believed, had forged ahead when the other (supposed) “races” lagged behind.

It turns out that the really hurtful fantasy is the invention of this “superior white man” rather than any “noble savage.” The truth is that people were taming, domesticating or moving plants and animals long before the proliferation of grain crops in any imagined “cradle of civilisation.”

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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

By Rasna Warah

“And you, do you go on a bicycle?”

“I do go on a bicycle, yes.”

The question was meant to be an insult but there was no comeback to the answer. Tom Mboya had just interrupted Martin Shikuku’s speech in Parliament to ask him whether he was any different from others who “…change cars everyday…” Shikuku’s answer, even then in 1964, was shocking – and even true to an extent. A few years later, he would be cycling to Parliament in a bid to encourage his colleagues to follow suit and “meet the people”. It clearly never caught on.

Shikuku had reason to be concerned. Everyone in the independence generation had grown up in a time where the bicycle was the most accessible means of transport. In their varied careers in the colony, they had cycled to school, work, social events, and political meetings. As soon as they could upgrade to motor vehicles, they ditched their bicycles and became part of a capitalist class with a penchant for conspicuous consumption. In the years just before and after independence, this newly minted political elite engaged in a race to purchase the best cars they could find. The only rule was to not get cars, or a fleet, better than the president’s. As he unveiled the national flag in September 1963, Tom Mboya set out the rules for flying it. He specifically asked people “not to fly the national flag on bicycles and so forth” and not to make copies of it with “cheap material in River Road”. The flag, he said, “must be treated with respect”.

In 1963, an American businessman gifted Jomo Kenyatta a Lincoln Convertible to add to his fleet, which included a Mercedes 300 SE and a Rolls Royce, setting the bar quite high. By 1966, he had yet another Mercedes, but ordered a Rolls Royce meant for the mayor of Nairobi returned to London. This acquisition spree by men, many of whom had been careless just a few years earlier, was a waste of public funds. It was also a psychological coup, a statement of a new class that did not want to be associated with poverty in any form.

As he unveiled the national flag in September 1963, Tom Mboya set out the rules for flying it. He specifically asked people “not to fly the national flag on bicycles and so forth” and not to make copies of it with “cheap material in River Road”. The flag, he said, “must be treated with respect”. This critical symbol of a new nation was now limited to the select few who could afford, by virtue of their political and economic positions, to drive. To fly it on a bicycle was sacrilege. The bicycle was now what shecyclesNairobi calls “a strong symbol of poor man’s mobility in Nairobi, second to walking.”

In Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s short story “Wedding at the Cross”, the (Raleigh) bicycle features prominently as a symbol of poverty that was not acceptable to the “Christian and propertied class”. The protagonist, Wariuki, has to lose his bicycle, and himself, to become what he thinks society needs him to be, and to show his parents-in-law that he is good enough to marry their daughter, Mariamu. By the time he meets them again after independence, he is a rich businessman driving a new Mercedes Benz. In another of Ngugi’s short stories, “A Mercedes Funeral”, a poor man’s funeral planning becomes the epicentre of political competition. One politician offers a Mercedes to transport the corpse, trumping his competitors. The implication in these postcolonial tales is the same: the bicycle had lost its cool.

The earliest bicycles in Kenya were used by the unholy tripartite of colonial conquest: administrators, missionaries, and settlers. Some were given as presents to servants and friends, such as Nabongo Mumia, and before long the domestic market grew. It was still significantly smaller than the Ugandan market, where a cycling craze was well underway by the mid-1920s. Of the 4,852 bicycles that were imported in 1927, for example, only 1,719 of them were meant for the Kenyan market. At the time, overall demand in both countries had been falling steadily from a short-lived peak of nearly 24,000 bicycles two years earlier.

By 1930, demand had dipped to 1,295 bicycles. It recovered, clocking 14,003 units by 1936. Despite these fluctuations, bicycles were still outselling all other forms of mechanised transport. They were an expensive purchase only affordable to a select few who had jobs that paid well enough to save up. This cost element also meant that only men, who had actively been forced into wage labour since the early 1900s, could afford them. In the migrant labour economy, a bicycle was the fastest way for them to get to work, and for some, to get the work done.

Even when more women were employed in formal wage labour, they were mostly limited to resident agriculture and low wage employment. Combined with pre-existing perspectives on gendered roles, cycling emerged as an exclusively male space. It explains why nearly all the major stories involving bikes from this time involve male riders, from Kenyatta’s famous bicycle in the 1920s to the story of Kamawe Musungu, whose murder led to the first (and only) execution of a white man in Kenya. A forgotten detail of the assassination of Chief Waruhiu, which triggered the State of Emergency, is that his bodyguard was not in the car with him because he (Waruhiu) had forced him to cycle back on his friend’s bicycle.

Most of the women who rode bicycles during this time came from families that already owned a bicycle. A good number of stories of the first women to get an education involve a bicycle, often a father carrying his daughter to school. Before long, in the 1940s and 1950s especially, women were riding too, although female riders never became as prevalent as male ones. This was partly because, as bicycle use became an almost exclusively rural form of transport, cultural views on female riders did not change. They extended not just to riding, but also to usage, as a by-law requiring women to sit sideways, introduced in the Kisumu County Assembly in 2013, shows.

The safety bicycle

Bicycles were still a rather recent innovation at the start of the colonial conquest of the African continent. A German man, Baron Karl Von Drais, filed the first patent of the modern bike’s ancestor in 1818. His design was inspired by the “Year without a Summer” (1816), which followed the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before. Considered the worst eruption in recent history, it lowered global temperatures and ruined crop harvests for several years. The ensuing famine killed humans, and more importantly for this story, horses. That presented a transport problem for which Drais had an answer.

His invention, the Laufmachine (“running machine”) was a wooden, human-propelled, two-wheeled machine. It had no gears or pedals, which would take another five decades to invent. But it, and later variants, caught on. One of those variants was called The Boneshaker because it had a wooden frame and metal tires, making for an uncomfortable ride. Others had one massive wheel and a much smaller one. Still, they had the same basic problems as Drais’s machine; they were heavy, uncomfortable, and unsafe. Such variants informed the perception that the bicycle was a toy for daring, wealthy young men.

All that changed in 1885, when the “safety bicycle”, as we know it today, with its metal frame and two same-sized wheels, was invented. Two years later, a Scottish veterinarian called John B. Dunlop experimented with pneumatic tyres on his son’s tricycle. He filed and got a patent for the tyres, although he lost it two years later because another Scotsman had filed a similar patent four decades prior. Combined, these inventions triggered a cycling craze in the 1890s that led to more affordable bicycles and eventually, their presence in the colonies. Colonies became even more important markets after bicycle demand stalled in the United States as Americans ditched other forms of transport for Henry Ford’s Model T.

By the 1930s, there were several brands battling for the East African market. Almost all were British, and the most prestigious of them was Raleigh. The introduction to the 1932 Raleigh Sales Catalogue claims that the Baganda were so enthralled with the bicycle that “the name has been adopted as their common definition of quality, and should a necktie, cap, or any other object meet with their enthusiastic approval, immediately it is dubbed ‘Raleigh’.”

The competition, which had brands such as Humber, Hercules, and BSA, was still formidable. Bicycles, unlike gramophones (the other luxury item of the day), had a primary appeal beyond prestige. They offered mobility in an economy that was increasingly demanding it, with few public options in place.

The bicycle economy

The bicycle that caught on was the single-speed, steel-frame roadster. Like Henry Ford’s Model T, it came in black. It was relatively within reach, economically, and to some extent, durable. It also needed to be registered, and over time, modified to add parts, such as reflectors, as road rules evolved. But bicycles offered an unmatchable utility because they could perform many other roles, including as economic and social tools.

The brands advertised heavily, and many of them were some of the earliest advertisers in local- language newspapers. In a Mambo Leo newspaper advert from June 1930, Raleigh advertised this claim: “It has strength of a lion! The lightness of a feather! It goes faster than the wind!” Raleigh used different variations of this idea in most of its artwork, incorporating a man, a lion, and a bicycle. A BSA bicycle ad from around the same time shows a smartly dressed man cycling, and two ladies in the background checking him out. A slightly more forward-thinking Raleigh billboard depicts a man riding a bicycle in the foreground, and two ladies cycling in the background. Its copy reads “Be Modern Ride a Raleigh.”

This primary market also spawned off another source of employment – bicycle mechanics. Bicycle mechanics were a unique class at the time because they were mostly self-employed, and their primary customers were black. The competition among them drove down repair prices so that if you owned a bicycle by the 1940s, you didn’t need to pay a herd of cattle to get it repaired, as Nabongo Mumia had done in 1910.

