The Bobi Wine Phenomenon: the Youthful Face of Uganda's

The Bobi Wine Phenomenon: The Youthful Face of Uganda’s Resistance

By Abdullahi Boru Halakhe

Like with many stories, the story of Yoweri Museveni and Kizza Besigye was consummated and nurtured by idealism. Similarly, like many stories built on idealism, inevitably it ended in betrayal, real or imagined.

The story of Ugandan politics over the past two decades has been dominated by two personalities – Yoweri Museveni, the incumbent president, and Kizza Besigye, his main challenger. In many ways, the political vision of both men has been marked by a certain idealism inspired by their participation in the 1981-86 liberation war, whose relevance is increasingly being questioned by many younger Ugandans.

Though they are widely seen as polar opposites, consciously or unconsciously, over the years Museveni and Besigye have needed each other to remain relevant among their respective constituents. Museveni cannot operate without Besigye, and vice versa. The two are thus stuck in a historical time warp of unfulfilled revolutionary utopia.

In dealing with Besigye, his most formidable opponent yet, Museveni is guided by a sense of entitlement, while Besigye is motivated by a sense of betrayal – both individual and collective. He wants change. Museveni believes that he rid Uganda of dictators and tyrants and, therefore, he should rule as he wills, unencumbered.

Besigye, on the other hand, is convinced that Museveni has perverted the ideals of the revolution they fought in together, and like other tyrants, he should be resisted as a matter of principle.

In dealing with Besigye, his most formidable opponent yet, Museveni is guided by a sense of entitlement, while Besigye is motivated by a sense of betrayal – both individual and collective.

The difference between the two, one could argue, is that Museveni is “flexible” and Besigye is “obdurate”. Museveni sees himself as the grand patriarch of Uganda’s revolution, but with shreds of flexibility that allow him to stay in power. Besigye, on the other hand, sees himself as an egalitarian moral crusader, a position he acquired during his days as the National Resistance Movement’s Political Commissar. In his unbending vision, he saw the National Resistance Army (NRA), the precursor to the National Resistance Movement (NRM), as a moral army to end all of Uganda’s ills. He was and still remains a doctrinaire ideologue.

Besigye sees NRM as incurably corrupt, unaccountable and a one man-circus.

Museveni, however, sees NRM as the heir to the rich revolutionary tradition of restoring dignity and improving lives of citizens.

Besigye’s obduracy, even when it costs him power and friends, is, in essence, the difference between the two men – one a successful President and the other the ‘People’s President.’

In real terms, Museveni is undoubtedly the winner; he has defeated Besigye in three straight elections, although, some may argue unfairly. But in symbolic terms, every Museveni electoral victory felt hollow and insecure – the more he won, the more he and Uganda lost. In the end, Museveni’s victory looks increasingly pyrrhic, while Besigye’s electoral and personal losses, innumerable as they are, look like a victory for him and for Uganda.

However, Besigye has reached the limits of his defiance; he needs to give space, support and share his wisdom with the younger leaders because he has done his part in his struggle to make Uganda a better place. Increasingly, both Museveni and Besigye have had to contend with a young Member of Parliament who doesn’t draw on the revolutionary ideals of the bush war years, which are fast fading from the conscious memory of the young Ugandans who make up a huge proportion of the population.

Enter Bobi Wine…

The Kyaddondo East MP, Robert Kyagulanyi, popularly known by his artiste name Bobi Wine, was 4- years-old when the NRM came to power in 1986. While Museveni’s and Besigye’s world views and programmes of action are mostly about history and fear, Bobi Wine’s world view is shaped by the future and hope. His background as a ghetto kid, figuratively and metaphorically, appeals to the majority of youthful Ugandans, who identify with his story of triumph over adversity. Over 60 per cent of Ugandans are under the age of 30. For this group, Idi Amin’s and Milton Obote’s horror stories, which Besigye and Museveni are wont to use, sound like old lady myths. They see themselves as entrepreneurs, music moguls and successful civic leaders.

Bobi Wine’s combination of a remarkable personal story of rising from a Kampala ghetto to become an independent MP, defeating candidates sponsored by both Besigye’s Forum for Democratic Change, (FDC) Party and Museveni’s NRM, has seen him take the mantle from Besigye and throw down the gauntlet to Museveni.

Consequently, his framing of Ugandan youth’s existential angst because of the bleak economic reality, the conscious nature of his social justice message through his music, and the penetration of social media, which has seen the rise of a critical mass of brave front-line activists who have been working in the shadows for change, all have contributed to making Bobi Wine a potent force of nature.

Possibly, the fact that he doesn’t come from a military/revolutionary or big political/economic family background must have initially led Museveni and his coterie to assume they could safely ignore him. But increasingly, he is making the state respond in the language it has deployed against many of its opponents: use of excessive force and trumped-up charges, especially treason.

