Identity Politics in Nairobi Matatu Folklore Mbugua Wa-Mungai
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Identity Politics in Nairobi Matatu Folklore Mbugua Wa-Mungai To cite this version: Mbugua Wa-Mungai. Identity Politics in Nairobi Matatu Folklore. Philosophy. Department of Jewish and Comparative Folklore The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2003. English. tel-01259814 HAL Id: tel-01259814 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01259814 Submitted on 21 Jan 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Identity Politics in Nairobi Matatu Folklore A dissertation presented to the Senate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for the award of the degree degree of doctor of philosophy Mbugua wa-Mungai Department of Jewish and Comparative Folklore The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 11 1FRA 1111111 111 1111 111 IIIIII IF RA002891 Wow 3o1. March 2003 Declaration This dissertation is my original work and has not been submitted for any academic award, or other credit, in any other institution. The writing has been done under the supervision of Professor Gain. Hasan-Rokem, Department of Jewish and Comparative Folklore and Dr. Hagar Salmon. Departments of Jewish and Comparative Folklore and Middle Eastern and African Studies. Dedication To the MbuQua clan, my wife Wanibui, and our children Mun.gai and Njeri, in appreciation for the life that we share, for braving the lonely years and for keeping my place by the fireside as I went matatu-chasing. The matatu ride is now yours. Table of Contents Title Page Declaration •jj Abstract Acknowledgements .iv Dedication .. vi Chapter One: Matatu Culture: Nairobi's Three Dimensional Space 1.0 Elements of the matatu culture matrix 1 1.1 Definition of terms 1 1.2. The study of "nothing": Informants' understanding of matatu (culture) .7 1.3 "Demands of the road": Key Problems in Matatu Culture .12 1.4 Literature Review 21 1.5 Theoretical Framework 25 1.6 Dissertation Plan .30 Notes 32 Chapter Two: Creating and Contesting Expressive Space 2.0 Fieldwork .34 2.1 Alternative Logics of Space 36 2.2 The Creation of Tradition: Exchanges in the Tea Zone .39 2.3 In the Absence of a Fireside: Blackboard Narratives 48 2.4 Cultivating Difference, Ghettoizing Modernity 53 2.5 "Mobile Street Philosophy" and Imagined Space 59 2.6. Embodied Spectacle and Consumer Discourse 62 2.7 Sticky Meanings: The Sticker as Contest(ed) Discourse .72 2.8 Conclusion 78 Notes .82 Chapter Three: Expressive Forms as Tactics of Self(re)invention 3.0 Spectacular Signs .85 3.1. Sticker Lore .88 3.1.2.0 In Praise of Bad: Rap's Inversions .96 3.1.2.1 More Resources from the Mediascape .106 3. 2 "In the beginning...": Biblically-derived Transgressions 108 3.3. 0 Discourse of Bodies 114 3.3.1 Detached Parts .114 3.3.2 Animal iconography ..117 3.3.3 Spider/man: The Career and Mutation of a Trickster/Hero .120 3.4 Conclusion 129 Notes 132 Chapter Four: World Upside Down I: Kanda-Boy 4.0 The Traditional within the Modern 135 4.1 The traditional Gikuyu world-upside-down ..138 4.2. Wrecked modernity: "Mahewal" 142 4.3. Libidinously speaking: Obscenity in matatu culture ...153 4.4 The Politics of Eating/ Erasure .162 4.5 Complicated games: Travelers' Personal Experience Narratives.....166 4.6 Leisure: Mugithi and the Links in the Web of Obscenity 174 4.7 Conclusion 179 Notes 182 Chapter Five: WUD II. A Last Laugh: Carnivalesque Esthetics in Nairobi matatu culture 5.0 An Inventory of Inverted Roles 187 5.1.0 Locating the Esthetic 193 5.1.1.0. Intertextuality and Reflexivity in Matatu Texts ..196 5.1.1.1 Names ...198 5.1.1.2 Drawings .204 5.1.1.3. Tpurruk: Word Games .212 5.2.0 Interflows between representational strategies .222 5.2.1 TV comedy, advertisements and the popular press ...223 5.2.2 Popular Music and Fashion Labels .229 5.2.3 Football Metaphors 233 5.2.4 Barroom entertainment as social discourse 234 5.2.5 Satan's Blessings: Matatu Rumors as Social Critique .236 5.3 Conclusion 239 Notes 245 Conclusion: Dada, Houdini and Chameleon: Metaphors of Cultural Adaptivity 250 Notes 268 Appendix I: Interview guide .270 Appendix II: Glossary of work-related terms 272 Appendix III: Glossary of Sheng Terms commonly used in matatu culture... .278 Appendix IV: A Nairobi bar-room 'hymn' 282 Figures .283 Bibliography 322 Chapter One Matatu 1 Culture: Nairobi's Three Dimensional Space Our every day lives can also be seen as stories, as narratives, in which we act out our lives and construct our identities. (Berger 1995:165) 1.0 Elements of the matatu culture matrix. In this introductory chapter, I seek to map generally the issues that lie at the core of this study, indicate the perspectives from which the study has approached its subject as well as highlight key questions that have been addressed in subsequent chapters. An appropriate beginning point then is to explain the term "matatu culture." 