Mechanics and bicycle owners got their spares from Asian-owned shops, which thrived as bicycle usage increased. In 1936, for example, bicycle tyre imports were ten times higher than the number of bicycles imported. This trade built a few Indian tycoons, such as Kassam Kanji Rahim Varsi, who got a loan from his father-in-law and opened a bicycle parts shop in Nairobi. By the 1950s, Bata and the Avon Rubber Company made bicycle tyres in Kenya, but other parts still had to be shipped in.

While many of the bicycle’s earliest users used it to commute to and from, and during, work, people found other economic uses as well. The most resilient of these is transport, which grew out of a demand for transport services at the Kenya-Uganda border. The bicycle was also used to transport food, at times animals, tools, and other materials. Others modified their bicycles to create mobile business units, such as mounting a knife-sharpening stone oh the bicycle.

The prestige and utility of cycling also meant bicycles were a frequent target for burglary. Bicycle theft was such a problem in East Africa in the 1950s that Dar es Salaam had a special Bicycle Squad within its police force and Uganda had a Bicycle Thefts Committee around the same time. In Kenya, it was often listed among the most common thefts of property, and magistrates regularly whipped young offenders who were caught with stolen bicycles. Early administrators in Nairobi also employed vagrancy laws to arrest people for a vaguely described offence called “misuse of bicycle”.

The Wabenzi class In the post-war period of the late 1940s, thousands of demobilised soldiers sought transport licences. Many bought lorries and cars, but the bicycle remained the most frequently used form of transport in the country, especially in rural areas. As more people joined a fledging white collar class in the late 50s and the early 60s, the bicycle remained a symbol of the blue-collar worker and ultimately, poverty. The only black people who had cars before the 1950s were colonial chiefs and a few enterprising businessmen.

Before long this cadre of car owners would include independence politicians, who bought them for campaigns and travels. They quickly ditched the small cars they had acquired in the late 50s and early 60s and switched to fuel guzzlers. What mattered now was what type of car one drove, hence the rise of the “Wabenzi” – a generation that even included at least one high profile theft of a Mercedes Benz from a showroom in Nairobi.

The statement “cannot even afford a bicycle” appears several times in the Hansard in reference to the economic plight of former legislators. By itself, it suggests a lifelong responsibility for the taxpayer to fund the lifestyles of its political class, even after they have left the public space. In a discussion about Daniel Arap Moi’s retirement benefits in 2003, one of the main issues was why his bodyguards and watu wa mikono also needed Mercedes Benzes. The alternative, of course, was not bicycles.

For this class, bicycles were only good as toys for children. This was not a view limited to Kenya or East Africa, as the global bicycle market was struggling as more people opted for cars. Bicycle manufacturers had to find new ways of selling them, which pushed them back to the original sales pitch of the bicycle as a children’s toy and a tool for extreme sports. The single-speed roadster was now a product more popular for its function over form, and its users invisible to the “cultured” classes.

Still, as grown-ups moved to cars, bicycles for their children became a major class distinction. In the 1970s and 1980s, owning a BMX was a middle-class status symbol. Ironically for these classes, the car craze meant that cyclists were forgotten in infrastructure and budget planning. Private cars and motorways took over, and riding a bicycle in an urban centre increasingly became dangerous. This meant that children who grew up in cities and towns were not allowed to ride bicycles on the roads because of the dangers cars represented.

The implication for the majority of bicycle users was far worse, as they were seen as a nuisance on the roads. Bicycle lanes were not a priority, and even essential things like proper bicycle parking were only available in some colonial-era structures. Import duty remained prohibitively high (in some years as high as 90 per cent) until the government started systematically reducing it in the mid-1980s. Even before then, bicycles remained an important economic tool for a silent majority who could not afford private cars or even the expense of public transport.

The end of the bicycle’s run as a symbol of prestige was to be expected, but it did not end its usage among the working class or even the lower cadres of government employees. In 1990, for example, the government imported 525 bicycles to be issued to field agricultural extension staff on loan basis. Bicycles were bought for local government employees, and even health workers working in HIV/AIDS prevention in the early 2000s. They’ve even been used in political campaigns as recently as 2017, before being quickly replaced with fuel-guzzlers that constitute the welcome package for our legislators.

The true threat to the bicycle’s run as the wheels of the people was not the car, but its motorised descendant. There were only 525 registered motorcycles in Kenya in 1963, and only 4,136 in 2004. By the time duty on motorcycles below 250cc was waived in 2007, these numbers had grown to 16,923. Today, there are closer to a million bicycles, serving different functions but primarily as boda bodas (bicycle taxis).

But the single-speed roadster is still remarkably popular, mostly because of the same reason it has always been popular – it doesn’t need fuel, and it is cheap to repair. Plus, it’s good exercise.

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.

Binyavanga Wainaina: The Writer Who Democratised Kenya’s Literary Space

By Rasna Warah On March 12th 2018, Kenya, coached by Innocent Simiyu, trailed USA, led by former Kenya 7s coach, Mike Friday, by 12-19 with 1:46 left in the semi-finals of the Vancouver leg of the HSBC Sevens Circuit. The winner of this match would meet Fiji in the final of the Vancouver Sevens.

Two converted tries by American speedster Perry Baker had given the US a 14-0 lead that was halved by Nelson Oyoo, whose dancing feet hoodwinked the American big man Danny Barrett for five points in the centre. Oyoo went over again, one and a half minutes after the half-time hooter, shrugging off the attention of American speedster 2.0 Carlin Isles and taking advantage of a wonderful interception by Kenyan superstar Collins “Collo” Injera deep in the Kenyan half, to bring the Kenyans within two points of the Americans.

The Americans regained the lead at the start of the second half after Isles, arguably the fastest man in sevens rugby, had put on the afterburners, to score a try. Straight from the restart, Kenya won the ball and moved it swiftly to Andrew Amonde, on as a substitute, who tucked it under his right arm and pumped forward. From the resultant ruck, the ball moved to Jeffrey Oluoch, for a nifty switch that opened space for Collins Injera. Collo blasted through the American defense, and appeared destined for the try zone, only for Perry Baker, to catch up with him. Nevertheless, just as Baker sealed his tackle, Collo had the presence of mind to offload the ball to Willy Ambaka and Ambaka, with his 98th try on the circuit, dove in for a try. Sammy Oliech proceeded to convert to even the scores to 19 all.

One would assume that this is the story of how Kenya 7s found success in Vancouver, and catapulted itself into being a sevens powerhouse. It is not. Instead, it is the story of how the management of Kenya Rugby Union, sabotaged Kenya Sevens or as coach Simiyu phrased it, “They are the same people. They never change. Year in, year out.”

With 24 seconds on the clock, Oliech takes the kick off. The Americans win the restart, and pass the ball, looking for an opening in the Kenyan defense as the hooter buzzes. Danny Barrett, holding the ball, attempts to run through Oyoo, but the Kenyan brings him down. The Americans ruck. The ball pops out to Perry Baker, moves down the line to Martin Losefu and then Bevon Williams who runs into a solid tackle from the Kenyan captain Oscar Ouma. The Americans ruck. The Kenyans who had established a reputation as the best team in the breakdown on the circuit win the ruck as Collins Injera steals the ball. Losefu brings him down as he off-loads to Eden Agero who, in the face of the heavy American charge, pops it to Ouma. It is thirty-five seconds after the hooter and Ouma, holding the ball under his right arm, barrels towards the try-zone to seal the game at 24-19 securing a place for Kenya in the final of the 2018 Vancouver Sevens.

Kenya became a core member of the IRB Sevens circuit in 2004. Unlike the national football, cricket and athletics bodies, Kenya Rugby Football Union (nowadays known as Kenya Rugby Union) did not receive support from the International Rugby Board, impeding investment in a countrywide developmental program, and relied on the school network for their players.

In Shujaa’s (The Kenya National Sevens Team) first season as a core member of the circuit, the star player was Oscar Osir who like Edward Rombo before him was a swashbuckling winger with pace to burn. Osir had developed his talent at Nairobi Secondary, and he, together with other players who had developed their talents in the school system such as Benyamin Ayimba at Maseno School, Dennis ‘Ironman’ Mwanja at Musingu High, Ted Omondi at St. Mary’s Yala, among others— led Kenya into their first season as a core team. Shujaa went through a steep learning curve on the international scene.

It was not until Ayimba’s appointment as coach in 2009 that Kenya shed off its tag as the whipping boy of the circuit. In his first season as coach, Kenya reached the semi-finals seven times out of nine and the final once. Collins Injera became the World Series top try scorer while his brother, Humphrey Kayange was nominated as IRB Sevens player of the year in 2009. The Ayimba-led team reached the semi-finals of the Sevens World Cup at the end of the season.

