'Peeling Back the Mask': Remediation and Remix of Kenya's News Into

JAMS 7 (1) pp. 11–23 Intellect Limited 2015

Duncan Omanga Moi University

‘Peeling back the mask’: Remediation and remix of Kenya’s news into popular culture

Abstract Keywords This article probes how two ‘ordinary news’ events were remediated and remixed remediation by ordinary users, journalists and professional musicians, and were circulated hypermediacy as popular music in Kenya. Specifically, using TV news clips and music videos remix uploaded on YouTube, the article reveals how the digital media allow news events Kenya to be emptied of their ‘hard news’ and to be circulated as either entirely new, or viral as modified artefacts of popular culture. To achieve its aims, the article borrows immediacy and modifies Bolter and Grusin’s logic of remediation to show the conflations and distinctions between news and its digital derivatives, and also their metamorphosis from hard news to popular music. In particular, the article concludes that the process of the remediation of news into remix is a factor of technology, content and context, whose interplay ambiguously interrogates the notion of erasure/invisibility (immediacy) and construction/visibility (hypermediacy).

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1. In 2011, Portland Introduction Communication analysed more than Increasingly, the general complexion of the Africa media is going through 11.5m geo-located a massive change. In Kenya, this change is not merely manifest in the Tweets. In their study, Twitter was dominated exponential growth of media outlets, but also in the content of the news by South Africa, which that is being purveyed to the public. In Kenya, recent developments in the sent twice as many Tweets (5,030,226) as production and consumption of media content, coupled with a dynamic the next most active, media economy, have dramatically altered the nature of Kenyan media space. Kenya (2,476,800). A conspicuous outworking of this change is the increasing consumption and Nigeria (1,646,212), 1 Egypt (1,214,062) and sharing of news through social media platforms and digital technologies Morocco (745,620) make (Portland Communication 2014). As in several other places, there is a grow- up the remainder of ing tendency among former audiences to move beyond the merely passive the top five most active countries. As evidence consumption of news towards active production and the circulation of news of the convergence content (Shirky 2008). Thanks to digital technologies and mobile telephones, of the old and the new media platforms, the domain of and monopoly in producing and disseminating news no longer 68 per cent of those rests in large, profit-minded institutions, but is increasingly being ‘devolved’ polled said that they to ordinary people. In Kenya, a notable change has been in the way digital use Twitter to monitor news. The use of social technologies shape how television news is being consumed and refashioned media to consume by ordinary users into a completely new genre: popular music. news is also driven by The idea of refashioning is borrowed from Bolter and Grusin (2002), who demographic dynamics that show that it is were trying to come to grips with ways in which digital media technologies mostly a youthful are effecting and shaping modern culture. According to Bolter and Grusin population that forms the basis of the (2002: 45), remediation is the ‘defining character of the new digital media’. interaction between Taking cues from McLuhan’s oft-cited claim that ‘the content of any medium the old and the new is always another medium’ (1964), the authors argue that remediation is not media. simply a matter of repurposing, but is a more delicate kind of borrowing in which one medium is incorporated or represented in another medium. To begin, they deny the existence of a pure ‘new media’ category, arguing that ‘what is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media’ (2002: 15). New media is thus conceived as a way to refer to older media and revise them. They further argue that remediation practices preceded digital technologies and such traces of remediation can be seen in mediaeval paintings, where painters included maps, globes, inscriptions and letters in their works. In the present digital age, the new media achieves cultural significance by reference, displacement or refashioning of the old media. This can be seen in the way cinema is being remediated as online streaming, using the infrastructure of the Internet and computers. Other examples include cases where particular websites remediate photography by offering options for gallery views, or to download these photos, or where popular novels are transformed and adopted into successful films. This is the essence of remediation. Evidently, their inordinate technological focus becomes a source of weakness in understanding remediation practices. While the impact of technology on the media is enormous, this article argues that it is vitally important to broaden our concept of new media to include media content. In this sense, we might conceive of remediation as not merely a refashioning of older media, but also as a refashioning of the content of old media. In this way, new media can also be conceived to be how one genre is built onto another to create something entirely new, or how new content refers to older content or even more, how one genre represents another genre through either a total or partial eclipsing of the original. In other words, new media need to be broadly conceived to subsume both form and content.