Since his election in July last year, Bobi Wine has demonstrated that he has his fingers on the pulse of the younger urban electorate, especially those who have only known Museveni as the president. He has articulated and energised their latent desire for change in a language they understand, through a medium that is accessible to most of them – music.

His election into parliament has not blunted his appetite for using music as a vehicle to connect with his supporters. During Togikwatako (Do not Touch It), a popular movement against changing the constitution to remove the term limit that allowed president Museveni to contest the presidency, he released the song Freedom. The video of the song features Bobi Wine in a cage-like structure interspersed with images of police violence, making the lyrics as well the video at once poignant and raw, thus connecting with many who have suffered at the hands of the police and other auxiliary security forces.

Freedom is not the only video he released. In 2017, he released another video, Time Bomb, whose socially uplifting message in both Luganda and English touches on the day-to-day kitchen table reality of many Ugandans. For instance, why is the price of electricity so high? Why is corruption so prevalent? But in a forward-leaning pivot, Bobi Wine says there is no reason to cry.

Freedom comes to those who fight

But not to those who cry

Coz the more you cry

Is the more your people continue to die.

Both songs are a rallying call, not dissimilar to Museveni’s when he went into the bush. Museveni is acutely aware of the power of anyone capable of distilling the frustrations or aspirations of the youth, and knows that articulating them in their language poses a mortal danger, even if not immediately. Remarkably, Bobi Wine’s message is paying dividends at the ballot box; since his election, candidates supported by him have won various parliamentary seats; Arua municipality was not the first – he had beaten established parties in Jinja, Rukungiri, and Bugiri.

The state’s disproportionate response after the loss of the Arua seat by arresting him and other opposition MP’s and supporters is a clear indication that it has been rattled by the reality that the centre of gravity of the opposition has shifted from Besigye to Bobi Wine, and that they cannot afford to ignore him.

Last year, Bobi Wine energetically took up the push against the constitutional change within and outside parliament. During one parliamentary debate, security agencies invaded the session and beat up MPs, fracturing Mukono Municipality MP, Betty Nambooze’s spine. While the bill eventually passed after the MPs received a sweet deal extending their term from five to seven years, Bobi Wine still remains a significant threat to the status quo.

Digital activism

Reflexively, many dismiss online social media activism as a dirty word. In their eyes, online activists are people who are not ready to put their money where their mouths are. These activists are not ready to roll up their sleeves, take tear gas and be arrested by the police.

But behind the dismissive tone, which is accentuated by the generational divide, African governments are fully-aware of the power of social media as a tool for mobilisation and building cross-sector and cross-country solidarity. #ThisFlag in Zimbabwe, and #FeesMustFall in South Africa have demonstrated that social media is a powerful platform.

In Uganda, Stella Nyanzi has become a one-woman army against President Museveni through her Facebook page. She was arrested last year after criticising the First Lady and Education Minister, Janet Museveni, for her ministry’s failure to provide sanitary towels to girls in public schools, a promise her husband had made during his campaign in 2015.

Social media platforms reveal a chink in President Museveni’s armour; he can’t send in his security agencies to stop people using them like he does at public demonstrations. Because they’re decentralised, he cannot take out a leader, and they are not susceptible to manipulation using advertising shillings like the mainstream media. The Internet shutdown during the 2016 elections and this year’s social media tax were essentially designed to contain social media, but they have so far proved ineffective.

Beyond Uganda, Bobi Wine’s arrest has spurred a nascent youth mobilisation. In East Africa, digital mobilisation and organising by young activists have coalesced around the hashtag #FreeBobiWine. Over half of the traffic for the hashtag was driven by Kenyans on Twitter. Activists in Tanzania, Burundi and the DRC were involved as well. This in itself not only demonstrated the transcendent appeal of Bobi Wine, but was also a rebuke to the perceived wisdom that millennials have limited interest and involvement in civic citizenry.

The future

Bobi Wine’s rise could also upset the regional ‘balance of power’ within Uganda. Museveni and Besigye both come from Western Uganda. Bobi Wine is from Central Uganda, a region that has been a thorn in the side of Museveni, and which the president has attempted to subdue using all means necessary, fair and foul. Beyond Uganda, Bobi Wine’s arrest has spurred a nascent youth mobilisation. In East Africa, digital mobilisation and organising by young activists have coalesced around the hashtag #FreeBobiWine. Over half of the traffic for the hashtag was driven by Kenyans on Twitter.

However, if he would like to transcend the Museveni-Besigye duopoly, Bobi Wine needs to expand his base beyond urban areas to the rural hinterland. Like every wily politician, Museveni has ignored urban areas, and instead concentrated all his efforts on rural areas. This has been lucrative for him politically. Bobi Wine needs to speak to the youth, not just in Kampala, but in Kitgum as well. He had already started doing so through visits to various parts of the country and in his music videos as well.