1.1 Definition of terms. Matatu culture is the combined range of activities and symbolic acts, verbal or written, either deployed upon the vehicle or embodied by matatu workers and passengers in their interaction upon the space constituted around the material culture object known as matatu. Its worldview is governed chiefly by the fact that matatu work is a predominantly male youth occupation. 2 Music, DVD movies shown in the duration of a trip, stickers, icons of film, music and football stars drawn on the vehicle's exterior surface, 3 hip hop fashion, humor, idiom and gestures used by crews and passengers, attitudes towards other road users and disregard for the Highway Code are key ingredients of matatu culture. It is a culture that thrives on the hybridization of semiotic codes as diverse media, languages and attitudes are brought to capture and express experiences and worldviews. After Hebdige, I view culture as any "systems of communication, forms of expression and representation" (1979: 128,161) of which the combined oral, visual, auditory and written items deployed on matatu are examples. Hence, matatu text means crews' quotidian expressive acts and forms manifested through such elements as stickers, dress, language, pictures, gestures and music, variously or in combinatory sets. Even though subcultures generally enact values that differ from those of the mainstream (Bauman 1992: xiv-xvi; Fiske 1992: 25; Dundes 1987:149- 150), as an example of such, matatu culture discourse is ambivalent in the sense that it is also couched within mainstream patriarchal practices and views on crucial issues like gender and (male) control over property. Passenger responses to the culture are part of matatu culture in that they help to circulate its ethos and values within public discourse, with personal experience narratives being a relevant instance of such responses. I use the term sign to refer to any object, action, image or sound that embodies meaning either within itself, outside or in juxtaposition to other objects, images and sounds. As texts, such signs point to other meanings in other texts. An agglomeration of such visual, oral, auditory signs, among others, which might seem disjunctive when taken as a unit because of their disparate media, make up texts just as individual items like sayings, swear words, gestures or designs on the matatu have been treated as texts in themselves. Without doubt, behavior such as pick-pocketing, extorting sexual favors from female passengers whose fare has been stolen on a matatu by a conductor's accomplices or the physical confrontations between crews, passengers or, on the other hand, competing matatu crews lies in the region of criminality. As such, an assessment of matatu work as crime does not lie within the scope of this study; it is only pertinent to the extent that it sheds light on the general transgressive behavior that shapes the subculture's character. As informants pointed out, it is important from the outset to be clear that the designs on matatu are not taken as mere 'decorations'. Moreover, these artists eschew the set of terms decoration/decorators because it reduces their work to mere aesthetic appeal as an end in itself. The term decoration also carries with it the sense of superfluity, which subsumes the work's politics to some other, supposedly more important purpose. This stance shows that these artists see a subcultural politics, a tension, expressed in their work, an awareness captured succinctly in the matatu name Subculture (Figure 1). The function of a copied work of art, Benjamin (1966:225) has demonstrated, is political:4 In this case, they pride themselves in effecting a creativity that affects the constituency of consumers of this 'mobile art.' 5 The objective in matatu designs is to make the esthetic component give a perceptible pattern, and therefore some sense of order, to the final 'product' as a whole, to wit, the vehicle, its name(s), drawings, the crew and their road behavior. I have analyzed matatu names6 as floating signifiers in order to isolate patterns used in their invention/choice. Matatu have been in operation in Kenya since 1953 when the first ones came onto the scene in Nairobi as "pirate taxis." They were branded pirate operators because the By-laws of the then municipality gave sole franchise for public transportation within its borders to the Kenya Bus Company (Lee-Smith 1989).