Ayimba’s next two seasons were not as impressive as the first, and neither was his replacement, Mitch Ocholla’s sole season in 2011-2012. Under pressure from the sponsors, Kenya Airways, and the IRB, KRU took their search for the next Shujaa coach abroad. In came English man Mike Friday. Friday was coach for only a season, but what a season it was. The team finished 5th in the standings. Willy Ambaka was voted into the season dream team, and, at the World Cup, at the end of the season, the team replicated its performances from three years earlier, reaching the semi-finals, with only a last-gap tackle by Englishman Dan Norton preventing Ambaka from netting a try that would have kept them in the tournament.

However, Friday left the team at the end of the season, in almost the exact way that Simiyu would five years later. He was controversially fired by KRU and promptly reinstated just before the 2013 World Cup in Moscow. After the World Cup, he walked away completely. A new coach, South African Paul Treu, was hired, leading Shujaa in the 2014/15 season, but he would resign abruptly citing interference by some members of the KRU board. It was during Treu’s tenure that KRU reviewed player salaries leading to the senior players including Injera, Oscar Ouma, Dennis Ombachi and Billy Odhiambo, refusing to play for Kenya. Former Kenyan international Felix Ochieng, who was Treu’s assistant, was promoted to head coach for the remainder of 2014/2015 season.

The next season would see the return of Benjamin Ayimba for a second time, a reign which would culminate in Kenya’s first ever main cup win, at the Singapore Sevens in April 2016. However, Ayimba’s glory did not last, as he found himself at loggerheads with the KRU board allegedly over a move to fight for the players’ rights. Ayimba’s appointment was revoked at the end of the season and KRU was back shopping for a new coach, one who they hoped would not get under their skins as Ayimba had.

On October 17th, 2016, Innocent “Namcos” Simiyu was appointed head coach of the national sevens team. His remit was to ensure that Kenya became a serious contender at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Simiyu, a former Kenya 7s and Kenya 15s captain, took to the task with gusto, and he came up with a four-year plan. The first year was supposed to be the foundation year, to focus on the systemic concerns such as issues with player contracts and equipment that had previously affected player performances. In the second year, the team’s performance was projected to rise to the challenge of securing a place in the top six teams alongside a plan to build a Kenya Sevens B-team that would be playing five tournaments per year.

By March 2018, Simiyu’s plan was well and truly on course. The team was performing exceptionally on the circuit, and gaining plaudits for their wonderful displays on the turnover, in which they were by far the best team on the circuit. The improved physicality and tactical awareness of the team was due to the work put in by Simiyu and Geoffrey Kimani, the Strength and Conditioning Coach, combined with sessions with IRB referees that delved into the rule changes in the game. Furthermore, late in March 2018, the B-team, which Simiyu had been advocating for, had won the Victoria Sevens, with Brian Wahinya and Levy Amunga, who had been schoolmates in St. Mary’s, Yala, scoring the tries in the final.

After a stellar performance by Shujaa in the Vancouver leg of the IRB Sevens Circuit, in March 2018, Brand Kenya approached Kenya Rugby Union to appoint the team as brand ambassadors of the country. As part of their deal with the players, Brand Kenya was to pay each of the players a one- time fee of a hundred thousand Kenya shillings, and KRU instructed the players that, rather than having each player deal directly with Brand Kenya, they would take over and make sure the payments reached each individual player. The deal was made public on May 24th, 2018, by Richard Omwela, the Kenya Rugby Union board chairman.

However, by the time the team was playing in the Paris leg of the HSBC Circuit on 9th June, no money had hit the players’ personal accounts. The players, in a desperate attempt to make a point, decided to mask the ‘Make it Kenya’ logo on their national jerseys before their second game against Fiji in Paris. Shujaa beat the sevens heavyweights, winning 22-19, ending the Fijians’ 24-match unbeaten run in the circuit. Despite the win, KRU and Brand Kenya officials were furious, and Omwela promised consequences. Several sources interviewed stated that Brand Kenya had indeed paid out the money to KRU’s accounts before the Paris leg only for the money to be rerouted to take care of some pending overdrafts that KRU had. The board defended its position, stating the delay in the payment to the players had been clearly communicated through the management.

Incensed, Simiyu got embroiled in this saga, and earned the sack as a result, with his assistant, William Webster, mandated to guide the team through the World Cup, six weeks away in San Francisco, USA. Simiyu says that he had been in a meeting with the rest of the coaching staff when he received word of a disciplinary meeting constituted against the players. Simiyu went to the disciplinary meeting, requested to be heard and was told to wait outside. He obliged. According to Citizen TV, Simiyu had stormed a tribunal hearing between Brand Kenya and the Kenya Sevens team, to plead the player’s case following the fiasco in Paris. While Simiyu denies storming the meeting, he does not deny his anger at the injustice of the situation. “We were six weeks to the World Cup, and KRU initiated a disciplinary process on the players without notifying me…I felt that, as head of the program, I had to be involved because I knew the issues.”

Just like Ayimba before him, Simiyu’s tiff with the board was due to his insistence on fighting for the players.“It was more of a kangaroo court,” he says, “because the people who started the problem were the ones disciplining the players, and this did not make sense. Because the issues with regards to Brand Kenya started at the office of the CEO and the DOR (Director of Rugby), and they were solely responsible for what happened, but they are the same ones who are now disciplining the players. It was more of a cover-up so that they can sell a story to the public.”

The sacking of Simiyu, and the subsequent refusal by KRU to renew his contract, is an indicator of a dangerous pattern that has emerged in Kenya Sevens in the last few years. While some would claim that it was an individual disagreement between KRU and Simiyu, it is telling that senior players such as Collins Injera, Oscar Ouma, Oscar Ayodi, and Willy Ambaka and virtually all the players who were contracted by KRU to play for Shujaa last season have refused to play Sevens rugby this season.

Kenyans on social media reacted in anger at the move to fire Simiyu. The players, too, reacted, as they swore not to play in the World Cup as long as Simiyu was not the coach. Rashid Echesa, the former Cabinet Secretary for Sports, intervened, and, after a meeting with the KRU board led by Vice-Chairman, Thomas Opiyo, Simiyu was restored to his post. However, by the time he was reinstated, it was too late for the team. Shujaa had lost four weeks of active preparation time, and it cost them in San Francisco. After two consecutive semi-final appearances at the Sevens world cup, Shujaa failed to qualify for the quarters of the 2018 World Cup, losing their last group stage match 31-26 to Scotland, after having squandered a 28-5 lead. This was to be Simiyu’s last assignment as Kenya Sevens head coach. Despite leading the team to a record points tally of 104 points in the Circuit, KRU decided not to renew his contract, choosing instead to advertise the position. The four- year plan had now been abandoned.

According to Simiyu, the problems in Kenyan rugby are obvious, and one does not need a rocket science degree to point them out. First, he feels that there is a lack of proper governance within Kenyan rugby. The leadership is irrational, has issues with their integrity, and the people at the top have bought their way into the leadership of the game. Furthermore, Simiyu argues that several of the clubs are briefcase clubs (either owned by a company, or run by a few individuals, and, sometimes, just one individual), and the people use their clubs to advance their personal ambitions. “It will be more about sharing resources. That’s what happened with Kenya Sevens. They used the national team as a kitty to share, to secure votes, so that they can get elected.” This is what had happened in 2014, when the KRU Chairman, Mwangi Muthee, together with KRU directors Godwin Kiruga and Maurice Masiga, quit in a huff (Peninah Wahome, the KRU Director of Development, would soon follow). In his resignation letter, Muthee talked about “serious questions raised by sponsors about some board members’ involvement in issues of conflict of interests in the supplying of kit to the KRU and the fraternity, questionable procurement of airline tickets worth tens of millions of shillings outside established KRU channels, questionable hotel accommodation contracts, and many other inflated bills and cases of unbecoming language to downright insulting language directed at senior management of some of our sponsors.” Muthee’s piledriver hit hard, and the national government promised to clear “the rugby mess.”

Simiyu feels that some of the people on KRU the board, are out to deliberately sabotage Kenya Sevens. “We had put up a plan how we approach the game, even in terms of pre-season, conditioning aspect, health aspect, the management and administration…by the time we were going to the World Cup, all those things were being removed. By the time our contracts were ending, it was not clear whether there would be a pre-season. There was no point basically to apply.”

Ayimba is equally blunt in his assessment of KRU. In his view, “they know where they want us to be, they don’t have a plan, neither to do they support anybody who’s got a radical idea…Right now we just have people who are happy to be in office and to be called KRU directors, as opposed to people who want to make a difference.”