The land question and the presidential age limit have sufficiently radicalised a significant constituency in Uganda. And there are a significant number of the young in need of direction. To win them over, Bobi Wine will need to proactively and innovatively capture their issues, provide them with leadership and imagine a possible future with, for and by them.

The musician-cum-politician needs to be aware of the state’s machinations, which are already evident. Treason is a favourite charge, as is rape, which Besigye was charged with, and economic sabotage via the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA).

Bobi Wine is a product of the zeitgeist and is a beneficiary of decades of work by fearless frontline activists, including Besigye. They include the Walk to Work protests following the contested 2011 elections, which were brutally suppressed by security agencies. They revealed the limits of Museveni’s patronage network that has sustained him in power for decades. The disproportionate reaction to Walk to Work and what it stood for shook the state, despite Museveni’s claim to winning the election with over 60 per cent of the vote.

Recent events have obviously rattled Museveni’s administration. Since Bobi Wine’s arrest, the president has been making all manner of statements, but it should not be assumed that the collapse of his administration is a fait accompli. To defeat Museveni, Bobi Wine and other progressive forces will need to continue to pursue peaceful mass mobilisation, and to contest every available by- election with similar vigour.

Whether they succeed is another matter, but Bobi Wine’s rise undoubtedly marks the beginning of a turn away from the bedtime stories of liberation that Museveni often recites to his grandchildren, to something new, fresh and bold.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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The Bobi Wine Phenomenon: The Youthful Face of Uganda’s Resistance

By Abdullahi Boru Halakhe

After 33 years in power, President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni finds himself in the unflattering position of engaging in running street battles with a man 38 years his junior.

Used to sparring with fellow bush war veteran Dr Kizza Besigye, a man he has accused of everything from being a rapist to having HIV/Aids, Mr Museveni finds himself in a situation where he has to accuse Mr Robert Ssentamu Kyagulanyi, a.k.a Bobi Wine, a man younger than his last-born daughter, of stoning his car.

For that, Bobi Wine is facing treason charges together with 32 others.

How did it get to this?

Just after the 2016 general elections and the clampdown and mistreatment of opposition leaders that followed, Bobi Wine released the song “Situka“, which challenges Ugandans to do something about corruption and injustice in their country. It opens with the lines: “When the going gets tough, the tough must get going, especially when our leaders become misleaders and mentors become tormentors. When freedom of expression becomes a target of suppression, opposition becomes our position.”

Later that month, he visited opposition leader Dr Kizza Besigye at his home where the latter was being kept under “preventive arrest”. He went with his guitar and strummed a few notes of his new song for him. He would then appear alongside him at a rally all suited up, his dreadlocks reduced to a low fade box cut. He had joined politics! Social media lit up.

A couple of months later, there was a vacant seat in Kyadondo East Constituency. He won but the social media fuss that came with it was brushed aside as city noise. Many thought he was just another celebrity trying to have a piece of the national pie.

The House had already attracted the country’s leading gospel artist Judith Babirye. Kato Lubwama, a leading comedian, had also ditched stage garb and got suited up.

These two celebrities had, however, buckled on the political stage. Two years in, Judith Babirye was yet to make her maiden speech on the floor—she was busy organising a “charity” gospel music concert for the political A-class at $100 a pop. He had made his intentions clear on national TV: “Buli omu afungane wafungana” (Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too). He was not going to antagonise anyone.

People looked at Bobi Wine’s dreadlocked hair, his ghetto ruggedness, his sagging jeans and his ghetto swagger and judged him: “He is just excited. He is not politician enough. He should drop the ghetto look. Will he even manage to sustain a debate in the house?” many wondered.

“Come on, the excitement won’t last a month,” a former legislator, now a Permanent Secretary in one of the top ministries, said as we read the tea leaves on Bobi Wine’s coming to Parliament.

“The social media noise is from his city fans but Parliament is not a music stage. Reality will hit him and he will retire to his studios to only pick paychecks from Parliament.”

The President too was not that bothered. The National Resistance Movement (NRM) had lost a by- election but so what? It was in a city constituency and the winner was a celebrity.

“We shall do better in other coming by-elections. In any case, they are mostly in NRM strongholds,” Justine Lumumba, the party Secretary General told the press.

However, they forgot to interrogate one thing about this musician-cum-politican: his music.

Born outside Kampala but raised in the squalid slum of Kamwokya, Bobi, as he is fondly called by his crew, knocked his hustle doing all manner of odd jobs, from car washing all the way to starting a ghetto music production house, the Fire Base Crew, composed mainly of his ghetto boys-to-men, from where he spoke truth to power to the struggling youth through music. He would later attend Makerere University where he got a diploma in Music Dance and Drama – not a minor achievement for a ghetto kid. He bestowed unto himself the title of Ghetto President and the slum dwellers approved.