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As such, news remix that is produced and circulated by new media technolo- 2. ‘Hard news’ is a general term that gies can be conceived as being part of the genus of new media. is used to refer to To add ballast to their idea of remediation, Bolter and Grusin (2002) up-to-the-minute news argue that the process of remediation works through two principal strate- and events that are reported immediately, gies: immediacy and hypermediacy. In the former, remediation works through while ‘soft news’ erasure and invisibility. In this sense, immediacy works by effacing the medium is background through an illusion of transparency. For instance, it assumes that works of art, information, or human-interest or video productions, video games, music video and so on, are attempts to stories. Politics, war, achieve transparent immediacy by erasing traces of media. The logic of imme- economics and crime are usually considered diacy works on the promise and expectation of an authentic experience that hard news, while attempts, as much as possible, to deny the reality of its own mediation. As arts, entertainment such, the medium becomes an erasive medium. New media technologies and and lifestyles are considered to be soft structures have only made immediacy all the more possible through the effec- news. Sometimes it is tive manipulation of image, text, audio and animation. Still, remediation is not the tone that marks the simply about the media being self-effacing, but may also call attention to its difference. state of being mediated. This occurs through hypermediacy. Although the two strategies appear contradictory, they are a necessary feature of remediation in the digital age. Hypermediacy constructs and calls attention to the interplay, convergence and co-mingling of image, text and audio in a mediated product. Unlike immediacy, hypermediacy is not self-effacing, but instead announces its constructed nature. It does not promise an authentic experience, but revels in arranging disparate elements, whose arrangement is visible, to produce a product whose contours and points of intersection are celebrated and made visible. It naturally leads to a fascination with the media themselves. The interconnectedness of immediacy and hypermediacy is a reflection of the digital culture that seeks both to multiply its media and to erase the traces of mediation. Ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiply- ing them (2002: 5). For instance, hypermediacy is evident in many websites that combine diverse media forms, such as video, graphics, hyperlinks or in modern day news broadcast that combine text ribbons, pictures and live foot- age. These efforts constitute attempts to produce an ‘authentic’ experience, immediacy, through hypermediacy. While the logics of remediation are suitable for understanding the technological structures that support the transformation of news into popular cultural products in Kenya, they still privilege form over content. Similarly, it is equally possible to broaden the two logics of remediation to subsume the realities of the ways that users refashion news content in Kenya by using new media technologies. In this sense, probing remix and news content as possibilities for both transparency and opacity opens up wider possibilities of understanding remediation beyond its limiting focus on the technical aspects. Since this study is interested in discovering how news is refashioned, or, to be more precise, how it is remediated into popular cultural products, this article aims to trace the process of erasure and hypermediacy on the refashioning of news into popular music in Kenya. The focus is not on the physical material interface but, rather, on the intangible cultural interface of the ways in which the content is transformed from an authentic real experience (news) to another seemingly authentic product (music), while at the same time erasing the facts of this transformation. In other words, when new media forms revise and refashion media content from ‘hard news’2 to popular culture, what aspects are built into the product in order to erase and deny the traces of its progenitor? Second, bearing in mind that immediacy and hypermediacy work symbiotically, the other question that naturally follows is: how, in its pursuit

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of immediacy, does the newly minted cultural product become hypermediated and actually recall its constructed, remixed status? In other words, how does this challenge the immediacy of the construct, revealing its mediated aspect rather than erasing it and making us aware of the process of construction and delight in that acknowledgement? To answer these questions, I agree with Lessig (2008) that culture as a whole can be construed as a remix, and that remix is the general condition of culture. In so doing, this study takes up Knobel and Lankshear’s (2008) definition of remix: that it is the result of a process where cultural artefacts are combined and manipulated into new creative blends. Such a conception of remix covers the whole gamut of remix practices, from Photoshop practices, game remixes, book, video and trailer remixes, among others. Combining the two ideas, remediation thus becomes a process through which news is transformed into popular music, and remix is the product that is finally circulated and commodified for consumption. The focus of this article involves two cases in Kenya, where a specific form of remix emerges in which ordinary users and media professionals alike transform ordinary hard news clips into popular cultural products, and the ways in which they are remediated and remixed through digital technologies, as popular music. The first case is the bonoko news clip, discussed below.