On January 16th, 2019, the Kenya 7s team to the Hamilton and Sydney legs of the 2018-2019 HSBC World Sevens Series did not include any of the players who had represented Kenya at the 7s World Cup six months earlier. The players who had travelled to the World Cup had been expected to form the core of the 2018-2019 team which would challenge for Top Four status, in line with the four-year plan that had been agreed with Innocent Simiyu when he was appointed Head Coach of Kenya Sevens in 2016. That none of the senior players was named in the team for these two legs, and that the team accumulated a grand total of four points from these two legs is a sign of how quickly things have unraveled for Kenya Sevens and at the Kenya Rugby Union. This unraveling is part of an existing pattern, rather than a new event.

The Jacob Ojee-captained side was led by Paul Murunga Amunavi, the immediate former Homeboyz RFC coach, who had been appointed Simiyu’s successor. Murunga was appointed coach on the back of Homeboyz’ dominant performance in the local sevens circuit, having won four of the six tournaments, and finished second and third in the other two. In an interview with the Daily Nation, Murunga claimed that the aim was “to a build a strong side next season that will reach the medal bracket at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games and go on to win the World Cup in 2021.” Speaking separately, Thomas Odundo, the Director of Rugby at KRU, offers thoughts which do not tally with Murunga’s assessment. He says, “I can’t say I can tell you what will be there in two years’ time. For instance, one, we don’t know how the World Series is going to end, I don’t know. It might go either way, we might fail to remain in the World Series”.

On February 2nd, 2019, ten months after the win over the USA in Vancouver, the Kenyans faced the Americans again. The Kenyans had faced USA after Vancouver, drawing 19-19 in the London leg of the circuit. Just over half a year later, the team is no longer the same. Gone are Willy Ambaka, Collins Injera and Nelson Oyoo, the try-getters in the last two USA-Kenya matchups. Gone too are Oscar Ouma, who was in the dream team last season, Sammy Oliech, Andrew Amonde, Billy ‘The Kid’ Odhiambo, Dan Sikuta. Agero, Ayodi, the captain, Jeffrey Oluoch and Brian Tanga. In short, the team that was supposed to compete for the gold in Tokyo in 2020. In their place, instead, are a bunch of players who are, while talented, simply not ready to be playing at the top level. They are, in the words of Odundo, “players who had never played at that level. They were seeing people they see only on TV.” This new team was pummeled by the US, going down 41-0. What this means is that while the US and Kenya were at the same level last season, this season USA is top of the standings, while Kenya is firmly in the relegation battle.

According to the Kenya Rugby Union, lack of money is to blame for most of the challenges facing Kenya 7s, and Kenyan rugby in general. Odundo says, “We had to revise our terms of engagement, based on whatever money was available to us. The Sevens team doesn’t have a sponsor at the moment, so we don’t really have the funds to support the pay they were being given when Sportspesa was there.” On January 1st, 2018, a government tax of 35% took effect. The next day, Ronald Karauri, the Sportpesa CEO, announced the government tax meant that the betting firm could no longer continue supporting sports, and so it was cancelling all its sponsorship arrangements with Kenyan sports teams.

KRU was one of these, and it lost its main financial partner. Four months later, when Sportspesa renewed its sponsorship deals with Gor Mahia, AFC Leopards, and FKF, KRU was left out in the cold. Despite this, Odundo points out, “For all of last year, KRU met all its obligations to the players, despite having no sponsors. But this year we simply had to review that.” Furthermore, all their attempts to get new sponsors have been moot. “It is ongoing, we are always having conversations with sponsors, but we haven’t had any positive response.” But, in the meantime, “…plans change…we’ve got to adjust. There’s always adjustments going on.”

While money is definitely an issue, focusing solely on it absolves KRU of all responsibility for the failures with Kenya Sevens. Critics have argued that it is KRU’s job to get money for the team, and their inability to do so is an indictment of their failure as a body. A general rule with sevens rugby, and with other sports, is that sponsors are attracted to a team that is performing well. Reflecting on this, Ayimba asks, “So, if you get rid of the people who are performing well, what is the end game?” In addition, KRU is heavily in-debt, with indications of debts of up to 100 million.

Sasha Mutai, a former KRU vice-chairman who vied for the chairmanship at the concluded March 20th KRU elections, points out that KRU dug this pit for themselves. The fact that Safari Sevens, which used to be the flagship sporting event in the country, having made losses for five years straight, thus making 2013 the last time the event was profitable. This, coupled with the fact that a KRU director was verbally abusive to Safaricom’s head of marketing, led to the communication behemoth pulling out of sponsoring the tournament, and KRU.

Subsequently, corporate Kenya lost its faith with Kenya Rugby Union. Mutai argues that under the tutelage of the Omwela led board, the game has lost credibility completely, and only with a fresh start will the sponsors come back to sponsoring the Sevens team. That the national government, while promising to assist KRU, insisted that it would only do so after the elections, (perhaps waiting to see who will be elected), is a microcosm of the lack of trust that stakeholders in the game have in the KRU board and this includes Corporate Kenya, the players, the coaching staff, fans, both pitch side and online.

Innocent Simiyu, the most successful coach in the history of Kenya Sevens by virtue of points tally at the end of the season, left his role acrimoniously. So did Ayimba, who guided Kenya to its first ever Cup win in Singapore in 2016 and Mike Friday, who took Kenya to the World Cup semis, and who is currently lighting up the circuit with USA 7s. In the first six legs of the new season, Kenya Sevens has not qualified for any of the quarter-finals. There is a feeling in sections of the local rugby circle that current coach Paul Murunga is being set up to fail and that he will be fired and a new coach will be hired by KRU, probably a foreigner.

Simiyu smiles with bitterness at this prospect. “I don’t think it’s rocket science. You don’t need a foreigner to tell you. The challenges are always there. Ayimba said it, he was fired. Friday said it, he was fired. Paul Treu said it, he was fired. I’ve said the same thing, I was fired…It’s the same rat race. So long as they can’t deal with the issues, they attack the people.”

Meanwhile, KRU has shifted its expectations with the realization that this season is bust, with the conditions it has dug Kenya 7s into. While the previous plan was that, Kenya would be fighting to win several legs, this season, Odundo, the Director of Rugby at the KRU is not optimistic “We hope to get to some quarter-finals, and maybe a semi-final, which is achievable.” In addition, Odundo, the man responsible for matters rugby at the Kenya Rugby Union, points out, “I don’t know what failure is. Maybe our expectations of ourselves are too high.”

On 20th March 2019, Oduor Gangla was elected chairman of KRU. Alongside Gangla the former KRU secretary, most of the KRU directors retained their seats. In 2016, when they had been voted into office, Gangla and this crop of directors had declared themselves ‘Team Change’, but now having seen the state of Kenyan rugby during their reign, rugby observers are pessimistic about whether the next three years will be any different from the previous three.

On March 4th 2019, USA won the Las Vegas 7s. With the win, which was coincidentally the fifth consecutive time they were making a main cup final, the team rose to the top of the standings. It is not possible to look at USA’s performances without a tinge of regret, knowing that this was the level which Kenya would very well have been at had Simiyu been allowed to proceed with his plan. While the USA, a team that was at the same level as Kenya less than a year earlier tops the standings with 113 points, Kenya has a measly 18 points, which, while should ostensibly mean that the team is safe from relegation, is a sign of how low, and how fast, the Kenya Rugby Union let the team fall.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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

By Rasna Warah

In early February 2019, local and international media were awash with the story of how an American photographer named Will Burrard-Lucas had captured breathtaking photographs of the first black leopard seen in Africa in over 100 years. Reaction came in thick and fast on social media. It began in wonderment at the beauty of the creature, the quality of the photographs and the apparent magnitude of the achievement. This so-called discovery was further elevated when it got endorsed and parroted by the venerable National Geographic magazine.

For an individual who has been in the field of conservation for nearly two decades, the critical opprobrium generated was fascinating. The proposition began with a few of the uninformed questioning whether black leopards really exist, followed by consternation that nobody had ever seen this animal in a century and puzzlement over how a foreign photographer had the requisite knowledge to find and photograph the animal living in our midst.

People all over Kenya were stunned for different reasons. Many friends who know of my involvement in conservation practice questioned the arrogance of the “white gaze” in conversation and the racial undertones that accompanied the “discovery” of the black leopard. After a lot of thought and conversations, I came to the realisation that the ground is beginning to shift, and conservation will have to change a lot sooner than many people expected.