Bobi bore witness to government inabilities and iniquities toward the wretched of the earth and hit by hit, especially in the two years leading to his joining politics, the Ghetto President articulately and fearlessly stood on the side of the disadvantaged. He rallied young people to believe in themselves and change what they believed was wrong around them.

In Tugambireku Jennifer (Please talk to Jennifer), he tells the story of the plight of hawkers in the city and says they have sent him to plead with the Kampala Capital City Authority boss, Jennifer Musisi, to reduce the bitterness and brutality with which the city council was getting hawkers off the street.

His campaign song, Bikwase Kyagulanyi (Entrust your affairs to Kyagulanyi) was a rags-to-riches testimony targeting the ghetto youth who he referred to as the super youth. He uses himself as an example of a poor ghetto kid who made it to the top without forgetting his roots.

“We work hard not to leave the ghetto but to make the ghetto a better place to live in,” he sings, before asking the youth to go forth and spread the message of hard work and success. “And if anyone does not believe you, use me as the example.”

Bringing the ghetto to Parliament

After being sworn in as MP, Bobi stood on the steps of Parliament and told journalists: “I have brought the ghetto to Parliament”.

With his unshaded spirit of a hustler and the bounce of a college kid, he was to represent not only Kyadondo East, but the youth who make up more than 75 per cent of Uganda’s population— aggressive about what they want and restless about the future; aware and disapproving of the societal issues like unemployment, the broken health system; and detached from NRM’s post- bush war rhetoric of peace and security that had made the Museveni generation too scared of change for fear that the country would slip back to turmoil.

Uganda’s Parliament is largely youthful, but the majority of the legislators are pro-government and largely silent, toeing the usually unpopular party line.

The opposition in Parliament had become predictably toothless. Divided and outnumbered, they always buckled under NRM’s numerical strength when faced with a controversial subject on the floor. The Majority of the youth had therefore given up on Parliament and taken their political frustrations to social media.

The age limit stage

Having come in at the height of the Presidential Age Limit amendment debate, Bobi Wine brought in the raw energy of the youth. He mobilised fellow anti-amendment legislators and they rolled up their sleeves and literally fought physically in Parliament against the Bill. Just like in ghetto street fights, where fist fights are lost by the outnumbered, Bobi Wine and his group of MPs were out-fought by the security men who bundled them straight to police cells.

They were applauded on social media. At least they went down fighting, many said.

Students of Makerere University immediately invited him to be on a panel to discuss the Mandela legacy. President Museveni was the keynote speaker. To high-pitched clapping and foot stamping from the students gathered in the university’s main hall, Bobi Wine, looking straight in the President’s eye, drew the line that showed that his was a generational cause.

“In their times, the youthful Museveni and all the other revolutionaries did not fold their hands when things were bad. They looked injustice straight in the eye and registered some achievements. I wonder what our President Museveni would be thinking if he were young today,” he said adding a quote from Mandela that “it is up to a generation to be great”.

“I want the young people of this generation to know that every generation has had its challenges. For the Mandelas it was apartheid. For the Musevenis and his comrades it was bad politics and instability. For us it is about unemployment and exclusion and it’s what we have to fight.

“Mandela spent 27 years in jail but didn’t have a sense of entitlement. He accepted that it was not about himself. He gave chance to the young to take charge of their country as the elderly gave guidance,” Bobi reminded the audience.

After the lecture, the President took to Facebook and accused Bobi Wine of hijacking his audience in Makerere and described him as a liar spreading blackmail after benefiting from the government’s music service development.

The Kyagulanyi People Power effect

As the anti-age limit wave picked up, so did Bobi Wine. He went to Firebase Music Studio and recorded Freedom.

In the song, he breaks down the justification for his stand against the removal of the age limit clause from the constitution. He questioned President Museveni’s pledge in 1986 to bring about fundamental change and said that he now preaches “no change”.

When the opposition set out on a nation-wide campaign against the amendment, the song was picked as their anthem, with the slogan “People Power”.

Bobi Wine’s celebrity status, his definitive message against President Museveni’s government through music, his identification with the youth, and his street twang made him a darling. He became a crowd puller and even though he is in Parliament as an independent, every opposition politician wanted him at their rally. He obliged until more by-elections came about; he then decided to only support independent candidates. Bobi Wine has never said he is going to contest against President Museveni but in three consecutive parliamentary by-elections, every candidate Bobi supported won. FDC, the erstwhile strong challenger to NRM, came a distant third. The trick, independent candidates knew, was to bring Bobi Wine to their rallies.