Bonoko: The case of the fake gun Kimani was born on the mean, tough streets of Nairobi. As a baby, he slept with his mother under the verandas, and when he was about 10 he preferred other places, like the gutters under the highways. Later, Kimani made Nairobi’s Ngara area his home. It is a ten-minute walk from Nairobi’s city centre and is composed of a collage of slums sandwiched between modern high-rise buildings, cramped market stalls selling second-hand clothes and an endless flow of traffic into and out of the area. Historically dominated by the Asian community, the bustling Ngara neighbourhood has long lost its middle class attraction due to its proximity to the city centre, and its immense potential for attracting informal and itinerant business that targets those Nairobians who prefer to walk home rather than use the chaotic public trans- port. Separated from the business district by the murky waters of the Nairobi River, it is today a veritable modern African city, full of colour, noise and life. On a normal day, Kimani and his fellow street boys would sit at the Ngara roundabout, waiting to run errands for second-hand clothes vendors or fruit and vegetable dealers at a small charge. As a 20-year-old, he had outgrown the obnoxious habit of sniffing glue for a temporary high, which is very common with street children much younger than him. Still, for him, and for many other street children who are struggling to forge a new identity, overcoming the negative suspicions of members of the public and the police remained a daily struggle. Even while they sought economic independence, frequent run-ins with the police were a constant feature of their life. This was the kind of life to which Kimani had become accustomed after his father abandoned him, his mother and four siblings. At the age of ten he had already assumed the role of breadwinner. One morning, on a routine police patrol in Ngara, a street boy was found urinating against a wall. In the subsequent chase and scuffle, the police shot the boy dead. To make the killing look legitimate, the police planted a toy pistol, known as a Bonoko in the Sheng language, next to the lifeless

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body of the boy.3 Watching everything unfold from a safe distance, Kimani 3. This is a common practice in Nairobi witnessed the police placing the Bonoko in the boy’s limp hand, and then walk and it is used by the away. A curious crowd soon milled around. Shortly afterwards, a crew of jour- police to beat the nalists was on hand to record the event for the evening news. Although such complicated nature of the criminal justice incidents are common in Nairobi, the event had all the hallmarks of a good system in Kenya. story: a violent and bloody end to what is essentially a misdemeanour involving an armed policeman and a helpless teenager; a key witness (Kimani), who saw every detail unfold and who happened to know the police involved and the slain boy; and a story that neatly fits the template of what was becoming a rapidly more insecure metropolis. The combined news values of conflict, unambiguity and consonance made what might have been reported as normal crime news gain modest media coverage. However, there was something more enduring about the story, especially when it appeared on the day’s news on both radio and television. It was the rhetorical manner with which Kimani’s witness account was rendered to the media. It was rendered in authentic street language, told in awkward Kiswahili with a receding Kikuyu accent, in a nearly repetitive style and involving a call and response conversa- tional manner that prompted the journalists (and the audience) to complete particular thoughts and phrases for effect. With a microphone on his lapel and TV cameras all around him, Kimani narrated to journalists how the event unfolded, as follows;

Kimani: He is not a thief. He is a butcher here in Ngara. He was simply found urinating by the police. Now, not wanting to face the police, he took to his heels. It was then that the police shot him. Now, when he was shot, he died, and after dying, the police came with something called a bonoko and put it on him. Even the other day, they killed one of our colleagues and put a bonoko on him. He is not a thief. He is not a thief. Even you (addressing the journalist) can be killed (by the police) and they will place a bonoko next to you. And you do not need to commit a crime, not even stealing. Even two nights ago, they did exactly that to our friend, even the vendors can confirm this, and they know him. Journalist: What is a bonoko? Kimani: A fake gun. It is used to cover up extra-judicial killings by the police. With that (bonoko) you are cornered. […] He was chased, and he hurtled by […] you know, here, you have to run when you see the police. Because you do not have money […] you will be imprisoned, and you know in prison one suffers, that is why you have to run, because if you go to jail you will suffer needlessly. See, there (prison), eh! You do not eat, eh! and you are beaten. Journalist: What’s the name of your departed colleague? Kimani: I do not know his name. But he usually sells me mutura (a kind of sausage common in the poor neighbourhoods, made of stuffed intes- tines) for, say, 20 shillings, 10 shillings. He sells meat and mutura at the Ngara market. Journalist: So, was he running away from the Police? Kimani: Yes! You know if they were to come now I will equally take off, I cannot wait for them, because they will beat me and lock me […] up! You see, I don’t have people, my dad and mum are all chokoras (street kids)

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and I was born in a street alley, I do not have money to pay a court bond, so you need to protect yourself (by running from the cops)! (YouTube 2011a)