As the news of the findings made the media rounds, the protestations rose to a crescendo, with the informed rightly questioning the arrogance of the photographer making such a claim. These were accompanied by photos of black leopards taken in the area in the last few years, including one photographed in Ol Ari Nyiro conservancy in May 2007 and another photographed in Ol Jogi conservancy in August 2013.

The most powerful rebuttal, however, came from the NALOOLO blog written by John Kisimir, a veteran journalist, that shed light on the hitherto unmentioned field assistant, Ambrose Letoluai, who works with a San Diego Zoo research project in the area and who knew of this animal, saw it, and photographed it, long before showing Will Burrard-Lucas where to set his camera traps for the best shot. Ambrose correctly states that their research team (which includes both locals and foreigners) has sighted and photographed this animal several times over the last year, and it’s unacceptable for their work to be slighted in this manner.

Noble white hunters and explorers

My training is in carnivore ecology and I have been involved in conservation research and policy work for 20 years now. Those aware of my writings and lectures on racial prejudice know my position on these matters, but nonetheless I was intrigued by the events around this single species discovery. In a backhanded manner, Will Burrard-Lucas’ hubris and National Geographic’s inability to escape its “white explorer” origins inadvertently created awareness of an injustice and prejudice that was hidden in plain sight in our society for generations. It is worth stating here that “Geographical Societies” in the West are by and large bodies that were formed by wealthy people to fund and facilitate the white explorers’ voyages of “discovery” and plunder in the Global South. They are the ones who defied the likes of Henry Morton Stanley and others of his ilk.

In recent years, I have dedicated time and energy in advocacy, trying to get this message across to an oblivious society that is blissfully unaware of the seamy underbelly of the conservation world. Therefore, the spectacle of sudden enlightenment among the Kenyan public was a moment that defies description. The story of the first black leopard photographed in “over 100 years” advanced the understanding of the depth of our societal oppression and an appreciation of the sheer magnitude of our challenge across space and time.

Our colonial history class taught us about European explorers, such as David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, James Augustus Grant, Pierre Paul de Brazza and Samuel Teleki, who came to Africa to explore the “Dark Continent” that we call our home. The education we received in school implied that these were brave souls in search of adventure. As a young student, I remember being intensely curious about the “why” question. Why did they come? Why here? Why for so long? Why the risk? These explorers were coming to spread influence and political power, to plunder resources and to spread Christianity. The personal glory and self-gratification accrued after random acts of cruelty and arrogance was generally just a bonus that came with the territory. Besides the church and their home governments, these explorers brought great prestige to institutions like the Royal Geographical Society, which quickly became venues for enthralling talks of their adventures and repositories of specimens collected and artefacts looted from the lands being “explored”.

The consensus in conservation biology is that for anything to exist in Africa, it has to be discovered by a Caucasian. This isn’t a new phenomenon; since colonial days, lakes, mountains, rivers, valleys and even wild animals have been “discovered” and named by people from Europe. It is never questioned, just accepted. For those who think that these are relics banished to ancient history, we only need to look at the names around us. Restricting ourselves to the conservation sector, we see the names Grant’s gazelle (Gazella granti) and DeBrazza’s monkey (Cercopithecus neglectus) named after James Augustus Grant and Pierre Paul de Brazza, respectively. The Grevy’s zebra (Equus grevyi) was named after Jules Grevy, the president of France between 1879 and 1887.

Following the end of the Second World War in 1945, there was increased conservation activity in Britain’s East African colonies (the term “conservation” being used very loosely in this instance). This prominently involved the declaration of national park ordinances in Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda in 1945, 1948, and 1952, respectively. National parks were crucial instruments in the dislocation of Africans from selected areas and the creation of nature spaces for recreation by European settlers by expressly demarcating areas where no person (read: native) was allowed to enter. What escaped all but the most perceptive of historians is that the flurry of creation of national parks and other conservation structures that followed these ordinances was a sphere of influence that was designed to withstand the African independence wave that followed shortly thereafter.

These parks also provided a useful and relatively harmless employment opportunity to demobilised British soldiers with no skills other than shooting. Indeed, an examination of colonial game wardens’ reports from the mid-20th century reveals wardens with military backgrounds without exception. This set the stage for African wildlife conservation practice as a domain of white men with guns – a situation that has stood the test of time and which is becoming an anachronism that has survived the passing decades of decolonisation.

This position of dominion captured the imagination of Hollywood, and was celebrated in “noble white hunter” movies, notably Mogambo (shot in Kenya in 1953), Hatari (shot in Tanganyika in 1962) and Born Free (shot in Kenya in 1966), which featured George Adamson, the last relic of the military age who was killed by bandits in Kora in 1988. The latter years of the 20th century also saw the advent of the noble “white saviour” in the form of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (1984), and the “classic” Out of Africa (1985) starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep.

The ranger mentality

The paradigm that we inherited (and still ignorantly embrace) firmly places a black man exclusively in the position of a ranger. In this context, “ranger” describes a non-intellectual participant in conservation who enforces policies created for the benefit of other people in other places, often to the detriment of locals. Within this fallacy resides the mentality that ties conservation values and heritage to their attractiveness to tourists. The most obvious manifestation of this in Kenya is the existence of a Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife. In countries where heritage is regarded for its intrinsic value to its citizens, it is placed under the ministry of interior (security) or under natural resources.

This weakness is recognised by NGOs and their foreign supporters who seek to supplant the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) in the policy arena while almost exclusively restricting their support to operational materials and equipment. Like all other long-held beliefs, the ranger position is one that has numerous adherents who have invested significantly in it, resulting in a systemic malaise. The long drawn-out struggle to recruit a substantive Director-General at KWS has taken strange turns, with repeated advertisements and re-advertisements interspersed with long interludes of silence.

Two recent events in the policy arena have revealed the systemic challenges that arise from the “ranger mentality” that pervades our statutory conservation authority. The first was an ill-advised attempt to re-introduce consumptive use of various wildlife species as game meat to be served in restaurants, kowtowing to a cabal of tourism investors that want to re-introduce sport hunting in Kenya. This was a case where the tourism industry asked for conservation policy to be changed to serve their purposes. If this question was approached from a conservation perspective, one would have questioned the feasibility of serving game meat in restaurants while prosecuting (and occasionally shooting) suspected poachers.

As expected, this initiative ran into strong headwinds, and seems to have been aborted without the task force having submitted their report following several months of discussions and “public engagements”. This was an attempt by the “rangers” to change the law to satisfy external interests at the expense of locals.

The second starkest and potentially most tragic example was the recent declaration by the Minister of Tourism and Wildlife that Kenya is going to fast track legislation to introduce the death penalty for poachers, proudly announced exclusively in foreign news outlets. As expected, there were choruses of praise coming from NGOs and “conservationists” all over the world at this “significant step” taken by Kenya to save wildlife.

The minister’s proposal seemed extreme given that poaching figures in Kenya currently stand at 69 elephants last year out of a population of 34,000 (an attrition rate of 0.2%) and 9 rhinos out of a population of approximately 1,000 (an attrition rate of 0.9%). (The latter number is even lower than the 12 rhinos that were lost at the hands of KWS itself in a botched translocation exercise in July 2018.) Neither of these numbers presents the “crisis” that dominates conservation news out of Kenya, and it beggars belief that the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife would act on the denigration of the state authority’s efforts in this manner.

Moreover, there is the well-known fact that Kenya has not carried out the death penalty since the hanging of the 1982 coup plotters, Hezekiah Ochuka and Pancras Oteyo Okumu, in 1987 for treason, so there is no chance that a death sentence can be carried out on a killer of a wild animal. It is, therefore, difficult to imagine what purpose this legislative move would have served, other than the ranger state seeking to please the perceived owners of our wildlife narrative.

When Save the Elephants reported (also in 2016) that a lone bull elephant had “bravely” entered Somalia after 20 years, BBC (again) parroted the same news with much fanfare. Nobody thought to question how they deduced that this elephant is the only one that had crossed into Somalia, or that it had last visited that country 20 years ago. It is worth repeating that the most robust aspect of this perception of ourselves as rangers is the manner in which our citizens and institutions have all internalised it. KWS staff at all levels are regularly taken for security training, including high-level courses at the National Defence College. Yet they are law enforcers, not military personnel. I stand to be corrected but I am unaware of KWS staff ever being taken for conservation philosophy and ethics training at a similar level. The most likely reason for this is the lack of resources because our policy weakness and “operational” thinking doesn’t accommodate this. Our usual big NGO donors certainly wouldn’t fund it because a “thinking” KWS might wake up to the fact that they are killing and supplanting it. As we learned from the colonialists, black people in conservation in Africa are not supposed to think. They are the porters, rangers, trackers (and poachers). The unseen and unheard black man is not just a factor of photography, a subjective art form from which we can easily be deleted using Photoshop or movie editing software; it spills over into science as well, which is supposed to be objective observation.