The President and the NRM machinery responded by attacking Bobi Wine’s ghetto upbringing. “He is violent. His group is rigging votes. They are using violence to scare NRM voters from voting,” the explanation from NRM went.

Bobi Wine has never said he is going to contest against President Museveni but in three consecutive parliamentary by-elections, every candidate Bobi supported won. FDC, the erstwhile strong challenger to NRM, came a distant third. The trick, independent candidates knew, was to bring Bobi Wine to their rallies.

In Arua, Bobi charged the largely young crowd, telling them he had gone there to liberate the district from NRM and Museveni the same way he had done it in Jinja, Bugiri and Rukungiri districts.

“We find themselves in a situation where they have been postponing a problem hoping it can solve itself. Until a time has come when we must come and we do what we must do.

“The war we have is between the oppressor and the oppressed. A small group of people led by Museveni as the majority of Ugandans being oppressed. I come because we must win this war here in Arua. If we lose, NRM will continue misrepresenting you,” he said.

After the rally, he was picked up, badly beaten and thrown into a military cell. His candidate and 31 others were also locked up and missed the voting. Yet he still won the election.

In jail, Bobi was isolated from the 31 other detainees and moved to a military facility. However, his supporters took to social media with the hashtag #FreeBobiWine that spread the Bobi Wine effect far and wide.

Ugandans in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom joined the fray and asked Museveni to free Bobi Wine.

Kenyans joined in and marched to the Uganda High Commission. An opposition party in Tanzania wrote to the Uganda government and demanded that he be freed. The Kenyan Young Parliamentarians Association threatened to fly to Kampala and lead a demonstration.

The more the government refused to release a picture of Bobi Wine in detention, the more his lawyers fed the world with updates of how badly he was beaten and how he required urgent medical attention or else he would die.

Young people in major towns across the country took to the streets and lit old car tyres, chanting people power slogans and demanding the release of Bobi Wine. International law and human rights lawyers from America offered pro bono services.

In just a year after joining Parliament, and after attending four parliamentary by-election rallies, Bobi had already caught national and international attention. But is he a threat to Museveni?

“He seems to inspire very young people that he can actually make them get what they want and he seems to give them an inspiration that it’s possible to come out of the ghetto and become something,” Makerere University Don Sabiiti Makara told NBS TV after the Mandela lecture at Makerere. “He is a factor now and he has become a factor in a very short time and you know the establishment doesn’t want anyone else to become a factor, especially amongst the youth who are the biggest number of voters.”

NRM Chief Whip, Ruth Nankabirwa, has acknowledged the power of Bobi Wine’s celebrity status and how he has used it to achieve his goals.

Stuck with an increasingly aggressive 36-year-old (a year younger than Museveni was when he went to the bush), President Museveni has taken to social media to personally justify the military’s use of excessive force in Arua where Bobi Wine’s driver was killed. Since the Arua chaos, he has put out four missives addressing the near cult-like social media reaction to Bobi Wine’s brutal arrest. In all four posts, he takes the priestly seat of a grandfather addressing his grandchildren and insists that Bobi Wine is an undisciplined grandson

“The problem in Arua was caused by Bobi Wine’s group together with KassianoWadri, who attacked me, a useless action because I am protected and I can defend myself,” he said in one group.

Many responded to his thread by telling him that his time was up and that they wanted him out.

It is hard to tell whether Bobi Wine will muster the courage to contest against President Museveni, but according to Dr Makara, it is clear that the President is yet to find the best way to respond to young Ugandans. “He had mastered how to deal with Besigye, now he doesn’t know how to deal with the Young Turks.”

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 Abdullahi Boru Halakhe

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness in this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” – Ephesians 6:12

The first episode of the popular Netflix series Narcos opens with the title card: “Magical realism is defined as what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe. There is a reason magical realism was born in Colombia.”

Magical realism as a literary genre presents the supernatural and the fantastic in an otherwise mundane, ordinary real-life setting. These magical elements are presented in the story in a matter- of-fact way, without explanation or even being remarked upon. It is not quite science fiction, or straight-up fantasy writing. The writer does not create a fictional universe to set the story. It is something more subtle, more murky. It is the integration of the supernatural with the ordinary, like the ghosts in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, who visit the real world without being haunting or terrifying like they would be in a classic horror movie. The reader, therefore, accepts the marvellous as normal and common.

Now in its third season, Narcos’ story arc of notorious druglord Pablo Escobar places his fantastic wealth and opulence in the realm of magical realism – at one point Escobar offered to pay off Colombia’s entire national debt of $10 billion from his own pocket. His criminal enterprise was spending $2,500 a month just on rubber bands to wrap bank notes from the proceeds of drug trafficking, and at one point was losing 10% of its income – always stashed in cash – to rats and mould. When Escobar’s family was hiding from the police in a mountainside farmhouse, his daughter became ill and hypothermic, so he burned $2million of currency notes to keep her warm. Now in its third season, Narcos’ story arc of notorious druglord Pablo Escobar places his fantastic wealth and opulence in the realm of magical realism – at one point Escobar offered to pay off Colombia’s entire national debt of $10 billion from his own pocket.