That day, Kimani’s version of events competed with the official version from police sources about what exactly transpired. The contest was aired on all the major FM stations and also in the evening news. While Kimani’s version resonated more with an audience that is sceptical of narratives from police sources, it was only a matter of time before the audio version of the story went viral. Soon, the narrative around the event, the killing of a defenceless boy at the hands of ruthless police and the candid account of a witness to the murder became subservient to the performance and rendition of the story. The full recorded version of the event was soon available to the public and began appearing as a ringtone. Meanwhile, the term Bonoko, a word only common in the street children’s parlance, became not only part of the social nomencla- ture, but also formed part of the popular imagination in Kenya as a metaphor for both rising insecurity and police extra-judicial killings. The bonoko ringtone, as it was popularly known, sought to both remediate what was essentially hard factual news into a form of entertainment and a popular cultural product. The ‘new’ product, although appearing to refashion what was essentially a real, if not tragic, event that involved real people was, at the same time, an entirely new product. It became flippant and a source of laughter. As more and more people consumed it through mobile phone text messaging, it was transformed from being purely an account of a crime to being a source of entertainment. In the process, emptied of its context and elevated to laughter, and as a product of popular consumption, the refashioned product attempts to erase its progenitor and to acquire a new and independent identity. This attempt at separation or detachment from its previous make up points to a crucial point in it becoming a candidate for remix and further remediation in the digital space. With increasing popularity, the Bonoko audio was soon uploaded onto YouTube and was remixed with simple alternating pictures in a clearly amateurish attempt to remediate the Bonoko audio, in which Kimani’s verbal account was complemented by corresponding still images. Among the first videos to be uploaded, a remix was made that in several ways attempted to re-enact the events in a simple way, a situation that recalled, rather than erased, the original (YouTube 2011b). Accompanying Kimani’s narration, the video first shows two Kenyan policemen as though they were engaged in a street chase, it then cuts to a young man urinating, before showing what appears to be a toy pistol, carved from wood. In the end, as Kimani describes why the boy wanted to avoid arrest and what he did for a living, the video cuts to an image of prisoners, before showing fresh ‘muturas’ being sold. In remixing Kimani’s original, unedited voice as recorded by journalists, and the corresponding pictures so as to re-enact the events as narrated, the refashioned product appropriated and reclaimed its ‘hard news’ status, albeit on YouTube. In other words, unlike its ringtone counterpart, it lost its flippancy and its ability to cause laughter, partly on account of the medium used. While its audio content remained the same, as a ringtone it was consumed and understood differently (as entertainment), and it was consumed as merely a factual narrative when it appeared as a non-musical remix video on YouTube. In the latter, it recalled, rather than erased, the original. Shortly thereafter, a local musician named DJ Styles took advantage of the popularity of the Bonoko audio and remixed Kimani’s voice with musical beats,

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producing what became a chart hitting song (YouTube 2011c). While the 4. Genge is the Swahili word for gang, but it audio version was clearly a case of immediacy, where the previous news item is commonly used to was transformed into popular music and consumed in dancehalls whose hip refer to Kenya’s hip hop (genge)4 status sought to erase and efface its previous news format, it was hop music. the video version of the song that ambiguously interrogated the two logics 5. According to Knobel of new media remediation. In the particular music video, while Kimani’s and Lankshear (2008), endlessness in remix voice is taken from the original, it is versified, given an alternating refrain is the situation and is imbued with sound effects, such as scratches. Additionally, in a very where each new mix authentic and masterful manner, the whole episode is re-enacted to repro- becomes a meaning- making resource for duce the bonoko story on two levels: first, as a dialogue between the audience subsequent remixes. (journalists?) and a young man playing Kimani, giving his witness account In other words, there is no end to remixing. as a bunch of street boys nod at particular intervals; and at the second level, However, some remixes as the song proceeds, an enactment of the narrative shows two police in hot are ‘infertile’ and do pursuit of a street boy, a chase which ends in a fatal gun drama. To cover up not reproduce, while others are fertile and their act, the police slip a bonoko into the hands of the dead boy. Throughout have a long genealogy. the video, the set alternates between the interview and the gun drama. A richly hypermediated piece, the fusion of sound and animation, whereby narrative and performance are remixed in a dialogic format to produce genge music, draws us to appreciate the creativity of the product, and also to partake in its enjoyment. In refashioning a previous news item into popular music, the music video erases its progenitor and invites us to appreciate it aesthetically as Kenyan hip hop music. At the same time, even in contradiction, the full appreciation of the music assumes a foreknowledge of the original. The remediated product demands to be seen not only as a remix of Kimani’s account, but also through it. As such, the hypermediacy is not merely in its form but also in its content, where genres from music and journalism are conflated to erase and construct at the same time. By transforming a journalistic interview into lyrics, the aesthetic erases its past and seeks to be seen as art, but the journalistic portions still recall a real event, an event that is re-enacted in the music video. This seeming contradiction allows us to see immediacy and hypermediacy in new media, not as mutually exclusive processes, but as greatly interconnected logics. After this video was released, its popularity in the online space was evidenced by the tens of thousands of hits it attracted. Shortly afterwards, several remixes of the same music were produced by professional musicians, and also by ordinary users, into various musical genres, such as techno (YouTube 2011d) and afro beats, in a situation that confirms the endlessness of remix practices.5