In my carnivore ecology experience, I have come across what was described (by the BBC, no less) as a the “discovery” of a population of 100 lions in the Alatash region of Ethiopia in February 2016 by a group of scientists led by Dr. Hans Bauer of Oxford University’s wild carnivore research unit. One single lion’s roar can be heard across several kilometers. These were 100 lions. Ethiopia is a nation of around 90 million people. It stands to reason that some Ethiopian would have heard or seen the lions, their tracks or the remains of their kills.

The real poachers

Our profession exists in a realm where the message is simple: All African wildlife is in peril and the source of the threat is black people. Just to be clear, this is not an aspect of citizenship, but race. There are hundreds of thousands of Africans of Caucasian extraction who routinely indulge in “hunting”, “culling”, “cropping” and other euphemisms for killing of wildlife, but however often they kill wildlife outside legal structures, the odious term “poacher” is never used in Africa in reference to anyone who isn’t black skinned. This is no accident – it is the existence of African conservation practice in a twilight zone where reality seeks to follow perception, rather than the logical reverse.

A fairly stark reminder of this is the way in which meat from wild animals is referred to as “bushmeat” when eaten by local black people, and called “game meat” or “venison” when eaten in upper-class circles dominated by foreign tourists. The most shocking thing to most people whenever I share this example is not the depth of this obvious prejudice, but the way in which societies all over the world (including ourselves) have come to accept it as the norm. This norm, in a nutshell, is the greatest challenge to conservation in Kenya, not poachers, not human populations, not law enforcement, or smuggling. My experience in the realm of wildlife management in Kenya has been largely in the arena of carnivore conservation and I have witnessed several instances of race-based, bare-faced entitlement to destroy our national heritage.

Three incidents come to mind. The first was a “conservationist” (sanctioned by KWS) carrying carcasses of cows into the Aberdare National Park in the year 2000 and hanging them on a tree, patiently waiting and shooting every single lion that came to eat the meat. I was the unseen and unheard black man who was an MSc student collecting tissue samples from the killed lions for research. I am not sure how many lions were eventually killed because I only survived one night. (A “normal” African man not suffering from bloodlust may have lasted longer.) It is a crying shame that this man served on the board of KWS until last year, and is currently the CEO of the largest wildlife conservancy in southern Kenya.

The second incident was years later, in 2009, when as a member of the KWS carnivore management committee, we fielded a request from another “conservationist” to shoot 50% of the hyenas in the Aberdare National Park because “they are killing too many young rhinos and buffalo”. I was taken aback by the temerity of the request, and I was glad that the revulsion that I and other committee members expressed carried the day.

The third incident happened in 2012 when as a member of the same committee, we fielded a request from another world-famous “conservationist” to kill lions in his private wildlife conservancy because he felt that they were killing too many Grevy’s zebra foals. Again, we rejected this request, but it never stops.

One thread was uniform across all these requests – they came from white men who are considered leaders in conservation, and all have sat on the Board of Trustees of Kenya Wildlife Service. Would KWS countenance such hubris from a black Kenyan? Is there any possibility that the recent ill- advised request to hunt wildlife to serve game meat in restaurants came from a black Kenyan? I think not.

To an observer from outside the profession, the difficult conundrum in which conservation finds itself would look like a situation we should be struggling to free ourselves from. However, there are factors that we must consider. The status quo has been in place for so long that there is a large contingent of local professionals who have learned how to negotiate it and find themselves very comfortable positions therein. These are positions and assignments that are well-remunerated and highly regarded without the burden of formulating, justifying or adjusting policy as necessary. This entails sitting in an office, travelling to attend (not give presentations at) conferences, being the “Áfrican face” wherever one is needed and appending signatures wherever and whenever one is needed by the foreign interests that really do hold the reins to our conservation sector.

In return for this, there is a lot of “discretionary” funding, business class travel, and handsome per diem allowances, not to mention slaps on the back and being referred to as a “good chap”, “fundi” or a “switched on” fellow. (Incidentally, the latter term is one strictly reserved for black people. It is a backhanded compliment that implies the subject is a relatively intelligent and active member of a largely indolent population.)

Under the current atmosphere, is it really a surprise that KWS was unable to recruit a substantive Director-General nearly two years after the resignation of the previous holder of the office whose qualifications were in banking? The most recent move by the Board of Trustees was to lower the qualifications required in the advertisement initially put out in November 2018. This wasn’t surprising either, because the intellectual weakness in our conservation sector still desperately wanted a ranger, not a leader at the helm of KWS.

‘Why are you people so angry?’

I wouldn’t be so confident as to claim any cause-and-effect relation, but since the publication of The Big Conservation Lie, there have been questions raised in various quarters about the millions of dollars perpetually being sunk into the conservation “industry” and the returns on investment (or lack thereof). This book, which I co-authored with John Mbaria, has understandably elicited very strong reactions because of its content.

We live in an imperfect world, and it is rife with injustices in almost every field, but the visceral reactions to The Big Conservation Lie continue to confound me even two years after its publication because of how illogical some of them are. I cannot speak to my co-author’s experiences, but I’ve had a few bizarre interactions with readers attempting to police my outrage, mostly in the realm of “I understand that there are governance challenges, prejudice, and corruption in the conservation sector, but why are you people so angry?” Others would opine that everything said in the book is true, but for some reason would take issue with the pointed way in which we said it. The truth about these comments has only recently dawned on me – that it is normal to point out and have opinions on conservation policy challenges in Africa if you are white but not if you are black. Even if what you are saying makes perfect sense and is already in the public domain, the colour of your skin makes it unacceptable.

I have previously embarked on a mission to find writings (articles, books, chapters, etc.) by black Kenyan conservationists on the injustices and prejudices bedeviling the sector. There are none, and I would be delighted to be proved wrong on this. With all our high qualifications and senior-sounding positions, we are content to be rangers awaiting instructions on the destiny of our own heritage.

Many of us mistakenly think that we are safe, but we are not. When 12 rhinos died in a botched translocation exercise in 2018, a number of senior and highly-qualified black “rangers” paid a heavy price for their part in an exercise that was solely based on a World Wildlife Fund power trip dubbed the “Kenya Black Rhino Action Plan” and not on government wildlife policy.

We are beginning to experience a paradigm shift, and there is a growing realisation that this whole conservation thing is really about us, and not about those who come to see what we have conserved. It showed up in the immediate response to the claims of the Laikipia leopard sighting being the “first in 100 years” and the backtracking from the photographer.

This new thinking is especially true amongst the younger conservationists because, sadly, most of those above the age of 40 have been irretrievably defiled by the conservation establishment. However, the rest of us are enjoying something of a “perfect storm” with unrelated things occurring together to accelerate change. It is a story that is still fluid and happening. As a writer though, I appreciate the poetic justice of it all – how the arrogance of a white man claiming to have discovered a black panther in Kenya proved to be the trigger that woke up our sleeping masses.

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.

Binyavanga Wainaina: The Writer Who Democratised Kenya’s Literary Space

By Rasna Warah

My inquiry into the status of contemporary Kenyan protest music indignantly began with a hypothesis that this genre has gone mute in recent years. My agitation was fuelled after watching a documentary on the great artist of the American civil rights movement, Nina Simone hunched over her piano, singing Mississippi Goddam. The song was riveting, bold, defiant and ‘in your face’. Her song, sung in 1964 at the height of the American Civil rights campaign, was exceedingly bold. Nina was a rising star and a commercial success, but her musical career took a different tangent after the release of Mississippi Goddam. The song was banned from the air-waves, supposedly because of the cuss word, ‘goddam’, an unacceptable term for the time. However, that did not stop the song from becoming the Civil rights’ anthem and receiving more resonance than the popular gospel turned protest song, ‘We shall overcome’ mainstreamed by Pete Seegar. Nina’s song, spoke truth to power, the power of the white supremacist, segregationist intent on denying African Americans their human rights. In a sense, Nina committed commercial suicide in order to gain her political voice. The documentary led to my reflection on the role of music in political protest in Kenya, and left me wondering, when did the voice of protest music in Kenya fall silent?

Immediately after independence, there were “patriotic” songs composed to celebrate the newly attained uhuru. Musicians created songs reminding Kenyans of the independence struggle and the sacrifices that had resulted in self-rule. They also extolled the virtues of the main actors in this fight but slowly the music morphed into songs glorifying the first president, Jomo Kenyatta. As President Kenyatta consolidated power, the timbre of praise songs rose; the person of the president and the aspiration of the nation became one. It was the beginning of court poetry and a hero-worship culture.