WTF?!

The problem with explaining Escobar as magical is that it obscures the very real-life political processes, historical context and foreign policy strategies that make an Escobar possible. The notorious Colombian druglord comes on the scene during the Cold War, in the midst of a civil war in his country. The right-wing factions of that war have had US/CIA support almost uninterruptedly. The US/CIA supports the drug trade when it suits their political and foreign policy interests. (See the Iran/Nicaragua Contra affair.) Most of the profits from the drug trade went to the United States as illegal money to be laundered in CIA-linked banks.

Kidnappings, murders, and fantastic wealth are not things that “just happen” in a magical place south of Miami. [For a wonderfully insightful long read on why Narcos is not magical realism, see this blog post by Diana Méndez]. Still, it is difficult for most of us to grasp political processes that produce death, destruction and destitution. We see the effects, but we can’t really explain what has happened. They are too big or abstract for us to grasp, and too nefarious and diabolical for us to believe.

So some turn to magical realism, an artistic attempt to capture the unbelievable in a setting where these things happen frequently. Magical realism expresses a “’Third World’ consciousness,” Salman Rushdie once said, societies where “the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new, in which public corruptions and private anguishes are somehow more garish and extreme than they ever get in the so-called ‘North’ where centuries of wealth and power have formed thick layers over the surface of what’s really going on”. Rushdie pointed out that in the works of Márquez, as in the world he describes, “impossible things happen constantly, and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sun”.

***

I never read Emmanuel Eni’s Delivered from the Powers of Darkness when I was a child, but it was a hugely influential part of my Christian discourse and formation in the late 1980s and 1990s. In Christian Union meetings, in youth group discussions, in passionate sermons and testimonies, the Nigerian evangelist’s influence was everywhere.

Rushdie pointed out that in the works of Márquez, as in the world he describes, “impossible things happen constantly, and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sun”.

The plot can be summarised thus: An adolescent Eni, orphaned and insecure, is introduced into satanism by a former schoolmate who is in her twenties and improbably wealthy. The friend confesses that it is her interaction with the occult that has got her to her present status, and she introduces him to the occult congregation, many of whom are intellectuals.

Then impossible things happen – human sacrifice, teleportation, bloody rituals, shape-shifts into animal form, descending to the bottom of the sea on a staircase to meet the “Queen of the Coast”, a beautiful woman with whom he seals a contract that would guarantee him riches, and so on. (Eni constantly reminds the reader that these were real events, happening in his physical form.) The second half of the book deals with his conversion: He meets Jesus Christ himself –who he describes as a beautiful man. After the powers of darkness have been exorcised, he becomes an active member of the Assemblies of God church.

I recently conducted a very unscientific survey on Twitter, asking followers what they remembered about the book; what it felt like to read and talk about it. “Scary”, “chilling’, “terrifying”, came up again and again.

Others said: “I’m still haunted by it”; “stayed up all night afraid of the darkness”; “so confused…it took me a long time to recover”. “It was one of those books that was passed around in class. Hastily read in rounds during preps,” KipropKimutai (@Tiboron) tweeted.

But this wasn’t the kind of fear one feels in a fictional horror film, which can nervously be laughed away once the credits start rolling. The real terror of the stories of satanic riches – of which Eni’s tale was just one of an entire genre of books, movies, sermons and devotionals – was in the way the supernatural and the quotidian were colliding in a way that was fantastic yet…plausible. For most people who read the tale, there was something you just couldn’t shake off.

The narratives of satanic riches are plausible for two reasons. First, the fact that they are confessional actually adds to their credibility – if one confesses to doing despicable deeds which no one would ever like to be accused of, that makes the confession very credible. “For anyone who admits to having killed others by witchcraft or done harm to people must indeed be telling the truth. Since Eni admits to having killed, the rest of the story is taken at face value,” researcher Birgit Meyer argues.

But second is the fact that a crucial element of the stories of satanic riches was the sacrificing of one’s reproductive capacity (the devil would make one barren in exchange for riches) or sacrificing of actual loved ones, such as a spouse, child or relative. The crux of the story is that money is never obtained for nothing, but always in exchange for a human being, preferably a blood relative or spouse, or a future offspring.