Peeling Back the Mask: The case of the political whistle blower On 14 July 2012 Miguna Miguna, a former aide and adviser to the then Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga, released his memoirs that exposed the inner rot at the Premier’s office. The book, Peeling Back the Mask: A Quest for Justice in Kenya, sought to do exactly what its title suggested; to reveal the political intrigues in the highest corridors of power, and also to expose the Premier, who had always positioned himself as being a reformer and a clean politician. The book was an exposé on corrupt dealings, nepotism and underhand political machinations. Appearing months before the presidential elections, the launch of the book was expected to have extensive ramifications on the political scene. Others felt the whole project contained ulterior motives that aimed to politically injure the Prime Minister, considered a front runner to succeed

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the incumbent president (Daily Nation.com 2012). The sum total of all these conditions meant that its launch would be a media spectacle. Indeed, prior to its launch the book was already a matter of a public discourse after one of the leading papers in the country had serialized portions of it. During the book’s launch, Miguna Miguna delivered a speech that immediately went ‘viral’. While the content of his speech was as newsworthy as the contents of the book itself, it was the dramatic rendering of the speech that drew intense public discussion (YouTube 2012a, 2012b, 2012c). Dressed in a flowing green Agbada, Miguna hurled expletives, shuffled around the dais, sometimes walking towards his audience to stress a point, at the same time deploying emphatic and fury-filled gestures. In the climactic moment, he mourned:

[…] all I can tell you is this, every single leader here I can take to the Hague, mark my words, I have it right here (then he moves from the dais, slams one hand on the other as if swatting a pesky bug). And I am saying, come baby come! So when I decide not to speak about what ODM did in the PEV (2007/8 post-election violence), they should thank me and kneel before me and kiss my feet. You understand!

That is how angry I am when I see some people running around like idiots! The strategy Muite was talking about, 41 minus 1, was delivered in my presence. And I challenged it. I have the writing; I even have the strategy in writing. And it is not even detailed in the book. And a stupid idiot is running around town saying that they can take me to court. Come baby Come! (YouTube 2012a, 2012c)

Although Miguna spoke for longer, it was the paragraph above that was immortalized as news and that was later remixed as hip hop. For a start, every phrase above touched on very sensitive political issues in the country, which were only months away from a general election. After the 2007 post-election violence, a number of leading politicians were charged with war crimes at the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC). At the time of Miguna’s speech, the ICC issue had already become a source of heated debate, with growing perceptions that the Court had become a political instrument that was designed to help the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) leader, Miguna’s former boss Raila Odinga, to ascend to power in the 2013 poll. Essentially, what Miguna was saying was that Raila was as guilty of war crimes as any other suspect at the ICC. The 41 minus 1 strategy was the metaphor used to isolate the populous Kikuyu tribe from the rest of Kenya’s 41 communities, and to frame the elections as a contest between a powerful Kikuyu hegemony and the rest of the country. This divisive binary discourse is thought to have led to the ethnic cleansing after the 2007 poll. Bearing in mind that Miguna worked as a close adviser to Prime Minister Raila, his every word carried an air of authenticity. The speech itself was newsworthy in several respects: it contained the element of conflict, pitting a powerful politician and his former adviser; it was unambiguous in its political ramifications, and it focused on the personal life of the second most influen- tial politician in the country and, finally, it fed the ongoing discourses around succession and the ICC cases. Apart from the content, the delivery and