The first major political shock to the national project was the assassination in 1965 of Pio Gama Pinto, the left-leaning journalist, politician, ex-detainee, freedom fighter and confidante of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. Pinto was a Specially Elected Member of the House of Representatives and an avowed socialist. His assassination followed the dissolution of KADU (Kenya African Democratic Union) that led to Kenya becoming a de facto one-party state.

The next major political event was the formation of Kenya People’s Union (KPU) in 1966 that flung Kenya back to multi-party dispensation, but which, most importantly, signified the split in the original KANU (Kenya African National Union) and the beginning of the Kenyatta/Oginga-Odinga rivalry.

These events fermented the beginning of protest music in Kenya as artists began to respond to the political contestations. The state came down viciously on its critics and opponents, signalling the narrowing of democratic space. Artists began to speak truth to power.

In 1969, in an act of defiance, Abdilatif Abdulla, a poet and member of KPU, wrote the treatise Kenya: Twendapi? (Kenya, where are we heading to?), which earned him the notoriety of being Kenya’s first post-independence political prisoner (1969-72). It was a bold attempt at speaking truth to power and revealed that the state was prepared to use all means to stifle commentary.

Speaking truth to power is described as a non-violent political tactic employed by dissidents against the received wisdom or propaganda of governments they regard as oppressive, authoritarian or an “ideocracy”. Speaking that truth through music has the benefit of being able to inform, educate and mobilise through popular entertainment. The potency of music arises from its ability to mutate into contemporary popular culture and reach across the barriers of elitism that limit a novelist, an actor, a musician or any other type of artist.

As the Kenyatta government progressively became more repressive, so did the intensity of the protest music. The manner that the state responded to protest music speaking truth to power offers us a window into understanding the current state of protest music. Bitter independence waters

As the dream of independence began to fade, Ishmael Nga’nga of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) Gathaithi Church choir released a song, Mai ni Maruru (The waters are bitter), which likened the deferred dream-fruits of independence to the bitter waters spoken of in the Bible. The expected fruits of independence had been replaced by aggrandisement by the political elite. Though his song was couched in biblical and religious symbolism, the powerful heard it. Nga’nga lamented that, “Men and women are quarrelling/ over small matters, telling each other/ “I did not want someone like you”/ Because the water is bitter/ When you go to the office seeking assistance/ You find an angry officer/ When you try to enter, he tells you he is ‘busy’/ Because the water is bitter.”

Ishmael’s song was banned by the Kenyatta government and the president is said to have retorted that the fruits of independent could not be equated to the proverbial bitter water that caused concern to the children of Israel. The state resorted to silencing its critics using the public broadcaster that was the only one available at this time. This approach was to become a standard way of ensuring that the voice of protest was not heard.

The culture of political assassinations, mysterious deaths and disappearances of politicians began to become commonplace. Argwings Kodhek died in a suspicious accident in January of 1969. A few months later, the charismatic politician Tom Mboya was assassinated. In 1972, Ronald Ngala died in a Christmas Day accident that baffled many. In 1975, the fiery Josiah Mwangi Kariuki (JM), who had served as Kenyatta’s personal secretary, was murdered. Joseph Kamaru, a personal friend of JM and a popular Benga musician, used his music to protest the killing of the politician. Kamaru’s song was banned by the Voice of Kenya (later known as the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation) on June 20, 1975 and Kamaru is reported to have been arrested and, along with his collaborators, and whipped by the president himself. (This claim is, however, difficult to verify.)

Beyond the use of state machinery to limit access to audiences by shutting down the airwaves, physical threats and actual violence entered the repertoire of tools used by the state to ensure that criticism was curtailed. Kamaru is reported to have said that after releasing the song, he experienced very hard times because the song didn’t go well with the ruling elite and he even started receiving death threats. He said, “I received threats that if I was not careful, my head would be picked from Ngong where Kariuki’s lifeless body was found.”

After President Moi came to power in 1978, Kamaru enjoyed a period of molly-coddling Moi and even earned himself an official state trip to Japan. Upon his return, he sang the Safari ya Japan collection in which he heaped praises on Moi. This dalliance did not last long. When Kamaru supported multipartyism, he fell out of favour with Moi.

State capture

In 1988, amid the infamous mlolongo queue-voting system championed by Moi, Kamaru released a song, Mahoya ma Bururi (Prayers of the Nation). During this time, the discontent with Moi’s rule had reached boiling point levels. There was growing opposition to the state after the brutal 1986 crackdown on real and perceived dissidents, especially members of the Mwakenya movement.

Kamaru recalls that the song was an instant hit and created a lot of tension countrywide. He describes efforts by Moi to have him stop selling the Gikuyu version of the song. Moi went as far as giving Kamaru Sh800,000 to make a Kiswahili version of the song. Kamaru jumped at this offer and actually made the Kiswahili version, but was unsuccessful in his attempts to see Moi and to present him with his finished “homework”. He concluded that it must have been Moi’s way of trying to get him not to sell the song. The state used its economic muscle to appropriate protest music by buying out artists and, in some cases, turning them into total pro-establishment praise-singers. The need for financial success and survival was enough incentive to silence voices of critics. When coercion did not work, the state was willing to “buy out” the artist speaking truth to power. Kamaru’s experience with Moi is instructive.

Daniel Owino Misiani, another musician who had used his art to consistently critique the political repression by the Kenyatta regime, especially the political assassinations, was imprisoned on various occasions for his lyrics, which were deemed offensive to the state. He was also threatened with deportation from Kenya on several occasions because he was born in Shirati, which is administratively in Tanzania. Kamaru and Owino were unique musicians in that even though their music could be taken off the air by the national broadcaster, they had built a strong ethnic fan base. Their records sold in the thousands and, therefore, their financial independence offered them a better chance of resisting the state capture of their protest music.

The state used its economic muscle to appropriate protest music by buying out artists and, in some cases, turning them into total pro-establishment praise-singers. The need for financial success and survival was enough incentive to silence voices of critics.

The end of the Kenyatta presidency and ushering in of the Moi era gave some respite to the artists. However, this only lasted till the 1982 coup by the Air Force that was followed by state repression. The fact that university students, lecturers and intellectuals had supported the coup led Moi to clamp down on creatives.

As Moi’s regime became more repressive, and as the economy sank deeper into a black hole, Osumba Rateng’ released the song Baba Otonglo that detailed the economic hardships ordinary Kenyans were facing. In the song, a family is forced to adopt severe austerity measures, which were presented in a humorous manner, but which were painfully true. Baba Otonglo parodies the rigmarole surrounding the presentation of the annual budget in Parliament. Economic policies were singled out as sinking the ordinary Kenyan deeper and deeper into despair. He sings, “Budget iko high, vyakula vimepanda, ukame umezidi, vitu vyote vimepanda” (The budgeted cost of living is way too high, price of foodstuff has escalated, the drought has persisted, the cost of everything has risen.” The state responded to this song in the usual brutal fashion.

When the song was released, it was considered to have political undertones. The thin-skinned politicians lobbied to have the song pulled off the air. Osumba was visited by police and questioned. He detailed his experience in an interview.‘Four policemen came to my house in Baba Dogo Estate, Nairobi and arrested me. They accused me of criticizing the Government and composing a song that incited people.” To save his skin, Osumba insisted that the song was just a creative spin at the hard economic times. He escaped without charges being preferred against him.

Hip hop, Sheng and angry urban youth

The late 1980s and 90s marked a change in the socio-political landscape in Kenya. Among the most relevant change was the liberalisation of the airwaves and the resumption of political contest after the re-introduction of multi-party politics. Between 1980 and 2009, the population of Nairobi ballooned from 862,000 to about 3.4 million. According to a 2009 UN-Habitat, more than 34 per cent of Kenya’s total population lives in urban areas and of this, more than 71 per cent confined to informal settlements. Informal settlements in Nairobi, and other urban areas, are a consequence of failure of government policies and official indifference. Amnesty International has described the intricacies of the informal settlements in this way, “The experience of slum-dwellers starkly illustrates that people living in poverty not only face deprivation, but are also strapped in poverty because they are excluded from the rest of the society, denied a say and threatened with violence and insecurity.’’

Enter, Dandora and other marginalised urban settlements like Mathare, Majengo, Korogocho, Mukuru kwa Njenga and Kibera. Dandora, better known as, ‘D’ by the youthful musicians of this era became the code name for the Kenyan equivalent of the projects where Hip hop as protest music was born. The life and demographic profile in these inner cities mirrors the hip hop producing ghettos of the US. The hip hop story in Kenya is the story of Kalamashaka.