In the context of a collapsing economy and dilapidation of social services – as was happening in most of Africa at that time in the 1980s and 1990s – the family is the only meaningful social safety net for most people. Therefore, it is not a huge imaginative leap to argue that the only way one could become rich in that context is by neglecting one’s loved ones, by ignoring pleas for help from poorer relatives, by meanness and avarice. Only an individual who has become atomised and who is disconnected from the wider community is willing to sacrifice other people’s lives for wealth; everyone else is likely to be drained by the competing demands of spouses, children and extended relations. Magical realism tells us that whether that sacrifice is literal or metaphorical is not the point; the point is that something is off; something doesn’t add up, some evil is at work here.

People can sense the dehumanising logic of capitalism that discards real human lives with alarming indifference. It is the logic that allows an accident victim to die a wholly preventable death because a cash deposit has not been paid for a bed in ICU. It is the logic that makes it okay to have a country where pastoralists are ejected from their own land because they are not “contributing to the economy”, as was once said of the pastoralists in Laikipia. It is the logic that produces a Kenya where less than 0.1% of the population (8,300 people) owns more wealth than the bottom 99.9% (more than 44 million people). It is the logic that reduces all human activity to a form of economic calculation, dismissing love, empathy and care as powerful but unfortunate delusions. It is a form of creating that actually destroys creation, in the words of Prof. Willie J. Jennings of Yale University. “This is not the logic of breaking eggs to make omelettes. The horror here is distorting the bodies of chickens to maximise egg production unto death. This logic drives creation towards death.” By keeping track of the trail of blood that taints every exploitative capitalistic success story, the stories of satanic riches are, in a way, a site of resistance.

***

In 1994, the then President Daniel arap Moi established the Devil Worship Commission following a sustained campaign by the church, supported by the media, that the existence and extent of devil worship in Kenya should be investigated. The devil worship inquiry was triggered by a claim by the head of the Anglican Church that educational institutions in Kenya were in danger of being taken over by devil worshippers and that parents should be wary of which schools they take their children to.

On 21st August 1993, the Minister for Education issued a directive to expel all devil-worshipping children from public schools. The following day, in reaction to the minister’s directive, the Daily Nation, in an editorial, stated that parents needed to be told more about devil worship so that they could avoid taking their children to schools where it is practised.

The momentum had begun. A few months later, the Standard, citing an education official, said that devil worship was rampant in Western Kenyan schools, and another official said the same about schools in Taita Taveta district. Eventually, the issue made it to the floor of Parliament when two MPs called on the Minister of Education to institute a probe into devil worship, which was “threatening public schools”.

The following day, the Daily Nation joined in and, in an editorial, claimed that “time seems to have come for a serious inquiry into the whole diabolical business, if only for peace of mind of many parents.” Vice President George Saitoti reiterated the same two days later, decrying the rise in devil worship in Kenya. Church leaders, members of parliament, and ordinary Kenyans – sometimes through angry letters to the editor – continued to pile on the pressure.

On 20th October 1994, President Moi announced that a commission of inquiry would be formed to look into the matter of devil worship in Kenya. He noted the ongoing public discourse on devil worship and said, “If these reports are true, then this obnoxious and ungodly practice must be checked.”

The Daily Nation carried in its editorial the headline, “Here is a most welcome probe”, in reference to the Commission. The editorial claimed that the setting up of an official inquiry was the right thing “given the emotive nature surrounding the issue of Satanism”. It added that the inquiry “is welcome as its aim is to remove the murkiness that has surrounded allegations of existence of this practice and the fear it has generated among parents, church leaders and ordinary people”.

It is not a coincidence that this fear-mongering was happening in Moi’s Kenya. Magical realism was happening in real life at that time, the fantastic and the mundane existing side-by-side. A 25-year-old named Kamlesh Pattni somehow contrived an audacious financial buccaneering scheme that promptly drained Kenya of 10% of its Gross Domestic Product. The scheme, dubbed the Goldenberg Scandal, began in 1991, almost immediately after the Kenya government, following directions from the IMF, introduced measures to reform the economy and increase international trade and investment.

Precisely how they did it – by manipulating regulations on export compensation in an economy strapped for hard currency – is complicated to explain (See this wonderfully detailed article by Peter Warutere, one of the leading financial journalists who covered the too-crazy-to-believe scandal as it unfolded.) By all accounts, Goldenberg was a high-level conspiracy “by senior officials of the Moi administration, together with local and international wheeler-dealers who ostensibly capitalised on the government’s desperation for foreign exchange and the greed of Moi’s cronies. These cronies displayed an insatiable appetite for plundering the economy even when it was flat on its back,” wrote Warutere.

The effects of the scam – even though it is difficult to explain how it had happened – were obvious to everyone. Interest rates rose to a stunning 80% per annum. Goldenberg tore through Kenya’s political, economic and social fabric, plunging Kenya into a decade of recession and decay. By one estimate, it will take three generations for Kenya to fully recover from the effects of the scheme.