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performance that accompanied the speech became news. Moments after the speech, it went viral on social media (Capital FM.com 2012). It was not so much the content, but the person of Miguna that was the basis of online discourse. Even in the mainstream media, discourses shifted less to the damning reve- lations of graft than to the person of Miguna Miguna. In the few minutes of media attention, Miguna Miguna the demeanor dominated and virtually eclipsed his message. Soon, it became fashionable to have ‘come, baby, come’ ringtones. TV commercials announcing events would end with a ‘come baby come’ clarion call. Not surprisingly, a few days later, the news clip on the book’s launch became the source of a weekly humorous news programme on several TV stations. Just as was in the case with bonoko, the transformation from hard news to a popular cultural product in the new media involved a phase of flippancy and humour. Humour and flippancy thus become a form of erasure, a point of separation in the transition to an independent identity, and an integral point in the shift from hard news to popular culture. Humour and flippancy are thus deployed in a way that sets in motion the process of erasing the reality and nature of previous claims (hard factual news). Barely a week later, the ‘come, baby, come’ speech had become entertainment. Its past seemingly effaced. Of interest to this article was a remix video that was a hypermediation of the speech, remixed on a music track, featuring video from the book launch itself and a series of images drawn from Photoshopped (a form of remix) images circulating on social media (YouTube 2012a, 2012b, 2012c). The video itself was the outcome of a collaboration between journalists and Nairobi Music DJs, which may explain why, at its release a week after the original speech, the fully remixed dance music was screened on prime time news, before being uploaded on YouTube. A heavily hypermediated piece, the music video begins with techno beats which support Miguna’s speech, who is first shown deliv- ering his address at the book launch. Selected phrases from the speech are remixed with the beats to produce a catchy and rapid danceable track, which gels with Miguna’s animated and drama-packed rendition to produce a near comical, yet intriguing, piece of art. In particular, the phrases ‘all I can tell you is this … Come, baby, Come!’ are transformed into a refrain and actually become the chorus of the whole track, as the rest of the speech forms the refrain to the track. It is worth noting that the video is a collage of the speech itself, an array of Photoshopped images collected from users through social media, and the actual book, Peeling off the Mask! The creators of the video punctuate the speech with repeated neon lighting that creates the impression of a live music act, rather than a speech. The natural movements of the speaker, although still animated in their original form, are quickened in their motions in a clear bid to transform gesticulation into dance. Miguna, the provocateur, turns into Miguna, the entertainer. News is remixed into farce. Meanwhile, the jocular- ity and flippancy begin to reign supreme, as the remix reveals its richness by using video and composited photos that tap into other prevailing news and are mingled into the song. For its decoding, the remix demands wide contex- tual knowledge and an understanding of current events. For instance, a highly publicized campaign involving a paraplegic, designed to raise money for the construction of a spinal injury rehabilitation facility in Kenya, was a huge part of the remix. Appropriately named ‘Bring Zack Home’, the campaign sought to ‘stop’ plans by the wheel chair bound Zack, who had vowed to make the 4000 kilometre journey to South Africa on a wheelchair (see http://www.bringzack- backhome.com).