Kamaa, one of the founders of the Kalamashaka trio, describes how the group rose to express the tribulations of urban marginalisation and how the voice of this group and others like it were marginalised.

Kalamashaka was the most prominent of the pioneer Kenyan hip hop groups using Sheng to rap and infusing politics in their lyrics.

Kalamashaka began by rapping about the state of their existence in the urban ghettos of Nairobi dominated by serious social strife, depressed economies, ethnic tensions, state corruption, institutional failure, infrastructural collapse, crime, violence, police brutality and extrajudicial killings. Just like their American role-models, they were anti-establishment and explicitly political.

Kalamashaka made a mark in the music scene by their signature tune, ‘Tafsiri Hii’ (Translate This) which, by default, managed to get a lot of air-play when it was first produced. The song was an indictment of the prevailing inequality in Kenya and the disenfranchisement of the youth. Kamaa describes their lyrics as “gangsta and radical.’’ The use of Sheng, which at that at that time was struggling to shed off its identity as a street thug language and gain acceptance as a Kenyan patois was revolutionary because it immediately drew a generational as well as class line.

Kalamashaka began by rapping about the state of their existence in informal settlements dominated by serious social strife, depressed economies, ethnic tensions, state corruption, institutional failure, infrastructural collapse, crime, violence, police brutality and extrajudicial killings. Just like their American role models, they were anti- establishment and explicitly political.

The emerging Hip Hop musicians spoke truth to power, describing how the system had failed them. The lyrics were described as “full of rage.’’

Hip hop Sheng was inspired by American Hip-hop music that the establishment had problems with because of the explicit lyrics and the apparent glorification of violence. The urban ýouth generation’ in the poorer settlements of Nairobi identified with Hip hop emerging from. The music was angry and retributive. Kalamashaka became the face of a movement that morphed into Ukoo Fulani – an angry and disenfranchised urban youth movement. Kalamashaka and Ukoo Fulani began to invoke the name, Mau Mau the liberation movement that remained banned in Kenya till 2002. This sent signals to the political status quo that the movement was potentially dangerous.

Market forces and political sycophancy

The response to the rising protest music signalled a totally new era in censorship. It was no longer the state that took it upon itself to ban music; commercial radio stations did this job for the state. Kamaa describes how radio presenters began to shut out these sounds from the air, effectively driving them underground. The emergent commercial radio stations that were reliant on state and corporate goodwill and advertising effectively became agents of shutting down any anti- establishment voice. The use of Sheng was tolerated only to the extent that it allowed commercial interests to provide marketing information to the youth demographic. Any message that was aimed at raising social conscience was not acceptable.

Denied air time, and obviously not the kind of musicians who would be invited to perform at national celebrations, the economic marginalisation of this genre of music drove the artists deeper underground while their lyrics became angrier. Denial of air time meant that their voices were limited because they did not enjoy the base popularity that Owino Misiani or Joseph Kamaru had.

Commercialisation was the other factor that sunk youthful urban voices deeper into oblivion. Eric Musyoka, a producer, recalling his break-up with Kalamashaka, poignantly says, “I learnt that radical and hard stance does not help.” This marked his transition from a producer of hip-hop to commercial music. So-called “market forces” conspired to lock out the voices that were not in line with the status quo.

Just as had happened to Nina Simone, the interests of the commercial oligarchs meant that raw talent and protest music could not secure time in recording studios. Barred from commercial airwaves and recording studios, protest music became a marginalised genre. Even though there were some who were speaking about vices such as corruption, only the less controversial numbers, like Eric Wainaina’s Nchi Ya Kitu Kidogo, received acceptance and air time and were played at national celebrations. Though Eric spoke of the extent to which the cancer of corruption had metastasised in Kenya, he was not angry enough. Though he spoke of the fact that ordinary Kenyans are confronted with corruption in every facet of their lives, he did not squarely lay blame for this sorry state on the rulers. So whereas Eric’s voice is broadcast loudly, that of the angry hip hop and reggae musicians, such as Mashifta, Kitu Sewer and Sarabi, are pushed away from the mainstream and into the underground; effectively muted.

Political sycophancy is also responsible for muting the voices of musicians speaking truth to power. Tom Mboya Angángá, better known as Atommy Sifa, had to flee into exile in Tanzania after he and a nondescript musician, Tedeja Kenya, produced a song in which they lampooned Raila Odinga for being responsible for the political and socio-economic woes bedevilling Luoland. Though there are no records that indicate that Raila Odinga himself threatened him with repercussions, the opposition leader’s rabid supporters intimidated Atommy enough for him to fear for his life. Tede received few brickbats because, unlike Atommy, he was considered a non-entity and had little following through his music. When politics is highly personalised and ethnicised, those perceived to speak truth to the prevalent power are silenced through political patronage. However, when it suits the political class, they will use musicians who sing in ethnic languages to their advantage. For instance, the hip hop group Gidi Gidi Maji Maji’s hit song Unbwogable (Unbeatable) became the rallying cry of Raila and other opposition politicians during the 2002 elections that ousted Moi’s KANU party from power.

Musicians, like all professionals, depend on the power of the market to make ends meet and commercial considerations, as we saw in the case of Kamaru, can silence the truth. In Kenya, musicians face immense struggles because of a poor infrastructure supporting the music business. Piracy and irregular payment of royalties for airplay makes it hard to be a commercial success. The market for live performances is low, with foreign artistes in higher demand and commanding better pay. An artist who hopes to speak truth to power gradually finds him or herself ground out of operation by penury. Artists like Owino Misiani and Kamaru could afford to be outspoken because they had a strong ethnic fan base that translated to a vibrant market. Their music being banned from the airwaves actually served to popularise their messages among ethnically-polarised constituencies. But they are more the exception than the norm.

The language used in protest music can also lead to marginalisation. The modern Kenyan musician, in an attempt to be more cosmopolitan, uses Kiswahili or English. These are not languages of political discourse in Kenya. Granted they may be used in public rallies, but the real political discussions happen in mother tongues. This explains why Moi was not comfortable with Kamaru’s Mahoya ma Bururi in the Gikuyu language, but was willing to finance the Kiswahili version. Moi knew that the same song rendered in Kiswahili would suffer the same fate as Gabriel Omolo’s, Lunchtime or Eric Wainaina’s Nchi ya Kitu Kidogo. The passion of political protest only works in the language of the masses, and outside the urban informal settlements, ethnic languages hold sway. Any song rendered in Kiswahili or English carries no threat of insurrection.

Language for protest assumes a deeper complexity in Kenya. Whereas Bob Marley used Jamaican English to sing political protest and Fela Kuti used Pidgin English, which is the language of the downtrodden in most of West Africa, there is no equivalent language of the masses in Kenya. For example, Juliani’s song, Utawala (The administration) speaks of poor governance and impunity, but the moment he switches to rap and a hip hop style, he limits his audience. Hip hop and rap in Kenya are associated with crotch-grabbing African American wannabes who do not resonate with the ordinary citizens outside of the urban settlements. With time though, as urbanisation increases, and urban populations become a significant electoral demographic, this is likely to change.

The most successful musicians who have been able to speak truth to power are those who have a base, who speak in the language of that base and hence have a strong constituency. Failure to understand the true language of the ordinary citizen renders any political content irrelevant or innocuous. The powerful are not bothered by any message that will self-reduce to a touristy sing- song like Nchi ya Kitu Kidogo because it will never mobilise political response. Even the hugely successful Sauti Sol’s recent song and accompanying video, Tujiangalie, which critiques the current government’s neglect of ordinary citizens’ concerns, has failed to move the masses, perhaps because the band is associated more with feel-good songs than with anti-establishment music.

If Kenyan musicians are to regain the chagrin and attention of the establishment, they must speak the language of the masses. They must break social taboos, like Nina Simone did with Mississippi Goddam. She was able to express the anger of the African American in his everyday language. So must our musicians express the anger welling up because of grand corruption, huge national debts, state wastage and opulence, extrajudicial killings, over-taxation and miscarriage of justice.

One could rightfully argue that protest music in Kenya is muted, not because artists are not producing it, but because the genre has been effectively driven underground. It’s vibrant in the digital repositories where the masses have little access.

In addition, the artists themselves have been marginalised by commercial interests keen on maintaining the status quo, so they struggle against all odds. The state no longer needs strong-arm tactics like detention, jail and threats because the media is doing the work of censorship for them. Civil society might support these artists, but as long as access to mass media is outside their grasp, these voices will remain muted.

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.