When you have a generation of parents who cannot adequately explain why they are unable to afford their children a better life than they had, the discourse of “generational curses” gains power. It must be the devil, and in a way, they are right.

***

“The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God… ” 2 Corinthians 10:4

In today’s Kenya, we are constantly bombarded with the fantastic and the unbelievable, but delivered to us in the implausibly dry and composed tones of the evening news. Everything seems normal – the lights; the blue, orange or brown set; the TV station logo in the corner of the screen; the scrolling ticker tape of news highlights at the bottom.

But the words being spoken are in the realm of the absolutely fantastic: billions of shillings being carted away in sacks in broad daylight; poisoned sugar that may or may not be on your table right now; a man eating githeri getting a Head of State Commendation; horrible sexual abuse of children, babies, grandmothers; murders of wives, husbands, entire families; a probably unlicensed, collapsed dam that sweeps nearly 50 people to their death, just like that. On and on.

No one flinches. No one’s voice breaks. No Kanye West blurting out “George Bush doesn’t care about black people!” No one seems on the edge of tears. Perhaps that’s the truly amazing thing – the objectivity and professionalism with which we are calmly reporting our own death and destruction.

Theologian Emilie Townes describes the fantastic as [living] in those moments of uncertainty when it is not clear if what we perceive or experience is an illusion of the senses (which makes it a product of the imagination and the laws of the world remain intact), and when we detect that the event has actually taken place but laws unknown to us control reality. Yet the fantastic is much more; it is also being comfortable with the supernatural or what may seem supernatural to others. In other words, the fantastic may be the everyday for those who live in it. They may not find the presence of ghosts or shifted realities unusual.

For me, the fantastic – and especially those obscure, real-world processes that produce suffering and evil – can be distilled into the notion of strongholds, powers and principalities that the New Testament talks about in 2 Corinthians 10 and in Ephesians 6.

Structures of domination and oppression that are too big and too nefarious for us to grasp, the ones that make the unbelievable frequently invade our daily lives, are those powers and principalities talked about “in high and low places”. They reproduce evil with alarming regularity, sometimes even without the malicious participation of those involved.

Here are some examples. The Brand Kenya master plan describes Kenya as “an exotic destination that is surprisingly familiar, where people and nature live in harmony alongside ambitious economic developments”. Wandia Njoya has critiqued this racist, self-loathing logic that makes Kenyans see their own country as an investment destination for foreigners first, and the needs of Kenyan citizens way down the priority list – after all, they are just living “alongside” economic developments. Which is why a minister can be more concerned about what foreign tourists will think about us than that mercury in sugar that might be poisoning Kenyans.

Rasna Warah has written about Nairobi as a city where “contempt for the resident is everywhere apparent”, where more than 80% of trips are made on foot, bicycle or by public transport, yet the lack of adequate pavements and bicycle paths has resulted in unnecessary deaths of pedestrians and cyclists; in fact, cycling and walking are considered among the most dangerous forms of transport in Kenya.

Darius Okolla has argued that social mobility in Kenya is a figment of our imagination – less than half a million Kenyans are middle class, in a population of more than 44 million, and 85% of Kenyans will remain in the social class they were born in. Yes, there is always the anecdotal and inspirational rags-to-riches story, of the charcoal to gold variety, but the vast, vast majority of poor people will remain poor, as a result of a non-existent and dysfunctional public sector.

I could go on and on.

There are forces at work here that make us hate ourselves and each other, that make us express more sympathy for buildings than for human beings, as Kiambu governor Ferdinand Waititu did recently when he pleaded that buildings built on riparian land be spared from demolitions and that the rivers be moved instead. Yet he expressed no such sympathy for the thousands of human beings being evicted from their homes in Kibera at the crack of dawn to make way for a road, against a court order and against all sense of human decency. This is not normal.

Destroying arguments that seem sensible but keep people in oppression is part of the work of imagining freedom. Shining a hard, unrelenting light on structures of domination should be the work of writers, journalists, artists and preachers in this moment, because the work of domination happens in that uncanny place where the imaginary and the real collide – to deadly effect.

However, the acts of controlling and manipulating human lives through processes of domination and subordination are not inevitable or unanswerable, just as the diabolical deeds of Pablo Escobar were not magical. They were aided and abetted by an intersection of history, politics, market forces, technology and foreign policies. Complex, yes. But not magical.

We need to deconstruct that “fantastic hegemonic imagination”, in the words of Emilie Townes, which reproduces structural evil in our society. It will take deconstructing and probably destroying the institutions that are founded on colonial, capitalist logics. As Wandia Njoya says, Kenyans will have to go through a national mental re-engineering that heals us of our inferiority complex and deals with our historical wounds, and then write an affirmation of dignity as human beings. Only then can we be delivered from the powers of darkness.

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.