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Among several platforms, the campaign involved mobile text messaging, televised campaigns and other media. In the remix video, released shortly after Miguna Miguna had left the country in the wake of the media frenzy around his book, the video shows scenes of what appears to be a mobile phone screen with instructions mirroring the ‘Bring Zack Home’ Campaign. In a moment of humour, the video cuts to a display announcing ‘to bring Miguna Miguna back home, text Come baby Come to 4848, to unsubscribe please text go baby go to 8484’. Severally the video cuts to composites of photos of Miguna juxtaposed with those of his former boss, mocking and making fun of the relationship between him and the Prime Minister. The video reveals several other photomontages involving TV commercials, politicians, the book cover itself, alongside other jocular videos that are built into the video and that are remixed with the speech rendition into a pop format. This expression of multiplicity is a hall‑ mark of hypermediacy, which acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible. Unlike the logic of immediacy, which tends towards erasing and rendering automatic the act of representation, hypermediacy multiplies the signs of mediation and attempts to reproduce a rich sensorium of human experience (Bolter and Grusin 2002: 34). In this video, not only is there a hypermediacy involving form (colour, image compositing, sound ) but which also involves content, such as the remix of news, humour, flippancy, TV commercials and music. The Come baby Come music video is not merely an act that transforms news into something entertaining; it is equally a fascination with the act of repre‑ sentation, a fascination that calls attention to the reality of mediation. The refashioned news, now made into music, becomes an element that reveals the human act of selection and arrangement, whose cluttered structure and mingled form prompts attention to the construction. Targeted at those who have actually watched the news itself, the remixed video loudly announces its hypermediacy. It suggests that all the aspects of the video had previously existed independently, such as video, music, images or sound, and that they were simply collaged to produce music. Rather than partake in enjoying the music, the video invites an appreciation of the process of creation. While traces of immediacy are evident when the product acquires flippancy and attempts to gain a new identity, its full appreciation is only experienced by the viewer having knowledge and acquaintance with the original. In this sense, in claiming to be an entirely new entity, the remix version undermines this claim by seeking to be appreciated through the original speech ‑ on one side, as news, and on the other, as popular music. Furthermore, even if a truly trans‑ parent experience might be possible, only knowledge and acquaintance with the then prevailing political context, coupled with the media coverage of the speech, allows for full enjoyment of the remix. Not only do both immediacy and hypermediacy thus seem to be locked in a relationship of mutual gain, but a truly transparent experience remains an illusion. In summary, the sheer political ramifications surrounding the book launch added to the style of delivery of the speech and the combative nature of the speaker, made Miguna’s speech newsworthy and formed the nascent recipe for an online remix. The ‘viral’ nature of the speech, evidenced by the sheer number of Google searches and online trends on Miguna Miguna (Shiundu 2012), also set up the most congenial moment for a remix. Still, the tension within the two logics of mediation, demarcating the act of mediation and what is perceptively real, was further ambiguously interrogated when the

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remix was played purely as music in Nairobi’s dancehalls, and also when it was sold and circulated as a mobile phone ringtone. With the absence of the video, the remix on its own demanded to be appreciated as a music form, which sought to erase its original journalistic form. In this sense, one perceives the conflated nature of remediation, whereby the distinctions between immediacy and hypermediacy become increasingly blurred.

Conclusion To conclude, I reiterate that remediation, as a concept, cannot delink new media technologies from their content. As technologies change, so do their contents. The 1950s movies that held audiences spellbound were, at the time, seen as having a high degree of transparency and immediacy, but they may be judged by today’s standards as content with little, if any, transparent attributes. This calls for thinking about remediation as a two-pronged force working simultaneously on both media technology and media content. Second, as the Kenyan cases have shown, it is difficult to even contemplate a clear distinction between immediacy and hypermediacy. As has been shown, the remediation logics severally recall each other. A fascination with the creativity and prowess of the final product does not entirely erase its progenitor. In many cases, knowledge of the original is a prerequisite for gaining full satisfaction from the remix content. A third dimension that emerges is that a remix is created in a context. It is a cultural construction. While the Internet and new media content create the illusion of boundless reach, the dynamics of time and place index the boundaries of interpretation, consumption and interactivity. While it is difficult to outline a general portrait of African remix practices, this article provides an interesting glimpse of remix processes and practices in Kenya. In this instance, hard news, especially news that contains a distinctive peculiarity, somehow captures popular imagination and is emptied of its ‘hardness’. In a situation that is obviously helped by trending and online discourse, the content attains flippancy and can be remediated as ringtones, before being further remixed and remediated as popular music. The endless nature of the remix is evidenced by the multiplicity of further remixes by ordinary folk, professional journalists and music professionals. Finally, since news is essentially real events involving real people, it might seem callous not to mention how remix practices (as essential forms of remediation) have shaped the personal lives of those finding themselves as witnesses to murders, or as whistle blowers and, at the same time, as the new celebrities of remixed-news-music. For James Kimani of the bonoko case, there was a sudden change of fortune that was directly linked to the popularity and commodifica- tion of his witness account and the subsequent remix. The latter catapulted him to celebrity status. To boost its popularity with the youth, Ghetto Radio, a community FM radio station in Kenya that prides itself as the country’s official Sheng station, hired Kimani as one of the co-presenters (Sheng is a Swahili- based slang spoken in urban Kenya and influenced by many of the languages spoken there) Kimani was directly dragged from the streets, given clean clothes and trained for the job. Today, he goes by the stage name of ‘Bonoko’, and his story has since been covered in local and international media (YouTube 2011e). For Miguna Miguna, the relationship between the remixed video and his present preoccupation is less obvious. Largely due to his falling out with the Prime Minister and the publication of his controversial book, the huge public- ity surrounding these events prompted him to wade into the mud of Kenyan

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politics in mid-October, 2012 (Daily Nation.com 2012). On 13 December, 2012, Miguna announced that he would soon be publishing a sequel, entitled Kidneys for the King: De-Forming the Status Quo in Kenya, (Standard.com 2013) perhaps another reminder of the scope and scale of remediation and remix!

References Ainslie, R. (1967), The Press in Africa: Communications, Past and Present, New York: Walker and Company. Barton, F. (1979), The Press of Africa: Persecution and Perseverance, New York: African Publishing Company. Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R. (2002), Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Capital FM.com (2012), ‘Miguna Goes Viral!’, http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/ lifestyle/2012/07/17/miguna-goes-viral-migunamemes. Accessed 3 December 2014. Chelagat, J. (2012), ‘Miguna eyes Nairobi governorship’, Standard Digital News, 5 October, http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?articleID=200006769 3&story_title=miguna-. Accessed 3 December 2014. Daily Nation.com (2012), ‘Miguna set to release new book in February’, 13 December, http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Miguna-set-to-release-new- book-in-February/-/1056/1643278/–/k2c19k/-/index.html. Accessed 3 December 2014. Knobel, M. and Lankshear, C. (2008), ‘Remix: The art and craft of endless hybridization’, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52: 1, pp. 22–33. Lessig, L. (2008), Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, London: Bloomsbury. McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill. Mutiga, M. (2012), ‘Will Miguna book ruin Raila?’, Daily Nation.com, 21 July, http://www.nation.co.ke/News/politics/Will-Miguna-book-ruin-Raila/- /1064/1460472/–/j573d/-/index.html. Accessed 3 December 2014. Portland Communication (2014), ‘How Africa Tweets: Cities, Languages and Trends’, http://www.portland-communications.com/wp-content/ uploads/2014/03/How-Africa-Tweets.pdf. Accessed 3 December 2014. Shirky, C. (2008), Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, London: Penguin Group. Shiundu, A. (2012), ‘Abortion tops list of Kenyan online searches’, Daily Nation.com, 13 December, http://www.nation.co.ke/News/How-to-abort- is-top-internet-search-in-Kenya/-/1056/1643018/-/vdksy/-/index.html. Accessed 3 December 2014. Standard. Com (2013), ‘Miguna to release New Book in February’, 16 January, http://standardmedia.co.ke/?articleID=2000075174&story_title=Kenya- Miguna-to-release-new-book-in-February. Accessed 27 December 2014. YouTube (2011a), ‘Bonoko’, 29 January, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ PLCfnYv6l4&feature=related. Accessed 3 December 2014. —— (2011b), ‘Bonoko’, 4 March, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ZScwMubqxRI. Accessed 8 December 2014. —— (2011c), ‘Bonoko Offical Video, HD’, 29 September, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=T2WqXcUQKBk. Accessed 8 December 2014. —— (2011d), ‘Bonoko Techno reloaded.mp4’, 18 April, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PQRedUMY3bk. Accessed 8 December 2014.

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—— (2011e), ‘Mgaagaa na Upwa: Bonoko’/‘He who toils: Bonoko’, 8 November, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56OopY-ckFI. Accessed 8 December 2014. —— (2012a), ‘Miguna book launch’, 14 July, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ok9yyQv75wo. Accessed 8 December 2014. —— (2012b), ‘Miguna Miguna reloaded’, 20 July, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PQT292eXgls. Accessed 8 December 2014. —— (2012c), ‘Miguna officially launches his book’, 14 July, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZpamsiUArI. Accessed 8 December 2014.

Suggested citation Omanga, D. (2015), ‘‘Peeling back the mask’: Remediation and remix of Kenya’s news into popular culture’, Journal of African Media Studies, 7: 1, pp. 11–23, doi: 10.1386/jams.7.1.11_1

Contributor details Duncan Omanga holds a Ph.D. in media studies from the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He is currently a lecturer in media studies at Moi University, Kenya. His research interests are in print cultures and new media practices in Africa. Contact: Department of Publishing and Media Studies, School of Information Sciences, Moi University, P.O. Box 10036–30100, Eldoret, Kenya. E-mail: [email protected]

Duncan Omanga has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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